A type one diabetic, Dean tested his blood sugars every few hours and gave himself shots throughout the day. On hikes, he refrigerated the glass vials in a specially fitted ice pack which he carried in his blue daypack with the bag of syringes. We were walking down the vacant shore of Washington’s Olympic Coast one day, dark water lapping to our right, when he spotted a huge raven hunched over his daypack, picking through the spilled contents by our tent. At our approach, the bird leapt into flight with Dean’s only bag of syringes in its beak. Waving his arms and screaming profanities, Dean ran after him. Some twenty vertical feet up, the raven dropped the bag on the gravel, cawing as he went. We retrieved them unharmed.
Dean wasn’t scared of death. He’d accepted mortality while I was still playing with Star Wars figures. He had no choice. If his diabetes didn’t kill him in his youth, it would likely get him before he got old. The injection of insulin caused spikes in blood sugar levels that often led, more than the diabetes, to debilitating complications: blindness, kidney failure, heart disease, impotence, stroke, reduced circulation, numbness in extremities, infection, gangrene, amputation. Maybe that was why he wasn’t afraid of catching rattlesnakes. On weekends he scooped them up with hooked poles in the desert outside Phoenix and slipped them into gossamer nets to get a closer look. He once caught a Gila monster, North America’s only venomous lizard, with his bare hands; he pinned its head with four fingers so it couldn’t turn and bite him. Bad dates, boring weekends, living his whole life in Phoenix—those things worried Dean, not death.
The previous week on Mt. Rainier, I’d asked him if he thought death was the end or if something followed after. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m suspicious of heaven, but reincarnation seems possible. It’s an ancient tradition.” I nodded my head, staring into the forest.
I didn’t know what I believed. Some days I was a deist, others an atheist, most days an animist. My mom’s side of the family was Jewish. When I was a kid, Mom wanted me to appreciate the basic aspects of our heritage. So I attended a Jewish elementary school, and Mom and I lit the annual Chanukah candles, but she and I never went to synagogue, and I abandoned my bar mitzvah study halfway through. Age thirteen seemed too arbitrary a number to signify anything, and tradition didn’t require I know the English translation of the Hebrew I was supposed to recite. How could mindless repetition of a cryptic language make me “a man,” especially when the only hair on my body was a blonde peach fuzz? Clearly I had become spiritual by age eighteen, but what sort of spirituality wasn’t clear. I had no plans to practice yoga, or study Kabbalah, or read Buddhist texts. I knew only one thing: I needed a sign.
“God is a mystery,” my Grandma Silvia always said. “That was Einstein’s view. Maybe God is a man, and maybe a being, but to us down here, he’s first and foremost a mystery.” I didn’t want to be worrying about God on a decadent roadtrip, but I couldn’t help it. Wilderness made me think about design, which made me think about cosmology, which made me wonder if we were alone in the universe and if human existence had any purpose or not. Life and death were everywhere in the lush coastal forests. Young hemlocks grew from the soft innards of rotting tree trunks. Green shoots poked from the furry remains of decomposing animals. Death and its fertility were as in your face as trail-markers, and it all led back to questions concerning creation and meaning: why were we here? What would become of us when we were gone?
When I looked around, I found distressing potential answers: a soaring hawk carrying a wriggling snake in its claws; spawning salmon with tattered gray skin dying in streams after laying their eggs, and the way ravens and raccoons tugged at their flesh when the fish washed ashore. Was this the heartless universe that God fashioned for us? Part of me loathed any divinity who built us this way, able to question our own existence but access no answers, just carbon machines blind to our purpose, built to lay eggs, eat each other and die. It seemed cruel.
When the Peace Arch at the Canadian border came into view, Dean said, “Here goes nothing.” Darkness spilled like Alaskan crude around the brightly lit station, a darkness so thick it gummed the edges of my peripheral vision.
I checked my eyes in the mirror for redness, and wiped my palms on my shorts. Canadian and US flags flew side-by-side atop the arch’s crown, with the words “Children of a Common Mother” etched in the gray cement. A rattling in the van’s tired engine mixed with the drone of crickets, and I’d wondered about the condition of prisons that drug smugglers were sent to, and whether we’d pay bail in American or Canadian currency. Dean cleared his throat.
The agent rattled off questions with a surprising indifference:
“Where are you coming from?”
“What was the purpose of your trip?”
“What is your destination?”
They seemed the sort of questions a spiritual leader would pose, which made me want to ask him the same things. I also wanted to blurt: that’s it? All that preparation, the digging and stashing and answers Dean and I had rehearsed, for that? The agent didn’t request ID. He didn’t look in the van, the interior of which was stacked floor-to-ceiling with plastic bins full of clothes, canned food, river rocks, and camping gear. He simply stared puffy-eyed and dangled his arms out the station window, then he said, “Safe trip guys.” We were the only car in line.
Sometime in my late teens, I’d started my wondering. All our struggles, accomplishments, heartbreak—for what? What was the point? I didn’t understand where we as human beings came from, where we were going or why we were here. Where was here anyway? If the universe sat within another universe, where did that sit? Nothing made sense. When I started taking weekly hikes by myself at age eighteen, it was because the wilderness seemed to offer a more direct, unbiased source of existential information.
The outdoors had always been a presence in my life. My parents didn’t hunt or fish, but as a kid they sent me to sleep-away camp in northern Arizona and Colorado, and back home, we hiked. Phoenix contains numerous desert mountain parks, and we visited many of them. We picnicked at South Mountain Park, climbed Squaw Peak, saw petroglyphs on A-mountain. Mountains piled upon jagged mountains along the brown horizon. My dad, who was raised in a small town in southern Arizona, taught me the names of rivers, mountain ranges, and plants, and about regional history. “See that?” he’d say on family outings. “That’s a palo verde tree. It means ‘green wood’ in Spanish.” And: “That there’s Picacho Peak. It’s the sight of the only Civil War battle fought on Arizona soil.” My dad was a diehard Arizonan, enchanted by the desert, proud of his state, and he imparted this passion to me. But it was an entry-level college geology class that got me fixated.
Geo 101 was mind-blowing. Caldera-complexes, plate-tectonics, fossilization—the field’s fundamentals forced me to look at landscapes as not just scenic backdrops, but as the result of the earth’s dynamic physical processes. Concepts like volcanism, hydrology, ecology, and decay also brought to life the great sweep of time preceding my brief existence. Our planet was 4.5-billion-years-old, the universe 13.7. Six thousand years of recorded human history didn’t register as a blip on that grand a scale. And if the mundane components of my daily life—term papers, unreciprocated crushes, which scent of detergent to buy—meant nothing measured against epochs and millennia, what was I?
When the geology professor described the Superstition Mountains east of town as “a collapsed volcano,” I drove out to see them. I’d lived in Phoenix my whole life yet had never thought of those mountains as anything but the home of the storied Lost Dutchman’s Mine. I parked in a lot and took a National Forest trail. The fall air was warm, the sun bright but comfortable. Native creosote bushes scented the air with a clean, medicinal fragrance, and tall saguaro cacti towered around me as I navigated the rocky slopes.
I started hiking a new local mountain range almost every week: the Goldfields, Sacatons, White Tanks, Usery Mountain. Yellow brittlebush flowers bloomed, sweetening the air with pollen. Coyotes darted between bushes and hummingbirds