Five days into our trip, after we’d left Seattle in my old Saab, after the motel clerk in Boise had told us she couldn’t imagine living where we did because of all the niggers, after we’d stopped in the Idaho mountains and wandered into an old mission with horsehair plaster walls and the feeling of genocide, we arrived at the Badlands.

We’d been driving all night, making time from Yellowstone to the Black Hills. The heat wave kept us holed up inside my car all through the dry plains, and the West scrolled past the windows.

We wanted to watch the sunrise from inside the national park, so I drove faster down the access road than I should have. The park rangers were still in bed, and in the cool slim air of six o’clock I slid the car past the entrance booth without paying a dime or getting a map. A mile or so in, Heather noticed a slash cut into the flat expanse of the prairie surrounding us and the dainty parted “V” of a canyon in the distance. I pulled the car to the side of the road, coming to rest for the first time in five hours.

There’s a Polaroid that Heather took of me right then, as I changed my sweaty shirt next to the car. My hair is so short that I look like a sunburned boy, at least from the back. We stood by the car and waited for the sun, and when it broke the horizon, we walked to the place where the land dropped away.

Beneath us there were acres of round and loping buttes, shaved to curvy brilliance by centuries of rain and wind. Each was wrapped with alternating bands of yellow, tan, brown, red and a color like nectarine skin. The sunrise caught their stripes and the whole valley flared with impossible light.

Then and there you could walk off the edge of the world. For different reasons, we both thought that was a very good idea.

**

Heather didn’t drive stick. She couldn’t tell east from west. She’d never read a map. Once, while we were sitting at a truck stop, she saw a moonrise and thought it was the sun going down.

On our way across the country, we shared the gas and the tent and the food bills. I played squeaky-clean Girl Scout to Heather’s cigarette-smoking cool. I put up the tent in the dark and worked the stove, navigated and drove. Heather read me Paul Bowles and pulled fresh mix tapes out of her bag to keep us going.

Heather had me listen to Vic Chesnutt and Liz Phair. And while I was driving, or eating lunch, Heather would sometimes ask me to imitate her favorite songs. “Do Flower,” she’d say. And I’d sing Liz Phair’s dirty lyrics with her phrasing and pitch and all the words intact, a parlor trick that Heather never tired of.

But everything I was doing felt like that trick. I wasn’t sure what was me, and what was just someone else’s idea. I’d come unmoored, a new life stretching before me like some huge sea; and my little boat was so small.

Leaving college, driving back home, single and buzzing with music and the total unknown, sometimes I would slip deep into my own mind and disappear. Like a falling into a trance, I’d be reading on the dirty bedspread of some motel we’d found, and close my eyes. Then I’d vanish into a comforting oblivion.

Not sleep, not meditation, it was like an emotional narcolepsy, an involuntary peace. It felt so different from my usual surefooted forward motion; strange and giddy, like getting high, and I had no idea what to do with it. In fact, it terrified me.

Surety had been my currency for so long. I’d been that girl at the front of the class, getting all the answers right. The kind of girl that soldiers through anything. And while you might admire such a girl from afar, lord knows you don’t want to be her friend. Why would you? Where is the pleasure in a girl like that, except maybe in finding the crack in her somewhere?

Those slips were the first crack I had found in myself. And as those cracks opened wider over the week we were on the road, they made room for new thoughts. Standing at the edge of that canyon on that first morning in the Badlands I thought, why not jump? And in the next second a sparky horror rushed through me, a shame at letting my standards slip that shook me up.

Heather would have understood if I tried to explain what was happening to me. She’d told me she thought about suicide all the time. But until we’d left Seattle, knowing this made me look at her like a strange fish in an aquarium. My father’s family had a history of dying young, and the notion that someone would crave death like we craved life was bizarre to me. What would it be like to want to kill yourself? What would it be like to have gills?

**

When the sunrise was over, the daylight muted out the canyon’s colors and the heat began to build again. By then, neither of us could look at it anymore, and we drove off to find a place to sleep.

Sage Creek campground sat in a bowl of light, floating on the prairie’s inland ocean. It was an empty place, no trees and none of the classic buttes or colors of the showy part of the park. Here you were totally exposed, surrounded by low hills, some scrub pine bushes, and tall grass that had gone pale in the heat.

Beyond the camp you could see a low wash bordered on all sides by cottonwood trees. There were no shelters, but there were tan painted picnic tables with fixed metal awnings that curved over them to protect you from the constant sun. From the side their shapes looked like covered wagons. They were arranged in an arbitrary circle in the center of a shallow valley, so it had the appearance of a pioneer stopover.

It felt lonely, alien and barren. There was a quiet that pulsed with something. I could feel the hum and push of the Badlands over the curve of the horizon. But, looking out at the grass, I felt a safe distance from their huge charisma.

We still had ten days before we had to be anywhere else. We’d agreed that we’d stay for a while at any place that felt right.

We stayed in Sage Creek for a week.

**

That first day, it was so hot that I lay down in the shadow of the tent and slept. Heather took a book and fell asleep under it, lying in the shade on her bench.

An hour later, the shade left us, and we woke up in full sun. Crickets arrived to cover the ground and us and every inch of my car. And then the wind started to shift. It blew away the tent and sent us both running over the cricket-strewn grass to get it back, the bugs jumping away from our feet in waves that made a sound like the surf.

That night, after the wind finally died down and the crickets inexplicably disappeared, Heather cleaned up from dinner in the dark. I took a blanket from the back of my car and lay it on the ground in from of the tent. The wind had swept away the clouds, and the open space made the sky press down on my chest like a vise. It was so big and dark and close that I couldn’t breathe at all.

After we went to sleep, the wind came back. It blew down the sides of the tent and pressed the nylon into my mouth. The tent walls bent back like sails, and for a second I thought we were in a storm on the sea.

**

Sage Creek felt too complicated to leave, and so Heather and I never went back to hike the Badlands. Going back so close to the edge of the world for something as simple as sightseeing seemed both too tempting and too literal. The campsite and the prairie turned out to be enough.

It was as if you could spend years right there and never understand the place fully, never understand why it held your focus so completely. You could pass a whole day just looking at the light. It moved all day long. It changed with every cloud. The sun edged across the big sky and with each degree it rose or fell, it took on a shift. The color of the land and grass and air would change too. You couldn’t look away.

“It looks like Africa,” Heather said. And while neither of us had seen Africa outside of the movies, I knew what she meant. It was so different than our idea of the country, but also so different than our idea of a pleasing landscape, that we had to imagine it as something very far away.

I sat at the campsite most of the time. I drew circles in the dirt with a stick. I watched the light march along and imagined African animals, prairie schooners, mastodons crossing my field of vision. I thought that I could see ghosts, or see God, or feel the history of the place seeping up out of the dry ground. The slip came back again and again.

**

I didn’t expect the pull the prairie had on me. I was raised in the thick of the Yankee forest. And, while my mother loved to lie before the ocean’s dip and flash, my father worshipped trees. Years later, when I tried to tell him what the plains were like, he told me, “I’d miss the woods too much to fall in love with a place like that.”

Before I wandered into South Dakota I would have thought the same thing of myself. I’d expect to miss variety, the privacy and shelter of the canopy above your head.

But the canopy of the sky and the utter emptiness made a different kind of privacy; a deeper kind, a solitude that let you go as far inside as you could. I’d operated as long as I could remember under the notion that looking inside oneself was not only unnecessary, it was dangerous. My parents may have been back-to-the-land hippies, but they were rationalists, and the closest that they ever got to opening some door of perception was my Mom’s one bad trip on LSD.

While I was a child they didn’t dabble in Buddhism, they never visited the local ashram. My father’s spiritual practice involved making furniture and listening to jazz; that was all. He raised me with the Shaker mantra, hands to work and hearts to God. Be useful, he said. Go make something if you want to pray.

And so I was useful. I worked, I studied. I weathered life with a fervor for accomplishment, even in the face of death. If death comes, I was taught, talk him into going away. And if that fails, make something beautiful before he takes you, something he can’t touch.

Now my subconscious, or maybe my God, was dragging that notion out of me. In slip after slip throughout this road trip I was visiting someplace else inside myself, that deep place I hadn’t given any weight to.

I was being shanghaied into contemplation, and as I sat in that desert, the place where people go to meditate after all, I felt those previously singular moments merge into one long heartbeat of slippage. As the days went by, I had a hard time pulling free long enough to drive to town for food.

I’d come out of it from time to time to find I’d been staring at the horizon. I’d wonder where Heather had gone. Somehow, while I’d been drifting, she’d walked across the prairie to the eastern edge of the campground. I’d see the swing of her brown bob turning the corner and disappearing down the bluff that led to the dry creek bed. I’d be gripped with several feelings at once. I’d wonder if she’d told me she was going, and I just hadn’t noticed. And in the next moment I’d wonder if I should follow her. I wanted to overcompensate again and tear off across the grass to go make small talk while we hiked together.

But I couldn’t do even that. I was utterly self-absorbed, as if I was falling in love. At first I thought that I was falling in love with the place itself. But it was really a version of myself that I was falling for. And the version of me that I loved, the one I found there, was the version of me that knew nothing, that was unmoored.

The silence and the space that opened up inside me seemed like all the stillness I feared in death. And in the face of it, there was something unseemly about putting my hands to work as usual. Better to just sit instead.

**

Heather, for her part, smoked and read and walked.

While we were at Sage Creek she kept asking me to sing Vic Chesnutt’s Dodge “…Well it’s time for me to/get the fuck out of Dodge…,” I’d mimic. And a smile would come over Heather’s face. She was getting the fuck out of Dodge. Our journey would put her 3,000 miles away from home.

She’d lived on the West Coast most of her life. She’d been adopted into a Mormon family in Portland where things had been tough –- not much money, nothing was simple. But I got the idea that the worst part was how little she fit in with them.

Heather loved quiet and music and film. She loved sitting in bars and reading a book. She had a curiosity that enabled her to put herself through school and be the only one in her family to pursue any kind of education. I could tell that it was a compulsion that had made her different at home and made it impossible to go back.

And yet the compulsion was so private and genuine that she hadn’t finished all her graduation coursework by the time we left Seattle. As if, her curiosity satisfied, she could put aside external accomplishment and move on.

She wanted to move east, to go to film school someday, to leave her painter ex-boyfriend behind and start clean somewhere where she couldn’t duck into her favorite bar to do her homework.

But it was clear that she took everything with her: her effortless hipness, her lack of awareness of her beauty and smarts, and her lonely intelligent ambition. I watched her in awe most of the time, and with her I fell silent a lot. As if in speaking I’d blurt out my admiration for her quiet complex lostness, the way she wore uncertainty like a gorgeous dress.

I needed to be near the way she often dropped her grip on life. As foreign as it was to me, it seemed a graceful gesture that I couldn’t really survive without perfecting myself.

I tried to stay close to her at Sage Creek, but it didn’t work. What happened to us there was linked somehow, but it was also so private and so different we couldn’t compare notes on what was happening. While we were there we avoided naming it at all costs.

**

The last night that we camped there, we drove to Wall for supplies. Coming back to Sage Creek, the sun turned the grasslands to a gold-green sea, the little hills rippling in shadow and color.

As we crested a ridge we saw a herd of bison spread out over the prairie. There were so many of them that without thinking I stopped the car in the middle of the road and we both got out and watched them pass. The herd moved like an idea, like a wave. Big as they were, they had the infinite quiet of the empty sky, and the things that had happened in the place where they lived.

At Sage Creek we were forty miles from the Pine Ridge Reservation. We were forty-five miles from Wounded Knee. Between two and ten thousand bison had been killed every day during the peak of hunting in the 19th century. And yet, here was a herd, in a protected park. Here were bison cows and calves and long sweeps of grass with no fences. After everything, here was life.

Heather lit a cigarette and we sat on the hood of the car until the last animal slipped over the far ridge and was gone.

**

After dinner, after we’d finished the last mini bottles of Sutter Home, Heather and I lay on the blanket looking up. Clouds swept across the night sky and I could tell that there were banks of them coming. I watched as they slowly covered the stars and brought the wind to a standstill. Heather kept her eyes closed to it, breathing so quietly that she might have been asleep.

The place was shutting down around me; taking back the spell it had had me in all week.

Just beyond the access road, past Wall and back on the highway, was the route we’d take away from here. We’d drive east to Chicago, then south to North Carolina. We’d split up, we’d find jobs and think about what to do next.

But for that night, we were still there. The wine, and the bison, and the disappearing stars were all there too, around the edges.

“Are you awake,” I asked?

“Yeah.”

We waited a little while before speaking again. The last star blinked and was gone; the night was still and hot.

“You know,” she said, “I don’t know how to leave here. This is the first place I’ve ever been where I haven’t wanted to kill myself.”

We sat like that for a long time, each of us lost in half of the same idea, until the opaque sky drove us into our tent to sleep.

In the morning we drove east anyway.

© Eiren Caffall 2007