Tom Robbins - Wild Ducks Flying Backward

Obviously, the Shoshoni hadn’t settled on this spot arbitrarily. On a practical level, it offered protection and water, for its cliffs are high and there’s a spring at the “uterus” end. Then, there’s the matter of its solar alignment. These facts fail to explain its magic, however, an intrinsic presence that was merely enhanced by the hanging of vaginal wallpaper.

Incapable of solving the greater mystery, we were content to sit, stroll, and loll in private communion with the disembodied organs that surrounded us there. I could almost smell the sea in them, feel their merry, saline humidity against my cheek. Like a dolphin, a vagina wears a perpetual smile, a grin as sloppy and loving as the cradle we all rocked out of. Even in the desert, such bogs do not dry up but glisten invitingly enough to make one suspect that little warm marshes dominate the topography of Paradise.

Later in the day, exploring the canyon’s middle section, we came upon what might have been Paradise Swamp itself. There on the southern wall (it seemed impossible that we’d missed it earlier) was the queen of the yonis. It was eighteen feet tall (the other vulval images seldom topped ten inches), circular, with a dark vertical gash and a broadcast wattage that could’ve carried its salty song to the moon. Truly the grandma, the great-grandma of vaginas, it had been embellished by pecking tools, but apparently was a natural formation.

We debated whether this geological yoni might not have been the inspiration for the petroglyphs. It carried life in it — that life that is self-renewing and outside history — the way a bomb carries death. This goddess-size orifice might have filled the Shoshoni with wonder, binding them to the flesh that was their origin and to the earth in which their journey ultimately would end.

Jon with his camera and sketch pads, Alexa with her tarot cards, and your pilgrim with his catalog of quirks, each of us would leave North Canyon with the profound impression that contemporary society lacks any equivalent of it, and that we’re the poorer for that. We sensed, moreover, that in our remove from nature and those forces that our ancestors knew intimately yet seldom named, we’ve lost something so important that its loss is akin to literal amputation. Without a Canyon of the Vaginas in which to peck our American tantra, in which to connect our hormones to the stars, we may be becoming psychological paraplegics.

Toward the close of day, we strolled up to the western end of the canyon to observe, as the Shoshoni certainly did before us, the setting sun. Mountain bluebirds were caroling from the juniper bushes, lizards were using their tails to write love letters in the sand, and I was meditating on Lawrence of Arabia’s remark that he adored the desert because it was so clean, when I stepped in a pile of regrettably fresh antelope dung. While scraping my shoe, I glanced up an incline and spotted a suspiciously marked boulder sitting off to one side.

Upon inspection, the rock proved to have been graced with what may have been the oldest vaginal glyph at the site. It was both more eroded and more naturalistic than the stylized clusters at the entrance. That, however, wasn’t what caught my eye. It turned out that this rock, and it alone, had been pecked upon by white men.

There were a couple of English words cut in the stone. They were less than legible, but from their dark color and serif lettering, we could tell that they’d been inscribed by settlers, perhaps at the turn of the century. There was also a figure on the boulder. A caucasian figure. A male figure. And how.

The honky dude sported a massive, saw-log erection (doesn’t phallic graffiti invariably distort in the direction of largeness?), and it was pointed at the vagina like a cannon at a clam. The clumsiness of the execution, the image’s total lack of emotional subtlety or spiritual dimension underscores the difference between so-called primitive cultures and those of the European invaders. It’s the difference between harmony and aggression, wisdom and shallowness, art and pornography.

Although safely out of the state now, I still wouldn’t want to say that the figure is indicative of a “dick first” attitude that continues to epitomize west-central Nevada. Nevertheless, I should mention one further thing about the man carved on the rock. As he moves to possess the object of his sexual passion, the rough ol’ dude is wearing a hat.

Esquire, 1988

So you tell your girlfriend you’re going to take her on a holiday to one of the most romantic spots on earth, and after she has tastefully demonstrated her gratitude and delight, she asks how she should pack. For the mountains? For the shore? For the samba clubs of Rio or the boulevards of gay Par-ee?

“Oh,” you say, “just throw a few things together that’ll get you by in a swamp.”

Naturally, she thinks you’re kidding, even after she notices you laying in a supply of mosquito repellant and aquasocks. And when you finally usher her into the Victoria Falls Hotel, following a spine-numbing twenty-two-hour flight, she smiles simultaneously at the pleasing surroundings and what she believes was your little joke. The Vic Falls, perhaps the lone nineteenth-century colonial hotel still operating in southern Africa, may have a run or two in its safari stockings, a few stains on its bush jacket, but it’s as romantic as the last act of a bad operetta.

Seedily luxurious, the low, rambling wings of the Vic Falls are tickled by palm fronds, scampered over by monkeys, serviced by an attentive staff in starched white livery, and moistened by mists from cataracts so immense they make Niagara seem like a leaky faucet. Your girlfriend is really settling into the place, especially its spacious patio, but the ice has hardly melted in her second gin-and-tonic before you’ve booked passage on Air Botswana, and toward the end of the next afternoon, the two of you are flying over territory that decidedly resembles… swamp . Vast, horizon-to-horizon swamp. You’re made a trifle sad by the look she gives you.

For reasons that are typically African (where all the clocks have elastic hands and rubber faces), yet difficult to explain, the flight from Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, to Maun, Botswana, arrives nearly two hours late, and as you wait for your luggage, the guide who has met you at the yam-patch airport is nervously glancing from his watch to the sky and back again. “We have a ways to go, and we’ve got to get there before dark,” you explain to your companion. When she asks, “Suppose we don’t?” you shrug. You’re afraid of what she might answer if you inquire if she’s ever spent the night with a slobbering beast.

Before long you’re motorboating up a reedy, sullen river, exchanging waves with folks who’ve never so much as heard of George Bush, even though their relatives are Bushmen. Before you can think to congratulate them, they, their huts, and their goats have vanished, and your boat is alone on a waterway that twists through the aquatic flora like a spastic vegetarian through a salad bar, and whose banks are closing in on you from both sides. The river narrows into a channel. The channel into a hippopotamus path.

Meanwhile, the sun has slipped below the palm-fringed horizon and the temperature is dropping so fast you think it must have fallen off a cliff. It gets later and later, darker and darker, colder and colder, lonelier and lonelier, the route more and more crooked, the papyrus beds more and more dense, and your girlfriend has to pee so bad she must gnaw on her camera strap to stifle a howl.