Looking for Nothing, In Particular

…oh my desert, yours is the only death I cannot bear.—Richard Shelton

My fourth-grade geography book defined desert, as I remember, as a place of nothing. Already, I began to long for it.

When my young husband wrote from his Army post in Utah, he said, “The desert is beautiful. There’s nothing here.” And then, from that emptiness, though we had decided I would stay in Ohio for his two years, he said, “I’m coming to get you when I’m on leave in December.” I began then to dream actively of nothing.

In the drive across country, space was unleashed. Ohio, familiar, stayed about the same all the way to the border. Indiana stretched, and Illinois yawned. Beyond that, every mile shattered into vastness, and we grew silent in the passage. A fire across the plains was visible for half an hour as we approached and departed. The Rockies were in sight for hours.

We came into Utah from the north, into the Wasatch Range and the first Ponderosa pine, the car doors’ slam reverberating in the echoes of the canyons. We stood at the point where Brigham Young stopped to say, “This is the place,” as he looked over the valley of the Great Salt Lake, before he tasted its salt. We crossed the Jordan River and headed south through the irrigated world of green, the snow above us on the mountains, the sky so blue I realized that the Ohio sky I’d grown up under washed to faint color under the haze of the Middle West. I was waiting for nothing, for the desert with the face of Sahara.

Arid lands in America do not wear Sahara’s face except in the unusual: the red dunes of southern Utah, the dazzle of New Mexico’s White Sands, the lunar stretch between Capitol Reef and Green River with buttes eroded to goblins, and patches of the old undersea with its exposure of petrified oyster shells a million years old.

The desert taught me to keep an eye out for nothing and rest in what grows instead. I opened wide, and still I look for nothing at all.

***

One day, a six-foot tumbleweed in a strong wind in a town dump in the middle of nowhere rolled, stickers and all, right into me. As I plucked out its splinters, spread body wide, a friend comforted me. Crying, laughing, I heard myself say, “Don’t worry. It’s nothing.”