"Denim blue fading up to the sky.............."

I first thought to write this post a week ago, but I told myself: No, don't do it. It'll make you look self-centered and vain again. All you do is complain about your current states of mind and make broad ethereal grasps toward some juvenile philosophy/musing/stereotype/truism and end up sounding like a Molly Ringwald monologue from 1980s' John Hughes.

Well, I happen to like Molly Ringwald. And I have a ripped-up pink skirt that I bought for cheap at Target and it's lasted me three years and someone always comments that it reminds them of Sixteen Candles. And for the first time since I was three-years-old, I don't have any wearable blue jeans with holes in the knees.

I don't know how to analyze that. And I just watched Annie Hall and it's made me very neurotic and I don't have anyone to talk to right now because there is chaos in the desert and children hitchhiking back to their hometowns and all my friends have been called out to hike and to work, leaving me behind with my stupid third and final dentist appointment for my ninth and tenth final cavity fillings (which may or may not be necessary, according to friend Drew's latest theories of dental fraud).

So I just want to say that I've had to say goodbye to old friends this month. Friends I bought at Rexburg's Rags-n-Tans' Silver Jeans outlet all the way the hell back in the fall of 2000, my freshman year of college. Yeah, man. They're that old. They've been through so many first kisses and sand dune bonfires and Jackson Hole retreats.....and I remember when the holes were first getting formed I got kicked out of Brother Olsen's Spanish 320 course but I cried so he let me stay....... I had other pairs of holey jeans....one I had to retire when I religiously couldn't show my thighs any longer (luckily that retired my overall shorts, as well). Another pair I stopped wearing in 2006 because the hole in the crotch just couldn't be safety-pinned shut any longer. A more recent pair finally wore out on my backside....the fabric just got too thin and you can't sew patches onto fabric like that.

This was my last pair. The pair that Atsuko Sensei told me was a work of art every time I wore them to Japanese 3010. I used to wear tube socks with red stripes on the top because you could see them peeking up through one of the holes. It was my trademark. People shouldn't have trademarks. I don't believe in trademarks. I'm glad I don't have to have a trademark.

While I was making pottery with hippies in Boulder, Utah, a roommate in Arizona saw them in the garage. It was one of the only things in that garage that wasn't hers so I can understand her apparent desire to try them on. Seriously, the garage is filled with her things...she makes me believe that it's possible for people on Gilligan's Island to bring so much crap with them for a three-hour tour. She has thirty years worth of built up baggage out there that she only picks up when she has to move to a different apartment (approx. every three-to-six months). So I can see why she'd want to try my pants on. I can understand they were on her marked territory.

What I can't understand is why she'd choose to do lunges in them. My last pair of holey jeans. She tried to give me a high-water pair of Sevens jeans she bought at Savers, possibly clearance at TJ Maxx, as a replacement for my Rexburg 2000 Silvers with the flared bottoms. I didn't even try her jeans on. It's like trying to replace my dead dog with a trendy new chinchilla. Hells no. I went to my room and lay my pants on the bed with me and we cried together. We wept for all the times we'd had and all the times we'll never have. Then I threw on my swimming suit, put on my pants, and ran around several neighborhoods jumping into pools and rolling around in grass. I plan to make one of those denim picnic blankets out of all my pants because I can't bear to chuck them out.

I'm trying to decide if I should grow out of holey jeans or keep falling to my knees in prayer for a next batch. I'm sure I'm just being dramatic, but I'm a single woman in my later-20s, in a limbo period between commitments, and I don't have a pet or a boyfriend. I'm afraid I need an outlet and right now venting about my lost jeans feels good. "And though you want them to last forever, you know they never will....and the patches make the goodbye harder still." Goodbye, my pants. It's been real--true and blue.

I snuck a camera onto the trail.......

........and these are some pictures that I took. I was only out there from a Friday evening to a Monday afternoon, and I had to hide my camera, so these are some pictures I took while I was making radio check-ins, et cetera--anytime I was wandering around by myself. These may be interesting or they may not be. Either way, here they are.

Due to some dental-emergency-type errands I have to run repeatedly in the next two weeks, I found out I don't have any more full weeks on the trail left. Just a couple more Friday-to-Mondays. It's bittersweet, but we're on fire restrictions now anyway....fires have been replaced by stoves. We still have to bust a coal with saguaro and seep willow and blow the coal into flame with tinder, but once the stove is lit, the tinder bundle is stamped out. It's actually a positive thing, in some ways. Everyone learns to bust coals quickly and efficiently and you never run out of tinder since you can re-use the same bundle a half-dozen times. I busted two coals a day the last week I was out. Anyway, blah blah blah. Pictures of the desert, for anyone with the time to glimpse them:

Here's a picture of my pack. The straps are made out of my army-issued sleeping burrito--what I put my sleeping bag in at night for added warmth. Mine is pretty ripped up.

People claim you can use hooked needles from this cactus to go fishing.

Along with stoves, gaiters are also back for the summer. They supposedly protect against rattlesnake bites, but considering a high majority of bites occur on the arms, face, and hands of men between the ages of 15 and 35 (I'm making half of that up, I think) I'm not sure why our ankles are at such a huge risk. But I like mine because they make me look like I'm wearing bellbottoms and I can run through catclaw mimosa with them.

Much of the wildflowers are clamming up for the summer, but they are being replaced by blooming cacti. Really, really beautiful. And many are edible. Ocotillo is blooming, too.






Oh, and grape leaves are EVERYWHERE. They are a sour treat for any summer hike...they are literally everywhere. I am never not eating grape leaves during summer hikes.

Here's Squaw Butte.

And this is the picture of me when I was in that polygamist colony in southern Utah. I was fourteen and was the seventh wife of a man named Isaiah Jacob Brenneman. Surely I told you guys about that before, right?

Top Twenty Overprostituted Guilty Pleasures

Today did not work out as planned. I missed everything I was supposed to make it to today. It was one of those domino effects....being late to one thing kept me from hitting the next...I ended up spending unnecessary money and wasting time. Just one of those rotten days. But--I never got hit by a car, no one told me that they hated me, I didn't kill any babies. So it could have been worse. WAY worse.

In any case, I feel like somewhat of a waste of space today and it makes me a bit confessional. So here it is. CONFESSIONS.

There is a list of over-played, over-prostituted songs one might hear on the radio that I never tire of. Some of these songs that I love so dearly I will openly admit are repulsive and even poor-quality and I agree with you on how hokey and horrible and despicable some of them may be. But. For some ungodly reason, whenever one of these songs comes on the radio, not only am I pleased to hear it, I get these tingles of excitement that YES, I LOVE this song, they are playing this song for ME, and even while I am thinking this very thought, I also know that I would take that secret with me to my grave. That is, until tonight.

So without further ado, the top 20 list of over-played songs that I will never get sick of, that I will never not want to dance on the tables to, songs that I will turn up loud when I'm driving or doing the dishes just so long as no one else is around, songs that I will scan classic rock and easy listening stations for, songs that I hope people ask Delilah to play for them. *commence kazoo fanfare*


20. Dancing in the Moonlight -- Toploader
19. Crash -- Dave Matthews
18. I'm Not Your Stepping Stone -- The Monkees
17. Play Me -- Neil Diamond
16. Time After Time -- Cyndi Lauper
15. Cat's in the Cradle -- Harry Chapin
14. From a Distance -- Bette Midler
13. Kiss from a Rose -- Seal
12. Everything I Do -- Bryan Adams
11. Everybody Wants to Rule the World -- Tears for Fears
10. Simply Having a Wonderful Christmastime -- Paul McCartney
9. Return to Pooh Corner -- Kenny Loggins
8. More Than Words -- Extreme
7. Place in this World -- Michael W. Smith
6. Yesterday -- The Beatles
5. Yellow Brick Road -- Elton John
4. Forever Young -- Alphaville
3. I Saw the Sign -- Ace of Base
2. I've Got My Mind Set on You -- George Harrison
1. For the Longest Time -- Billy Joel

So go on, judge me. Bring it. These songs have faithfully made me grin since before I even hit puberty. I love them! I will never tire of them! I want them played at my deathbed! ...Maybe!! So dish it out now, you hypocrits. What are your guilty overplayed pleasures that you pretend like you hate but secretly get all stoked up from. I'm sure we share some.

(Post Script: I wanted to place Cat's Peace Train and Gordon's Carefree Highway to the list, but they aren't quite as despicable as the rest, though they are quite overplayed. Consider them honorary mentions.)

I bet Etta Place really did teach English for a while.......

Fate has spoken. The stars have aligned. I am taking a less-traveled road that will one day seem to have made all the difference, after all. A boarding school with a campus in Saratoga Springs and a campus in Spanish Fork has asked me to be their English teacher, beginning June 16th (the Europe trip once again being placed on hold). The students are at-risk girls, much like who I'm working with here in Arizona, and the school specializes in equine therapy....horse whispering or something akin. I'm going to be a real English teacher. Today is a gloriously sunny day. I'm to begin choosing texts immediately...I can teach whatever I want, whomever authors/poets I want, and during the summer, Friday is fieldtrip day and I can take them wherever I want. They've asked me to check out what plays are being performed in Cedar City this summer--I get to teach Shakespeare and then take my girls down to see the play in August.....this thrills me. I'm too blessed. I'm incredibly excited.

And I may be moving to Provo, God forbid it. My Provo readers need to give me an honest appraisal of the Utah county situation and if I shouldn't head on towards Springville or Lehi or even commute from further north to avoid the legions of BYU freshmen that will force me into an early grave (considering I am an ancient old maid already to most of them)....I know there's at least two of you out there....come on Provonians, tell it to me straight.

I'm sad to leave Arizona. I'm quite certain that I'll end up living in the Utah deserts during evenings and weekends. I'd really like to learn to fly fish. Are there places to fly fish near Spanish Fork? I hear the rock climbing is all right, too. I like to think that I'll be living out my next few years like a young Katharine Ross......26-year-old English teacher hanging out with Western outlaws and keeping them in line while I help them bust into South American banks, and then, hopefully, I'll find a Dustin Hoffman to burst into the temple doors someday yelling, "Emily! Emily!" and waving a large wooden cross so I don't end up marrying some strange Provo man I don't really love. It will be very dramatic I hope, and I will be very beautiful. Fingers crossed! Anyway, just wanted to lay down the word--I'm moving back to Utah. *cue very formidable and conclusive metal door slamming shut*

Thoughts on mistletoe.....

After six months of reminding myself to research mistletoe from seeing it suck away at the lives of junipers and cottonwoods in the desert, I finally did a little low-key research on this parasitic symbol of love and courtship. Thought it might make an interesting blog. We'll see.

So it ends up that mistletoe most likely derives from the German Mist meaning dung and Tang meaning branch, reason being that birds eat the seeds, crap them out onto branches where they sneak their way into the tree's core a la Sigourney Weaver's nemesis in Alien. After five weeks or so of digging their way in chigger-style, the mistletoe copycats the tree's branch scheme as well as it can and sprouts itself from the tree, oddly brighter and yellower in color and dropping white, semen-filled berries for further domination. According to my friend Dodge as he told it apathetically to my band of girls one sunny afternoon in November, the mistletoe, like the romance it represents, will find a host and feed on it until both the tree and the mistletoe weaken and die together, leaving only the broken shell of the original tree and wilted rotting mistletoe all around the ground beneath it. Oh what baggage, oh what destruction. Oh, the sentimentality of it all!


In the areas of the desert I have walked, mistletoe leaves a bloody trail of leafless branches stretching bare and naked toward the sky while several clumps of mistletoe leech away at their last breaths, mocking the host trees by bearing their own leaves and fruits that deny the tree its own posterity. My girls used to gather the mistletoe to hang in our camps during the Christmas season, but we somberly quit as we followed the path of arboreal carnage the mistletoe parasites left in their wake. Hanging mistletoe felt like celebrating the Charles Manson of trees, like honoring the vampiric extent this plant takes for survival. And it surely made us at least half as cynical about love and romance as our friend Dodge was.

We most likely owe the Vikings for the kissing traditions. Balder was the Viking god of the summer sun (this legend makes for an appropriate Arizonan April trail tale). Anyway, Balder dreamed he was going to die. His mother flipped out because she knew that if Balder died, everything on the earth would die with him. Her name was Frigga and she was the goddess of love and beauty. Since she's Viking, let's assume she would kick Aphrodite's ass if they cage fought each other.


Well, Frigga did what only a mother would think to do, and she went to all the plants and animals on the planet and asked that they would be kind to her son because he was a good boy. The consequences of Mom's words were typical--it was as bad for Balder as it was for any young boy who walks towards to the junior high's front doors only to have his mom call out, "I love you, Pumpkinpants!" in front of all the jocks that hang out in the foyer until twenty minutes into first period--Balder had more rocks thrown at him in teasing than any of the other young gods and goddesses. Frigga was pretty powerful, though, so nothing worse than broken eyeglass rims ever happened to him.

That is, until this other boy god, Loki, found out that mistletoe had no sway against Frigga's power because mistletoe was not plant or animal as it has no roots of its own, no identity without a branch to leech from. Loki was as low as you could go......I'm not sure who would win a cage fighting match between Loki and Shakespeare's Iago. That's how bad. Loki not only made a poisoned dart from the mistletoe but he also tricked Balder's blind brother Hoder to shoot it into Balder for him. Balder died. Loki was a real bastard.

Here's where those tried and true Christianity parallels and Jung's collective unconscious comes into play. Three days after Balder jumped the Great Boa as they say somewhere, Frigga's tears washed the mistletoe's red coloring off from all its berries and washed them white as snow (or white as semen most Druids would say) and this miraculously raised Balder from the dead. Frigga was so thrilled and grateful for mistletoe afterward that whenever she saw it she got so damned excited she'd kiss anybody and everybody standing underneath it. Which is kind of a nice story and I like that kind of kissing more than the awkward, aw geez, we're both standing under the mistletoe...are we supposed to make out? type of kissing mistletoe pushes these days.


So, a happy ending. Also, it ends up mistletoe isn't so bad after all, botanically speaking. Mistletoe among juniper trees, for example, actually encourages more juniper berries to sprout before the tree chokes up under the mistletoe's grip. More birds and animals come for more juniper berries and the result concludes with more animals and juniper trees in that area than before the mistletoe arrived. What a paradox, huh? Also, mistletoe from some trees are so plush and bunchy that birds get giddy over them and make their nests there in the high branches. So, that seems positive.

Conclusion: love is a leech that can suck you dry and the romance might well die right along with your soul. But cry it out and you will live again. Sure. That's the way this big round ball keeps on keeping on. There are times and there are seasons and there's always another spring and another. We can only hope that if we are so lucky for romance and mistletoe to stick its parasitic tentacle against the soft meshy skins of our metaphysical aortas, that at least we can have the strength to live with these growths long enough that we both survive to fill our neck of the woods with plenty of birds' nests and juniper berries and happy little animal families a good long while. Then, if we all die together, it's romantic and meaningful, just like Old Dan and Little Ann, those timeless beloved coondogs that couldn't live without their love, and a red fern grows between them. The only book I ever saw my father cry in. So that's something. Mistletoe. Finally researched it.

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.

What am I doing in Casablanca, man?

Somebody was talking to me about catharses and what they're good for. I said they were good for clearing the stage of people at the end of Shakespeare's tragedies. But in retrospect, I think catharses breed people instead of chasing them away. These past 72 hours have illuminated a lot of pain from my friends that I haven't noticed because I've been so muddled up and reigned into my own selfish hands as I've tried to fingergrab any last remnants of something dead because I can't face losses, I can't let go. And all I see is what I'm grabbing for. I don't even notice whether or not or how it even wants to be grabbed...maybe it wouldn't be so difficult if I was only supposed to walk alongside it after all. Like trying to push a horse. A real mule-headed horse.

In any case, my hands are free. I should have gone rock climbing today because I'm fat from eating cake and I go out on the trail tomorrow, but I don't trust my fingers yet. I heard from old friends this week, good friends, some here some there and they were all hurting. Not desperately or disgustingly, but when they spoke I felt it in their voices and saw it in their eyes....I had good conversations these past few days about life and goodness and light and friendship. I learned about fights these friends were fighting that I had been completely oblivious to. I confided all my guts to my mom and she not only held them there so gently and forgivingly, she even brushed them off a bit and showed me some of her guts and how they healed up real nice just like mine would. So forgive me for throwing temper tantrums (which anybody real close to me has been privy to countlessly) and forgive me for trying to sound profound here. I just wanted to declare hope for the children and light in the distance and chocolate sundaes in heaven. I connected with people in the most raw ways and I feel clean and washed out from it. Today is a good day. Today is beautiful in Arizona and I wish all of you in the cold states could feel the summer in my parking lot. It is a good day.