It was the hottest afternoon so far that year in the remote reaches of southeast Utah’s canyon country, and the late April sun beat down on the wildflowers that pressed their way up from the living desert soil. It was a still day, and silence filled the basin, broken only by my footsteps plodding across the soft ground. A broken, tessellated land of mesas stretched out around me, bordered by soaring cliff bands and dotted with dusty, twisting juniper trees. From my field of vision, the relentless blue sky filled the space between the sweat-stained brim of my felt cowboy hat and the rim of red rock making up the horizon around me. At that point in my life I was immersed in wilderness living. I followed the tracks of animals, told time by the position of stars in the winter sky, and made fire with special woods I found. I was young, and I honestly took myself a bit too seriously.
That day I found myself trotting along a bench of sand, following a pair of footprints not more than two hours old. The tracks belonged to a 16 year-old boy, who had a fuller beard than I have ever been able to grow, even to this day. He, like the other members of his group, was in a wilderness therapy program, which is essentially a residential mental health treatment center that involves living out of doors for the full three-month stay.
Wilderness therapy has long been a controversial system of care for many reasons. Like other members of his group, the kid I was following was not in the program voluntarily. He had neither chosen to be in the program, nor stay there. Placement in such a program is often a traumatic experience unto itself. Once there, the freedom of choice is gone, and having choices taken away, including where your body is, would feel out of control to anyone. Being forced to be in therapy seems like a contradiction of terms. For these reasons, and related ones, there has been a public backlash against these kinds of places in recent years, leading to some programs closing down.
But death takes away all choices, and prior to being dropped off in the middle of the desert, this young person, like many others, had been expressing a very specific intent to kill himself. So in another view, having a non-voluntary stay at a place where someone can at least try to keep an eye on their child may seem like a decent trade-off for some parents. Many people who found themselves dropped off in the middle of nowhere actually ended up thriving in the setting. They would find their voices, address their family trauma, get off cocktails of psychiatric meds, and come to appreciate the beauty of the deep desert, along with the beauty of their own selves.
The very real ethical concerns weigh against the need for safety, as well as the possibility for truly magical, life-changing experiences. It’s hard to know how the scale ultimately tips and for whom.
Wilderness therapy programs are not easy places to be. You sleep on the ground, poop in plastic bags, and cook food on an open fire. Aside from not choosing to be there, you are there a long time. Like many others over the years, the kid had taken matters into his own hands and decided to try to leave by running away. He packed up everything he had in the program: clothing, a sleeping bag, materials to make fire from scratch, and water bottles. Leaving his shelter up where we could see it from a distance, he must have waited for a gap where we guides were checking on other participants, and took off. One problem with his plan was there was not another human being for miles in any direction, let alone a source of water. And the sun was getting lower in the sky. I thought I had a chance of catching up to the kid, and so once I realized he was gone, I myself took off running, following his footprints into the giant sand basin that was wrinkled by washes.
“ERT 1, this is base, do you copy?” The crash of the radio interrupted the enveloping silence of the desert.
“Good copy base, this is ERT 1, over,” I replied.
“Are you still on his tracks, and what’s his heading? Over.” Base replied.
“He’s heading south-southeast toward Little Nancy Patterson Canyon. Wait a minute, uh, stand by base.” I stopped jogging, and looked around, puzzled, and let out a string of curse words.
In my rush to find tracks and follow them, I only took what was already on me. I had a radio and 2 extra radio batteries, which were coming in handy. I also happened to have a bottle of sunscreen, which I was doling out to participants up until I realized one was missing. It was proving to not be very useful. In addition to cursing myself that this fiasco was somehow my fault, I was also regretting that I hadn’t given myself time to grab a few things I now was starting to think I needed. For example, I hadn’t brought a map with me. Or food. Or water.
I had been diligently following the kid’s tracks for several miles by that point. While the basin was broad and one could see cliffs miles away in every direction, the land was checkered with small mesas and scoured with arroyos, fins and drainages in between. The maps of the area were mostly drawn up in the Cold War, and green colorations on the map signified where a commander could hide a platoon of troops. Even though the scrubby juniper trees were few and far between, the whole basin it seemed was colored green on the map. There were many places to hide. The kids' tracks scribbled through it all, and I followed him to the north, to the northeast, back north, to the northwest, west, and in a big arc to the south. From above, his tracks drew a giant backwards question mark. Sometimes they led across easy sand where I couldn’t possibly lose his trail. Other times he crossed boulder fields or washes where his tracks ceased, and where I had to make semi-circles back and forth until I picked up the imprints of his off-brand pair of crocs in the dirt again.
My pursuit had turned into a sort of meditation, a rhythm where the world converged on those prints across the desert. Maybe it was dehydration seeping in over the course of those miles, but it almost seemed like those imprints had started to glow with a faint gold light. One after the other, faint gold shoe prints dotted the landscape, about a pace apart. At a jog they sped by, one, and then another, weaving and winding through the land.
Talking to Base on the radio, the light was gone, and I no longer saw any tracks. They vanished as soon as I spoke into the radio. I was puzzled, and with the hurry I was in, I was pissed.
I again swept the area in ever-enlarging semi-circles until I stumbled upon a track. Then another, and then following his footstep spacing I was able to see the direction he was traveling again.
“Base, this is ERT 1, over.”
“Go ahead.”
“He’s heading to the main Nancy Patterson Canyon, not Little, over.”
“Copy, he’s heading to Main, not Little. Stay on his tracks, and we’ll see if we can get a vehicle at the other end of the canyon, over.”
“10-4 base, I’m clear.”
“Base clear.”
I tucked the radio back into my pocket, and a frown creased my face. I honestly loved talking on the radio. The lingo and quasi-formal practical nature of the communication lent itself well to bringing order to a life of transience. At the time, I was living out of my car between shifts at work. I was often lonely, and my nervous system often skirted chaos. The radio had form and rules. It was something solid to hold onto. But talking on the radio, I had again lost the tracks, as if my ability to detect them had suddenly switched off. I dutifully began my sweep until I picked them up, and it was not long until I was back in the groove. The faint glow even returned after a few moments, and I could see his path laid out far enough in front of me to where I could pick up a steady jog again. At the risk of sounding really woo-woo, it seemed the gold dotted path guided me, and I had a steady feeling that I was tapping into a very ancient part of myself. It was a part that generation after generation of humanity was suited for. Writing now, I imagine generations of humanity following tracks. Children becoming grandparents, their grandchildren becoming grandparents themselves, on and on through the dark plodding of unwritten time. Our species followed tracks far longer in our history than we tilled fields. Even the time since Gobele Tepe (one of the earliest known archaeological sites ringing in the dawn of agricultural civilization) has been a blink of an eye compared to over a hundred thousand years of hunting, gathering, moving and orienting to our world and each other. So much time spent this way shaped who we are.
After more than thirteen miles, and just before the sun fully set, I finally caught up to the kid. Thankfully he was in one piece, and he had actually made some friends in a small Diné community he had stumbled into. I sat and talked with the kid for a while. He was quite surprised I came to find him, and even more surprised that I wasn’t angry, but rather that I had been concerned for him. He eventually decided he did want to come back with us. There is a whole part of this story involving ostensible bank robbers, a chase on horseback, and the legacy of Europeans on Native Land, but I will save all that for another time. For the kid, his trek in the desert actually seemed to be a major turning point in his motivations, and he went on to take on a major leadership role in the group in the program. I hope he is well.
For years I reflected on this experience, and among the many choice points and takeaways from the day, I could never truly understand the phenomenon of the glowing tracks and their disappearance. I more or less assumed that my brain essentially had a channel for talking, and a different one for tracking. Then I filed the whole thing away under experiences I probably won’t ever fully understand.
It turns out I actually was not very far off the mark, both with having a limited understanding of most things, but also with the nature of our brain. Our brains do have separate “channels” that we switch between depending on the needs of the environment and moment. In fact, this has been a concept that has been studied for several decades. As with everything else we discover in the brain, the detail with which we understand it is only increasing.
These channels, so to speak, are known as Large Scale Brain Networks…
…Stay tuned for more exploration of this in Part 2/3 next week!