Where the Streets Have No Name

My husband, A, and I went to Joshua Tree about a month ago.  Amateur trail runners that we consider ourselves to be, we decided to tackle the Boy Scout Trail, which to me sounded innocuous enough.  The worst that could happen is that it would turn us into precocious young homophobes with an ironic penchant for bright-colored scarves.

We did our due diligence and walked the first mile and a half the day before.  It was a sandy trail, slightly uphill, but nothing that we couldn’t handle at a slow pace.  We even encountered a family of four on their way to a few nights of camping.  All of them were fully kitted out in matching gear straight out of an REI catalog, including foot-high hiking poles for the pigtailed children.  As the littlest member looked up at me from under the brim of her safari hat, her beady eyes flashed me a withering look of scorn that only a child can give to an adult who is clearly too stupid to occupy the same trail as an experienced adventurer like herself.

The next day, my dad dropped us off at the northernmost trailhead.  I told him to pick us up ninety minutes later at the southern terminus, which gave us around a half hour cushion off our normal eight-mile pace.  Between us, we were armed with our satellite running watch and one bottle of water to share.  This may sound Spartan, but these are typical munitions for our mid-range city runs.  I never carry a cell phone since it’s cumbersome and expensive to fix if dropped.  Bringing one on this run would be especially useless given there’s no reception in the park anyway.

Some would conjecture that our first mistake was attempting a trail run in the first place, and of course they would be right.  But just to move the story forward, I am positing our first mistake was blithely assuming the trail cut through the mountain range we saw in the distance.  Around the two-mile mark, when the path dead-ended at the base of a rocky mountain, I quickly began to suspect that indeed the trail went over, not between, the mountains.  Every time we would climb up a mountain we’d have to search for where the trail resumed, but eventually it just disintegrated altogether.

Some would conjecture that continuing to run even though the trail disappeared would be our second mistake, and of course they would be right.  But just to move the story forward, I am positing that our second mistake was not taking the trail namesake’s motto to heart.  We weren’t prepared.  As we were lost on the desert plain in God’s country without even a tortoise to call friend, I realized that ours would be the skeletons that park rangers five years gone would be clucking over.  A’s bony fist would be found decomposed around the telltale indestructible piece of clear plastic, no longer a water bottle but a de facto latrine-slash-canteen that held evermore dwindling cycles of urine until we could produce no more.  We were the cautionary tale, the idiots who spat in the face of nature and went to the desert with but a few ounces of hydration and no means of communication.

We wandered aimlessly for a while, like nomadic tribes people without the wisdom of the elders to get them through the Sahara.  We tried looking for footprints and found nothing but animal tracks.  We did come upon an impression of a running shoe in the sand, but it turns out that it was my own footprint.  I’d like to say, upon this unfortunate discovery, I thought to myself calmly, “But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”  Instead, it was probably more like, “Oh my god!  We’re gonna DIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!”

I thought about letting A know that he could go ahead and eat me if I died first.  You would think that it would go without saying, but we are vegetarians.  I read an article where someone was making a case that breast-feeding isn’t vegan, but others were arguing it is still to be considered vegan because the source is giving consent.  So I wanted to put it out there that I was consenting to being eaten for A’s survival as to not besmirch his outstanding vegetarian cred.

I began wondering how long before my parents became alarmed and alerted the authorities.  As I was calculating how much we would owe Park Services for the Search & Rescue helicopter, A went off on his own and found a well-worn trail that looked full of promise.  We ran for about fifteen minutes before coming upon three hikers.  It turned out that they were from the same suburb where A grew up and one of them even knew his cousin.

They pointed us to the highway where we hitchhiked our way to where my family was waiting for us.  The girl who picked us up turned out to work in the city where we live.  It's so funny that after not seeing a soul for three hours, we meet two groups of strangers from our backyard.  Even though the desert is big, it's a small world after all.  She was traveling with her mother, who told us in mildly German-accented English that we were the nicest "hijackers" she’d ever come across.

In the end, we were only about an hour late.  It took me around thirty minutes to predict our demise, but fortunately A maintained a better outlook for our survival.  I’m certainly glad nature did not get the better of us, despite all the gloomy scenarios that were running through my head.  Perhaps next time I’ll at least take a compass.  Maybe I’ll figure out how to use it first.