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Palm Springs

January 2, 2023

10:30 A.M.

The hot ranger with the thick black ponytail and body shaped by an active life took a seat at the outdoor table next to mine. I’d left Indian Canyons to get a jolt of caffeine. I needed something warm to drink, and the coffee shop offered an escape from all the commotion Hobie had created by starting the search, perhaps needlessly.

There wasn’t much for me to do, anyway. Brady had ushered me out of the trailer. “It’s not conducive for you to be in here,” he said. “We see things a normal person doesn’t see every day.” He told me that, once, a young woman was waiting for news about her lost boyfriend when she’d overheard someone radio in that a body had been found. She thought her boyfriend was dead, only it turned out to be someone else’s body, and the boyfriend was just fine.

But outside the trailer wasn’t much better. Everyone was shouting into walkie-talkies, and helicopters took off and landed right next to me. I felt I needed to be there to stay near the action, but I also had a strong desire to leave in case the action was happening (to my mortification) entirely somewhere else.

The ranger’s eyes were a secret, covered in sunglasses that wrapped around his head and shielded by the wide brim of his hat. To spend time in an area where so many people were protecting themselves from the outdoors was like attending a masquerade ball.

In my bucket hat and sunglasses, I could be anyone, so I decided to start a conversation. “I didn’t realize it got so cold here.” I shivered, wishing I’d brought my parka with me. A few months in Palm Springs had thrown my internal thermostat out of whack. What was warm before felt cold now; what was good before was bad now; what was normal before was strange; what struck me as benign was now terrifying.

The ranger seemed as if he wanted distraction as much as I did. His must be a lonely job—almost as lonely, I thought, as mine, which was waiting. “Looks like it’s going to dip below freezing again tonight.”

He said freezing, but I heard hypothermia. Just when I thought the cold was my biggest worry (of the moment), he added, “Big storms coming in a few days.”

“Storms?”

“Don’t you pay attention to the news?”

Grant was my news.

“Then again, I don’t need a weatherman to tell me when we’re about to get it. I can always feel the pressure drop, makes me tired. Thirsty, too. My sinuses act up. It’s already starting.”

“Back home, I notice that the birds fly low when the fronts come through,” I said. “That’s how I always know.”

He nodded. “Atmospheric river, they call it. The Aleutian Flow. It’s a big front coming across the Pacific. In a few days, the clouds are going to wring out like a giant sponge over the San Jacintos.” He pointed up. The sky was the usual solid blue. “The thing about the weather here is it curls over the mountains. It could be bright and sunny when you start out, and suddenly it’s snowing up there. I hear people say we don’t have seasons in the desert, and I say they aren’t paying attention.” He took a sip of his coffee. “Take a picture of the same thing every time you hike, that’s what I tell them. You’ll see, it always looks different, every time you return to it. This place changes as much as anywhere.”

“I heard a hiker went missing?” I played dumb, figuring he’d tell me more if he didn’t know who I was.

“Yup. He’s been gone longer than we like to see.”

I wanted to ask, What if it’s all a mistake, but I held myself back. Would we be charged for all the time and resources they were putting into the search if Grant were really just on a long drive back to Wisconsin? Then again, maybe he was lost, stranded just a few miles away from where we stood, but so turned around by the rocky sameness of the mountains that he couldn’t get himself home.

I asked, “What do you think happened to him? The missing guy?”

“Could be anything. You’ve got people who get confused, and people who ain’t right in the head to begin with. We just had one of those last year, some guy who convinced himself he was training for something, the military, special ops, who knows. We caught him a few times camping out and banned him from the reservation, but he came back again and again. Only the last time, he didn’t make it.”

I realized that the most thrilling part of this ranger’s job was the worst-case scenario of my life. “We had a guy here last summer, twenty-five years old. Healthy. Strong. From somewhere in Europe. Two weeks before he was supposed to get married, he and his fianc ée decided to go for a hike. She came back alone. A week later, I knew it wasn’t good. I saw a redtail hawk making circles in the sky, and that’s how we knew where to look. The hawks, they find the bodies before we do.”

I tried to tell myself that these were stories that belonged to other people—someone else’s demise, someone else’s fear and agony, like reading the news. I couldn’t stand the idea that Grant had left, maybe for good this time. But the more I learned about the dangers he could be facing if he was lost, the less I wanted to think he was still in the mountains.

“Do you think he’ll be found?”

The ranger shrugged. “Sometimes they are.” He paused. “And sometimes they come out in a body bag.”

Did I wince? If so, he didn’t notice. He was looking past me, at the mountains in the distance. It was his job to look.

“You’d be surprised how many people go missing. Lots of unidentified bodies turn up every year. All you’ve got to go on are fingerprints and dental records, DNA from a strand of hair, a facial composite from the CT of a crushed skull. Only a quarter of people who get lost can get out without needing to be rescued.”

“That…” My voice choked. “That can’t be right.”

“We’re used to navigating all kinds of tricky situations and dangers in life, big and small. That’s what we humans do. But the decisions you make in the mountains aren’t like any others you’re ever faced with, and that’s when you get into trouble. Do you go high to find a lookout, or go low? If you go off trail or the snow has covered it up, there’s nothing to follow, just a lot of scrub that looks the same everywhere you turn. Makes some people crazy; they start to hallucinate. I’ve been on rescues where we find someone and the first thing we do is we try to see if they’re alert and oriented.”

He took a sip of his coffee. “They’re scared when we find them. ‘I’m freezing,’ they say. ‘No, it’s one hundred degrees out.’ They think their arm is broken and it’s just fine. They don’t even know their name. You try to help them, and sometimes they run from you. When you’re faced with a stressful situation, your eyes will narrow to pinpricks. Your ears will close up. A regular person doesn’t know how to respond to the stress of being lost—like, really lost.”

I could feel my earlier optimism leak out of me. But then his tone softened. “You know, it’s nice to remember that sometimes they do come out just fine. Last week a little boy disappeared. It was only twenty minutes or so, but—you got kids?”

“Two.”

“Well then, you know. Remember when you were little yourself? You’re hiding under the racks at the department store and you think you see your mama’s legs, then they’re gone, and you don’t know where you are, and you melt down? That’s why fairy tales are all about kids wandering into the forest and never coming back. Must have happened all the time in the old days. They’d get eaten by bears, carried away by crowned eagles or giant condors. The old-timers here talk about skin-walkers. They’re like witches.” He smiled to himself, and said, “That sure was nice, seeing that family reunite. Real nice.”

I thought of the stories Grant’s mother used to tell of the times he’d run away when he was a kid and how angry it would make her, but also how relieved she was when he’d come home. Once, when he was six, she’d gone on a bender and he bolted out of the house when she’d lost her temper with him, something that happened often after his dad died. That was a stressful period when she was young and had to work two jobs. She looked all over the neighborhood for Grant. When she returned home from her search, there he was, sound asleep in bed, his shoes still on, clutching the journal his concerned teacher had given him to help him work through his feelings after some outbursts at school.

“How come you don’t think they’ve found that lost hiker yet?” I pressed.

He shrugged. “You want to know the truth?”

“Yeah.” I needed to be leveled with.

“Because finding people is hard—especially those that don’t want to be found.”

I walked to the edge of the patio, leaned over, and worried I might throw up. The hum of conversation stopped. I could feel all the patrons looking at me.

“Oh no,” he said. “Hey, are you—?”

I couldn’t talk.

He walked over to where I stood and rubbed my back. “I sure am sorry. You should’ve told me you’re the wife.”

The wife.

“I didn’t mean to scare you. Now, you listen, he’s going to be okay, got that? We’re going to find him. We’re going to bring him home to you.”

He crouched down next to me. “Shit, me and my big mouth. I had no idea that was your guy.”

I wiped my eyes with the back of my sleeve. “Yes,” I said, my voice cracking. “That’s my guy.” Married or not, Grant was mine. It was important for me to claim him.