Badlands

We wake up in the badlands when the sun begins to rise. It was a mistake to keep walking in the dark last night. Every pathway the same, we could have walked in a hundred circles. We put our hands on the ravine walls and used the planets and the stars to orient ourselves. Walk south. We said it, "South, south, south, please, south." But the planets and the stars, they shifted themselves. Venus, the North Star, Orion's Belt, they hung themselves in different places each time we looked up. The moon set and the ravine walls became black as the sky and the stars were so bright and close we felt as though we were wading through the dark matter the universe is made of. We had to lie down, we had to sleep.

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Which way did we come from? Our footprints point in different directions up and down the wash. Lines rake along both faces of the walls—our fingers are raw with cuts. There's nothing to do but walk, the badlands so narrow sometimes we can hardly fit through. Thin ravines lead to wide washes with pale, dry trees that look like puffs of smoke. I take my shirt off and wrap it around my head to keep the sun off. My feet follow behind Sarah's. In the deep sand, it's easier to walk in footprints. When she gets tired, we switch places and she walks behind me. When I get tired, we switch places and I walk behind her. The sand glows white. Steps stop being motions, just sounds. Foot after foot hushing the sand.

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"I think we're lost," Sarah said yesterday when the sun was low in the sky and turning orange and the feeling that the walk there was shorter than the walk back had just begun to rise inside us. "I don't think so," I said. I pointed straight ahead. "I think we're just about there."

We had parked our car next to the road and walked down into the badlands. We were on a trail, on a hike to an abandoned quartzite mine. We saw other hikers, two other women, who said hello, heading the way we had come from, back to the road, though we hadn't seen another car parked by the trailhead. The mouth of the mine was filled in with sand. There were chunks of quartzite, cloudy white crystals, scattered all around. They used to use it to make lenses. Sarah filled her pockets.

We must have veered off the trail, or missed the slope back up to the car. We might have been close at some point. Or maybe not. We could have been miles away. Every branch of badlands looks the same.

Sarah stopped walking and looked up at the sun, nearly gone, then back the way we came. "I think we have to go back," she said. "No," I said, "we need to keep going south." "What if we overshot it?" she asked. "We can't have," I said, but when the last of the light was gone I heard a hawk crying somewhere and its echo trickled down the ravine behind us and I said to her, "I think we overshot it." Sarah didn't raise her head. She turned her shoulders and started walking in the other direction.

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"If I can get up there, I'll be able to see where we are," I say. I said the same thing yesterday. I try again to climb the walls, but they are so steep. The eggshell crust of sand crumbles under my hands.

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When the sun clears the ravine wall on the second day, Sarah begins to shout, "Help! Help! Help! Help! Help! Help!" She looks right at the sun and she screams it. I put my arms around her and say her name to her. The sweat on her forehead stings my cheek. I can smell the salt of her. Her knees are badly scraped, but I don't remember seeing her fall...