Part 50

The Wind Eye

“Most invented languages begin with invented names.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Names are tricky things. They feel natural on the tongue, native to the mind, but they are not. All words are native to the body rather than the mind, and as far away into the Narnia of Concepts we travel these days, if we get our heads out of the clouds we will see that all words originate in embodied experience, or for the need to tie those experiences together. The English word window comes from Old Norse vindauga — a compound of vindr, meaning wind, and auga meaning eye. To our ancestors a hole in the wall was not an empty space, it was an analogous to a body part, and it felt the wind pass through it. A millennium later we have windows; just holes in the walls, more or less.

And names go on and on. Take Window Arch, for example — a natural sandstone arch you can detour to see off a popular unofficial alternate through El Malpais, peeling off the redline itself onto NM-117 and the Narrows Rim Trail. No one knows what the native peoples called it, if they called it anything, but they certainly didn’t call it Window Arch because they didn’t build windows at all. Maybe they called it The Wind Eye.

Whatever they may have called it, it was La Ventana — The Window — now and it looked out not onto the unspoiled and heavily romanticized lands of uncolonized nature, but onto a parking lot. There was also a few gazebos providing shade for picnic tables and a set of pit toilets. Ice Cream and I took refuge in the shade behind the restrooms and enjoyed some of the trail magic that had been stashed there in a cooler. Mostly water, which was welcome in this part of the world, but also sodas, which were welcome everywhere. Then we got back on the highway. A car stopped, heads and arms were leaning out the passenger window. It was Ya’ll and Institute from back in the Basin, along with Baldy, who had pulled a New Mexico Toolman and was now driving his hiker friends around. Baldy was taking them back to Grants to pick up a resupply; the post office had sent Ya’ll’s to San Diego by mistake and he had to get another box set up for Pie Town. In short, it was a pleasant surprise to see them. Ya’ll was one of our favorite single-serving friends from the CDT and Institute was cool too. We talked, we caught up, chatting in the hot sun on the side of the highway and then they left and we never saw Ya’ll again. Hiker life, a tribe with no certainty, a world as fickle and rootless as the wind, the trail the eye we pass through.

***

Towering spires and volcanic rock gave way to a night of endless stars. A bright comet blasted across the sky, or else a rocket. “Whoa!” Ice Cream was pointing. I looked up and we tracked the object as it darted across the length of the sky. “Totally a UFO,” she said.

“I hope so.”

The highway stretched on into infinite dark. “Zen, look…” Ice Cream said again. “Turn off your headlamp and look over there.”

I thought she was going to show me a constellation. She often pointed them out to me when the stars were clear enough to see them. “I don’t see anything. Which constellation?”

“Not that. Look close, it’s like a satellite, but they are moving with each other.”

I saw it. Faintly but clear once I noticed. The satellites were moving in a line, but staying equidistant from each other, and they spanned most of that half of the sky. They spun and spun and then locked into place, hiding in the forest of stars as if they’d always been there. “Starlink?” I wondered.

“Probably,” Ice Cream said.

***

A trailside grave. The sun-faded image of a toddler girl, now a ghost surrounded by stuffed animals ragged from weather and fake flowers full of color and empty of life. Nyveah Lynnette the poster declared. She’d bloomed and never made it. The days of praying for our children to win the race between growing up and early death were supposed to be over. Mostly they were, but no doubt that was small comfort to those that still never made it. Something about the dark melancholy of the decaying roadside grave called to me. I knew Nyveah was not buried there; her bones were safe in a town graveyard or else her ashes sat eternally still in her parents’ home, but this is where her spirit persisted. A plastic rocking horse rocked but the nearby leaves did not rustle. No wind blew.

***

Long roads lay like sunning serpents along the desert. Windmills spun, creaking. A badger’s head appeared from a hole ten yards into the scrub, and the animal cautiously climbed out to watch us pass. We’d last seen one in the Wind River Range where it seemed natural. This one seemed like it had wandered here and never found its way home.

We moseyed on, and a man named Mosey pulled over. “Hey! Want some cold drinks? Snacks?” We did. He got out and popped the hatch of his SUV and gave us trail magic while he told us about himself. A triple crowner and hunter. His claim to fame was that his face graced the front of a bag of freeze-dried backpacker meals. Mosey blessed us and wished us luck before driving toward Pie Town. He left a trail of dust that spread out over the desert as he went.

***

Endless sun. Endless wind. Little cover. We found a sprawling juniper with low branches and sheltered there for a break. Frito caught up to us first, then Toolman, then a man on a bike passed by, pedaling heavily against the loose gravel of the rock and the headwinds. I barked like a dog after he’d passed and he turned around, finally seeing the four of us hidden under the tree. He stopped, got off his bike and pushed it over to us. “Can I join you?” He had an accent, Polish, it turned out. His name was Grommet and he was a documentary filmmaker, kind of a big deal in his home country. We rested gently in our ignorance of his reputation. We all left together, but he quickly outpaced us on his bike.

There is a ranch along that road, Sawtooth Basin Ranch, that offers water and camping to hikers, as long as we stay within bounds and follow the rules posted on the signs. They’d set up a bucket of apples and had a picnic table tucked under a lean-to. We found Grommet there cooking his dinner in a giant cookpot that only bikers would be willing to carry. “Mind if we join you?” I asked.

“Of course.”

I sat and started cooking, followed by Toolman, who had been pitching his tent, and then by Ice Cream and Frito who had fallen behind on the road and had just arrived. I heard her before I saw her. “Oh my gosh! What an angel!” I thought she was talking about a cow again, but I looked out to see her holding a cat and grinning ear to ear. “He’s purring!”

“He loves you,” I told her.

“I love him!” She sat down at the table and the cat sat in her lap. It stayed there most of the night while the five of us talked first over dinner, and then by lamplight; I’d hung my headlamp from the rafters. Grommet being from Poland, we ended up talking about the Ukraine war.

“Are you worried?” I asked. “Some say Poland could be next.”

“Many people are. As with everything it depends person to person. What do you think of it? Do Americans worry?”

“Worry? Not really. We get involved, have opinions like we do on everything. It’s the American way.”

Grommet laughed. “Do you think the US would ever become involved?”

I shrugged. “You know, twenty years ago I visited Europe. At that time Bush II was president and the Europeans were giving Americans a lot of shit. You know how it was, Team America and all that, Amerrrrica! Fuck yeah! bla bla. Many of us sewed Canadian leaves onto our packs just to avoid it.”

“Did you?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because for better or for worse, I’m American. And you know what? Back then it was all, ‘Oooo look at you, Mr. American. America thinks it has to police the world!’ But now? Now that Russia is a threat, Europe holds out its hands and says, ‘America, where are you?'”

Grommet didn’t say anything.

“But,” I added, “I can’t talk shit on the Polish. You’re spending what, five percent of your GDP on military now? Shit’s gotten real and so have you.”

“I’m surprised you know that. It’s true. You know, as a sort of journalist, I like these talks. I have other questions. What do Americans think of Elon Musk?”

I eyed Frito but didn’t give him the floor yet. “History will look favorably on him, I think. But we’ll have to see. Maybe ask Frito. He’s passionate about that topic.”

“History will not be favorable,” Frito said. “He’s done nothing. Everything he says he’s done was done by someone else, someone working for him. He slaps his name on it and takes the credit, steals the good ideas from other people, has them do the real work.”

“Someone has to lead,” I said. “You think those people would have organized all that without someone like him to lead it?”

“Of course.”

“Then why didn’t they? Where were the mass-produced electric cars, the reusable rockets, the starlinks?”

Frito shrugged. “It’s just timing. Someone would have done it.”

“Someone like him? Just as supposedly evil? Are you telling me some angelic utopian would have stepped in and done all that?”

“Musk didn’t do any of it. That’s what I’m saying. He’s just a parasite.”

I rolled my eyes. “Henry Ford didn’t make any cars then?”

“Not the same thing. Henry Ford was a good person.”

“That’s how history sees him now, anyway. All I’m saying is, history may do the same with Musk.”

“It won’t.”

“You’ve made that opinion quite clear.”

Grommet was eating it up. No doubt we’d wind up on a Polish article or something later on. I handed the floor to Frito. “Tell us more then about why you think that.”

He did, and it was a lot. Some I could agree with, some I could not, most of it I can’t recall, but suffice it to say that if Frito had a string in his back that made him say something when it was pulled and released it would, in fact, be a socialist slogan followed by a Domino’s Pizza commercial.

Frito’s political passions released, we wound down the night by feeding the cat cheese and laughing at its cuteness. Later, after we’d all pitched and laid down to sleep, we could hear Frito hollering in the dark. “Git! Stop that! Hey, damn it cat!” In the morning we found out that it had spent a good portion of the night trying to get into his tent, or else walk across the top of it.

“Aww. My kitty! My perfect angel!” Ice Cream said.

“It was accosting me! I have been accosted!” Frito said, but he was smiling despite himself.

We packed up, ate breakfast and bid Grommet and the kitty cat farewell. The dirt road continued on toward Pie Town and the occasional sign warned us that Sawtooth Basin Ranch would tolerate absolutely no trespassing, nut picking or shed hunting. Thankfully none of us were picking our nuts, nor had we ever thought to shoot a shed, though we’d slept in one back in Cuba.

Later on we’d meet a man who had telepathically communed with aliens, see a ghost, eat a pie and much more.

Unless given express permission for their use, all names and trail names in my articles have been changed. Any resemblance to real people is coincidental. If you enjoy my writing, please feel free to subscribe or buy me a coffee using the Tip the Author button below.