It was two years ago that I left my job at Grand Canyon Trust and my home in Flagstaff to learn how to be an organic farmer in Santa Cruz, Calif. I spent my last month at the Trust’s Kane Ranch headquarters, a central part of the geography of my heart. This cowboy outpost cobbled from limestone in the 1870s is nestled at the foot of the Kaibab Plateau where it meets the House Rock Valley.
From the front porch there is a sweeping view of Vermilion Cliffs, Echo Cliffs, and the crack of the Colorado River as it travels through Marble Canyon. This landscape shaped my destiny. My first hike in the Grand Canyon was through South Canyon. I walked Saddle Mountain Trail with a crosscut saw on trail crew. I roamed these places as a botanist with a 50-meter transect tape, and later lead groups of volunteers to give back to these places with work gloves and passion. I have always come here in search of answers. Each time I feel my feet on this familiar ground, I root deeper and more stubbornly into the rocky soil.
I planned a month-long retreat at Kane, largely alone with the exception of my two canine companions. I needed a transition zone—time and space to be still and reflect before I began a new chapter. The house I owned with my former husband was in escrow, so everything that mattered to me was crammed into a 5 foot by 10 foot storage unit. While at Kane, I had big plans to liberate myself further by finishing many work and creative projects to be free to begin new ones on my journey ahead.
A few days in a thick blanket of snow silenced the landscape. I’d never seen anything like it in all the seasons I had been there. The drifts were taller than my cowboy boots and the dogs’ tummies. I was far away from everything, and isolated by a snowstorm, yet I had everything I needed.
After about a week alone in that wild, lonely place, I became almost feral—not showering, wearing the same clothes every day and peeing in a bucket in the dining room so I didn’t have to go outside to the bathroom building. I lived in the moment. I would pop a CD into my computer to digitize, sort through my vintage suitcase of random collage paper scraps, then open a song file on my computer to edit the disparate lines, then read Ann Patchett, make popcorn, then transition to the typewriter to write a letter. My creative process was not pretty and it smelled bad, yet it was intensely joyous.
I revisited a song I started years before called “A House Without Walls.” I borrowed the title from a poem my friend, Mike Wolcott, wrote one morning after we shared a cup of coffee at the same house I was getting ready to sell on Meadowbrook Drive. The sentiment was full of gratitude for the shelter and comfort of our house, but because Mike was a seasonal rambler at that time, he also expressed the true joy of living season to season at home in the outdoors, writing: “In a house without walls there is more room for love.”
I too used to live this way before becoming a homeowner. There is little to insulate you from the weather, from the people you work with, from all the good and bad that arrives on your so-called doorstep, which is actually a tent vestibule or tailgate. Temporary dwellings marked my journey—the beaches of the Colorado River were my front porches. Shelter was a bunk in the trail crew bunkhouse or a tiny trailer shared with another intern. Home was a feeling I carried with me everywhere like a turtle shell.
While trying to express this in song, I was in the midst of final negotiations for the sale of our beautiful, luxurious (by my standards) home. We resided there for 15 years and put our blood, sweat and tears into it to make it ours. Yet, here I sat in an old rock house that did not belong to me and somehow it felt more like home.
Frustratingly, I could not seem to find the right words to express this. I was listening to Prairie Home Companion when one of my musical heroes, Brandi Carlile, sang her new song “Wherever Is Your Heart.” The chorus goes: “Wherever is your heart I call home.” I realized that her song had the right combination of heartfelt sentiment and catchy melody I wanted so desperately to write. I fought the urge to feel defeated, cranked it up, sang along and summoned the courage to keep writing. I knew the words had to be somewhere inside me.
On one of my last days at Kane I went for a run down the lonely dirt road. The sun was fading on the Vermilion Cliffs and they were lit up in bright fuchsia and coral red. Long creases of indigo shadows lay down on the land, letting go of the day and everything I had hoped to do while I was there. It broke my heart open. I knew that when I returned I would be different, and that uncertainty was beautiful because it helped me cling ferociously to the present.
I realized that letting go of everything was helping me to learn how to be at home in my skin. The landscape of Kane was a huge part of my personal growth. This wildness was lodged deep into the fissure of my being. I was carrying all it had given me with me to my farm yurt in California. Being there in that expansive valley running down a winding road where there is no sign of human settlements for miles, I let myself be open and present and ready for the road ahead, wherever it would lead. I knew I would always belong to this place.
