Under the Utah Sun

This is a story about being lost and found. I’m telling it as best as I remember it, but nearly three decades later, I might have some of the details wrong. I’m sure my family will forgive me.

The summer Utah sun is blazing overhead, the ground is dry beneath our feet, and my brother and I stop and come to the realization that we are lost.

We’re a thousand miles from home, at least a couple miles from where we last saw our dad, and everything every direction looks exactly the same.

The only footprints marking the ground are the ones we left behind us, proving we have most definitely wandered off the trail. The only lines to guide our course for the past half hour have been the walls of this dry creek bed we’re in.

Please don’t think ill of our father, who left his two pre-teen sons to wander the desert alone. It’s not quite like it sounds. We were given directions to “follow the pylons” to the end of the trail, then turn and go the quarter mile or so up toward the road, where we’d find a parking lot. He was going to meet us there in our family car. Also, it was 1990, maybe ’91, and we were used to roaming on our own through the woods and hills until the sound of mom’s holler from the back porch for supper called us home. He wasn’t asking us to do something outside our skillset.

The only problem is, we weren’t yet familiar with the word “pylon” and we didn’t see much else to mark an end to the trail. So, we just kept going. At some point, we lost the trail, wandered a bit until a dry creek bed looked trail-ish enough for two kids to feel like they were being led somewhere, and started following it.

Backtracking only led us to the end of the creek bed, with no more certainty that it was the right place to be than before, so we must have decided it was as good a path as any and continued following it. Until at last some inward sense told us that everything was wrong, that this couldn’t have been where our dad meant us to be, and that no amount of further walking would get us any more found.

“The road is that way.” I point to my right. “Maybe we should just go to the road?”

“Unless the road isn’t that way,” says my brother. “Maybe we’ve turned. It could be any direction.”

“Well, I don’t think it’s that way,” I say, pointing to my left, only somewhat certain.

We stand in silence for several minutes. A breeze rustles the dry shrub nearby, and I wonder to myself if a rattlesnake sounds exactly the same, and how would I ever know the difference until it’s too late? I start forming a story in my head of my brother getting bitten, and I’m trying to carry him on one arm as he limps to find help. And there’s no one. Not a single person to help. Because we’re lost.

“Alright,” my brother says, “we’re going to find the road. Maybe we’ll be able to see the parking lot once we’re there.”

We turn to our right, clamber out of the creek bad, and start walking roughly perpendicular to the line we’d been on. We stumble over rocks and plants and thorny things. We don’t say anything to each other, but I’m imagining us as fantasy characters in a strange world, adventuring through the wild to find our way back to hearth and home.

My mouth is dry and I can feel the sunburn on the back of my neck. My feet hurt, my legs are getting rubbery, and I’ve stopped sweating even though I feel hot.

It never occurs to me that these are the circumstances that end with a bad news report.

I don’t think of myself as heading toward death. I’m certain I’ll come out the other side mostly unscathed.

Naiveté and confidence can look awfully similar in the Utah sun.

At one point I grabbed my brother’s arm. “Did you hear that?”

“No, what?”

“I thought I heard mom’s voice. Calling our names.” I listened intently, not even breathing, my ears pricking as I strained them to pick up that faint noise I had heard. But I didn’t hear it again. Just more rustling.

“Wait, I heard something,” my brother says.

“Was it mom?”

“No, I think it was a car. Like on the road.”

We stand breathless again, listening, listening.

“It was that way,” he gestures in the direction we’d already been walking.

“Are you sure?”

He shrugs. “Sure enough.”

We keep walking, lost in our thoughts. Lost in general.

“That it,” he says. “The road.”

Up ahead I can see how the land curves up just a little. I’m not absolutely sure that it is the road, but my brother is two years older than me, and he knows way more than I do, so he’s probably right.

We start walking faster, maybe even jogging just a little, until we get to the incline and scramble up it. An old barb wire fence, rusty and tangled, makes a half-hearted attempt at keeping wildlife and stray boys off the highway, but we’ve carved our way through blackberry bushes as tall as we are and jumped fences meant to keep horses in pasture. This is nothing.

The gravel at the side of the road is a welcome new sound as our feet crunch over it, so different in texture from the rocky sand we’ve been on. Even better feels the pavement under our feet as we stand on boiling blacktop. But our hearts sink as we look from one end of the road to the other, where the streak of black and white and yellow lines coalesces into a singularity and meets hazy blue, bordered on either side only by rolling brown hills. There’s nothing. No parking lot. No cars. Not even a sign.

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In the far distance, I can see what looks a little like a mile marker. I became familiar with those as we drove out here to Utah from our home in Washington; I liked counting them. Turning around, I look the other way and I can see what I think is the mile marker in that direction as well.

Dad said the end of the trail would be less than half a mile from when he left us. Neither of us had enough of a sense of distance to know how far we’d walked. But standing here, between mile markers, and not a car or soul or parent in sight, I know now, without a doubt, that we are lost and alone.

But now I have a direction.

I know that if we turn to our right and walk along the road, we have to get to the trailhead at least. Probably we’ll find the parking lot first, because for sure we’ve gone past it. So if we just start walking, we’ll get there.

I tell all this to my brother, but he’s skeptical. “But what if we haven’t actually gone far enough yet? What if the parking lot is that way?” he says, point left.

Silly. That’s impossible! Except my brother is usually more right than I am, isn’t he? Well, sometimes. I waver. Even if I am right, I hate disappointing him. I hate arguing with him. I hate disagreeing with him.

“Maybe,” I say slowly. “But maybe they got to the parking lot, and when we didn’t show up they want back to the beginning, thinking we went back to the start as well.”

“That could make sense,” my brother says. “Okay, we’ll try it.”

And we start walking. Again. Now the heat is coming from below us as much as it’s coming from above us. At one point, we hear a car coming, and I start to wave my hand, thinking maybe they can help us. My brother stops me. “We don’t know who they are, they might be murderers or something!”

I hadn’t thought of that. Best not to draw attention to ourselves. Let’s just walk.

Another car blows past at an incredible speed, and honks twice, a quick “beep beep” as he blares past.

We keep walking.

Another car is coming up behind us. I’m too tired to even look. It pulls past us, and then very quickly veers off to the shoulder and skids to a halt. It takes me a moment to realize it’s our car.

In an instant, my dad is leaping out and rushing toward us. His arms are grabbing us into a hug.

He smells of sweat and deodorant and home and love and dad.

All at once my body feels like it’s jelly and I just want to go to sleep. He gets us into the car, pulls back into the road. He’s talking, and so is my brother, and maybe I am too, but I can’t process any of this. The last hours just became a blur of sunshine and dirt, and I’m just thirsty.

We pull into the parking lot – it feels like it was literally just a few seconds down the road. There’s mom, and my sister, and my aunt and uncle. We all get out and everyone is hugging us and telling us they were worried and how long they’ve been searching and calling for us and scolding us rather severely. My dad seems to be more angry at my brother than he is at me, which is both normal and unfair, my aunt seems more angry at the both of us than either of my parents are, and my mom is just happy that we’re safe.

“I told you to follow the pylons!” my dad says to my brother.

“I don’t know what pylons are!” my brother protests.

I see the sudden realization in my dad’s eyes. “The rocks piles? You know, how they had the rocks piled on top of each other?”

“Oh, those!” my brother says. “Yeah, we stopped seeing those a long time ago.”

“Those are pylons!”

“It doesn’t matter. They’re safe now, we have them here now,” my mom is saying. She’s hugging me and it feels like curling up in my bed.

I just want a drink of water. I finish an entire water bottle and still feel thirsty. But the cars are cool. And comfortable. And we are safe.