Salvation by Dread Alone

Never take the south road to Chaco Canyon. No one gave me that advice, though, so I did. It’s what Google Maps told me to do when approaching, as was I, from Santa Fe. The road was blocked by a series of watery ditches owing to recent thunderstorms. The driver of the only other vehicle I saw—a well-equipped Ford F-150—laughed at me and my dinky rental Hyundai as he passed me from the opposite direction. This was an omen. I navigated the first ditch successfully. On the second and third ditch I barely made it. But the fourth one got me. I spun my wheels for about ten minutes, but the car was as immobile as one of the New Mexico buttes that surrounded me. The uninhabited desert stretched mercilessly in all directions. In Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather says the landscape I looked out on has the appearance “of incompleteness; as if, with all the materials for world-making assembled, the Creator had desisted, gone away and left everything on the point of being brought together.” The wilderness writer Edward Abbey agrees: “The desert says nothing. . . . [It] lies there like the bare skeleton of Being, spare, sparse, austere, utterly worthless, inviting not love but contemplation.”