• It was during one of the long exhausted silences in the cancer ward—between drugged naps, between doctor rotations, my bad prognosis having been made carefully but terribly plain—that I began my theory. It was all about life’s density, not length, I said, addressing your outraged tears. I saw a beaver swimming under the dory on the Green River, then looked up to see a bald eagle snatch a fish. We floated through a canyon of ancient Vishnu Shist, dark and shiny as obsidian. We took turns as you sat at the foot of my bed: we drove through that apocalyptic storm in canyon country, purple lightning blasting sideways through green-glowing thunderheads—rain on one side, clear sunset on the other, throwing hot dusty arms through the windows on the highway to catch the giant raindrops. You saw a tornado of fire jump a valley. I saw a herd of wild horses running across the Mojave. We swam naked, alone as Adam and Eve, in Havasu Falls. Now I hardly remember the hospital room, thin and disposable as a sheet of blue lined paper. I think you held my burning feet to your chest. I forgot to say I saw a pack of wolves in the Yellowstone backcountry with my brother, just after sunrise, making coffee on the camp stove. The wolves seemed enormous. Seven or eight or eight of them regarded us. When you’re that vulnerable, fear is senseless. I stood looking into the dark one’s eyes. We kept looking. In time the black wolf broke my gaze, and in unison, without a sound, the pack turned down the path and loped away, behind a hill, and left us blinking in the light.

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• Maybe the true self emerges, lives and works outdoors. Forgets it can be seen—no mirrors, no service, no battery life, no photos. The true self wakes from dreams as dense and real as life—more dense, more real, more fraught. Life is overheating and cooling, hungering and eating. Shadows close and open the canyons. Feet are cracked—the cracks packed with salve, the salve stuck with dirt, then a pair of unwashed socks for sleeping. Swollen fingers, puffy eyelids, matted hair. There is bad coffee. Brushing teeth without water and spitting into the sand. No deep talk. Some confessions under the stars, yes, but no articulate wisdom rushing forth to meet the pain. Chain-sawed invasive trees drop berries by the thousands that float in floes down the river. There are thoughts, many of them, petty and ruminative. Wide ranging, caged pacing. But one lives, as they say, here and now. Maybe that is why illness and wilderness go together. Waiting, idleness, dreamtime. Nothing lasts. Regular life awaits your return or it doesn’t. Come back to town and the soul’s own eyes burn out of the filthy blemished sunburned face. Strange dirty clothes. Stagger into the hospital bathroom and the soul’s own eyes burn out of the gaunt and sallow face. Damp greasy hair, cotton gown. Where have you been? It’s ecstatic, frightening—just a glimpse of itself. The thing, soul, that makes its appearance in the absence of comfort and purpose. Is it resting or working? Being forged or being whittled away? Meanwhile—pill organizers, CT scans, directives. Outdoors the body can work. Pull oars. But something watches very closely as uneventful days pass one after the next. Meeting each need as it arises. Sleeping hard. All the time, the real life waits.

• It happens—friend raped, friend abducted from a sidewalk, friend chased by a stranger through woods. When I backpack alone, when I lie awake, I’m not afraid of the animals. Grand Staircase-Escalante is the most beautiful place on earth: rainbowed canyons, cream-colored swells, stone spectrums of bone to ochre to maroon, cottonwood rivers. And almost no-one out there. I knew a man who lived in that backcountry as a hermit, surprisingly young for how scraggled and withered he was. He showed me the pack he sewed from goatskin. He had eyes like a prophet, but you could see it glinting there: too many psychedelics. I was working on a chainsaw crew, removing invasive trees. Between hitches, I would watch as he was kicked out of the one restaurant in Escalante. The owner’s hand on his back. He told me he had everything he needed out there: he was surrounded by divinity. I don’t trust true believers. But I admired this man when I knew him. Bow drill fires, spring water, a cave nest to curl up in, eating what? A few pine nuts, his own goats—though it seems he’s always had the same two. He said he was good at catching lizards. He said the Lord was out there, waiting to be found. I bought him a beer and a basket of corn chips. But I never want to see him out there, walking towards me, thin as he is.

(First published in the Indiana Review as winner of the 2020 ½ K prize)

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• In the photo, you’ve grown a beard. You tell me the wildfire is amazing, apocalyptic to look at. Tall trees exploding around you. The red sky, and long cracks of flame over the hills. I walk our dog in the haze and wait. Pass the old stone wall. You’re still safe, despite the flaming sheep running down the slope, the cows mincing on burned hooves. Blackened acres. Five years ago, nineteen Hot Shots from your hometown died in the Yarnell Hill Fire. The next year we hiked to the makeshift memorial on Granite Mountain. You’d been in school with some of the dead men when they were living, boys. This week your crew’s controlled burn jumped the line. You worked past midnight, stamping sparks, your face lit and flickering. On the phone, we talk about dying reefs. How inmates do this work for a dollar a day. Less. The shame of it. You say a brushfire turned the base of each clump of grass into a black anemone; singed the tops off the stalks. You say you walked with the crew slowly in your primary colors over the crest of the hill, the sky behind you otherworldly blue. And much later the rains came, and the hills filled with steam, and then you were allowed to rest.

• It feels good to shock the body with the desert—even in work, even in digging. How the motion repeats, my back so tight  and sore I’d ask my crewmates to punch it. Cycle of hypertrophy. Downstroke, shovel’s tip sliding through the first dusty layer, then the shunk of hesitation, then the sturdy boot coming down to drive it down, then the lovely heft. The clumsiest part is scattering the dirt down the slope. But then it’s gone. Repeat. Bend your knees. We were made to wear long pants, long sleeves, ridiculous hardhats, even in 100 degrees, 120. Sweat-drenched, dust-pasted, hair matted, mouth dry, nailbeds blacked. After digging, retrieve another tool. Flatten the yard of trail you’ve made. Tamp it down. Move to the end of the line. I was out there to recover from you. It was hellish. I still miss it. Joshua trees, spiked yucca, ephedra, creosote, a little saltbush—so little could live out there. But a shovel’s blade might split a lizard. Or those enormous Jerusalem crickets—translucent, striped, alien-eyed—or scorpions so numerous I learned to ignore them. I woke up with a white scorpion in my sleeping bag, shook it out. Dust devils, sunburn, talking about nothing on shade breaks but swimming pools and cold drinks. You might see, from the campsite, a herd of wild horses running across the flatlands, churning up dust. You could sweat through a shirt and a backpack and ruin your notebook. Guzzle sugar water and never slake the hunger. Fall instantly asleep under the dizzy violent blur of stars. And at the end of the hitch, after drawing straws for the first shower, watch the water run black.

• I made it to thirty. A year in hell, nursing memory. Two years living scan to scan, tense but present. It’s pouring today, January. You’re frying eggs at noon in the grey dark. Suddenly I’ve had enough remembering. Or maybe I’ve just begun to forget. I wanted this everydayness: crosswords, long walks to campus, groceries, ocean, rain boots, seasons, deadlines, libraries, outings, repetition.
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• In the woods where we walk every day, enormous crumbling stumps are draped with the roots of new trees. On the nose, yes. That’s just the heavy-handed thought I love right now. Wasn’t it wisdom I wanted? Experience, philosophy—whatever secret truth I thought the desert meant. When I had cancer, I hated wisdom. I hated pain. I worshipped innocence and the young woman who could never have known what was coming. Today, at last, I don’t miss her.
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• But somehow everything’s connected, after all. New Brunswick rearing up horribly again through the train window: that nightmare of hospitalization, chemotherapy, nausea, agony, bleak ugly confinement. I’m looking down from the window in the cancer ward, day after day, watching maybe the very same train. Now I’m really down there, flying backward, watching it all recede, having got my wish—and going to see that very friend, the musician, who I worked with on that Escalante chainsaw crew, to stay up late talking again.
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• And later there you are, picking me up from the empty Phoenix airport at midnight, made of your own scent, wrapped in our whole life—tattered striped blanket on a bed of ponderosa needles, orange light from a streetlamp on purple-shaded snow, electrified monsoon winds, dark mornings, wood shavings, bandages, river water, cottonwoods, a decade compressed in one bright collapsing star, driving through the shadows now of ocotillo, creosote, saguaros, winding dirt roads, and after making love, waking up to a frosty sunrise and walking alone—silence and morning birds—alert, alive, knowing nothing is ever really lost—until I see you walking towards me, a bit weathered, happy, tired—sitting in the armchair now by the rainy window: there, right there.
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• We wanted a new life. Walking on the wet stones at the edge of the ocean as the seals spy on us. Purple starfish, fallen Doug firs, Cretaceous ferns, early morning ferry rides—we made it, Shane. Sometimes it seems we’ll live forever. There’s a future now. But my dreams run just as far as tonight, with you, or tomorrow morning. We’ll walk the dog. Drive through the rain and blinking stoplights to see our friends. Your laugh booming out. Catch each other’s eyes. We’re always tired; it’s all enough. I love today; I love tomorrow. I’m coming over there now.