Naked

“The first thing I did was take off my pants.  Naturally.”  So said Edward Abbey, when one summer he  reached a deserted mining camp five miles below the Native American village of Havasu, on a branch of the Grand Canyon, where he lived alone for thirty-five days.  My husband and friends hate this line, because I say it all the time.  “I just want to move to the desert and take off my pants,” I joke, whenever I get exasperated with life, my career, my own drama.

           

Today I am leaving the desert, and I want to say goodbye, so I get out of bed an hour before sunrise.  My traveling companions sleep tight—they will be off to greater travels in a few months.  My husband says, “It’s so early . . . ” when I rouse him, then rolls over.          

           

I walk through an unfamiliar neighborhood, past squat, earth-colored ranch homes, at a time of day that would be mostly unfamiliar to me anywhere.  It makes me feel slightly uncomfortable.  A coyote wails, loudly and rooster-like, more deranged than usual.  I’d like to see him in the distance, over the low desert plants, but I imagine him close:  waiting at the trailhead, daring me to cross into his territory.  Every dog in the neighborhood responds, more odd-sounding than the coyote—their wild canine barking muffled by stucco walls.

           

At the trailhead, I press my nose to the map, attempting to review, in the light of the just-two-days-ago-full moon, the trail I hiked once already yesterday.  I can’t see it, which, combined with the coyote and the general strangeness of the place and time of day, makes me a little afraid.  I hesitate.

           

But we need a little fear in our lives, I think, and anyway, soon enough, the world will be almost too beautiful to bear:  my husband will appear, stirred by the coyote’s wail and enough concern for his wife to follow me on this humble pre-dawn hike; and then the sun, sending its unfathomable but undeniable warmth across 93 million miles; and then, one-by-one, six hot-air balloons.

           

“They look a bit like some kind of alien spacecraft,” my husband says, turning from our perch atop Sugarloaf Hill, sunblind, to view the balloons hovering high above the sleeping tourist town.  And there it comes again:  the naked mind rotating between so many things—night and day, fear and beauty.