Evaporation

Lately, I’ve been traveling to the nearly treeless expanses of southeastern Oregon to visit Mom. She is living out her days with my youngest brother at his alfalfa farm. My brother and his wife have been heroic in their commitment to give her some vestige of a life. When I’m here, I usually wake in time to watch the fiery crown of the newborn sun dome above the eastern ridge, summer-baked and sharp as a bronze sword. The arid light lends clarity, dividing the living into watered and waterless. Edges sharpen. Brightness and shadow become unambiguous. People here are decisive, too. Indecision is sometimes as destructive as a wrong decision.

Last night my niece and I gave my brother a badly needed break and stayed in the living room with Mom, so I slept a little later. Around midmorning, I resolve to walk and jog across this small valley, an eastward diverticulation off of Malheur Basin. By the time I head down the gray gravel driveway toward a stack yard of hay, the sun is climbing hard into the blue vault of the southeastern sky. I turn onto a two-track road leading toward a lenticular cloud suspended like a vaporous blimp above the eastern ridge. The crunch of my running shoes sends clouds of grasshoppers briefly skyward. Perched on the ground, they look like lemon-lime cigarette butts. Then each one erupts into a flying Tinker Bell wand. Occasionally, a hitchhiker snags onto the hair on the back of my leg. Never have I been able to tolerate the feel of prickly insect legs on my skin: not flies, not beetles, not ants, and certainly not grasshoppers. Even though one of my unwritten job descriptions is to love the unloved, there are limits.

Evaporation leaves an accumulation of talc-like dust between the ruts of the road, dust that holds another accumulation—a days-long dialog of spatially overlapping beings. Slim toenailed prints of Coyote. Dragging tail of Ord’s Kangaroo Rat that weaves miniature arroyos into the dirt. Thin clawed toes of scurrying California Quail frozen in time. Tiny heart-shaped hooves of this year’s Mule Deer fawn. My actual footprints are shielded from the impressionistic dust by lug-soled running shoes that are a clumsy and invasive overlay on all of these other-than-human comings and goings.

Mom is evaporating, too. Her dissipation is both literal and figurative. She takes in water only sparingly. Her cells have a three-billion-year history of staying alive, and they seem to sense that their only way out of the living world is through dehydration. This is a termination of their ongoing dialog with water that has kept them plump and able to transport life-sustaining molecules into and out of a seemingly miraculous intracellular interior of channels and vacuoles and membrane-bound structures, the machinery that separates life from the other-than-living. Mom vacillates between cognizance and dementia. In lucid moments she converses with us, but her words are muted and slurred by a series of small strokes. I strain to understand, feel frustrated that I can’t follow these last conversations. And yet she hasn’t completely lost her fight or her enunciation. When my niece told her we needed to stand her up for some routine hygiene, Mom hardened her blue eyes upward and shifted into a singsong voice that rose a step with each monosyllabic word, eventually dipping at the top: Oh-no-we-doh-ohn’t! We would have laughed outright, but Mom wasn't messing around. I also realized that my own work to forgive her hard edges is paying off.

The road climbs steeply toward the top of a rimrock ridge. I grab a sprig of big sage, crush the gray-green leaves, encircle the wad with my fingers, hold the open side of my curled hand to my nose like a flesh-and-skin pipe, and take a hit. Resinous aromatherapy. I’m not fit enough to stay out here too long, so carry no water. My body, a water-filled bag of skin, is being depleted. Dark stains of sweat evaporate quickly from a turquoise cotton T-shirt. The wet recesses of my lungs lose water to exhalations that increase in rate, a response to the extra carbon dioxide thrown off from cells challenged by the incline. Elevation, heat, and age conspire to downgrade my plodding run to a walk. The downy gift of a Red-tailed Hawk feather rests lightly between the ruts. I stop to photograph the feather, then decide to step off the road and give my quads a workout while making a contribution to the local nitrogen cycle. The tipping silhouette of Turkey Vulture soars in to check on my final disposition. I am an interloper here but would be happily assimilated by scavengers into the food web.

I’m also a bit of an interloper in the circle of Mom’s care. She has been with my brother and his wife for nearly a year now, supplemented by the hired care of a local friend. Routines have been established, even as her physical and mental health has declined. I have not been integral to this process. This has been both a blessing and a literal curse. For several months I couldn't call because Mom was battery-acid angry at me for moving her out of her house (even though it was a family decision). Anger is nearly always a heat shimmer, in this case a trick of the light ultimately caused by loss. Since Dad died in 2018, Mom has lost nearly everything, human and other-than-human, that has defined her life. I can’t imagine her grief. I don’t think she could have imagined it either. Yet there is this moment; when I lift myself off the couch this morning and come over to her chair, her blue eyes brighten, and the pucker of her denture-less lips spreads into a smile. She is thrilled to see me. And I am thrilled to be here. In any capacity. Especially as a son who she forgives and loves.

Fresh tracks of an off-road vehicle tell me someone is out checking fences and water tanks. Domestic cattle are not desert-adapted animals and won’t last long without available surface water. I’m also trespassing on a neighboring ranch, and if our paths cross I might not be well-received. I turn back toward my brother's place, back toward the imminence of loss. Distance here is distorted by a lack of obstructions. Feet become yards become miles become a day’s drive to make the far horizon become an infinity. The house and horse arena seem close, but they are one raven-fly mile, two by road, on the distant side of alfalfa circles kept jungle green by irrigation from aquifers of fossil water.

In the building heat, I plod along the valley floor. The lenticular cloud in the east has evaporated. I set a goal to keep jogging back to the stack yard. Don’t make it. Start walking. Don’t care. And it's good that I don’t care. Because clutching at life is like grasping at a cloud. In all the living and dying, grief and gratitude, gain and loss, happy and sad, hope and despair, life has been cooked down into this essence: an unfurling of my clenched hand, a letting go.