Background Image

Unbounded Space, Uncontrolled Willfulness

7th Aug 2024 in

I wrote this many years ago, probably around 1998 or so. It takes place in Hellhole Canyon outside of Borrego Springs, California. The banner picture above is a view down the canyon from a place named Hellhole Palms. It's a true story, all of it happened including the toast at the bar at the end of the story. I have parenthetically added the source of the quote "never apologize, never explain", and have gone through making spelling corrections and putting one space after a period instead of two. I thought I gave up that habit long before I wrote this, but you know what they say: "Never apologize, never explain".


Unbounded Space, Uncontrolled Willfulness

I went for a hike one Sunday, not long ago. Now this statement is quite unremarkable, except for the fact that particular Sunday was also Mother’s Day. For the longest time, I wondered why on earth my ex-wife ever left me. As I look back, I see that quite possibly it was because I go for hikes on days like Mother’s Day. Hindsight is always 20-20, and everything looks clearer in retrospect, I suppose. I came across a quotation once from a member of the British Foreign Service, dating from back in the days of colonialism, that seems as good a response as any I might be able to conjure up on my own:  “Never apologize, never explain.” So, I went for a hike on Mother’s Day.

(Having received a few notes regarding the origin of the phrase “Never apologize, never explain”, saying that it's a much more modern phrase, here is a bit from Wikipedia: John Arbuthnot Fisher, 1841 – 1920, a notable British Admiral of the Victorian and Edwardian era is noted to have said, "Boldness has genius, power and magic in it ... Never contradict. Never explain. Never apologize". And earlier, King Charles I of England is quoted in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations as writing "Never make a defense or apology before you be accused", in a letter to Lord Wentworth ca. 1636.)

I journeyed out to my own personal desert, the Anza-Borrego, which occupies something close to the entire eastern half of San Diego County. Now, truth be told, I don’t own this desert in the proprietary sense. I call it my own out of a sense of personal acquaintance, gained through years of hiking within it, and coming to know it intimately, as well as the fact that it is a California State Park and belongs to each of us as public land.

May in the desert is a special time, as is any other month you might care to name. The heat was just starting to make its presence felt as I pulled into the small clearing, not really a parking lot, at the trailhead. I find that there is a distinct difference in the quality of heat from season to season. This Mother’s Day heat was a “spring heat”, fresh and new; much different from the yellow heat of August which is old, dry, and foul until freshened by the occasional thunderstorm. Late summer heat like that of August has always reminded me of a blacksmith hammering on his anvil;  the rocks seem to ring from the pounding heat, and the air reverberates and echoes with the deafening silence of radiation streaming down from the solar furnace, some 90 million miles distant. Even a yawning gulf such as this seems far too close in August.

Noting with pleasure that mine was the only car at the trailhead, I climbed out, took a long drink of water, shouldered my pack containing lunch, water, a book, a map, and my camera, and started up the trail. No need for ceremony here, just start walking. As I meandered up the long, gentle rise toward the mouth of the canyon, cactus wrens, gnatcatchers, and phainopeplas would startle ahead of me from resinous creosote bushes and dry, crackling bunches of brittle brush. The sudden beating of wings, along with the occasional mad whirring of a sun-addled cicada were the only sounds around me as I ambled along. The excited quality of these sounds set a perfect counterpoint to the relaxed and joyful air of my own mood as I climbed steadily up the slope to the canyon. The sun on my back pushed me along, and the sight of the canyon’s opening pulled me with an irresistible, invisible beckoning gesture, like a glance from a lover across a crowded room. It seemed that I was moving through the desert three-dimensionally, rather than merely over it. I felt the good heat seeping into my pores, replacing the sweat that came out with a sweet cleanliness that reminded me of my mother hanging blindingly white sheets out to dry in the bright summer sun of the Mojave Desert, so many years ago. Happy Mother’s Day.

I reflected as I walked on how pleased I had been that mine was the only vehicle parked at the trailhead; I’m hard-pressed to understand my misanthropic antipathy for those others of my own kind, but it’s probably related to the same reason that I abhor driving on our sunny, funny, suicidal Southern California freeways. The anonymous, ineffably obscene smugness of being contained within a slim, sleek coating of steel barreling along at 75 MPH plus, is really all too much for me. I long to know what makes those other drivers who they are, and what unimaginable things they think of while throttling up to pass the next car ahead. Why is it that technology must always entail a separation from the natural world, the real world, of which we are all such vital parts? A question for another time, I suppose. However, the anonymity of others visiting my precious desert stirs these emotions. This is a personal problem of my own that I must work through; the desert belongs to everyone...and to no one. Please don’t consider foregoing a trip to the desert on my account. There’s more than enough desert to share, for now, and I promise to be quite friendly if we should ever meet on the trail.

After a long climb up the fan of sand, gravel, and boulders issuing out from the mouth, I arrived at the canyon itself. Just before passing between the buttresses that guard the narrow defile, I turned and looked back over the slope I had crossed, and noticed that off to the north, cumulus clouds were building, portending rain for the desert. Although much too early in the year for the monsoon, I considered the prospect of a thunderstorm; Thor’s hammer, pounding off the walls of the canyon I was about to enter, and had a rush of adrenaline and anticipation that made me want to hurry the moment along. I remembered hunkering down under an outcrop in a nearby canyon one summer not too long ago. There, I spent the ensuing three hours entertained, enraptured, and trapped by a downpour seemingly unequaled in size since that ultimate diluvium some centuries ago, when a man living in the desert made a large boat and single-handedly saved all the animals of the earth. Leave it to a desert rat.

Within the canyon, there are several springs that support a rare desert ecosystem, that of the palm tree oasis. These palms, Washingtonia filifera are termed “relict”, meaning that they are relics left behind geologically from when the region basked in more southern, tropical latitudes back in the good old days of the Pleistocene. Those were the days when the ancestral Colorado River flowed through the region; the days before dam-nation and the Department of Reclamation, when the mighty Colorado was still wild and free; free of those impediments to its flow that we in our ignorance seem driven to plant in its way in order to build yet another golf course in Phoenix, another casino in Las Vegas, another strip mall in Los Angeles.

Enough silly reminiscing and nostalgia, though. Back to the present day. As I approached the first of these springs, I was in the throes of tunnel vision and rapt in my own reverie, finally back in the wilderness after a long hiatus. My mind was occupied by the present, the historic past, and the distant gulf of the geologic past; anything but the mundane, day-to-day that was left outside the canyon walls.
I must backtrack a little here, and mention that I’ve been hiking in Anza-Borrego now for the last 7 years or so, and even though “Borrego” means bighorn sheep in Spanish, the only desert bighorn I had ever seen was from within the relative safety of my car, standing on top of a hill near the road. I know that there are about 200 or 300 sheep scattered through the park, but as far as seeing one while hiking in a “natural” setting, removed from the confines of a vehicle, I had not.

As I approached the spring however,  not paying much attention to the possibility of there being large wild animals in the canyon, I heard first a clatter of rocks, and then the hollow sound of bounding hooves, echoing down the canyon. I looked up in time to see 4 or 5 sheep leaping up the canyon wall. My heart started to race, and I dropped my pack to scramble up the slope to get a better view. I stopped at the top of a small rise and waited. Sure enough, the sheep began to move along the canyon wall;   I could make out a ewe and one of her lambs. Then, from across the canyon to the south, another group of sheep made an appearance with a clatter of dislodged rocks. There, I saw three sheep near the ridge line looking down at me, and at the other two sheep on the north wall. I stood still, transfixed, watching the sheep for a long time, as they looked back at me. Suddenly it dawned on me that I was quite uninvited, and that I should probably move along and let them get down to the water, which I assumed was their goal.

Excited and elated, but remorseless for having detained the sheep from their drink, (Never apologize, never explain), I continued up the canyon past two or three more palm oases to my final goal, a 30-foot waterfall at the head of the canyon. This waterfall itself is a goal worthy of the 6-mile hike up the canyon. Water shoots out a few feet from the cliff wall, which is completely covered by delicate maidenhair fern, and cascades down through sun-speckled shade. The surrounding area supports a lush growth of sycamore, palms, and wild grape vines. The sun streaming through the leaves of the trees makes the little amphitheater around the waterfall glow in a soft green light, and the sound of the breeze blowing through the palm fronds reminds one of wind chimes made of slender, hollow stalks of bamboo. The silence and solemnity of the place are nearly palpable, and the percussive sound of the water as it falls into the shallow pool at the base of the dark cliff seems to play timpani to the soft, woody echoing of the palm fronds above.

I stood beneath the waters cascading off the rock above. I was thankful for the cold, clear water pouring over my overheated body, and thought of the River Jordan, of the Celts, and of the sacrality of water in countless other mythologies and religions throughout our history. I understood again that age-old religious bond that we have with water.

According to the small key-chain thermometer on my pack, the temperature outside my little alcove had hovered somewhat above 100 degrees. Inside, under the luxuriant shade near the water, the temperature leveled off at 75 or 80 degrees. I ate my lunch;  thick slices of dark bread baked on the Indian reservation near my home, and sage honey collected from an apiary near the small community of Julian just west of Anza-Borrego in the mountains, along with still-icy water which had spent the night in my freezer. A nap in the cool green shade on a rock beside the waterfall, and I was ready, albeit reluctant, to retrace my steps down the canyon...to continue the journey. I tentatively made my way out of the shade and into the fiery heat of afternoon, to return back to this world through the womb-like opening of the canyon reborn, or “re-created” once again. Happy Mother’s Day.

I made my way down the canyon, and as I neared the spring where I had enjoyed my encounter with the sheep on the way up, I slowed and this time looked and listened for signs of the animals I thought might still be there. Of course, the sheep heard me before I spotted them. However, instead of the 4 or 5 sheep I had expected, there were more; many more. I watched the beautiful animals leap from ledge to ledge, and decided, clear-headedly, to count them. As they leaped up a particular rise, one by one, I counted 5 then 6 then 9, but they still kept coming. I continued the count. Seventeen crossed the rise. Then behind me, I heard another clatter of dislodged rocks. I turned to see 4 more sheep on the wall, up the canyon from me. I had somehow not startled them as I moved down the canyon.

Up to this point the trail had run along the north side of the arroyo, but here it crossed the creek bed and wound down the canyon directly below the 20 or so sheep on the wall above. As I made my way down the trail, the sheep again began to move up the wall, dislodging rocks in quantities that made me fear one or two crashing into my head, so I crossed back over to the other side to avoid the danger. As I continued down the canyon, I kept turning back to watch the sheep on the wall. Just as I was about to exit the gorge, I turned back for a last look and saw a particularly large ram standing on an outcrop watching me, marking my leaving. I stopped and stared back at him, reluctant to leave. Stupidly I waved, not knowing what else to do. He just stood and stared directly at me. I could only take this as a token. Whether of good fortune or ill, I haven’t yet determined, but it seems a token nonetheless. The look in the old ram’s yellow eyes will glow and murmur, and continue to exist within my memory of the canyon for the rest of my life.

My trip down the fan back to my car was a much more reflective journey than the trip up had been. Rather than rollicking, my mood was tranquil and still. Birds would fly from creosote bushes, and cicadas would scream, but they all seemed tuned, as I was, to the ending of another day under the great arc of sun and stars.

It wasn’t until I was within a mile or so of the trailhead when a red-tail hawk soared overhead and screamed its lonely cry, that I turned and looked back up the way I had come. Great billowing thunderheads rose above the mountains that I had just been in, and the sun was just touching the towering, white peaks of the clouds, illuminating them from behind. I watched the shadow from these clouds reach across the desert toward me, and heard the distant rumble of a far-off storm. The hawk, which had been circling above me, suddenly dropped from a tremendous height, feet out-stretched and wings swept back, toward some unsuspecting prey. The shadow cast by the clouds silently enveloped me as I watched the hawk;   down it streaked, until it became inseparable from the desert around me. In a few seconds, it reappeared, with a small animal clutched in its talons. The bird flew off toward the canyon as the sun passed completely behind the clouds.

Watching this display, I was exhilarated once again by the sheer nearness and abundance of life all around me. The Russians have a word for this sense of wonder and exhilaration. It is inherited from Mongol nomads who rode screaming and murdering across the steppes: “Volya”. Roughly translated, because there is no exact English equivalent, volya means “a sense of unbounded space and uncontrollable willfulness."  
Yes. Uncontrollable willfulness and unbounded space; these are the words that I had been hoping to find. These are the meanings for which I was hoping to provide experiences. This is what I always look for and hope to find when I go out into the wild, untouched lands that surround us.

Trapped in the day-to-day logic of work and raising a child, living and loving, and existing in a world somehow removed from that of this particular canyon, this desert, the wild earth, I allow control and boundaries to take hold and dominate my life. Too often, looking out from behind our windows, we retreat back into that seeming shelter that we have made for ourselves. Behind our technology we hide, and slip into our sleek steel sheaths, in which we rocket back and forth on our countless, anonymous, and often meaningless journeys. We accomplish these Herculean feats, while the sheep in the canyons move from spring to spring, the birds fly from bush to bush, and water falls into tinkling pools that echo through temple silence.

I reached my car, threw in my pack, and headed off toward the sunset and home. I stopped in the small town of Julian for dinner. I sat at the bar, and heard men talking about their home lives and their jobs, and the problems they faced. The usual things we discuss with each other; the things that lend meaning and texture to our lives. I thought of the canyon, the sheep, and the Mongol hordes screaming across the steppes. I toasted all the men at the bar; “Volya!” They looked silently at me, and politely raised their glasses and returned the toast, then settled back into their own conversations, wondering what it was exactly that the grizzly, grinning, sunburned man at the end of the bar was thinking of.

 

Add new comment