Planet Fever (26 page)

“I love this shit!” JD continuously repeated.

Over the final crest the vehicle leveled off, revealing a panorama of mountainous desert.

We were atop a mesa overlooking an entire city of otherworldly red and brown castle wall mesas, splotched with green vegetation at their bases. This went on as far as I could see, and I had trouble believing it wasn’t all a splendid painting. Far below us a winding river coursed its way through the canyon, tiny specs of faraway cars making their ways on the road alongside it.

“This is it,” said Eliza.

“It certainly is,” I said.

The dogs ran around and chased one another as JD got out a blanket, a cooler and my backpack.

We sat and ate some grapes and trail-mix and allowed the breeze and the birds and the resounding quiet to be our entertainment.

So it went for quite a while….

After a bit, J.D. spoke: “Which way you thinking about going?”

I scanned the landscape of endless mesas and canyons. I shrugged. I still wasn’t entirely sure what I was doing in Utah, and more specifically inside Mt. Zion National Park. But having been compelled to come this far led me to believe I would be pointed in the right direction. Or perish, lost in the middle of the Utah wilderness.

“If you look that way, to the north of us, you see that big towering rock over there. It’s called ‘North Guardian Angel.’ It’s a view all right, and it’s right where the canyons border the more foresty mountain area. I think if you start now, you could get to the base by evening, camp out, then climb up it tomorrow. That’s what I’d recommend.”

“Sounds good. Thanks for looking out for me. I really appreciate it.”

This was it. Time to go.

They each gave me a hug and Trumpet licked my face. Eliza grabbed a bag from her pack and handed it to me.

“It’s a homemade granola whatchamacallit.”

JD took a couple liter bottles of water from his cooler and put them into my backpack. He zipped it up and patted it.

I thanked them again, said “so long” and began my trek downward on a little hiking trail.

I WANDERED
down the trail into the canyon area which was edged by shrubbery, desert trees, and whizzing insects. The sun gained momentum into the sky and started sucking the sweat out of my body.

I reeked. The last of the pharmaceuticals was flooding out of my skin and the smell was toxic and metallic. When stopping to take a break I noticed my hand trembling: I had the shakes … not as bad as a hangover after a week long vodka binge but enough to let me know that I was detoxifying hard. I didn’t want to sit around for long because my mind would begin to go into a panic-like paranoia:
What if withdrawing from the drugs cold-turkey gives me a heart attack and I die out here? My heart’s beating too hard…. Maybe I should’ve stayed at that infernal hospital…. This was a complete mistake…. Why am I doing this? I’m totally insane….”

Yet, a still, quiet voice prompted: “
move on.”

So I moved on.

By dusk, I had sweat out quite a bit of the garbage in my system and arrived at the base of a large mesa/mountain that I presumed to be the “North Guardian Angel” that JD had spoken of. He was dead on target: it was a solid place to camp out for the night. I’d get some rest, then in the morning ascend the mountain. I laid out the sleeping bag and set down my pack, then gathered a bunch of dry twigs and little branches to fashion a small fire. I sat and ate some of the homemade granola, staring at the flames until it was time to sleep.

I woke up to the tweet of a bird. It had a distinct pattern and cadence of the first bird I remember hearing from childhood that had resided in the field behind our duplex. Two slow whistles rising in pitch (G and A) followed by three successive, rapid whistles jumbled in F, octave lower F, and C.

The other awakening, natural sounds of nature filled the air as the sun rose. I ate another handful of granola, sipped some water, packed up the bag and cleaned up the spot.

I began my ascent.

The first part of the climb went easy. A narrow trail wound up the side of the rocky mesa hemmed at times by close-cropped canyon walls. Things got tricky about two-thirds of the way up, which was mid-afternoon by the time I got that far—and it got
steep.
At times I crouched on all fours and climbed up, making sure every piece of stone I grabbed or stepped on supported my weight; if it didn’t, I would lose my footing and slide backwards a bit—which happened multiple times. The fragrances of the natural were overwhelmed by the unholy funk of big-pharma synthetic sweat. I couldn’t quite place that smell: chalky, pilly, metallic,
unsettling, unnatural. How much more of this stuff did I still need to sweat out?

Climbing about and up the mesa sparked another childhood memory: a movie I had loved as a five-year-old kid:
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
. The poster had been mesmerizing to my young and imaginative mind—a cluster of bright stars in a night sky above a two-lane road illuminated by a mysterious glow off in the distance of a barren and dark landscape. I often wondered where that road was going to. What
was
there?

“
Can we go there, Daddy?”

My pops thought I meant to the film. “Yes, we’ll go next week.”

The next week we went to the film. Of course I loved it, particularly the parts with the little boy and his toys going haywire and the crazy man making a mountain out of mashed potatoes.

“Can we go to
there
?” I asked my dad again as we exited the movie, pointing to the film poster—that holy and strange place in my mind on that poster.

He said it was very far away, but some day we would go.

As an aside: I was baffled
why
that exact shot from that poster wasn’t actually in the movie. But that movie had seeded the desire in me to quest outer space. From that moment forward I had been focused and disciplined and
knew
I was going to become an astronaut when I grew up.

Then it happened: one drunk night, in high school—
my first drunk night ever—
I decided to play show-off in front of a group of people, particularly Heather Halloway, and display my climbing savvy.

The way up the side of the four-story building was a piece of cake, the bricks protruded randomly and out enough to grab and find good footing. The way down got tricky: I was cocky and certain the warm lips of Heather Halloway awaited me, her climbing champion. Midway my descent, in the midst of imagining the rest of my passionate and epic night with her, I realized neither my hands nor feet were in contact with the wall of the building. As a matter of fact, things were getting really breezy and when I looked back I had enough time to think, “
there is the sidewalk approaching fast. I am falling—”
followed by a surge of white electricity and a heavy cracking sound. I woke up, a concerned mom and dad hovering above me in a hospital.

Goodbye, astronaut. Hello, drunk.

The climb up the face of “The North Guardian Angel” grew more dangerous; it became the type of ascent professional climbers and aficionados scaled. Not some mental-ward-escaping, detoxing, hack writer on a quest of dubious possibilities.

Fuck it—I’ll master this thing with only my hands and legs, no ropes for me
.

I had nothing to lose. I wasn’t afraid of the challenge. Perhaps that thinking was a mistake. Or maybe not. Maybe all of this was going according to plan: this was the way things were supposed to happen. But who’s plan?

Maybe had I gone into the Air Force and done all that astronaut stuff, I would’ve been funneled into a narrowed and compartmentalized reality, never having stumbled into this alleged mission to take down a nefarious entity and their plan for universal domination.

Yes—that road on that
Close Encounters
poster led me not into the
literal
ship that went to outer space, but to the proverbial light: the awareness that
the aliens walk among us, and the bastards were pulling a big fast one.

Reminiscing about all this, particularly my first crush of Heather Halloway, prompted me to think about Mona. Lovely Mona. I really liked her. Was she really worried about me? My guess: she had finally had enough and said to herself, “I don’t think I can handle anymore of this nut job. I am out of here.” I would have understood if, when I got back (
if
I ever got back), she were long-gone from my circus. When I was around I was crazy, and when I wasn’t she was worried about me because I was crazy. What kind of relationship is that? What kind of guy does that to a woman? Why was I such an ass? Obviously
I hoped
she would still be around, but what the hell did she see in me in the first place?

Then the thoughts drifted to Moroni. That chimera of a man still fit into my story in some important fashion, but how?

I took a break from scrambling up the side of the giant rock and rested inside a hollowed-out portion, like a mini-cave overlooking the vast desert landscape. I fancied myself a weird monk, surveying the off-colored spectrum of the Universe’s colossal reality. I had ascended quite a way and I hoped the other side offered an easier descent because doubts were arising about making it down the same way without a rope….

There was a steep pitch yet to make before what seemed an easy path to the summit.

A tree to the right of me about twenty yards had grown outward from the cliff, sideways. What other way could it have grown? I appreciated, if not related to, its tenacity to find its own direction to grow in. For a second, the thought about climbing out onto the branches occurred in me, just for the challenge. I decided against it.

Why had I
really
climbed up that building back in my youth, and why was I climbing up this mountain now? As a youngster, climbing was one of my fortes and I would scale up anything: six-foot-high brown wooden fences prevalent in suburbia, lampposts, walls with protruding bricks, up to the roof of our two-story house….

The adrenaline rush. The challenge. The perspective.

In sixth grade, I climbed the rope in gym class faster than anyone in the history of that elementary school, but my name didn’t go up on the “record board” the resident gym teacher—Charlie “Chicken-Bones”—had put up in honor of the kid that had
all
the records from ten years prior. His name was “Don Deluzio,” and for a long time I had thought it was Dom Deluise, the chubby actor made famous from his absurd sidekick roles alongside Burt Reynolds.

Wow, Dom Deluise used to be quite the athlete.
My pals busted up laughing; they thought I was joking.

In reality, this infamous Athletic King of Little Elementary had become a big-shot freshman linebacker for the Colorado Buffaloes college football team when I was in sixth grade.

Why hadn’t
my
name gone up on that board?

According to Charlie “Chicken-Bones,” my climb wasn’t “officially” made during a “sanctioned” event. When the hell were these “official” events? I wondered.

I shrugged, knowing that I had just beaten the reigning champ, and nobody besides me, Charlie “Chicken-Bones,” and my friend Doug Chiccone (who
was very
outraged by this injustice) would ever know.

The game was rigged in Don’s favor. This became very obvious when I crushed his time in the 40 yard dash,
twice—
and a shocked and bemused Charlie “Chicken-Bones” examined his stop-watch, looked up at me, looked back down at his stop-watch, then stated “too bad this wasn’t a
sanctioned
event—you would have broken the record.”

That time I got it: Charlie “Chicken-Bones” was the high priest meant to maintain the altar of Don Deluzio and keep his hallowed records intact. Off-the-record, I
had
beaten his times. But I was destined to be only the clandestine
usurper.
No one was to know.

A few years later—entering his college senior year—Don and a buddy had gotten “hit-n-runned” by a drunk driver while summer vacationing the South Padre islands in Texas. Don had broken his jaw and leg, which healed in time for the fall football season, but then he slipped and tweaked his knee on the turf during a practice.