Mountain Gazette
The sun was about to dip behind the Vermillion Cliffs as I pulled up to the edge of Marble Canyon. In five minutes, I would have been pronounced someone’s wife. I had imagined spending my would-be wedding night playing minor chords on my guitar, befriending a box of wine, lamenting love lost. But Badger Point was more popular these days, and a group had already made camp. Smoke billowed from the barbecue, kids milled around, a woman carried a baby on her hip. My mind wandered downriver to another spot I had camped at a few years ago. But I hadn’t driven 300 miles today to camp just anywhere.
I got out of the truck stifling huffing noises and blinking back tears. A man whose black cowboy hat barely clung to a mass of salt and pepper hair introduced himself as Scott. He was holding a hamburger and welcomed me to join them. His daughter, a tiny preadolescent blonde with red-rimmed eyeglasses, asked, “Who’s she?”
“Jordan, this is Anna. She’s going to camp here tonight with us.” Scott looked at me.
“If that’s okay…”
“Of course.”
One dusky evening years ago, Felix and I pulled up to the Vermillion Cliffs Lodge. I asked the cook if he knew of a good car-camping spot. He directed us 150 yards down the highway to an easily missed gate. A limestone-cobbled road followed the edge of Badger Canyon for a mile-and-a-half to the lip of Marble Canyon.
Everywhere was rock and sky and light. The horizon to the south stretched for days, and the rock beneath our sandaled feet fell away forever to the wide blue ribbon of the Colorado. The sky, an inverted bowl of blue, could barely hold it all in. We had driven to the edge of the world, and laid our Therm-a-Rests down to sleep.
Badger Point became our routine car-camping spot for excursions to the Arizona Strip. We once saw a night sky ablaze in the apocalyptic glow of a devastating forest fire on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. We tossed and turned under a sky so packed with stars it looked like a sparkling silver blanket. Mornings caught high-rippled cirrus clouds on fire, and the Vermillion Cliffs earned their name as they erupted in rosy color from their silvery slumber.
The place was ours, and no one’s.
Scott introduced me to his family. His wife, Melissa, was a diminutive, quietly beautiful redhead. Carey, all awkward teenage limbs and hormones, said, “Hey” a little too loudly as his eyes bounced from me to the ground. A man with dancing blue eyes much younger than his white hair and beard told me his name was Terry.
A few minutes later the sun set over the Paria Plateau, and an inky shadow began a steady eastward advance. The Echo Cliffs across the river were soon enveloped in a hazy indigo, and the yellow velvet of the grassy rim turned white with starlight.
The steady southwest wind became erratic. I lounged next to the campfire, sipping a mug of surprisingly good boxed wine. Terry restacked rocks around the fire pit to compensate for the change in the wind. He asked me the questions they were all wondering. What was I doing out here alone? Why had I driven so far to camp here for one night?
I took a deep breath.
A year ago Felix placed a diamond ring on my chest as I sunbathed on a warm sandstone slab in Sedona. I didn’t even feel the ring. He waited several minutes before announcing unceremoniously, “Hey, there’s something on your chest.”
It was my birthday, the last one of my twenties. I had a feeling he was going to propose that day. I didn’t have the overwhelming joy that I should have had. I just kind of felt pissed off. Birthdays are supposed to be stress-free. The day I get what I want. Or avoid what I don’t.
The familiar hard knot of doubt cinched tighter in my belly. Seeing my discomfort, Felix said, “Why don’t you just wear it for awhile?” I was dazzled by the diamond when I put it on my finger. It was the brightest thing in the canyon. I loved Felix, truly. But something in me screamed silently for my attention, and I ignored it.
“You were supposed to get married right here?” Terry had stopped stacking rocks. “On this spot?”
“Yup.”
“Nice spot.”
Scott walked up to the fire, catching the end of our conversation. “What? You were supposed to get married today? Where is everyone?”
“No,” I couldn’t help but laugh. “I called off the wedding. We were supposed to have the ceremony here. About an hour before sunset.”
Scott was quiet as he stared at the fire.
I was grateful for the company, but in truth I felt like I should have been there alone, duking it out inside my head. A therapist friend asked me before I left if I would do anything to “honor” the event. He had suggested doing back bends.
“They really open the heart,” he said. I replied that back bends hurt my spine and that I was thinking more along the lines of getting really drunk.
I had spent the past three months drinking, smoking, writing, hiking, working. Tonight was supposed to be about “doing good work,” as another therapist friend calls it. It was supposed to be miserable, cathartic, intense.
Wasn’t it?
After he proposed, Felix and I spent the next year doing all the things that couples do to plan a wedding. We created a gift registry, ordered flowers, cake, food, alcohol. We set the date. What we didn’t do was have the talk we should have had that day on the warm sandstone of Sedona.
After ten years together, we had the basics down. We were both Democrats, liked to travel and wanted kids. We envisioned living in a cool mountain town working at jobs with plenty of time off, raising our children to appreciate the beauty of the Southwest. When it came down to the nuts-and-bolts of the equation, I guess we just assumed they would fall into place.
They didn’t. On a dark winter night three months before the wedding, a brutally honest conversation brought us to a sad and painful impasse. We each held our respective ground until it became clear that to proceed would mean a bitter sacrifice for us both.
A few weeks later, Felix asked if I wanted to call off the wedding. With a voice that came from somewhere outside myself, I answered, “Yes.”
The next day I left Marble Canyon. I made my way along the dark dome of Navajo Mountain, then traversed the edge of Black Mesa. In Kayenta I turned north, heading towards Monument Valley.
I hadn’t had any epiphanies, just a really good time. I still felt like I needed to do some serious brow-furrowing over my reasons for driving all the way out there. I wanted to find the meaning in it, to force the grief of loss.
I flipped on the radio. The only station in range was playing some sort of rhythmic tribal chanting. “Ha na nah ha, hi ya ha ya…” and so on, immediately followed by “Bullet the Blue Sky.” Near Owl Rock, the pairing of nonsense syllables and classic rock became too disconcerting. I rifled through my limited supply of CDs. Tom Petty. Perfect.
I flew over the open blacktop, belting out the words to “Learning to Fly.” I felt the tears streaming down my cheeks before I even knew I was crying.
“Learning to fly — bum bum — but I ain’t got wings! Dum duh dum — coming down — bum bum — is the hardest thing!”
Maybe it was the sun, the sandstone, or the hangover. Maybe it was making new friends at just the right time. Or maybe it was just the perfect song. A sublime warmth washed over me, and a huge smile formed beneath the tears.
The right and left mittens of Monument Valley waved goodbye, and I waved back.
