June 17, 2021
I’m staying in Moab visiting a friend who lives in a cave. I’m going to stay another night. I mean, how often do you get to stay in a cave?
Actually, I stayed in my pickup. Marlow has a driveway that leads to his cave but you have to have a four-wheel drive to get to the top of it.
“What kind of vehicle do you have?” asked Marlow when I arrived in town.
“A Ford Ranger,” I said.
“Four-wheel drive?” he asked.
“No. Two-wheel,” said I.
“A Subaru has made it up there,” he said.
“I’ll give it a try,” I said.
I did. It didn’t work.
Marlow bikes into town each day with his dog Flix—a decrepit, 14-year old greyhound that is mostly skeleton and hide and walks with wobbly straight legs reminiscent of a damaged Transport Walker in Return of the Jedi. The dog gets in a pulled cart once she is too tired to trot. This is happening sooner and sooner.
Marlow spends his days in town. His office is in a businesses’ basement room set off of a larger room filled with the things that get stored in business basements—old air conditioners and such. The price is right—free.
He works there in the basement on his latest novel, Geyser Rush. His other books, Island Despair and the three-part novel, Wet Exit, are for sale in town at the bookstore. The cave is plenty cool inside for working in this heat, but there is no cell phone or internet. The cave is plenty cavernous. A new friend—a young art teacher who works on the Pineridge Reservation—has his tent set up at the front of the cave for the next few days. Marlow’s permanent tent is way in the back.
Someone owns Marlow’s cave—94-year-old man whose ancestors were early white settlers. He owns a lot of the caves and property here on the Colorado River. Marlow pays $100 a month and has a $1,000,000 view. It’s strange to think anyone can own something that is such a beautiful part of nature. Other cave dwellers, ones not on this road, live further away, completely off the grid, and for free on BLM land. They come into town on motorcycles, resupply and then are gone. Some are outlaws. Some are mental cases.
“Putting down roots on BLM land isn’t allowed but they are so far out there and hidden they’ll never be found,” Marlow said.
Abrupt subject change—shit.
Have you ever noticed that sometimes you find yourself doing something you haven’t done in years or even decades and then all the sudden you are doing it in close succession? For me, that would be shitting in the woods. I have now done that three times. Twice when I was backpacking in the Trinity Alps last week and then again this morning. And here is what I have found—shitting in nature is not an easy thing.
Balance alone is difficult. My theory now is that it is best done completely naked although my most successful shit so far was my first one in the Trinity Alps where I leaned against a rock on a hillside. It’s gone downhill since then; not the shit—my abilities.
I won’t go into detail about the failures of this morning, but let’s just say I was ready for the first bath of my trip. I can say that most of it went into a gallon size ziplock bag (not having a shovel to bury it). It’s the small amount that didn’t go in, but ran down the edge that caused a mess.
Shit is the kind of thing that you don’t want to touch and it seems that because of that—because of your trembling hesitation and awkward movements to avoid it at all costs—it ends up getting all over you. Conveniently, the Colorado River was flowing right past me. Unconveniently, the embankment was steep and rocky without a shelf or beach near the land where my unsuccessful shitting took place. But Marlow had told me about a place where the road first hits the river that has a beach, so after almost killing myself to wash my hands I went back to my truck and drove there.
Marlow’s “beach” was actually just a few flat rocks the size of cafe table tops, with a few more submerged in the water close to shore. The climb down there was twice as high and steeper than the previous spot, but the fact that there was a landing pad made me willing to make the effort. While I was at it I grabbed some shorts that needed washing (an unsuccessful peeing effort while driving 80 mph on I-15, but that’s another story not worth telling).
After making it to the mini-beach, I sat down on one of the two rocks submerged in about two feet of the silty water. I soaped myself up with some Dr. Bronners (biodegradable and harmless I’ve been told) and had a satisfying bath, washed the pee shorts and threw them back on shore and my toiletry bag which I had somehow managed to get some of the leaky poop on.
As I sat there I started to notice little nibblings on my legs. I looked in the water and saw dozens of minnows. Soon the dozens turned into hundreds and, by the end, the hundreds may have become a thousand. I sank lower in the water and minnows starting taking their little pinching mouthfuls of dead skin—or whatever it was that they found satisfying—from all over my body.
I ducked my face in the water leaving my ears out. The minnows nibbled my cheeks, the corners of my lips and even ventured into the vestibules of my nostrils. The water churned around my head making the sound of a simmering pot. I opened my eyes and it was like looking through a microscope into a petri dish of swarming animals with whipping tails. I focused on the feeling. It was much like turning you face up to a winter rain that includes tiny pellets of ice. Where my skin was most sensitive—on the eyelids and under the arms—it was almost too intense, bordering on painful.
I thought about putting my mom’s ashes, ten years ago, in a different river across the country where I’m going—a sunny day on a dock in Tennessee. Mom’s ashes poured in the water dispersed in grey clouds and as the clouds dissipated suddenly sparkles appeared—white flecks of bone reflecting the light like tiny suns in a galactic cloud. Then minnows appeared, pecking at the white flecks, sparkling themselves.
So this leads to another question related to place. Where does the spirit go when we die. Does it pass to a bird or a whole genus of minnows? Is memory spirit? Is feeling spirit? Where is this home we are all searching for?
Maybe spirit is our home.
Spotty West Goes East 