Nevada Barr - The Rope

There was an old theater joke, attributed to everyone from Jean Giraudoux to Groucho Marx, that said sincerity was the single most important thing for an actor, because once you can fake that you’ve got it made.

Both nights she and Jenny camped on beaches. Their first camp was on a willow-fringed white sand beach in Warm Creek Bay. A piece of land, round as a coin and smaller than a Lower East Side block—less than an acre, according to Jenny—snuggled into a crescent of high sandstone cliffs that were slightly undercut, forming a natural shelter. A cave, not natural, but made by native peoples long before Columbus talked Isabella out of her jewels, burrowed twenty feet into the stone at the northernmost point of the arc.

A favorite place of the Anasazi, the beach was rich with potsherds, scraps of dusty history that fascinated Anna. Warm Creek Bay’s beach, also favored by modern humans, had subsequently been turned into an open-air latrine. Willows screened a wealth of toilet paper blooms. The small cave was as full as a week-old cat box, and the walls sported as much graffiti as a subway car on the 7 train to Queens.

While Jenny and Anna separated the ancient garbage from the modern, leaving the former and canning the latter, Jenny fumed and sparked. Anna was more baffled than anything. Poop, she could understand. Options were limited and people unprepared. What she couldn’t understand was the graffiti vandals had painted and scraped into the stone. In the city it made a twisted kind of sense. People who had nothing in their lives wanting to be seen, to leave a mark. Kilroy was here. Teenagers, who’d never known beauty, unaware they were destroying it, or enraged because they didn’t understand it. Kids who were never heard expressing themselves the only way they knew how. Gangbangers marking territory by spraying like tomcats leaving their sign.

In a playground for the wealthy, people destroying the beauty they’d come to enjoy mystified her. During orientation they’d stressed the parks-and-recreation ethic of preserving the natural and historical area to be enjoyed by future generations. On man-made surfaces graffiti could be painted over. Not so in a park. Paint had to be removed from rock. Scraping it off left scars that would not heal for many hundreds of years.

Anna argued for leaving the ancient cave in all its squalor and degradation. She tried to talk Jenny into posting a sign in front of it reading: IF THIS IS THE PARK YOU WANT, KEEP ON DOING WHAT YOU ARE DOING.

Not the NPS way, Jenny told her.

They cleaned and hauled.

By day’s end, Anna was tired and sore, her hands beginning to blister and her back and legs aching. It was pain she welcomed. The approval and concern in Jenny’s eyes dulled the worst of it, and, not now, not this week, or maybe even this month, but soon, it would make her stronger. Already she could work harder and longer than when she’d first arrived at Lake Powell.

Dinners were sacred events for her and her housemate. Hunger was indeed the finest spice. The Almar cuddy was well stocked with red wine and a cooler with cheese, bread, tomatoes, avocados, cold chicken, and candy bars. Anna ate more than she ever had before. The food made her stronger, she could feel it.

At the close of the third day, they returned to the Rope. The next two days were Anna’s lieu days.

Though Jenny insisted she didn’t have to, work, food, and nights in the open gave Anna courage, and she moved back into her own room. “Don’t want to compromise your sterling reputation,” she kidded Jenny.

Unsmilingly, Jenny replied, “What about your reputation?”

Having nothing to say to that, Anna went to bed. Guilt nudged her as she slid between the borrowed flannel sheets. In a few days she’d launder and return them, she decided. It would be foolish to go cold turkey on the whole comfort thing.

Without Buddy in his drawer and Jenny at her back, she slept restlessly. Dreams of being chased by unseen malice haunted her. The stuff of nightmares—inability to move her legs and arms, inability to see clearly or cry out—had come true in the jar and the slot canyon. Dreams that came true were not necessarily a thing to be wished for.

Unrefreshed, she woke dreading a day with nothing to do to keep body and mind occupied. Buddy was gone. Jenny was working. Anna didn’t have a boat or Jet Ski and was not the least bit tempted to hike the trail out of Dangling Rope again. Effectively marooned, she could read or write letters, but that required thinking, and thinking was an activity she no longer trusted herself to do without supervision. She wanted to do. She needed to armor herself with muscle and purpose.

Over coffee she decided she would get in shape for the big fight or joust or whatever was coming. Rocky, Karate Kid, and half a dozen other movies that showed the hero doing the pre-hero warm-ups in a montage of scenes made her laugh at herself. Jogging had come into fashion her first year in college. Anna had never seen any point in running unless late for a train or being pursued by slavering Doberman pinschers. Still, she put on her shorts and Reeboks and went running.

The only trail in the limited navigable land around the Rope went down a long sloping gravel road that ended at the shore of a small finger of the lake. Heavy machinery and supplies required by maintenance were off-loaded there so they could be more easily transported to the maintenance building behind the housing area.

Thirty yards before the boat ramp, a sketchy trail veered to the left, leading up through dirt, rock, and scrub to the top of a knoll. From there it descended to an upthrust thumb of earth and rock over a hundred feet high. The only access to the thumb was a narrow land bridge. When that eroded away, the thumb would be an island. The trail wound around its base. Jim Levitt, who ran most evenings, said the circuit from housing around the rock and back was close to a mile.

Before Anna reached the point where the trail left the road, she was panting. By the time she’d run the little distance to the land bridge, she had a stitch in her side. Forced to walk a ways, eyes on her feet so she wouldn’t stumble, she began to notice that what she had spurned as sterile desert was nothing of the sort. Just as the brochure had promised, Glen Canyon boasted a rich and varied plant life. Unlike the east, where plants were grand and green and rushed into spring and summer with a blaze of color, the plants of Glen Canyon were spread out, careful to claim sufficient space so they could collect water enough to survive. Fierce and independent, they protected themselves with spines or tiny fine hairs that prickled out from the fleshier leaves. In place of the infinite palette of greens Anna’d seen in the eastern forests, here the palette was in subtle hues of sage and gray. Leaves that looked more blue than green and leaves that turned silver in the sunlight.

It surprised her to see flowers. Deep in the arid heat of summer, their defiant blues and hot pinks struck her as courageous. They did not clump together in gay profusion. She had to look for their small insistent glory and was inordinately pleased when she found it. Next time she ran, she promised herself, she would bring the brochure so she could introduce herself properly, name for name.

Breath recovered, she began to run again. Twice more she stopped and walked, but by the time she made it back up the incline to the duplexes, she guessed she’d run easily a third of the one-mile circuit.

Bethy was sitting in a lawn chair on her porch when Anna came puffing into the square. Anna didn’t know whether it would be better to ignore her or greet her as if nothing had passed between them. Either way, she figured she was going to get a black eye out of the deal.