Easter on the Verde

This is the time to be stuck in the Sonoran Desert.......I cannot even adequately describe to you how beautiful and warm and breezy and chock full of life the desert was last week. Not even remotely adequately. I spent hours on my back atop grassy hills covered in purple honey-filled papago lilies (pic. 1 at bottom), totally edible, totally delicious, grazing....my mouth full of the sugary blue dick flowers, staring up at the stacked cumulus clouds spotting a starkly bright blue sky.....nothing but red rock, long slim sycamore branches with green buds slowly unfurling themselves....I tanned myself, lying beside the Dirty Verde River (yes, we pronounce Verde to rhyme with Dirty where I be), letting my fingers dangle in the water that was cool and lazy. It is a sheer crime that I get paid to do this.

My band of girls was exceptional. There were seven of them--some were practically Paris Hilton status and even attended the same parties as said celebrity, and others were there on rich and dying grandparents' money and came from more humble backgrounds. I love those girls. We laughed hard last week and it felt good. We had to cross the Dirty Verde--twice--and the second time nearly took us under, trying to swim through currents dragging our fat packs behind us before they completely filled with water, soaking our sleeping bags, food packs, thermals for the evening chill. But we survived that, ate some de-thorned Christmas berries (pic. 2 at bottom) and spent the starlit nights dancing barefoot in sand around bonfires built from driftwood, howling at the full moon and celebrating Easter by rising early to watch the moon set and the sun rise at the same moment. Like being caught between the meeting of two old friends, my hippie friend Troy once said. That morning we each took a rock we had carried in our pockets on our hikes that represented a heavy thing of the heart that weighed us down and we dropped them in the water and left them behind. I didn't want to let go of mine and held it longer than most. I hate letting go--I hate it hate it hate it hate it hate it. I don't even think I officially did let go completely.........but I let go of enough. I let it slip from my fingers and watched it disappear beneath the deep green waters of that river that the day before I had cursed so frantically when I thought the current would take me under until I realized I was nearly to the opposite shore.

I ended the week hanging out with my friend Price and watching gila monsters creep about the top of the cactused hill as the sun was setting Wednesday evening. A gila monster hissed at me--it was like staring into the face of a dinosaur, and I marveled at how it contorted and flattened its thick spotted body to crawl beneath the spokes of a fat prickly pear cactus when I saw what he was hunting--a tiny three-inch bite-size bunny rabbit. Almost too ironic of an ending for an Easter week on the trail. The little guy was scared, but also pretty chill and he didn't put up much of a fight when I reached into the thistled bush he was hiding in and picked the bunny up. The poor gila monster hissed one last time at me and sulked down the road in search of new prey while I cooed and purred over this smallest bunny ever that sat just as comfortable and content as could be in the palm of my hand.

Now, since I was a kid I liked to think I had some kind of special relationship with animals...I blame the boy in The Secret Garden who could talk to crows and foxes. I can't say that this bunny and I had any kind of special or spiritual connection and that's why he let me hang out with him like I did......but I can't deny that the experience affected me pretty profoundly. He was such a little fluffy guy...he eventually felt good enough to stretch his neck around and hop around a little bit in my hands. I lay on the ground with some sprouted lentils and piece of carrot on my chest, just in case he felt like eating. The bunny hopped up my arm and nestled himself between my chest and my shoulder and rested his chin there. Price, tell everyone how small this little guy was.

I had all these quick fantasies about taking the bunny home with me and raising it like one of my own, like those Disney movies about boys raising baby lions or wolves or bears or the like. This little rabbit and I found each other and we would be a real striking pair, the two of us. Any fears about the future and education and vocation and marital relations and all of that would be numbed and softened because my bunny and I had each other. But alas, I let someone else hold my bunny while I took a walk with a friend and when I returned the bunny had left, they had let him go.

It's for the better. That's obvious, I'm no dummy. The bunny would have died in a week. He probably would have refused to eat. The gila monster probably has him by now. Or maybe my scent that he carries makes all the other bunnies fear him now and he is as much a renegade of his species as I sometimes describe myself to be. The car ride home alone would have stressed him out, and who wants to live in a cage.

But am I so ridiculous to harbor a secret desire to run into my bunny again during my desert adventures? Would it be so silly to wonder if some rabbit some day that I find staring at me with ears perked across the cow tank isn't my little bunny that I saved from the death-vise grip of a gila monster? The smallest bunny I ever did see. It's a crime I get paid for what I do. And might I also add--the desert may be empty and open and blank to some, but this desert is so thick with emotion and memories and fears and gratitude and secret morning meetings and late night fire circles and bleeding hearts and belly laughs that I am becoming almost pained to return again and again to the same gravelly creeks and lonely peaks and lost caves. I miss my friends who have moved on or who are moving on. I am sad that I will soon be that one to leave the desert behind as well. I guess we can't all be Edward Abbey forever. I wonder what Ed Abbey would have thought of that bunny. I'm quite sure he would have been more inclined to raise the gila monster, and he likely would have began by feeding the bunny to it.


To anyone interested, here's a bunch of the rich life I was privy to witness on the trail this week. The pictures aren't mine, as we aren't allowed cameras, but these fine folks of the Internet took better pictures than I could have anyway.