I am still trying to process what exactly happened last Thursday. I am still trying to get my nervous system to come down from the chaos and the feeling that I was almost certainly going to see someone drown. I am emotionally preparing for this week’s class in which we have a full two hours to learn how to clear water out of our masks while underwater. What horrors will these children drum up?

Even though it’s still in the 90s in Grand Junction and only halfway through August, I already feel like I can smell autumn in the breeze. Please enjoy this snapshot of my summer.

We paddled on, got further out from the homes, and found a somewhat quieter stretch of river. We set up camp in the near dark and took a dozen or more attempts to throw a rope up over a high branch to hang our food. The fireworks dragged out long into the evening as did a particularly loud playlist of the same nine patriotic songs that played on repeat for several hours. By the time the rain began to fall around 11pm, my head was jammed full of Neil Diamond’s Proud To Be An American that not even the steady patter of rain on my tent could drown out. But the weather did shut down the fireworks. All that lingered was the thick scent of gunpowder, clinging to the saturated air.

I watched my grandpa grow bitter and mean at the end of his life, consuming Fox News in great heaving gulps the same way the cancer on his pancreas was consuming him from the inside out. I don’t remember many pleasant exchanges with him in those final years. Even when he knew he was staring down the last months of his earthly existence, most conversations (which my family worked INCREDIBLY HARD to make about ANYTHING other than politics) were inevitably tainted with some moment of red faced rage of his own creation at the “damn liberals.”

More and more often, I am losing the thread on what it means to tell the truth and what it means to be absolutely authentic, especially when it comes to writing. The problem is that there are so many truths. Those truths have nuance. Can nuance ever be perfectly conveyed? Similarly, I’m never quite sure what to include in terms of world, or even national politics in regards to my experience of the natural world 1) because I am embarrassed by what I don’t know and have failed to educate myself on and 2) because I’m alternatively embarrassed that I allow something as “unnatural” as politics to seep into my “natural” experiences.

Feeling even marginally athletic is new to me. I never in a million years thought I would actively look forward to sufferfests and here I am, regularly pushing the edge of what my body can do.

Disclaimers:

I am not very old so this advice might be very bad.

I got weirdly more aggressive as I wrote these. So some are more rants than lessons. C’est la vie.

The neighbor says he used to race motorcycles. Hit his head a lot. Now he doesn’t sleep much. That’s why he’s out grilling burgers at 11:30pm on his back porch which sits, more or less, directly below my bedroom.

So, what will it take? Even if goiters started bulging from our necks while our toes shriveled into necrotic black flesh and fell from our bodies, what excuses might we come up with to avoid the notion of a spiritual prod?

First there are the aches of everything familiar you will leave behind. The yoga studio where they know you by name, the grocery store you could navigate blindfolded, the patch of dirt across the footbridge where the prairie dogs squeak at the edge of their burrows in both terror and delight.

Outside, the snow fell like fine rain, filling the depressions of footprints before the next step could be taken. The scrape of plastic shovels on concrete outsung the chickadees while the blue flashing lights of the snowplows danced across the white walls all day.

By late fall 2015, local authorities are calling it an erratic monsoon season in southwest Utah. I had prior reserved a phrase like "monsoon season" for wet, coastal towns, not landlocked North American deserts.

Hildale, a small town of Mormon fundamentalists, sees two hundred-year flood events in a single afternoon. The floods kill 13 people. The cars are swept right off the road. The casualties are mostly children.

That same day, seven canyoneers die in a slot canyon in Zion National Park 15 miles south. A wall of water surges through the canyon. The seven aren't more than a few hundred yards from the vehicles they left parked on the pavement.

Colorado was like that in 2020, thirsty, thick blooded, but none of us understood how closely death was looming. Twelve inches of rain fell in Colorado that year, six inches below average. It was the hottest August on record and the state entered its twentieth year of drought. The land had been thirsty for decades.

It’s the extremely short lifespan of five years that has brought me out to Great Salt Lake. Unlike many of the other environmental disasters expected to occur in my lifetime — melting glaciers, disappearing snow, floods and fires — the lake could disappear by the time I am 35. Meaning I will still be a relatively young woman when I stand on her empty shores for the last time or listen to the cloying silence in the absence of the 10 million birds who rely on her waters for nourishment.

If water use continued at the same rate, the report predicted, Great Salt Lake had only five years before shriveling to a bone-dry alkaline memory and maybe only three years before entering a potentially ecologically unrecoverable low.

In grade school, snow could be called down from the heavens simply by flipping one’s pajamas inside out and backward. That was the lore at least. If you wanted a snow day and snow was in the forecast, it was your best shot at canceling school or at least landing a two-hour delay.

Celebrations are meant to remind us of some important truth that we may have forgotten the rest of the year, caught up in our little human thoughts. And so I wonder what it would mean to celebrate this time of year as a counter-cultural moment — to remember what it is to really live. In such a rationalizing, productivity-focused culture, could my celebration of the darkest month also be the celebration of the uncontrollable, unclean animals of our bodies?

That’s the thing about travel recently. I’ve got this sneaking suspicion that too many people use “travel” as a means to claim they’ve done something interesting or courageous without really having to do anything at all.

I’d been waiting all day to listen to this episode and with a little snow falling down through the night sky, making confetti under the orange sodium streetlights, I couldn’t have been more content. And the story from David Sedaris? Absolutely perfect. I sat there, the space heater burning a black line into the synthetic blanket, a pine-scented Christmas candle masking the smell of melting plastic, having a sort of knowing that I’d just created a memory, something I’d look back on for years and years.

There is a way in which canyoneering is beautiful — the body pressed, held by the earth as you slide through something not dissimilar to a birth canal. Your shoulders and hips wedge as you inch your way between the walls which threaten to either press you flat, trapping your body forever between the stone, or conversely, drop you down a great chasm that opens with such speed and force you have to wish, at least a little, that you were more liquid than solid.