Bone Woman

She had been a storyteller from the time she was three. Born to the high plains desert, she spent much of her youth with the blowing red dust of the American southwest- Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado- caressing her skin. Walking in the desert, wind and sun stripping water from her hair, her skin, her eyes, she could see and say more color in the dry sand of the desert dunes, than most people see in a tank of tropical fish.

She drove through Nevada and into California, her gunmetal grey pickup an oasis of air conditioning on the highway. Death Valley—the name—was a great mystery to her. Everywhere she looked, she saw life, she heard stories- stories of Spider Woman and Coyote the Trickster. The land itself, tough, scrubby and dry, whispered secrets to her, how First Man and First Woman brought forth Changing Woman, who gave birth to Monster Slayer and Born for Water and then rubbed the skin off her body to create the Navajo people.

She could smell the water she couldn’t see, and told of that, too.

It became her path to travel the great deserts of the world, in no particular order, before she grew too old, before she settled into one place for the rest of her days, before travel became too much of an effort. She walked with the Masai in the Kalahari, ate kangaroo and grubs in the Australian Outback, drove a Range Rover in a caravan down the West Bank and into the Negev. She rode camels and horses in the Sahara. From the inside of a Snow Cat, she saw the Arctic as a desert of ice. Ptarmigan, snowshoe hares, wolves, snow- a thousand different stories in white. She told of how the Bushmen and Inuit were cousins, how Anansi the spider traded hornets, a python and a leopard to Nyame the Sky God for all the stories in the world, and how Kiviuq lived in the winter with a white-haired beautiful woman who was not a woman but a fox. And the deserts began to murmur to her of her own place in the stories.

She began to grow weary, to look for easier ways to travel. She discovered sailing, and that’s how she came to know that oceans too are deserts.  Deserts awash in a thousand variations of that color often miscalled blue or green or grey.  Deserts teeming, with all of their life but the birds under the surface.  Islands—the San Juans, the Virgins, the Canaries, the Antilles—spotted like springs and ponds and lakes, peninsulas poked like long fingers of river carved out into the sea.  And she gathered their stories as well.

On her way to Antarctica, she slowly traced the Baja Peninsula in a forty-two foot sloop, anchoring in the bays of Espiritu Santo and the other island, the one whose name did not call out to her to be remembered, a long shank of land connected to Espiritu Santo by a thin braid of sand, not really a separate island. Perhaps she could not remember its name because it had no story of its own.

At Los Islotes, she swam with the sea lions, barking at the sudden cold crush of the water, waving her flippers and fingers at her sea cousins, slipping through the coven of jellyfish, quietly beautiful and painful as a cactus to kiss. She sailed south toward La Paz, toward hotel rooms and restaurants, bars and brazen stares, gift shops and groceries, toward hot showers, cold drinks, taxi drivers who talk too little and charge too much – sailed toward the La Paz of tourists and old broken dreams. On the way to La Paz, the desert of the Baja called her. Come. She waved farewell to the whales, anchored in one of the bays, and turned toward the shore.

The sea kayak, even with its shallow draw, took her only so far. Too many rocks, reaching up from the sand, sought its soft inflatable underside, its belly its weakness, just like the porcupine, puma, and bear.  Looping the rough, yellow lead rope around her wrist, she waded into shore, the cool caressing her knees, the sun hot on the bright still water. Gnats whined and dragonflies thrummed in the salt air. She left the kayak above the highwater mark, tied tight to the elbow of a mangrove tree. Anything the sea took from her now, it would not take without effort. She carried the stories of the world’s deserts and seas in her heart. An almost-trail wound through the low scrub, some kind of gorse, home to tarantula, lizard and snake. Pools of sand lay in the shallows of the land where she could smell the shade and the hiding places of tiny creatures. Small swells of crushed sealife, scale and shell and bone, gave way to bare canyon walls. Cactus of infinite size and shape and desire walked with her through the flat. Her bare feet, toughened and calloused from the teak deck of the sailboat, left whispers on the ground, breaking through the salt white crust. Jackrabbit tracks, frantic and fleeing, were paced by the track of coyote or fox. The hollowed-out shell of a pufferfish, the skull of a heron, the scattered bones of something small and no longer afraid, heard her go by.

The salt scent faded and she grew thirsty. Her pack with sunscreen, camera and journal, extra food, matches and a water bottle, her pack, she had left in the kayak. She took off her sunglasses, dangled them from one finger, then left them beside a rock in the shape of her past. Her clothing was cotton and hemp, and she shed it into the cactus and scrub pine, all but the woven blue-green anklet and the cord with the tiny brass bell.

Wind lifted the waters from her body. Her tongue grew dry and leathery until it reached down past her knees, still flecked with the dried tears of the sea, one last gift from the desert waves, past her ankle with the tiny brass bell, past her toes, until it touched the land, where it split into two, fell from her mouth, and became lizards who sailed off into the sky.

Her skin, a dusty gold from the sun, began to flay from her body, floating quietly in long sheets to settle at her feet as sand. Muscles fell away. Better they should feed the buzzards and bats, than weigh her down. Her eyes that could distinguish a hundred different tastes of green, a thousand different scents of grey, a million different touches of brown, her eyes became owls.

The fine thin bones of her hands drifted away as she walked through the land, becoming scorpions, centipedes, and lesser spiders.  Her shoulder became a rise in the land, a rock, a windbreak for the small yellow flowers of her toes. Her hair, tangled and twisted, a tan among the browns, lifted to the wisp of clouds shredded along the bowl of the sky, then became lines in the sand where the hermit crabs walk.

Her heavier bones settled into cactus and grasses and thorns. Over time, her ribs rolled back to the shore, rooted in the salt, became mangrove and heron. Her spine stretched into a sheltering thread of shade.

Millennia pass, or so it might be, and she lies quiet, gathering into herself the stones of the desert, the beetles and wasps, the cry of the owl, the wishes and secrets and dreams of the lizard. Constellations cycle through the sky, and galaxies spin farther and farther away, away from the desert and away from each other, and her stories blow to the ends of time.