The Last Word On Nothing

So I finally read Craig’s book Stone Desert, and I’m glad I did. It’s a republication of an earlier essay collection alongside his original journals – sketches, scribbles and notes he made in his twenties while hiking and paddling through desert canyons in Utah, along the Green and Colorado rivers.

For me, the book was a reminder of how zesty life can be when I remember to shut down my computer and leave the damn house without my phone, and with a notebook and pen. Sometimes (especially in summer) I forget what it’s like to be hungry for knowlege — to gnaw on a question before I Google it, letting my own thoughts develop and whetting my appetite before lunging for the answer.

Craig says he finds his 20-something self embarrassing, but his voracious curiosity was a perfect antidote to the summer ennui I’ve been flirting with lately. For one thing, he reminds me that it is in fact possible to write when it’s hot out, and for that I (grudgingly) thank him.

The book also reminds me what human writers can do that AI can’t — move our uniquely gifted, limited, vulnerable bodies through the world, use language to make sense of what we find out there and share it with each other. It’s hard to imagine an AI stashing canoes in the desert and writing about it (though I’d definitely read a sci-fi novel about that). But even if it could, it wouldn’t walk, paddle, or wonder like Craig.

Here’s our conversation:

Craig, Stone Desert is full of references to canoes you’ve stashed in remote river canyons. When and why did you start stashing canoes? Was this something you did as a kid? 

I was doing that as a kid with my mom, she and I would do these things. The plans were not quite as elaborate, but there was always some kind of adventure where she’d come up with a crazy plan and we’d go do it, you know, something in the backcountry. I enjoyed that so much that I stepped it up to a new level. 

Two of the people that I traveled with quite a bit were running a river outfit out of Moab. So they would jet boat down the Colorado River to the confluence with the Green River and pick people up. We knew these routes and we said, why don’t we just start dropping canoes at the bottom of the route – go hide them up in the boulders and then pick them up again, in the spring. We’ll hike down through a crack in a cliff and when we get to the river, there will be a canoe waiting for us. And in that way, we can kind of sew the whole landscape together. 

Confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers, Google Earth

So wait – you drive out into the desert, and then hike down the canyon and then get in the canoe?

That’s one way to go. We’d get dropped off somewhere and just start these walks. Within a couple of years we were doing 30-day trips out there. We’d have food stashed at the canoes. For the next month, we’d be gone and we wouldn’t see anybody, wouldn’t cross a trail, wouldn’t see another human footprint for 30 days. 

In the first essay, where you’re traveling with your friend from Scotland – was that the first time you attempted this?

No. I had been doing it for a long time at that point. She was working for the same environmental education outfit that I worked for, taking kids from Los Angeles, high school kids, out on these desert trips. And I just put out the word saying, anybody want to come? And she was the first taker. I was doing all kinds of guiding work at the time so my life was just running around in the desert. I met a lot of people there who I’m still really close with and I still do trips with, I’m still very close to a lot of them. 

I love the close relationships you describe in the book. As I was reading I kept thinking, you did something right along the way, to have so many people who are so competent in the wilderness and such good company.

Yeah. There’s one guy who showed up there, Irvin Fernandez, who’s been in a lot of my books ever since. We’re still up to no good.

I’m not done with the canoe stashing. When you say the landscape is littered with canoes, how many canoes are you talking about?

Oh, maybe five. Not like, 20, but a decent quiver of canoes. Yeah, maybe that’s a better word. I can get excited. 

So would you leave gear in the canoes?

We’d often have like a five gallon bucket full of food and fuel, enough to get us reloaded for the next one.

I’m sorry, how sturdy is this bucket? 

Oh, you know, it’s just like a Home Depot bucket. It’s not like an ammunition can – we did have some ammo cans but it doesn’t really matter. When I cache stuff it’s often just in a bucket that I’ll go bury or hide in a bush. This is stuff that can deal with the heat, that’s non-perishable. 

And it hasn’t by the time you get back been, like, torn to shreds by ringtails or rodents? 

No, they’re pretty sturdy. Rodents and other animals can’t really get into them. 

Does it feel like you’re giving presents to yourself? 

Yeah! You get there and you go, what kind of wonderful stuff did I leave? It’s like opening presents every time.

Ok I think I can move on from the logistics now, thank you. In the foreword to the book, you tell readers you find this book somewhat embarrassing because it’s so intimate. Is there anything you wish you’d done differently or is it mostly just the honesty of it that made you feel that way?

Yeah, well, some things are wrong, especially in the journal. Like, there’s a drawing of a raven and I wrote it was a crow.

So, a lot of little things like that. I don’t think there were too many blatant errors in the book, but in the journal, I was definitely, you know, saying “Oh, I know so much. Look, here’s a plant.” Later I realized that’s not the name of that plant. But also, sometimes I would read the writing and go, “You’re just so damned excited about everything, can’t you curb that just a little bit?” And then I realized that hasn’t changed. So I’m kind of embarrassed for myself. I didn’t change as much as I thought I would. 

Why include both the written journals and the more polished essays?

I resisted at first because, you know, who wants their journal from their twenties to be seen by everybody? And then I was kind of convinced by the people who wanted to put this together. They were saying this is a document of the time and a young writer, and it should be out there, and so I handed over the journal without reading it.

I knew if I read it I wouldn’t do it. I was really hoping that nobody would actually read the journal, but I’m hearing from people who got out magnifying glasses to read the whole thing, and I just go, oh my God, why would you do that? But it’s part of the process: Writing for me goes from handwritten to type, and I guess I want readers to have that experience too. 

I like the handwritten journals. They’re a portal to the place where you wrote them. Your handwriting was probably affected by where you were sitting and what position you were in, how hot it was. 

Yeah. I think you’re right. Was this being written on my knee, as I walked? Was I in a tent and was the wind blowing? All those things are what I’m trying to give to the reader, and you can lose it in the mass-produced text.

People sometimes think that there’s kind of a magic that happens in writing. I wanted to show how, actually, it comes from this raw material; it builds and it gets refined. And I think that sometimes the raw material might be closer to the source, might be more true, more real even though it’s not as controlled and clean.

How much back-filling did you do, in terms of the science and natural history that’s in the final essays? 

There’s a lot of back-filling. I still do that. I go out onto the land and then rack up all my questions. Then I come back out and say, these are things that I didn’t know or I need to verify. Rather than going in with preconceived notions, it helps me not to know. I love coming out and answering the questions later, because then I’m hungry for them. When you don’t have the questions on your mind, it’s not as tactile. When you’re inside the questions – then the knowledge goes into your bloodstream as opposed to just going through your eyes. 

I rarely understand what something I’ve written in an essay means until after the fact. Then I revise, and it gets a little clearer. Sometimes it takes a lot of revisions. Was it the same for you in these essays?

Yeah, it’s very much the same for me. I’m writing about the experience, I’m bringing in the science, and I don’t know what it means until much later. Sometimes until they’re published.

I guess my brain just sees the connections and puts them together – maybe an unconscious part of my brain, because it isn’t until much later that I read it and I go, “Oh, I see.” Sometimes I wish that process would speed up, but then I think I would start tripping over myself. 

The death of a buck in one of the Stone Desert essays stood out to me. You and your companion look at its tracks and decipher how it died. To me that essay felt important – was it a turning point of some kind?

That was one of those moments in a landscape when everything is so exposed. For almost every boulder you can stop and go, where did this come from? There are so many tracks, you can see how things unfold. You are seeing a truth you don’t get to see the rest of the time. It’s how things work in the world, but it’s usually hidden.

In that landscape, you can piece everything back together – walk through it and then walk back, go back and forth until you see how something happened. You see an animal’s tracks and the limp, you see the death. I think that’s when I really started to see how much more is visible in that kind of place. I’m looking around, saying, “Wow. So this is how the world works. This is how all the pieces come together. I want to live in this place.”

When you say this is how the world works, what do you mean?

This is how sandstone gets laid down and then breaks off cliffs and rolls. This is how gravity carries things. You’re seeing all of time wrapped up into one package, right now. It’s all the physical pieces of the world: This is where the bones are coming from. This is where the rocks are coming from. This is how water moves through the landscape. Things we just take for granted – the rain, the sky, the land. You start looking at it closely, and going, wow: These are all working together, over millions of years, and over really intense, short bursts: rock falls and windstorms. I felt like I was seeing a much larger view of the world than I ever had before, which started a long journey for me.

Can you tell me about desert varnish, the polish that builds up on rocks when they’re exposed to water? It’s such an interesting process. I didn’t know bacteria were involved.

So desert varnish is kind of the clothing that everything out here wears. You can see the age range of rocks – rocks that are deep black, almost blue, they’ve been sitting out in the sun for something like half a million years, just cooking. Every time it rains, bacteria oxidize manganese from the air and it builds these beautiful layers on the rock. In the late afternoon, when a cliff is reflecting the sun, you can see the patterns where water flows across a cliff – these long, tapering paintings made out of desert varnish. They are very like some of the old pictographs.

Sometimes I’ve mistaken them – looked up and said, that’s just varnish, when it’s actually an early hunter gatherer rock art panel. I think humans were interacting with these ghostlike figures that formed naturally, from water streaming down the rock.

You talk about being drawn back to the desert, over and over again, because there’s so much immensity in even a tiny sliver of it. 

I mean, there’s no way to fully understand it. So you’re just wandering through it, going, “Look over there, look here!” That’s all I feel I’ve done – walk readers through it, going “Whoa, check this out!” 

I should get back to work, but it’s a real treat to talk to you – maybe someday we’ll do it in person? Perhaps even on a boat?

I’d love that. Let’s find our way there.