Movement and Repose

Three friends go on a hike, knowing that the trek back may be very different.

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“I can’t hardly even think with how quiet it is here…”

Wind speaks through the brown hot desert, its whistling voice meshed with the aleatory of driving heels, its time marked by heavy breath from rucksacks weighted, its melody spun above the basso profundo of the silty clear smell of air warming quick to dry their noses.

“Well Eric,” Jake says, almost as one word after years of saying it, “That’s the whole reason you go.”

“Some time to think, y’know?” Joanie puts in. They three move through Joshua Tree, toward the Lost Horse Mine, with the morning’s chill gone, gone to an in-close heat with the desert before them reaching toward the speckled horizon where cholla cactus and the arms of ocotillo meet the bluewhite of the sky. Jake pushes back his loose mop of brown hair from his sweaty forehead and tugs at the neck of his dayglo shirt. Joanie watches her feet in their blue and gold Nike runners as they trudge forward.

Until Eric stops. “How am I supposed to think when it’s hotter than the Devil’s—hang on guys,” Eric drops his pack to take off his faded black hoodie. He scratches at his three days of beard then yanks the sweater over his head. When Jake’s phone chirps out an ESPN notification, Eric freezes. “Game musta started…” Jake says absently.

Eric, arms still in his sweatshirt like a minimum security strait jacket, wrestles his phone out of his pocket. He checks it, unlocks it, swivels, stretches his phone to the sky: an act of worship to the signal gods or the sun.

Still nothing.

A grunt of frustration.

Joanie says, “It’s even a total fluke that his phone went off.”

Jake gives him a shove. “Get outta your sweatshirt, nerd, we’re losing momentum.”

“Yeah but like—

“Dude.”

Eric takes off his sweatshirt and stuffs it in his backpack. As he does, Jake says, looking off, “It’s just so jarring to not see anything manmade. Even most of the trees near us were planted intentionally.”

Eric fights with his straps, scooping them out from around him. Joanie says, “Ain’t no man made this. That much is clear from you two.”

“Roasted!” Eric plucks his glasses off to wipe them on his stained-but-washed white shirt featuring the faded oblong outline of Totoro. They settle back into the quiet rhythm of the hike, their bodies falling into the motion of the task, captivated and quiet among the boulders in the hillsides marred with orange and yellow lichen. Some are sunbleached, some are shade baked, while the ever-present creosote blooms with white flowers between them, clinging to them, reaching around them toward the desert sun. “It’s like I’m on the moon, but brown.”

“Yeah it kinda does feel like Mars, maybe.”

“When has anyone ever called Mars the Brown Planet, Eric?” Joanie laughs at her joke, “But kinda, yeah, doesn’t it? I can see what you mean because I almost expect a bunch of craters.”

They make their way up another rolling hill, calves burning, hearts racing. When they reach the peak, the three of them exhale.

“Whoa hey look” Jake points at a cabin-shaped totem comprised of individual stones.

“I think I figured out what a wishing well looks like when there’s no water,” Joanie says.

They make their way down the hill, into the dry and shallow canyon, to the rectangular stone walls, half-high but still with an entryway through which Eric moves.

He yelps in surprise. “Oh what, look at this thing, guys.” Jake and Joanie enter through the entryway and look in the corner where he’s pointing.

Jake laughs, “You got scared by a turtle.” It had found shade for its marred and etched-in-pattern shell, head poked half-out and laying low.

Joanie stares at the tortoise. “Are we supposed to look up what this means later?”

“Or catch it in a Poké ball?”

Jake says, “I’m sure he’s straight chillin’ more than handing out omens.”

“Well then I’m puttin’ one down. She seems like good luck.” Joanie steps out of the edifice and grabs a rock. She places it atop the others, incrementally growing the totem.

“Did you wish for something?”

Joanie looks at Jake when she says, “Somethin’ like that.” Her boyfriend shuffles his feet and looks down with a laugh. He crouches down and picks up a rock. “I’m just hoping not to get smothered in my sleep, I guess.”

Eric says, “I just wish for our dear tortoise to have both fortitude and longitude.” He raises his pit-stained arm and the rock in cheers. “To the days ahead, my patient friend.” He places his rock and they carry on, through Joshua Tree’s eponymous flora, hoping to see lizards, praying not to see snakes as they curve and yaw along the trail once meant for commerce, for making a living in the hard country.

Joanie checks her phone to see where they are along their way. Eric opens his mouth. She says, “Don’t you go and start again.”

He replies, “Then at least tell me we’re close to having a place to rest my jelly legs.”

After a moment she says, “Oh cool, we should probably see something soon.”

Sure enough, further up and around a bend, they see the gold mine jutting out from the hillside. It stands as a testament to how the earth feels toward industry built on this sand: efforts memorialized as cautionary tales.

Up the steep final incline. Eric heaves out “good goddamn” for several breaths in a row.

“You think there’s gold buried around here?” Jake asks, scratching at a spot on his arm.

“Like pirates?” Eric says.

“Oh what if it actually is pirates but from the before-time when this was an ocean.”

Joanie says, “I mean, we are kinda standing at the inverse of the Caribbean… Here Jake, I’ll give you a spoon and we’ll leave you to digging overnight.”

Eric trundles over to the faded white outline of once-structures gone to seed, low walls remaining at angles that disappear into the silt, all connected to a rusted out water pipe that shoots off into the desert to be absorbed. He heaves off his pack and flops onto a wide-enough corner.

“It’s like ten feet to the mine, dude,” Jake says.

“Don’t you wanna see it? This is super cool, y’know,” Joanie says.

“Maybe when my heart’s back from its vacation to my throat.”

“Then I’m leaving my shit with you. C’mon Joanie.”

They drop their packs next to Eric and head over to the gold mine: fenced off and dotted along its wood with the bright sheen of new bolts, shafts boarded up with out-of-place cedar. On the ridge above they notice a man, redheaded and bearded and meditating, all in green and placid in his lotus position. “Homie’s found his zen,” Jake says, noticing.

Joanie wipes her hands along her lavender tank top then settles them on her hips. She shifts, eyes on the mine, “Could you imagine if our hike was your commute to work?”

“Wouldn’t be too bad with a horse, maybe.”

Joanie stays quiet.

“I said, ‘with a horse, maybe?’”

She looks at him. “Are you gonna do it?” Jake looks at his closest friend. “It has to be today, I think that should be obvious.”

“Why today? I could easily do it the next time we hang out.”

“But when will that be, Jake? I mean, the next time you see him—whenever that winds up being—he could be bought in on all of it.”

Jake sighs. “Well Eric?” He sees his friend, schlubby and overweight but endearing: a man trying to clean his glasses with one hand and fumble out snacks with the other, a man who never quite figured out how to prioritize, who grew lonely because of it. “It’s gotta be today.”

“Unless you’re a chicken, McFly. Ba-gawk!”

Jake smiles at her then leads them back to Eric. He’s brought out some peanuts. His phone rests on his thigh, unlocked. He says, “Why does salt taste so good right now? I hope I don’t turn into a crispy raisin out here.”

“Yeah, Jake, can you hand me the sunscreen? And maybe some jerky?” Joanie says as she lets out her hair to fan it out.

Jake sits next to his best friend to dig into his pack for Joanie’s request. Into the bag, he says quietly, “You can’t stick with this girl.”

Eric says, “What was that, Mumbles?”

Jake stops digging and turns his eyes to his friend, “I said, You gotta run. And fast.” He sits up to meet his friends gaze, blue tethered to brown across a seven-year river.

Eric chews in slow shock. His eyes follow Jake’s arm, to Joanie as she takes the sunscreen and food. “His idea,” she says. He scoffs, flecks of food bounding off his shirt.

“She’s not that religious, guys.”

“And yet you chose to lead with that,” Jakes says. He pauses a moment. “Y’know she told us she loves that her name has a “t” in it so that she’s reminded of the cross every time she signs her name?”

“…but she signs everything Sami…” Eric’s mouth remains open, tongue speckled with peanuts, smelling of exertion.

Joanie hands him water as she says, “You used to hang out with Jake almost every Sunday and hoowee was that me time hella sacred.” Joanie fixes the cuff of her brown shorts then adds, “We shouldn’t need to plan massive outings just to get time with you—all this effort just to ensure you don’t cancel on us, which was never like you before.”

Jake picks at the scabby red blotch on his thigh. He says, “We all live in the same stupid city, that’s all I’m saying.”

“Guys, like, I was single for so long. Why can’t you let me—

Jake stands as he shouts, “Because she thinks you’re an outreach mission, bro!” The desert swallows his words in its windstrewn silence.

And from this silence comes a voice, smooth and singsong: “Troubled waters aren’t meant for desert sands.”

They look over to see an anachronism in green fleece, wearing a matching green bucket hat, given variation by his olive hiking poles and khaki pants—an evergreen among the brown. He saunters over, a quieting presence like that of an oracle who tunes them in to the desert’s waves. “Instead of focusing so much on the receiving, embrace what nature is giving—the attention you crave, that we—Son of a biscuit, how did I miss this?” His hand had brushed a cactus and two long white nettles stick in his hand. As he plucks from his skin, he looks off in a way that invites them all to look out over the brown plain where Jake’s shot echoed. Oliver looks at Eric, “Brothers first, we must remember that.”

After a look down, Eric says, “But what if I feel trapped?” Quietly, he adds, “I think I just liked to be liked.”

Oliver put a hand on his shoulder. “We’ve all sought such things.”

Eric looks up Oliver’s arm to his face. “Still a stranger, dude.” The life-sized leprechaun takes his hand away and turns toward the mine, feigning pensiveness as he listens.

Jake says, “Look man, if you blocked her and forgot about her, what’s the worst that could happen?”

“She’d come to my door and then what?”

“Would she really make all that effort if she thinks she can find some other sucker to save?—and extrapolate that out too, right? Because like, is she gonna get bored with you after you convert? She’s a hyper-ass terrier chasing cars who doesn’t know what to do once they catch one.”

“I…” Eric knows there’s nothing to say.

Oliver turns back, eyes misty. “I am but blessed.” Tears stream down his cheeks.

Eric says, “Do you uh… do you wanna eat a bunch of salt with us?”

Joanie darts him a look. Eric shrugs. Oliver says, “Why, I’d be delighted.”

They talk for a time, until the sun makes it clear that they’d been there far longer than they meant. The four of them make their way together back along the trail, toward their cars, toward their problems, toward their phones.

At the totem, the tortoise moves slow along the shade. To Oliver, Joanie says, “Y’think she means anything?”

Oliver thinks for a moment. “The waters, the moon, the Earth Mother. Strength, endurance, longevity. The Cosmic Tree grows out the back of the tortoise—ow! Sweet shitness what is this?” Several long, sharp nettles are sticking out of his pants. “Maybe all these cactus fellas don’t like me.”

Oliver plucks them out as Joanie says, “I’ve got a wipe if you need one.”

“If it turns green it will only match everything else and blend in until it’s forgotten about.”

“These cactus don’t want us here, that’s what it is,” Jake says.

“They’re protecting the tortoise,” Eric says as they march on along the trail, desperate now for their car’s AC, the return trip feeling quick as they make the last long descent toward the information signs and the parking area.

When they reach the dirt lot, Oliver chirps the alarm for a neon green Range Rover, a car to match Jake’s shirt.

Dumbfounded, Eric says, “I honestly thought you drove a horse.”

“The only thing greener than me is all that tech money, boys!” Oliver doffs an invisible hat and heads for his car.

On the drive back, they reach the main road and head south. Eric, sitting slightly sideways, stares out the far window across from him, into the desert and beyond—a great big vastness framed and held close by the shape of the car window, its beauty formatted to fit this screen. His phone goes off. He makes no move to check it.

Again, he is notified of a text message.

And again.

With calm, he takes his phone of his pocket. As it vibrates and chirps, he puts it on silent. He taps Joanie’s shoulder with it and says, “Will you help me figure this out later?”

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