Stony Mesa Sagas. Chip Ward
up in the city, Hoppy loved western television shows and movies. He read Zane Grey in grade school and Louis L’Amour in high school. He also gobbled up nature programs and discovered he had an affinity for wild animals. He fed squirrels and pigeons in a park a block away from home and he knew where the raccoons who knocked over trash cans in the middle of the night denned by an abandoned railroad line. His parents took their kids camping on weekends, often accompanied by a half dozen of their city friends. He lived in the grimy fist of the city during the week but on weekends he learned by heart every trail in Muir Woods. Lately he lived on the road, taking in firsthand the best of the wonders he had imagined while living in Oakland. He visited national parks and other wild places he had read or heard about. He had just landed in Stony Mesa when he decided to join the Sea Ledges protest.
Hoppy brushed back a mop of sandy hair, quick-smoothed his beard, and walked over to the young woman who seemed to be as smart as she was pretty to ask her name and give her his. He’d been watching her for hours. He liked the way she moved so easily among those in the overcrowded lock-up, smiling, hugging, lighting up each person she encountered with her energy and charm. She could explain the chemistry of climate change to a fellow activist one minute and then engage in a heartfelt conversation about love and loss with that burned-out meth freak, Mona, the next. Her smile was radiant.
He stood near her and breathed in her aroma, an alluring mix of campfire, sage, and vanilla. Her clothes looked like a happy accident, maybe the best outfit that was ever pieced together from a free box. She even managed to make the orange jumpsuit that replaced her gypsy garb look stylish. She was small but athletic, and hot, very hot, in some way he couldn’t explain. He just had to get to know her. Since he was new to this crowd, having arrived only the day before the protest, he knew no one who could introduce him to her. So he swallowed hard and approached.
“You’re Luna, right?”
She turned to face him, smiled, and brushed a wayward tendril of hair from her eyes. Her gaze lingered and then she smiled, nodded yes.
“How did you get your name?” he asked Luna. “Is it your real name or did you make it up?”
“Waxwing is my mother’s maiden name. I took it legally as soon as I could because I didn’t want my father’s name. He left us when I was two. My mom says he was home so seldom that it took me a few months before I realized he was gone. He paid for stuff—my braces, piano lessons, my tuition, stuff like that, but I never saw him.”
Luna had secretly watched Hoppy from a distance, too, and now that he was in front of her she was so nervous that she couldn’t stop talking. Her explanation wasn’t going where Hoppy expected it to go but he did not interrupt her because he liked watching her talk, the way her brows danced above her eyes, the lilt of her voice, that beautiful loose curl of hair that would not behave.
She paused to brush the wayward lock away from her eyes and continued. “Well, I saw my dad once after he left us. He took me to Disneyland but I threw up on one of the rides and then he got in an ugly spat with some guy who was there from Utah with a dozen kids when my father cut in line. I cried and wanted to go home. For days after I awoke with nightmares about hydrocephalic mice. The next time my father wanted to take me somewhere I broke out in hives and my mother put an end to that. She said that he was her mistake and there was no reason I should have to pay for it.”
Luna’s heart raced and she was running out of oxygen. Stop talking, she told herself, but she couldn’t slow down. Words were the only defense she had against the urge to throw herself into his arms and melt. There was something about him that seemed so right. There was something she could almost smell or taste.
Hoppy primed the conversational pump again. “Where did he go when he left you and your mom?”
“On to the next wife and then another and another. He has a trophy wife now who raises Chihuahuas and has a line of little dog clothing and jewelry that she sells online. She calls it Bow Wow Wow! She has fake boobs and spends a fortune getting her nails done but she looks tan and fit on his yacht and stays out of his business. I guess she’s lower maintenance than the others who ended up in rehab. Low maintenance is important to my father because he has more important things on his mind than the wife and kids. And the ironic thing is that he gives oodles of money to political candidates who proclaim family values and the importance of marriage. The man is a total asshole and I want nothing to do with him.”
Hoppy nodded and furrowed his brow in sympathy. This chick was a trip. He could listen to her all day. “That’s all very interesting but I didn’t mean your last name. I meant Luna. Is that your real name?”
“No, my real name is Elizabeth—Elizabeth Suzanne Waxwing. My dad called me Betty Sue and my mom called me Liz. I decided I preferred Luna, after the redwood tree that Julia Butterfly Hill, the famous tree-sitter, saved. And it refers to the moon, which was worshipped by women and pagans before the patriarchs took over and burned midwives and crones at the stake for communing with nature and healing with herbs.”
Hoppy was impressed. “Sounds like you’re a student of history.”
“Not really. I’m just trying to figure out how this world we have inherited is such a mess.”
“So when did you do it? Ya know, change from Betty or Liz to Luna?”
She told him about the two seasons with the Pathway Wilderness School where she was sent after that unfortunate misunderstanding with the patrol car. She backpacked hundreds of miles with four counselors and a dozen fellow miscreants, a.k.a. troubled teens.
She arrived with a snoot full of resentment that she soon had no time or energy to feel because she was so busy just surviving. She had never backpacked before and it was grueling. Not only was the pack heavy, you had to find and filter your drinking water, make all the meals together, gather firewood, and wash yourself under a sloppy solar shower that was always too hot or too cool. Every day was a series of chores and struggles. At night she worked on staying warm. On days when they were not hiking they talked and talked and talked. The counselors were trained to rappel off cliffs and provide wilderness first aid but also to lead discussions about the emotional wreckage in the lives of their surly charges.
At night, the counselors took her shoes so she couldn’t run away. She wouldn’t have known where to run if she had the chance. Boon County included a thousand square miles of rugged wilderness. Although it was safer than any nighttime landscape she had ever known, with no cars to run you over and no lurking criminals, moving about at night was scary. Not a week into her first hike, she heard coyotes yip and a mountain lion scream in the pitch dark. There was no light but the moon and stars so it was easy to trip over uneven ground studded with sharp rocks. One must stay put at night.
Hoppy couldn’t get enough of Luna and was afraid she might stop. He told her he hiked through several national parks and wilderness areas but he was unfamiliar with Southwest canyon country. “You must know this land here very well after so much time on it. What can you tell me about the Colorado Plateau?”
She told him how they hiked across forested mountains cut by deep ravines that descended into redrock canyons with fifty-foot spillovers. She learned to rappel. Some canyons narrowed into slots that were scoured by flash floods. She learned to fit herself into them and climb with her back to one wall and her feet on the opposite wall—chimneying, they called it. They humped their packs up and over giant mounds of soft turquoise ash from prehistoric volcanoes long dormant. They camped in pinyon islands that covered the tops of buttes they had to climb with ropes. There was one gallery of old trees she named “the bonsai forest” for the twisted intensity of its venerable junipers. They drank from puddles in sandstone rills and from potholes that captured rain water running over open stone. There was nowhere to go but right here where you walked, no time but right now. This moment, no other.
Far away from the ubiquitous thrum, buzz, honk, and chatter of the city, she discovered a soundscape free of the collective tinnitus that is the murmur of civilization. It opened her. Eventually the noise in her head, all that blabber remembered and wished, the fragments of music, television, texts, tweets, and ads that cluttered her inner narrative, faded to silence. Sounds that