by Julia Piehler

My upbringing was the perfect foundation on which to build misgivings towards religion. Although my parents were not Catholic, I was sent to a Catholic school the moment I was potty trained. They acted under the misapprehension that it would be a gentler option than the preschool of the Army base where my father was serving. My parents, nonetheless, cautioned me that the goodness of the church that would be extolled to me at Sacred Heart was far outweighed by its evil acts, such as enslavement of native peoples, hoarding of wealth, and practicing corporal punishment. I came to agree about the church’s tendency towards malfeasances as I spent hours staring at the sliver of light leaking under the door of the punitive closet, where, for my misdeeds – such as refusing to curtsey to nuns I disliked – I was often imprisoned in the dark. Meanwhile, my father lurched from one mystical tradition to another. Sufism, Buddhism, and evangelical Christianity are some that I remember. But he always returned the family to the tastefully restrained Episcopal Church tradition of his own upbringing. Each return was a signal that my sister and I would soon be back in Father Gallagher’s Sunday school, coloring within the lines key moments in Christ’s life. Meanwhile, my mother watched my father’s religious gyrations in grim disapproval, her wariness rooted in childhood with an exploitive Methodist minister who happened to be her father.

The nuns once showed us a painting of an expanse of black space sprinkled with tiny bright stars and asked us to find God. We looked and looked in vain. Then a nun’s finger traced above the canvas the silhouette of a head and shoulders where there were no stars. God, our friend, was always everywhere even in the darkest desolate night.

My mixed salad of religious exposure gave rise to some ideas that I find touching now to recall. God’s incarnation to me was as a surprisingly innocent star-born friend. He sported a pure white cassock and knee-length snowy beard and when he came from afar to visit Earth he relied on my patient explanation of the workings of the world. I was at the age of eating animal crackers, and placing them—partially consumed, with mushy margins—on whatever surface I was near. When I abandoned a cracker and was unable to find it later, I decided God had taken it as an implicit offering. God was not omniscient. God was not all-powerful. The God of my fashioning was star-born and immortal but otherwise very much like me.

Decades after the era of my deity friend who fancied cookies, I came to a crossroads in my life. I was interning at Los Alamos National Laboratory. My ingenuity and out-of-the-box thinking was well-regarded, so probably I would receive a coveted offer of permanent employment when I completed my PhD. To me the most visceral allure to Los Alamos was the stunning natural beauty and Anasazi archeology of the New Mexico high desert. This was followed by the availability at the lab of world-class instrumentation and world-class colleagues. But I was growing dubious about tying my career to Los Alamos, for numerous reasons, the foremost being a fear unfurling in my gut that whatever project I agreed to undertake in my “memorandum of understanding” of employment would gradually but inevitably lead to my doing work I felt morally objectionable.

I craved time away from my colleagues, who had all accepted the lure of permanent positions, and I was hoping to shrug off the yoke of my brooding by viewing uplifting scenery. I decided to take a solo hike in a little-frequented national monument that bordered the Rio Grande River. My topographic maps showed two trails leading from the monument headquarters to the Rio Grande on two adjacent, peninsula-like mesas. On the map, just at the edge of the river, the two trails were connected by a dashed line, indicating that the connection was not always navigable. I guessed the ephemeral trail was rendered impassable in spring, when the mountain snow was melting and the river was highest. Since we were in the midst of a dry summer, I reasoned that the river probably would be low enough now to allow passage.

I planned to make a round trip, heading toward the river along one mesa and returning by the other. The hike would make about a twelve-mile loop. When I started midmorning, the day was breezy and cloudless, and every pebble and shrub was infused with sparkle and vivid colors.

The outward leg of my route was lightly used, making the trail difficult to follow. The scenery provided no vistas, which probably accounted for the trail’s faintness. As noon approached, the sun directly overhead took back the earlier sparkle of the landscape, replacing it with a wearying glare. When I reached the end of the mesa, the trail petered out and I was uncertain of the path of descent. I should have retraced my steps at this point. But I have a mulish streak—sometimes a boon to the tally of my life’s accomplishments, at other times the origin of train wrecks. Still seeking some sort of fulfillment from this hike, I scrambled down from the mesa to the riverbank. My genome contains some mountain goat, so the scramble was the most enlivening part of the hike so far.

At the base, I found no trace of the ephemeral trail, but bushwacking to the foot of the next mesa looked straightforward. The smooth river alluvium was dotted with islets of saw grass whose clumps of roots sat a few feet above the alluvial soil and had fronds about four feet long splaying from the elevated root clumps. I wore only shorts and a tank top so needed to avoid contact with the lacerating fronds.

I had taken a dozen steps onto a darker, silken-looking patch of earth when I felt the ground change. It began to jiggle, then opened up to receive me in a knee-deep embrace of cloying mud. Although it was my first direct experience of it, I knew instantly that I was in quicksand.

I had been taught that, if caught in quicksand, I should lie back on the surface, limbs outspread like a starfish, and wait, immobile, for my companions to fish me out. Flailing about would only cause more liquefaction. But I was alone. I had written out my itinerary while at the monument fee station, in the space provided for this purpose, on the back of the fee envelope used for paying for my day-use pass. Eventually the rangers, noticing that my truck had stayed parked overnight, would read the itinerary and come looking for me. But it would be a day or longer before help would arrive. I couldn’t float motionless on the quicksand long enough to have any hope of rescue. I needed to act in a way better suited to stubborn idiots hiking alone.

Throwing myself forward, I got my arms around a clump of saw grass. But that lurch cost me immersion to my hips — and a face and two arms full of saw grass lacerations creating strings of blood droplets like Mardi Gras beads. Thus, I began a two-hour struggle to get my legs out of the quicksand without losing my boots. (I could have liberated my legs fairly easily, if I were willing to surrender my boots to the mire, but I needed them for the six miles trek over sharp rock shards that separated me from my truck).  So, with my face buried in the lacerating saw grass, I pointed my toes upward and pulled with all my might on each leg alternately, until by inches I extracted one leg and slung it over the saw grass islet, and then liberated the other leg.

From my little island above the dark, even earth, it was impossible to see a margin to the quicksand apposed to the more solid soil. I felt my best hope was to avoid the alluvium altogether by jumping from clump to clump of saw grass until I was definitely beyond the quicksand. I took the direction towards the highest density of saw grass clumps which by happenstance led to the base of the second, homeward-bound mesa.  Each jump to the next islet was excruciating. First came the burning lash of the saw grass that drew crisscrossed strings of beaded blood from my legs and arms. Second came a duller pain in my right knee that I had strained during my struggle to extricate myself from the quicksand. By the time I reached the rocks and boulders at the base of the second mesa, I was dehydrated, limping, and already sunburned, since the saw grass had scraped my sunblock off my bare limbs. I did not want to try approaching the river for drinking water, for fear of encountering more quicksand. But I was apprehensive that I could not make the return trip of six parched miles without help, which I could think of no way to summon.

As exhaustion, dehydration, and pain overtook me, I fixed my eyes on my boot toes and concentrated on one step, then the next, and the next. By the time despair began to overtake me, my maps indicated that I had at least four miles more to go, a seemingly impossible distance in my condition. I lifted my gaze to search for any sign of hope, for any indication that I was closer to succor than my map-based estimate,

And that is when God decided to even out the balance sheet and compensate me for those long-ago soggy animal crackers.

(image c/o plantamex)

Not twenty feet from the trail was a magnificent specimen of nopal cactus. Throughout my hike, I had seen few nopals, and those specimens were stunted, dull green, and covered by scab-like brown blemishes where birds and rodents had partaken. Yet this nopal was enormous, and glowing with emerald vigor in the slanting late-afternoon sun. Along the highest lobes were rows of ripe pink cactus pear. Here was moisture. Here was sugar. Here was nourishment – a gift that would enable me to regain my truck. For many desert animals, nopal fruit is an important source of moisture and nourishment. Yet the gorgeous fruit of this nopal, glowing pink like tourmaline held up to a lamp, appeared untouched, as though it had been placed there for me alone to harvest.

I gorged myself on the fruit, and almost immediately felt revived enough to continue my trek. But I was kind to myself, and sat quietly for half an hour, digesting the fruit, digesting what I had just undergone, enjoying the shade of the nopal. The glare of the sun had softened and the sparkle was back in each pebble and sprig of mesquite. Like a mantle gently lowered over my shoulders, the certainty came that I would always be nostalgic for northern New Mexico, for Los Alamos, because I would never work and live permanently in this place I was so drawn to.

Did this miraculous appearance of fruit in the desert, this manna, make a believer of me? No, it did not budge me from my leeriness of religion by even the breadth of one hair. But it did fill me with that particular wonder of encountering unlooked for beauty and good fortune.

Julia Piehler has published in technical journals and compendia during a high-tech career. Her work spanned many job functions. Throughout her career she has collected bouquets of stories that will appeal to the general reader. She was educated at Harvard and Stanford where she specialized in geochemistry.