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THE DELTA

Spring 2014

I stepped into line at the Hollow Mountain gas station in Hanksville, Utah (population 215), holding an overpriced string cheese. Three or four sunburnt customers stood in front of me with Fritos and fountain drinks, waiting for the cashier to finish a tirade he was delivering to the man across the counter. The cashier’s voice boomed off the windowless walls of the store that sits fully inside a blasted-out sandstone cliff, the “hollow mountain” tourist hole frequented by houseboaters headed to Lake Powell and desert rats hoping to get lost in canyon country.

The speech sounded political. “Obama comes down here … government … thinking they can run the place …”

I waited it out with my string cheese.

Lurid colors oozed from racks of magazines. I tended to an itch on the back of my head and felt something hard in a tangle of hair. Working it loose, I discovered a small black feather.

“… bureaucrats out in Washington …”

For four days, I’d been living in sandstone slot canyons, tortuous openings in the earth sculpted smooth by centuries of rain. Utah had always been a place to escape for me, and wedging myself into the slots fifty feet off the ground—feet against one wall, back against the other—had always felt like freedom. But not now. My mom had died after a four-month battle with cancer five weeks earlier. I came here to meet friends and get out of the house where I’d lived with my dad, sister, and girlfriend for my mom’s last few months. I came searching for open space, silence, rock, but the day before, I’d panicked in the canyons. The walls became a cage. My body was both rigid and weak. I froze, unable to go forward or back, my right leg bobbing uncontrollably as if to a frenzied, arrhythmic drumbeat. There had been little rain that spring. The potholes at the bottoms of the slots were all dry, and I sat shaking above the red mud lines where the water once ran.

When I made it back to the cars, I told my friends they could go find more canyons without me. They left me with a hug and a hand-rolled joint. I smoked the latter that night, and as I lay in my sleeping bag, my eyes dried against the desert air. The guttural groans of toads wallowing in a nearby stock tank hammered into my skull. The walls closed in again.