This is a picture of where we camped last night. When people asked where we were going, I would say, “The middle of nowhere,” and I think this illustrates that pretty well. Also, I really wanted to go up that trail there in the distance, but time and ground clearance prevented me. Next time, and there will be a next time…
A trail of dust marked the passage of the pumpkin orange Jeep Gladiator truck along the desolate trail. The driver crested a rise and stopped as he and his passenger sat gob smacked at the view. Ahead the Joshua trees on the southern flanks of the unremarkable Magruder Mountain gave way to a massive alluvial fan that spread out into the Mojave desert. In the front seats the driver and the woman next to him consulted a topo map and pointed to where the trail cut across the gentle slope.
In the back seat sat a ghost. Unbeknownst to the living in the car, she watched the two deliberate as to which spur off the trail ahead would offer them the best place to stay for the night. She cast her gaze out the window and over a steep rise. Tire tracks led up to the top, but tall bitterbrush and mountain mahogany between the wheel ruts spoke to how long it had been since anything with four wheels came anywhere near the top of that hill. Her eyes drifted from one Joshua tree to another, admiring their sword-like spikey leaves and even the desiccated fruits atop them that would soon fall off and release seeds. She shifted from a particularly tall tree towards a barely-there tree when she saw a man standing alone, staring out at the desert.
No, not a man… well, the ghost of a man.
He looked about six feet tall and his khakis and maroon sweater vest seemed decidedly incongruous with the desert landscape. From his profile she could see a neatly trimmed beard and moustache on his dark face. As if reacting to her gaze, he turned towards the truck and made eye contact with her before turning his back on the car and staring back out at the desert spread out below him.
The driver put the Jeep into drive and they started down the trail. She deliberately stayed still and passed right through the back of the Jeep as it moved across the slope, dust blooming up behind it. “I’ll catch up,” she thought, then turned to look at the man on the top of the hill. She could have apparated right next to him, but instead chose to walk up the hill carefully stepping around spikey agave plants and sagebrush.
“Hi,” she said as the stepped up next to the man. “I’m Jan.”
He turned and regarded her and said, simply, “Trey.”
“Hi Trey,” she replied. “My son and his wife just passed that way,” she pointed to the dust rising behind the Jeep.
“Um-hmm,” he said without looking.
“I love traveling with them. They go to the middle of nowhere… it’s kind of fun.”
He nodded.
“So, uh, I’m following him because, well, you know, my son… But, uh, are you haunting this hill?”
“Not particularly,” he said summarily.
“This area then?”
He shrugged. “For now.”
“For now?” She said, quizzically. “I didn’t think that was how this ghost thing worked. I mean, I can stray from my son, sure, but I usually hang around my kids. Or, well, their kids. They keep me grounded. Not literally, but I like watching them, you know?”
He didn’t move.
“So, what about this place keeps you here.”
“It’s lonesome.”
“I can see that,” she said looking out in the desert. “That seems like more a reason not to be out here by yourself. Unless, I don’t know, did you die out here?”
A thin smile creased his face. “No,” he shook his head. “I was born and raised in Brooklyn. Bed Stuy. Moved to Manhattan and ran as a bicycle messenger before I took an office job.”
“You’re a far way from Manhattan.”
“That’s the point,” he said. “I lived around so many people my entire life. The congestion, the cabs, the horns, the yells, the humanity…” he shook his head. “I’m sick of it.”
“How’d you die?”
“Heart attack. You?”
“Cancer,” she said summarily. “So you’re out here because you want to… be alone?”
He nodded slowly. “I want to be lonesome.”
“What does that mean?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out. What does it mean to be lonesome? To be of humanity, but so far removed from humanity that the intrusion of it,” he nodded at the dust of the Jeep in the distance, “feels like an affront.”
“I… I’m sorry. I can go,” she said. “I didn’t mean to intrude on your loneliness.”
“No,” he said, “It’s alright. That’s part of it – I haven’t talked to another soul since I died and started wandering the country looking for emptiness. This is a nice break.”
“Okay,” she said. They both remained silent a long time, gusts of wind whipping through the canyons the only sound. “It’s beautiful here.”
He nodded.
“How long…” she started.
“I don’t know. It’s been three years.” He let out a chuckle, “I thought ghosts were attached to the living, that if I went out here then I’d, I don’t know, fade away.”
“But you haven’t.”
“I haven’t. And I don’t know what that means either.”
She let the silence fall again. The quiet murmur of a jetliner high above added to the whispering winds.
“I think I’m going to go catch up with my son,” she said finally.
“Okay, Jan,” he said and she was surprised her name registered on the man. “Enjoy,” he said and she could tell he meant it.
“Maybe I’ll see you again?”
“You will. I’ll be in the wind. I’ll be the pause in a cacophony. I’ll be the silence between breaths. I’ll be the unsaid.”
“I’ll be, uh, going,” she said. She disappeared and reappeared next to the now-parked Jeep as the couple unfolded the rooftop tent and started making dinner. She looked back towards the hill where Trey likely stood. She thought she could understand his desire to be lonesome. But she watched her son pour water into a pot of dry rice, his finger touching the surface of the grains and pouring until the water touched his knuckle like she’d shown him as a little boy.
Lonesome, she thought, is overrated.
