Tomb

After ending up in the same arroyo three times in succession, I realized I wasn’t paranoid, I was lost. Or, more precisely, I was trapped. And being caught in The Maze — often described as “a 30-square-mile puzzle in sandstone” in Utah’s Canyonlands National Park — was not a good thing.

The good news was I had a combo hydration pack and filter and there is plenty of water in mid-April. The bad news was there hadn’t been any park rangers to check in with before I started, and my topographic map had proven woefully inadequate. After scrambling over “slickrock” sandstone for two days, I was dead tired. But worse than all that, I started totally freaking out.

Suddenly the sublime vista turned positively threatening. The serene silence morphed into an aural black hole that sucked up what was left of my rational mind. Instead of the stoic consolation inspired and reinforced by the thoughts of loved ones, my brain churned out bizarre thoughts. It occurred to me that if a high-frequency trading firm took on clients it could do very well; that I missed the good ol’ days when girls still had pubic hair; that boogers full of bacteria don’t taste like anything unless they have real dirt in them. In fact, being unable to stop thinking this stupid shit was the scariest thing I’d ever experienced. Finally, when it got dark, I fell into a kind of stupor. It wasn’t restful, but at least it was a respite from the waking nightmare I’d been inflicting on myself.

Then came the morning.

I woke up with a big, mangy Native dude standing almost on top of me. He had a huge pack, no hat or shirt and, disconcertingly in this climate, an ice axe hanging from his belt. I was nervous. I got up too fast and fell back on my ass, hard. He grinned at that, and asked if I had a topographic map. I tossed it to him and he took one quick glance at it, upside down, and handed it back.

From his pack he produced a handful of freshly rolled fatties, and offered to light one up. I told him I was the only guy from B.C. who didn’t smoke weed, and instantly regretted saying it. He looked at me, as if from a long distance, and said the white man never understands when to just say “thanks,” and leave it at that.

Despite being the typical white man in question, I was desperate enough to ask how to get unlost. Hell, maybe I’d been reading the map upside down. But he was done with me. He walked away without another word.

I scrambled after him. He stopped, glared at me and asked what I thought I was doing. I told him I’d been lost for two days and then I did the stupidest thing I could have done — I offered him cash. The next thing I knew he had his axe in his hand. He snarled, “Hey pendejo, you sayin’ I’m broke?”

It was then that it hit me: I just have to tell this guy the truth. So I told him I was scared. Really scared. Of being alone. I said even if he was lost, I’d rather be lost with him.

Slowly, he dropped his pack, and without taking his eyes off me, he retrieved a joint. He lit up, took a few short pulls, and offered it to me. I did the first smart thing I’d done in quite some time — I took a long hoot. Afterwards, he turned to me and said, “So, how much cash do ya got on ya?”

The look on my face made him roar with laughter.

Over the next few days he never asked to see the map again, or my compass. So I just figured he knew what he was doing. We didn’t talk, trying to conserve energy, but I learned tons just watching him. He had a way of swinging his arms as a counterweight to his staccato lope, which allowed him to cover very rough terrain at a considerable pace. He knew which water sources had to be filtered and which didn’t, which of the hidden rock faces were exposed to weather and thus had more hand holds, and subtle breathing techniques — some to create body heat, others to dissipate it. Most of all, I learned to take my time, to ignore what couldn’t be helped, and to be patient.

Suddenly as we emerged on the top of a ridge, the Colorado River seemed to magically appear beneath us. He said he had to turn southeast, and that since there weren’t any bad rapids downstream, I could jump in the river and float until Glen Canyon, where I’d find a ride. In other words, he was ditching me.

Naively, I thought: “So, we aren’t going to be friends after all.”

Perhaps sensing my feelings, he showed me what was in his pack… and I realized he literally had millions of reasons not to help one scared white dude find his way. I also realized my own biases. I was looking at this man as a one-with-nature saviour, not so much a drug-runner. A typical Native who counterbalanced my typical whiteness.

As we parted, he said he’d have to kill me if he told me his real name, but that he was known off the rez as “El Hacha” (The Axe).

He left it up to my imagination to fill in the blanks.