Cheep

My pale flesh and potatoey filling were genetically designed for perpetually overcast and infinitely melancholy Irish scapes. Yet here I am, planted in the unblinking desert.

I had two (2) semi-disastrous / semi-humorous Sunday desert sojourns in just the past two (2) weekends. Desert misadventures…ill advised. But for me, constantly attempted. As if I am doomed to be spectacle for scavengers someday.

One misadventure ended up with me fetal-positioned beneath a sliver of sagebrush shade beneath a noontime unrelenting sun, with just 0.7 of an impossible mile to reach the Bonneville Point trailhead, once a wagon-rutted route on the Oregon Trail.

This is the place where, according to legend, the relieved French fur trappers declared “Les bois! Les bois!” pointing at the trees along the Boise River, a sight for sore just-slogged-through-the-most-hopeless-of-Utah eyes.

This is the place where, according to that 99 degree day, I would perish of sunstroke. A member of the Oregon Trail video game generation dying alongside the Oregon Trail IRL. Irony lives…at the very least. My translucent white skin flushed bright red. I ran out of water. I could not take…another….uphill…..blazing……desperate…….step. My friend heroically ran up with the key and bounced down the cow road in my CRV to save me from a rather desiccated end.

The other trip ended up here (pictured), somewhere nowhere near Reynolds Creek Canyon in the Owyhee Desert, in some waterless cliff deadend (shown).

(Disclaimer: I apologize to both of the unfortunate companions on my ill-advised, ill-guided 3 hour tours in the middle of godforsaken desert.)

vintage 80s blue flow-y empire dress with pink flowers, $22.50 – Antique World Mall (half off, going out of business sale) | pale SavageX pink halter bra, $12 (sale) – SavageX.com

Cheep it like an unexpected desert bloom.

I scream. You scream. We all scream. (Dead stop.)

This would be the tagline for my nihilistic ice cream store called Waiting for Fro-Yo. (With tortured irony, we would not serve frozen yogurt. But will perpetually imply it’s coming soon.)

The sweet shop’s staff would posit in a monotone Werner Herzog droll: “Yes, we all scream for ice cream. Yet, do we also not all scream for the existential horror of our fleeting, insignificant lives?”

And: “Would you like sprinkles on that?”

For a cherry on top feel, I brought this vintage yellow sunbrella all the way up Squaw Creek (groans: racist nomenclature) for this fashion shoot at the waterfall dead end. (“No exit,” Sarte would say.) I hiked here in the early spring. The creek was ice cold and the trail upstream and underwater. No extremities had to be amputated due to frostbite however. Licked it.

vintage yellow sunbrella with cane handle with the name Candi Miller handwritten on the band, $7 – Antique World Mall | screen-printed polka dot, acid-colored lips ice cream shirt, $5 – ReStyle thrift store | Stella McCartney x Adidas black leggings, $7, Goodwill in Walla Walla, WA | Nike neon mesh trail shoes, $10.99 – Idaho Youth Ranch , (now so beat up, this was their last run)

Cheep it like a soft serve.

Put your tray tables in an upright position, and prepare for departure from 2020. On your right, a once-in-a-millennium scene of cosmic proportions and galactic significance. Though a rather shoddy photo of it (as I took it myself, handheld, shaking in the subzero temps of the Utah high desert).

In a spontaneous gambit to witness the Great Conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter, I rented a magically-available yurt in the dark sky preserve of Dead Horse State Park near Moab, Utah.

We could all use a little escape hatch from the universe. A shift into a new alignment. A different perspective entirely.

Tho I imagine on the earth-bound Galactic Federation spaceship, the on-flight entertainment is exclusively limited to 1985’s “Cocoon.” Because we all know that when the aliens land—instead of delving into the timeless secrets of the universe—Boomers will just try to mine them for their next-level Botox and anti-aging secrets.

Victoria’s Secret blue satin jumpsuit, $15 – Antique World Mall | Smithline Exclusive brown knit coat with fur trim, $55 – Antique World Mall | Frye Boots black leather with punk-rock spur straps, $75 – Bombshell & Blokes Salon annual event | Importina blue 60s stewardess-style band hat, $12 – Antique World Mall | Kenyan Maasai beaded blue breastplate – Maasai tribe near the Maasai Mara

Cheep it to end of the world as we know it. (And I feel fine.)

“Perhaps he knew, as I did not, that the Earth was made round so that we would not see too far down the road,” – Karen Blixen, Out of Africa

Before I left for Kenya, I read Karen Blixen’s (nom de plume: Isak Dinesen) book, Out of Africa. Taking place at about this time 100 years ago, the Baroness owned a coffee plantation just outside of Nairobi. Her book is ripe with the soul of the country and its people, with less of the entitled colonialism than I expected.

Karen wanted nothing more than for her bones to lie in rest in Africa. She did not get her wish. Her coffee plantation suffered locusts and other acts of God, and she was forced to leave the land she loved, later dying of malnutrition in her Dutch estate. A minor tragedy of dislocation.

On the day I took this picture, I wanted nothing more than to make it out of Africa. I’ll likely process the full scope of traveling during the outbreak of a worldwide pandemic over time—peeling off the layers of weeping revelation like an onion. The unthinkable happened a million times over daily, and I wasn’t even paying that much attention, until reality forced my hand.

It gradually dawned on me that I was on one of the last planes out of anywhere in the world. That other countries (see: Morocco, Peru) closed borders a week before with less than 24 hours warning. That entire airlines and international routes were shutting down in the blink of an eye. That hundreds of thousands of people were trapped far from home everywhere.

And I was on safari. On the Sunday we came out of the Maasai Mara, the Kenyans in my group arranged to visit a Maasai village, delaying our departure, and eliminating a back-of-the-mind possibility to change my flight out to later that night.

It can’t really put into words, not yet, the sheer soul-expanding magnitude of that Maasai village visit. I inexplicably connected deeply and immediately with the son of the chief. He will always be in my soul, burning like the ember of fire that falls out onto the sword from the friction between human will, cedar wood and the sandpaper tree.

When he slipped off his beaded bracelet and somehow shoved it onto my wrist, still puffy and swollen from sunburn, I knew I’d make it home, transcendentally. The bracelet has no clasps. It’s not meant to be taken off. Even now, it smells like fire and smoke and him. He also gave me (I mean, of course I gave him money before I left for all of these wonderful gifts), the Maasai-made bright pink sheep’s wool wrap he wore. I bury my face in it often, and I’m immediately brought back to Africa. To the night sky of the Maasai Mara. To him, far around the world in his small hut under the stars of the Southern hemisphere. To the time-and-space-defying power of human connection.

Miraculously, I made it on the last Seattle flight out of Dubai before Emirates grounded all planes later that day.  The Maasai Mara is now closed. I am coming to grips with the changed world from inside my Boise home. And I am washed aground here awe-struck by God and humanity and Africa. And this precarious and magical opportunity to be alive. Fully alive. In it all.

handmade African orange, yellow, blue & green print dress – $3700 Kenyan shillings (about $37) – Nairobi market | Maasai red, white & blue beaded bracelet – $2000 Kenyan shillings (about $20) | Maasai armour bijoux blue & gold beaded breastplate – $3000 Kenyan shillings (about $30)

“Banish the ghost of coronaaaaahhh…”

Before my trip to Kenya, I went to Passport Health, a traveler’s clinic for immunizations and fear needling. There, I was handed a terrifying brochure filled with the potential dangers of my destination. Typhoid. Hepatitis. Yellow fever. And a long list of other shit-inducing diseases borne of filth and mosquitoes and the social nature of human existence. It totaled $1500 to completely mitigate the fear of the unknown. I paid $500 to slightly assuage it, which my Kenyan friend found baffling and idiotic. I also paid dearly for taking the live Typhoid pills that made me vomit for hours on end over the course a week.

I took off into an exponentially panicked world. When I left one week ago, the novel coronavirus drifted in and out of the public consciousness. It still felt like a somewhat foreign concept. Other people’s problems. A few days after I landed, COVID-19 did too. Blessedly not via the conduit of me. Since then, it feels like the entire world has screeched to a terrified halt.

As I hiked through the vast Karura Forest in Nairobi yesterday, I passed a group of 20-something Kenyans, and the guy at the end, smiling wide, sang while staring straight at me, “Banish the ghost of coronaaaaahhh…” I found it hilariously apropos, as I am the whitest person I’ve seen in this entire country. Now a specter of doom and death indeed.

no label multicolored-virus-patterned silk tank top – $3, Idaho Youth Ranch thrift store | ADAY almond Easy Days pants – $119 (discounted as I keep pretending I’m a new customer through alias email addresses to get the promo code) | Nike hot pink, yellow & blue cross-country mesh shoes with hot green laces – $5, Restyle Thrift Store | SavageX natural tiger print chiffon bralette  – $9.99 (during epic site-wide sale) | Quicksilver yellow fanny pack – $2.50, Idaho Youth Ranch thrift store (pick a purse outta a giant bin sale, I had to dig my way to the very bottom to find this) |pink & black multi-striped pink pashmina (the best travel accessory in the entire world) – gift from friend from Turkey

Cheep it while social distancing…

“I always know where I am by the way the road looks. Like I just know that I’ve been here before. I just know that I’ve been stuck here. Like this one fucking time before, you know that? Yeah. There’s not another road anywhere that looks like this road. I mean exactly like this road. It’s one kind of place. One of a kind. Like someone’s face. Like a fucked up face.” – River Phoenix, My Own Private Idaho

no label – vintage beach dress $5, ReStyle thrift store.