Desert Ceremonial: Part Three
Thursday, May 16th, 2024: 2024 Trips, Artists, Arts, Mojave Desert, Regions, Road Trips, Stories, Trouble.
Katie
Now we approach the main event of this ceremonial trip to the desert, which I’ve been hinting at obliquely, because it was too immediate, too painful, and there were others involved whose privacy I need to honor.
Remember this is only my version – others will differ. Why do I share such personal stories? Is it even appropriate? For me at least, sharing and hearing your responses helps me process these difficult experiences.
Forty years ago I began exploring, discovering, and falling in love with the desert with Katie, a fellow artist, musician, and writer. A mutual friend had shared his discovery of a magical place, a small basin lined with boulders and surrounded by cliffs, and my partner and I turned a boulder pile there into a home away from home – The Cave. Katie was the one who first found artifacts from the indigenous people who once camped all over that area. Those sparked our curiosity, inspired our art and music, and set me on the path I’ve followed ever since, as I broke away from my colonial Old World legacy to become a student of indigenous cultures. All in all, we explored the desert Southwest together for eight years.
At our home in the city, she was my bandmate and songwriting partner. We were ambitious, we worked hard, we competed. We were leaders in a fast-evolving, unstable community facing one crisis after another. Neither of us set limits to what we wanted to accomplish – as our music gained followers and admirers, we both continued to write and make art, and Katie experimented with new genres and media, learning to reproduce prehistoric pottery and rock writing, building assemblages from materials found in the desert.
She was a force of nature, challenging everyone around her. She changed the way I live, making me braver, more confident, more proactive. She could’ve coined the Nike motto, “just do it”.
But her dark side included anger and violence, and in the midst of all that ambition, all that work, all that turmoil, our relationship fell apart. We tried to remain friends, making trips to the desert together in the new decade, but Katie began to struggle with inner demons that drove me away and eventually destroyed her.
By the time they did, I hadn’t seen or spoken to her for 24 years. None of her many old friends and admirers had, and few even knew where she was. Her surviving family chose me to lead a memorial ceremony at our cave in the desert, believing that our time together there had been the happiest period of her life. And as the date approached, I was forced to revisit the trove of her creative work that survived in my personal archives, and to review the experiences we shared in the desert.
I discovered a file of song lyrics Katie had written before and during our time together, and decided to try putting them to music. It went well, and in the process I awakened to the nature and significance of her talent, and came to see her and her work in a new light.
Together, we’d been too competitive, and I was too insecure. Katie lacked the experience to set her own lyrics to music, and as time went by, I’d resented the competition and refused to help her. Now, too late, I realized that while I was writing from my head, she’d been writing from her heart, her eyes, her ears, her nose, her skin. Her lyrics lacked the irony, the sophisticated vocabulary and clever turns of phrase admired by critics and hipsters – they seemed simple or even juvenile, but that’s because they were economical. They clearly and honestly evoked the strong feelings of childhood and youth and the sensory experiences of engaging with our beloved desert. I realized, too late, that she’d been the only lover who’d ever truly shared my passion for the desert and its native cultures, the only fellow artist who like me had found her greatest inspiration in the magic of the desert. And I realized, too late, the talent that we’d lost, and that she’d never been rewarded for.
Climbing the steep trail
Indian summer
Following ancient feet
Up to the hunting grounds
Where are the mountain sheep?
I keep looking around
Writing on the rocks
Said I would find them here
After we broke up, Katie continued working on music and art for only a few more years. Her demons took over, and as she lurched back and forth across the country trying to find work or shelter, she lost all her old music, art, and writing. My archives preserve the only significant holdings of her creative legacy, so before heading out to the desert, I turned them into digital files and printed scrapbooks to share with her family at the ceremony.
Day Five: Reunion
I usually hate to leave my land, but after yesterday’s hike I felt ready. Driving out the mouth of the big wash onto the alluvial fan, I got a signal, reached Katie’s family, and made a plan to meet them at their rental in town. I had a long drive ahead – I decided to avoid the washed-out, abandoned highway and take back roads for about 45 miles to the next highway. Those roads would be maintained, but were sure to be heavily washboarded. They drop 2,000 feet in elevation and cross much starker habitat.
The backroads gave me views of other beautiful, remote ranges. But my lightweight vehicle’s MacPherson struts made driving that washboard an ordeal. And as I approached town after three hours of stressful driving, I discovered where all the wind from the forecast had ended up. The entire valley was beset by towering dust storms, including the house my friends had rented. We hadn’t seen each other in decades, they had adult kids who hadn’t been born back then, and we spent hours catching up as the dust swirled and blasted around their compound. I used their wifi to book a room at a nearby chain hotel where I could get points. The place was rundown, but I was still exhausted from yesterday’s hike, and slept well anyway.
Day Six: Ceremony
Yesterday’s wind and dust storm had vanished by morning. I’d assumed we would drive and hike to the cave, do what we needed to do, and leave. But in the morning, it became clear that they intended to spend the entire day out there. So I led them all in a caravan across the desert. As I said, I had no plan, but I’d brought ingredients.
We parked and loaded our packs for the day. I’d briefed them in advance on the dangers of the desert: sunburn, dehydration, cactus spines and catclaw thorns. Now I told them the hardly believable story of how I’d first discovered and fallen in love with this beautiful place – the start of the greatest love affair of my life, and the only one that has lasted.
I led them to the Cave, past fanciful boulders and flowering cacti, and they each took a look inside, and assured me that they now understood why it’d been so important to Katie. Then I led them over to the larger rockshelter nearby where we could assemble in shade for the rest of the day.
My artist friends and I had originally fallen in love with the desert partly because in this place it had largely belied its nature as a harsh wasteland. Although it could get cold in the winter and on occasion the wind would drive us away, in general it was a really comfortable place to camp out. And that’s what we found today. It was warm enough that we could shift back and forth between sun and shade, from the intimacy of the big cave to the spacious view of the ledge in back. I’d worried that we might be spotted from the road and interrupted by authorities, maybe even forced to leave. But traffic was unusually light; few stopped and no one seemed to notice us.
I always prefer to enable a group to lead itself through consensus, and that’s what I tried to do here. I began by sharing my gifts, starting with the scrapbooks I’d spent the past week preparing. Throughout the day, they all studied them carefully. A childhood friend had brought sage bundles and set one burning. And I set up a boombox playing tracks of Katie’s music, so we were surrounded by her voice and her bass lines for the next two hours.
We made lunch, and part of the group moved out back for some sun.
After a while, one of the women asked if we could regroup to share our stories of Katie, so we gathered in a circle in a corner of the big cave. I was asked to begin, and I tried to tell the story of my time with Katie. We were all overcome as I described how I’d failed her – how the world had failed her, had never found a way to handle her talent, her brilliance that had destroyed her in the end. Then her younger sister struggled to express how much she’d loved and admired Katie – like Katie herself, the feelings we were bringing out were too hot to handle.
I was especially moved to hear how the younger generation had only seen Katie’s positive side – the loss was greater for them, to discover her work after they’d lost her forever. How strange that while she’d lived a long life, we were only honoring such a short period of it, saying that was the best. Had the rest of her life really been wasted? Apparently not for her nieces and nephews. So sad, so seemingly pointless that we were only celebrating her now, after she was gone. I was feeling worse and worse, guiltier and guiltier, that I hadn’t been able to help her, to save her.
The sharing of stories devastated and depleted all of us, and we were rising to disperse when Katie’s younger brother asked me for some songs. Of course, I’d brought my guitar – as leader, I was basically on call for this group all day – but I wasn’t sure I could do it.
I stumbled through the two songs of Katie’s that I’d put to music in the weeks before. The first was the song in which she shared the experience of discovering the desert and its cultures. By the chorus of the second song, the one she’d addressed to me personally, I was breaking down, and that’s how I finished. And then we all moved out back, into the sun. One of the other elders had brought a boombox with a mellow playlist, and as we talked, we became aware of a big male chuckwalla, the largest lizard in the desert, perched on the tall boulder pile fifty feet away.
He made his way down toward us, and clambered into a flowering shrub where he began eating the blooms – they’re vegetarians, but I’d never actually watched one doing that. They’re usually shy, but some of our young ones approached within eight feet, and he ignored them. Then he moved even closer to our group, seemingly to observe us. As the young people said, “This is his home – we’re just passing through. He feels safe here.”
The sun was sinking toward the western cliffs. We’d spent seven hours out there together. Again, one of the women came and asked me to lead them in the final phase. So we packed up again and walked over to what would now be known as Katie’s Cave.
The women surrounded me outside the Cave and we conferred and agreed on the details. Then they followed me inside and formed an arc around the sister and me, who would perform the ritual. At this point, we were all overwhelmed.
And afterword, we hugged, and kissed, and thanked each other. A solitary jackrabbit sat on its haunches nearby, watching us.
We hiked back across the desert to our vehicles, and said our goodbyes.
I called ahead to the reservation, and my friend arranged a room at the tribal rate. It took almost three hours to drive there, and I hadn’t eaten since lunch. The restaurant was closed, but the staff, generous as ever, hauled a microwave and silverware to my room so I could warm up a frozen dinner from their freezer.
While eating, I looked something up online. After the ceremony, I’d recovered a vague memory of a similar ritual held prehistorically by this tribe. Based on the ethnographic record, it sounded much like the ceremony we’d invented on the spot. The place, and its memory of the ancestors, had surely guided us.
What to do with my grief, my guilt? That would be the work of the following days and weeks.
Heavy sorry Max
I am speechless, huge hugs!