Megan Eaves-Egenes

Autumn makes me yearn for canyonlands. A time for nestling and nurturing, curling up with a book while the day cools off and it’s suddenly tea weather again. At this time of year, my mind goes to the Southwest – give me the rust-coloured strata of a canyon and a pasture sage-green from summer rain. Autumn is a time for desert books.

I spent one reading Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Winter in Taos, her 1935 memoir about a winter rambling through her Big House on Morada Lane in Taos, New Mexico. It is a quiet book of adobe and piñon fires and snowfall. One autumn, I read Ed Abbey, Desert Solitaire, his 1968 memoir about a year spent as a national park ranger at Arches near Moab, Utah. He wrote it at a time when the United States was coming of age in the automobile era, lamenting the arrival of highways bringing thousands of cars into the national parks.

Last year I went to Arches in the autumn, arriving first on the fancy train from Denver and then driving from the desert into the high, dry pine forests of southern Colorado, the aspen trees quivering along the La Sal River and the mesas turning salmon and cerise in the lowering sun.

This year, it’s Katie Lee and Oliver La Farge – books I bought on last year’s trip and never read. It’s been a long year, one of travelling (four continents and seven countries all told, not including England), a brief love affair, and writing a lot. Birthing a book is exhausting and miraculous and leaves little time for any pleasurable or constructive consumption of other books. But today a sunny crispness took the air in London, and after getting my vaccinations, I wrote another 750 words in the deserted library at Goldsmiths College up the road, had a coffee and a croissant in my local cafe, and came home to make a cup of cinnamon tea. Finally, I felt spacious enough to read something real.

Katie Lee’s All My Rivers Are Gone has been on my shelf since I got it in Maria’s Bookshop in Durango, Colorado last autumn. Lee was one of the earliest women river runners, running early trips through Glen Canyon and the Grand Canyon, down the mighty Colorado River and the San Juan River in southeastern Utah, up where it meets manmade Lake Powell and tapers off into lifeless, still water.

These were rivers we ran as kids. My dad’s partner through most of my teens was a veteran river runner with all the kit – rafts, life jackets, tents, camp stoves, dry bags, a portable shitter and even a solar shower, although it was always better to just let the river take you over – what’s five, seven days jumping in the deep, silty water and back out, letting the desert sun cook your skin and tangle your hair? You become whole.

So fine…so smooth… Lee writes of these river mud baths. Let dry and draw and crack, like the medicine it really is when baked on your bod in the hot sun, then peeled off, leaving your skin like satin.

I was around 14 when we were running the rivers and was horribly prone to acne, but the San Juan always cured everything. I never felt so right as when I was caked with river silt, grains of sand crunching in my teeth, the taste and smell of damp dust in everything.

There have been more canyons over the years – places far away that felt just like home. The deserts in eastern Kazakhstan spring to mind – lunar gorges, red and waterless, where it could be Moab or Horseshoe Bend or Taos.

On those early river trips, I was the photographer – it was the 90s and no cell phones, so I’d go to Walgreens and buy those waterproof, disposable Kodak cameras and snap away, mostly pictures of my sister, which I am so grateful to have now – a lot of them got lost through the years – moves, deaths, divorce.

But there in my digital albums is Juels in a kayak; Juels in a dorky hat rowing a much-too-large-for-her raft. I was a scaredy cat – hated heights, rock climbing and rapids, but she was quietly fearless and always jumped into any new boat or hiking trail with wordless abandon. As the older sister, I envied that about her and still do.

I look longingly to female writer-pioneers of the Southwest – Katie Lee and Mabel Dodge Luhan, Ellen Meloy and Willa Cather – maybe for some guidance, some secrets of the desert that the women who came before knew. With their mud-smooth skin and forever tans and tarnished turquoise bangles and rings, more permanent tattoos than priceless embellishments. I wish for that knowledge to be my knowledge; those words to be mine. I wish to light their fires in a kiva fireplace and stand on a rug that smells of sage and cedar smoke.

This year, another autumn trip to the Southwest – part personal, part book research – and then a furious six weeks of writing. The book will be done in December….well, delivered. Then, celebrations, sleep and on to editing, agonising and…someday soon…my words and only mine, bound in my hands.

I’ve written a lot this year, just not here.