On the Trail
MARY ALLEN is the author of a memoir, The Rooms of Heaven: A Story of Love, Death, Grief, and the Afterlife (Knopf, 1999). She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship in 2002. She currently makes a living as a full-time writing coach.
IAM sitting in a faded-green lawn chair on the patio behind a rented house in the desert of Twentynine Palms, California. I’m here on a two-week writing and hiking retreat with my friend, the writer Jo Ann Beard. The plan is simple: Each day we write for a few hours in the morning, eat lunch and rest, then in the late afternoon we drive to Joshua Tree National Park and hike until dinnertime.
It’s the beginning of the day and I’ve come out to the patio to sit and look for a few minutes. I love everything about this bright, open, wind-swept place: the dazzling light laying its hands on the sand all around me, the tan landscape dotted with cactus, the deep-green oleander growing beside the house, the small shadows cast by dips in the sand. As I sit here I notice the air is filled with a low, steady buzzing: of a fly, the murmur of the big Italian bumble bee that circles the acacia tree, and, for the briefest moment, the deep vibrating whir of a green hummingbird hovering above a cactus. The wind is soughing across the desert, and a plane is droning high in the sky. One of the mourning doves that lives in the tree in front of the house lets out a cry as it perches on the telephone wire. In this moment, I breathe deep and feel nothing but happiness.
