The Cabin

Utah and I were a love-at-first-sight type of situation. I remember the first time I drove from Las Vegas airport through the desert into southern Utah. That utter lifeless, nothingness for miles and miles – just a spine of telephone poles and empty roadway snaking through a Martian surface. Then came the canyons, immense and towering, giving way to a plunging landscape so much the opposite of the Miami skyline I called home. Jagged boulders and cliffsides interlaced with lush fields, creeks flowing into thundering rivers, and farmlands seemingly unchanged since the days of the Sundance Kid. In a country where roadside fast food strip malls are the norm, Utah is proof that god still exists, and this is his land.

I visited the state twice more on vacation before I decided to make it my home. The timing was right. I was coming out of the far side of a miserable tunnel in my life – a major illness, a shit job, and a divorce had chiseled away my youthful energy and self-worth until I no longer remembered the person I used to be, nor recognized the person I had become. It was time to walk away, time to find out what was left of me.

I took a job with a major IT company as a software engineer. The pay was exceptional but the ability to work remotely was the real prize. I packed everything I owned into a U-Haul truck and moved west. I couldn't help but feel like the settlers of the 19th century, plodding westward in search of a better life.

I rented a small house outside of a town called Alton. Of course compared to south Florida, "house" and "town" are relative terms; the house was a four-room cabin and the town was little more than a dusty, long-forgotten neighborhood. It was exactly the change I craved after years in the city - I would work during the week and spend my evenings and weekends exploring my new home, the land of the gods.

For the first year in Utah that is more or less how my days were spent: quietly sifting through lines of incomprehensible code during the week, then putting mile after mile under my feet on the weekends. It became a point of pride to see how quickly I could thrash a pair of hiking boots. I started ordering two or three pairs at a time so I always had spares.

Solitude reinvigorated me. It brought peace into my life like I had never experienced. I made a choice to step away from the world only to find that I had never really known the world at all. Until that time, I had lived my life trapped in a biome of plastic trees and plastic people, totally devoid of reason or purpose. I treasured my life in the wilderness, but time has a funny habit of pushing us into the next lifetime.

* * *

I remember the first day that I saw her haunting face. I remember the coffee I drank with a bowl of microwave oatmeal and a protein bar for breakfast. I remember it was a clear blue day and the headline of the Journal read FDA Grants Rapid Approval to First Covid Vaccine. The date was September 16, 2020. It was a Wednesday. I remember because it was my 34th birthday and I had decided to take the day off and hike a trail near my house.

There was nothing particularly noteworthy about this trail but being so close to home it had become one of my favorites, perfect for evening walks. It drifted through rugged scrubland into pinyon pines and a denser forested gully with a small, unnamed creek. At three miles the trail skated the edge of an abandoned silver mine, its buildings picked over and sun bleached like a carcass cleaved from a herd that scarcely remembered it at all. Ruins of the sort are common in Utah, vestiges of aspirations past. They add a portentous charm to the landscape.

I first heard her at mile marker four - a swath of a blue bandana I tied to a bristlecone pine, rare for this part of the state. It sounded like whistling not far off the trail, through some shrubs and scruffy pines on a smaller path I had never noticed before. How had I never noticed this? Curiosity and a mild sense of alarm drew me silently, carefully down the path until I saw it: a rickety, abandoned cabin slowly decaying before nature, or perhaps being fossilized by the sun for a future generation to discover. How had I never noticed this? On the porch of the cabin sat a woman in a Windsor chair, staring off into nothing and whistling in a soft tone. I stopped. For an instant my breath caught in my throat.