Outdoor Adventures 
Conversations With a Grasshopper
Want to really get away from it all? Try spending a week completely alone in the most remote corner of Big Bend Ranch State Park. I did, and other than facing rattlesnakes, confronting my most primitive fear, and speaking to the occasional long-legged insect, I’ve never felt more relaxed in my life.
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There are other developments too, such as the auditory hallucinations I have been having, which may or may not be related to the fact that I have not eaten because of my acute indigestion. The first happened in my tent last night. I heard rock and roll music—actually just a big, distorted bass beat—as though it were coming from somebody’s boom box a few canyons away. I listened to this for a full half-hour before concluding that the sound was manufactured by my brain in the absence of its usual diet of urban white noise. Today I hear a conversation between two women, apparently walking down the wash. I distinctly hear one of them say, "Dearborn, Michigan." There is no one in the wash. (While lying in my tent on the following morning, I hear, unmistakably, the sounds of a cocktail party. I can detect voices and faint laughter, and this time it really does seem real. I jump out of my sleeping bag, out of my tent, and find myself, in the half light, in close proximity to a small herd of javelinas, fifty-pound piglike creatures with razor-sharp two-inch teeth and atrocious eyesight. They are snuffling about along the cutbank eating prickly pear cactus and making small grunting and clicking noises. This is the cocktail party. I start to retreat toward the tent when suddenly the whole group—at least eight—decides it’s time to panic and flee down the wash. They leave the campsite awash in a musky-skunky odor that lingers for several minutes.)
On my third day I take my first hike eastward, out of the Solitario and up to higher elevations of its massive rim. When I first came in to this country, I found it stark and inhuman in its sheer size and emptiness. It looks marginally friendlier now but still forbidding. Before me are the tapered escarpments of the rim, then a long rolling country deeply cut by washes and the startling vulcanism of Santiago Peak, Agua Fria Mountain, the Hen Egg, the Christmas Mountains, and then, behind them, the looming dark bulk of the Chisos, whose seven-thousand-foot-plus peaks rise nearly a mile from the basin floor. The recent rains have turned the desert into a brilliant green patchwork of lechuguilla and sotol and candelilla and Mormon tea and prickly pear, and covering the hillsides is a thick carpet of tiny yellow daisies. Out here in the open desert, I can hike for miles and miles, climb high rocky turrets, follow the undulations of ancient ranching roads through canyons and past old hunting camps. For the rest of my time here, I will split my hikes between this wide-open desert and the high cloistered canyon walls of the Shutup; I’ll average maybe twelve miles a day.
That night, the storm I have been anticipating finally comes. A moderate warm wind kicks up around sunset, followed by a hard rain. I find a scorpion inside my tent, one of the little ones that seem to like the sandy flat where my tent is pitched. I do not much like scorpions, but this seems far less upsetting than it might have been on my first night. I kill him, then lie on top of my sleeping bag and listen to the sizzle of the rain on the coals of my dying fire and let the air, now wonderfully fragrant with the sweet tarry smells of sage and creosote, wash over me. Life, it occurs to me, is getting steadily better.
ON MY FOURTH NIGHT IN THE DESERT, everything changes. There is no grand revelation. What happens is more like the absence of revelation, involving no thought, no lessons, no conclusions of any kind. A sort of non-event. The day leading up to it was sunny and windless: I had plenty of exercise—maybe fifteen miles of walking. In the morning I hiked the length of the Lefthand Shutup and into the Solitario toward an old ruined camp called Tres Papalotes. In the afternoon I walked south along the rim, toward the ragged distant silhouettes of the Sierra Rica mountains in Mexico. I surprised a lone javelina in a mesquite thicket; we were no more than five feet away from each other when he snorted and took off over the rise, drenching the air with his skunky scent. I peered into a dense collection of flood debris on the cutbank at two good-sized deer; I watched their chests heave as they breathed. After walking and exploring for five or six hours, I ate an absolutely splendid supper consisting of freeze-dried beef Stroganoff, a cup of lukewarm herb tea, and two peanut butter energy bars. The indigestion was gone.
The change happens after midnight and is simply this: I discover that I can now lie down in the darkness and be fully awake and alert and completely at ease, fearing nothing, wanting nothing. This is an entirely new feeling. The desert night is twelve hours long, and I have been sleeping no more than six to seven hours a night. Other than the half-hour I spent stargazing on the two nights without clouds (above me is the most remarkable horizon-to-horizon starscape I have ever seen), I stay inside the tent. On the first night I found those hours unbearable. Nights two and three were improvements, broken, however, by little moments of quiet, irrational panic and made less comfortable by my ongoing war with my body. But on the fourth night I have five full waking hours of what I can only describe as simple contentment. I am not happy or sad. I am not reviewing my life, reconsidering anything, or stacking up regrets or achievements. My thoughts are fleeting and immaterial. And perhaps this is what I had come for after all: a few hours of real ease and calm.
From this point onward my camping trip is happy, busy, and relatively serene. At times I feel a bit lonely—I miss my wife and daughter and often imagine what they are doing—but I am never bored, nor do I feel the momentary "What am I going to do next?" panic of the scheduled-up suburbanite that was a hallmark of my first two days in the wild. Somehow I find things to do, and I don’t worry about it. The remaining days are structured much the same: a hike in the morning, lunch, a hike in the afternoon, dinner at five-thirty followed by a fire until six-thirty or seven, then stargazing after dark. I do not even try to read anymore, other than to look up various flora and fauna in my desert guidebook. I spend long periods just sitting or, more often, just standing and looking around me. I talk to myself a good bit and at one point even find myself in conversation with an enormous grasshopper, who insists on sitting on my shirtsleeve and staring at me with this big, blank, walleyed gaze.
"How can you be sure," I ask, "that I am not a predator that eats nothing but grasshoppers?"
No answer.
"I mean, you are making certain assumptions here, aren’t you? What if those assumptions are wrong?"
He still does not answer, though I notice a slight movement of his right foreleg, as though in consideration of my question. He stays on my sleeve for an hour while I make notes in my diary, then buzzes off toward the cliffs. Somehow he comes to symbolize the odd, existential tranquility of my last days in the Solitario. There are moments during those days when I am aware that every thought has vanished from my head, where in a flash the very idea of myself as a separate or discrete entity has disappeared. These little miracles of experience don’t last, but they are provocative. I don’t believe they ever would have happened to me had I not been completely alone.
On the sixth day I venture out into the desert without my .357, which has been a bit of a bother and no longer seems necessary. I think it was really more of a Dumbo’s feather anyway, something that allowed me to believe that I could go alone into the wilderness without being immediately slaughtered and eaten. I am simply reordering my hierarchies of risk and fear. You can always choose what to fear and what not to fear. To fail to do so is paralyzing. It makes sense to fear poisonous snakes and falls down rocky screes; it makes no sense at all to waste time worrying about lions leaping at me from the canyon walls or stalking me in my campsite. And anyway I am still armed, with a stout walking stick and a knife.
On my last night I watch a sunset unlike any I have ever seen. The sun drops behind the mountains, and the light begins to drain from the sky. Overhead are cottony gray cumulus clouds, going darker as the light vanishes. Suddenly, as though someone has thrown a switch, the clouds turn brilliant pink. A minute later—again as though someone has thrown a switch—the clouds turn instantly bright yellow-orange, then a minute later turn a different shade of pink. I cannot imagine the physics behind this. I watch Venus drop like a molten rock into the banded sunset colors of the Solitario’s western rim, and that night I come to fully understand that my notion of darkness until now was really a suburbanite’s notion of darkness: a black place in the penumbra of sodium and mercury or tungsten lights. It really isn’t dark at all in the desert. With full starlight, you can easily see what you are doing; with full moonlight, you can almost read. Even with an overcast sky it isn’t really dark. The walls of the tent were always luminous. It is dark inside the tent, not outside.
Since my return from the desert, friends have asked me if I learned any lessons from my trip. At first I could not think of any, but now I think that maybe I did learn one simple lesson, after all. I learned that there is no such thing as darkness.
My Library
