Canyonlands, A Boy and A Hit of Acid 

by Ellen Graham

 

I was introduced to Canyonlands at 23 by a boy and a hit of acid.

In the ancient times of 1978 I lived in the Avenues in Salt Lake City. Before cell phones boys would simply come over and knock on your door and you would answer. Jason and his friend Steve come over on a Tuesday night, tell me to meet them in Canyonlands on Thursday morning, pet my cat Benny and leave.

So. It starts when I leave my apartment at 3am, armed with a thermos of coffee, a half a French dip and a bag of mixed nuts from the health food store. Somehow I thought that would be enough. I have on my best overalls. A long sleeve white shirt. Blonde hair to my waist. My best look.  At 5am I get to the tiny town of Monticello and there is light in the sky. I stop to pee and an Appaloosa clatters in front of my car. That happened. I am meeting Jason and going to a place that will change my life. Do you remember being 23? I have known Jason for years and always found myself following him.

We meet in the A campground. His sister Julie, with a katydid turn of the head, sizes me up. She is not pleased.

“Be careful.” she says.

Her friend Sally has broken her nose and is already in Julie’s car. How can you get hurt in such a beautiful place?

“Sally slid into a tree” says Julie. She and Jason look at each other and laugh. Just like grade school when kids whisper behind their hands. I’m not included. The secret belongs to them. I don’t know what is funny about this. They share the same straw hair and Mayan cheekbones. She palms something to him.

Do you remember boys at the age of 23? I met Jason at a conservation camp when we were teenagers. The funniest person I’d ever met. Lived to be outdoors. Iconoclast. Everyone wanted to be around his charisma. His magic. I know I did.

“Are you ready?”

He helps me put my pack on, which in those days was like strapping  on railroad ties.

“This is so light-did you just pack a hanky?”

He takes my hand and slips an orange barrel of LSD into it, shiny as candy. I take it. He grins, we begin.

Steve, Jason and Jeff have been camping together since grade school. The way they tell it: they decided to climb to the highest needle they could find. Chasing  a chuckwalla they ran down a canyon and saw the rock that looked like a kitchen table. Behold, the Kitchen. I wonder if this is boy myth. An embellished legend.

 

But an invitation to the Kitchen is the Holy Grail of invitations. The cool desert rat boys would come back from there dusty and tan and tired. Telling tales, laughing secret laughs. Stoner smiles. There is no map to the Kitchen. In order to get there you had to be invited. And until now I wasn’t the cool girl.  I have never been to The Kitchen and I have never dropped acid. In about an hour it will be impossible to tell which is which.

Salmon ridges, flesh colored stone, an azure sky with clouds from a cartoon. I trace my hands on the tiny lines running through the rocks like worm trails. The red rock is a grandmother’s hand, warm and smooth and worn. I watch his sinewy tan calves and smell his sunflower seed skin.

“It’s steep here. Be careful”

My second warning. But he is laughing.

“Do you feel it?” he asks

I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be feeling. I want to say “at home” because I do. Feel at home. Which is crazy because I’ve never been here. So I don’t say that.

There are footholds carved into the stone and a steel cable handrail anchored to the rock. I’m amazed I don’t seem to need either. I feel like I’m barefoot. My face hurts from smiling.

The rocks under our feet are uniform, as if it were a man-made sidewalk.  Square stones, the color of bone with scallop edges, snake around the path. Behind us the mesa is a jarhead’s  crewcut, magenta and mud brown.  Down a dry wash with curved pink walls like a mouth. Through a bowl with a lone mountain mahogany. Inside a wind-carved hollow, sun glancing off the whalebone curve of the canyon wall.

“This we named the Searing Desert-can you see the heat waves?”

I can’t, but I tell him I can. So badly do I want to impress him. Remember… 23.

“On the left, the loaf shaped bluff? Camelback. We’re almost at Death Crack. You’ll have to jump that.”

I am timid physically. I don’t like the name of that.

“Richard Nixon rock on your left. Slate Canyon is next-there’s the Abajo Mountains, and over there the Manti La Salle range.”  It is March and the Manti La Salles still have snow. They are so far away but feel so close I think I can count the trees. I don’t mention this.

I feel like I have never been here and I feel like I have always been here. The way the land ripples over the horizon, the way the wind touches my face, the way I smell the acrid sand, the way I feel so small, the way I feel at home. It is already singing in my blood. I look at Jason, I look at this land, I look at this, this, this place and I want to freeze time.

The sidewalk of multicolored stone seems to shift underneath me with each step.

“This is Death Crack, this one we named for one of Porter Rockwell’s advance scouts, LaVar Heber Death.” Then we have to sit down and laugh for a while. I mean, a really long time spent on one side of Death Crack doing nothing but laughing. And, no, I don’t remember why we found that so funny. I drink from his canteen, because it didn’t occur to me to bring water. We finally stand. And here is a strange thing. I sail over Death Crack as though I am flying in slow motion and fast motion at the same time.

We follow the trails by the cookie crumb cryptogrammic soil, past the water pots, past the soft sand, past the curved stone and we are here. The Kitchen.

“I’ve always wanted to have sex in that soil. But it’s delicate.  Be careful you don’t step on it.”

For the next few minutes that is all I can think about.

We put down our packs and he shows me this place.

“You can’t get hurt if you trust it” he says. “Don’t think about it.”

Running after him, skipping from ledge to ledge. I feel the sun and sky and dirt and rock. I can hear a raven but I can’t see it. We are the only people on the planet. I can feel the rotation of the world. Time stops.

“Can we sit?” I need to stop feeling like I’m flying.  He sits by me and holds my hand. His feels like a baseball mitt, hard and soft at the same time. It is glorious and I am delirious. We sit silently. Watching and watching and watching.

“How many hours have we been sitting here?” I ask, and this makes us laugh again. For a long time. Again. And then we begin to walk again. It feels now like time is stretching and this day will be forever. He turns and takes my shoulders. Leans in.

Later we lay naked on the red rocks, their heat fading into our backs.  I look up. The moon rises and glides through the sky as a sailboat glides through the water, lighting the desert floor. The canyon walls rise and rise, from the earth into plateaus, large above me, rising and rising, ancient and familiar.  The rocks glow, coral fading into alabaster fading into citron fading into umber.  I dream and in the dream I am in the Anasazi petroglyphs that pattern the stars and I am in the stars and I am in the scarlet paintbrush and I am in the desert dust and I am naked and I am happy and I am laughing and I am of the canyon and I fall into the earth as I am.

The next morning he is quiet. No smiles today. He has to share his coffee because I didn’t bring any.

“Let’s climb Shiprock. Follow me.”

Shiprock is a massive red rock formation. It looms over and around me, blotting out the familiar Manti La Salle range. The cobalt sky from yesterday is now a pale gunmetal, vast and unforgiving. There are three tiny improbable blooms by my Keds. Claret cup cactus. On the way to the base I keep tripping and falling and tripping again. I can’t get my feet to behave. The land that was so magical yesterday feels hostile this morning.  We are at a steep, menacing incline and I have to crawl. Higher and higher still. I slip and put my face into the sand to stop. It is like an angry horse trying to twitch me off. I slip again, slide, slip, but I can’t get purchase, flailing, I can’t hang on, thrashing, panicking, clawing the air, sand falling into my mouth, my shirt, my eyes. Jason goes below me to make a step for my feet. He is furious. The clouds form above us in a dark military formation. I am tired and i am cold and I am scared. I don’t know if I can move.

Somehow I have failed a girl test. That night we sleep on opposite sides of The Kitchen.

I have to leave the next day. We walk out in silence. He stands away when I open my car door.

“Be careful.” he says. He hugs me. Awkwardly. Chin digging into my shoulder.

What I don’t know is that as I am leaving the parking lot his ex is driving into the parking lot. She is a dancer. I am not.  I lost a boy and a place all in a moment.

I’m sure I’m not the only girl in her 20’s to experience this.

But I never regretted it. I never did drugs again in Southern Utah but I always felt like I did. I discovered Zion, Bryce, Escalante, Capitol Reef and other out of the way places I won’t tell you about.  Sleeping by the Virgin River, hiking the East Rim, seeing spotted skunks in Capitol Reef, being surrounded by rabbits at Grosvenor’s Arch, getting lost in Goblin Valley and not caring, bald eagles circling in Bryce.

 

Though I never returned to the Kitchen, I remember odd things. The way his sister’s shoes looked. The feel of the canvas canteen. The smell of cedar bark. I ache for it, still after all these years. I dream of it.

 

https://concretedesertreview.com/issues/issue-three-coming-soon