Along the Way

In the light of the moon, at the juncture of a continent, at the crux of my life, I searched for a not-too-rocky place for my sleeping bag.

Overhead the Milky Way glowed, brilliantly aglitter, despite the pale whitewash of the moonlight. The ghostly horizon lay beyond some vast distance, a lesser shade of black. The bone-white concrete of the Four Corner's Monument gleamed 30 yards away. I unrolled my sleeping bag, then stood and searched for the North Star. I took my bearings: Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico, underfoot.

Just out of school, on the brink of a career, on the still-ragged margins of love, I was all potential, edges, and elbows. I was running to, and from, and in circles, seeking some sense of place and purpose in a headlong internal-combustion rush across the arid terrain.

I'd struck up a conversation with a grizzled desert veteran at a gas station a hundred miles back, and he mentioned that every morning Navajo silversmiths gathered at the monument to sell cutrate jewelry to tourists eager to stand in four states at one time. The idea had grown on me as the miles clattered past. When I saw the Four Corners sign, I realized with the click of certainty that I wanted to buy something from the Navajo silversmiths for the woman I'd left back in Los Angeles in a jangle of confusion.

That night I slipped into my sleeping bag and watched shooting stars, the leftover debris of the solar system's formation transmuted in a flare of light.

A wild donkey woke me at dawn, shuffling across the concrete monument, alert for tourist leftovers.

We eyed one another warily.

At length he deigned to accept the apple I left for him on a picnic table before he headed on out into the desert.

The silversmiths arrived a short time later. They rattled up in old trucks, weathered, silent, and fitted to the place. I envied them their seeming surefootedness. I agonized and pondered, and finally settled on a five-stone turquoise squash blossom necklace, skin-smooth waxy shapes defined and deepened by a network of dark cracks.

I drove on through the desert where the Anasazi a thousand years earlier had built their kivas with entrances to the spirit world. I drove on through the stunted sagebrush and sun-seared rocks where the Apache and Ute had wandered, having memorized Every seep and water hole. I drove on past the spindly wash-bottom paloverdes and cottonwoods where the Navajo had rested their sheep between raids on Mexicans and Americans.

Then I drove back to Los Angeles, handed her

By Peter Aleshire AT FOUR CORNERS OUR AUTHOR FINDS STABILITY IN A CHANGING WORLD

the squash blossom necklace, and (eventually) married her.

That was my first trip to Four Corners.

My second trip came 14 years later.

So much had changed.

I brought my wife and our three sons. We piled out of the car at the end of a long day of driving, stretching our legs and savoring the burnished light of late afternoon. Elissa wandered down the long row of stalls where Indians in T-shirts hawked mostly tourist trinkets. Teenager Caleb, mindful of a gaggle of giggly girls, tried to look cool despite the embarrassment of his brothers. Noah, eight, and Seth, 10, bounced onto the center of the monument slab, falling all over one another and struggling to place each hand and foot in a different state. I stood atop a wooden platform supplied for photographers. They jumped from state to state while my shutter snapped. Afterward they tried to decide which state they'd liked best.

After a while, I wandered out beyond the booths of ticky-tacky and stared out across the desert. I half expected to see my donkey friend canter in from the sagebrush.

I was, by then, a reporter for The Arizona Republic newspaper, having been a journalist ever since I returned from that first trip and quit my job at a television station. Journalists move a lot, seeking ever-larger papers in ever-larger cities. I'd been repotted more often than a house plant, my roots quickly grown and shallow.

Staring at the shadows stretching out into dusk, I tried to invoke the ghosts of this seamless landscape.

I thought suddenly of something I'd read about the Chemehuevi Indians, who roamed the much harsher deserts along the Colorado River. They moved constantly and owned almost nothing, save the precious song of their clan. These songs could take three days to sing, and the memorization of the clan's song marked the onset of manhood for males. The songs were really a verbal map of the clan's territory with every water source coded into stories of gods, heroes, and fools. Anyone who knew the clan song could survive in that territory. That's why, it's said, passing bands effectively paid a toll by hiring a clan member as a guide. This story had inspired in me an odd, envious yearning. It must be a comfort, I thought, to belong so securely to a place.

Noah slipped up behind me and took my hand.

We stared at the sunset, the glowing rocks, the dancing shadows, the warm magic of desert light. And it occurred to me that this place had changed not at all in the 14 years between visits. I had changed. The Navajo had changed. The donkey had no doubt died. Another generation had been birthed.

But the desert had not changed, not for the Anazasi, or the Gila monsters, or the pronghorns, or the Navajo, or me, or Noah.

That thought, in the last lingering desert light, somehow offered a soothing benediction for a city boy still seeking home.