Origins of the Universe and What It All Means (6 page)

Child to adult.

Adult back to child.

Life to death.

Sometimes, in my more dramatic moments, I feel like I've just stepped into the mouth of a dark cave: blinding sunlight to my right, utter blackness to my left; I lean into the grey zone, where granite stone walls shadow the shifting rocks beneath my feet.
Where do I stand?

Perhaps I shouldn't take my position or myself so seriously. The little girl in the photo, the me wearing her mother's bra, felt no sense of obligation—she lived in the moment, in that sliver of time captured on film, the time between the opening and closing of the aperture, right before the click. Presence: when time stands independent of past or future; a moment captured on film; an ever-shifting point on the continuum of existence; what liquid prolongs for a pickled scorpion, still moist; where curiosity leads; a grain of sand so fine, so small, it settles, sinks beneath your feet unnoticed, unheard.

 

Thirteen

 

Cataviña, Mexico (1994)—

The problem with sidewinder rattlesnakes, I came to realize during a hike with my father in the Mexican desert a number of years back, is that they often bury themselves beneath the loose sand, making them difficult to spot—and easy to accidentally step on. Had I known beforehand that the sands were infested with snakes, I probably wouldn't have gone on the hike in the first place. But we'd already walked about half an hour beyond the end of the dirt road where we'd parked the car, and past the point where the gravel-crusted hardpan had gradually disappeared beneath deep shifts of fine-grain sand, when my father paused mid-stride, his brown leather boots ankle-deep in the sand, and said, rather off-handedly, “Oh, by the way, one must be careful of sidewinders.”

At first I thought he joking. “You never said anything about snakes,” I said.

“You probably should have worn long pants,” he said.

He wore Levis, which rode high above his waist due to the clamp-on elastic suspenders beneath his untucked polo shirt. Low on his forehead perched a brimmed driver's cap made of tightly woven straw, the kind you might see in a 1940s black-and-white photo. Directly overhead, the high-noon sun pounded down relentlessly, but the cap's visor cast a sliver of shadow across his wire-framed bifocals and the crow's feet spreading from his temples. He tugged the visor down to his eyebrows, leaned deeply forward at the waist, and with his feet anchored shoulder-width apart, reached for a dried cactus-branch-looking thing on the ground. He stood upright, waved the stick as if he were an orchestra conductor, and told me that from here on out I should watch for S-shaped patterns in the sand, the telltale mark of a snake's recent aboveground movement across the terrain. He also warned me about sleeping snakes that might be buried beneath the surface, and said that I should periodically test the ground. He demonstrated with a stick, pricking and sweeping the gravel near his feet several times. “Sidewinders cover themselves to keep cool,” he said, “so don't step on or near any suspicious-looking mounds until you've checked.” With that, he focused his gaze farther out, turned his head side to side several times, and pointed to an uneven, slightly elevated patch of sand several yards away. “Definitely stay away from that,” he said. He handed me the stick and marched a wide berth around the mound and the potential foe hidden beneath.

I gripped the poking stick and stepped slowly, wishing I'd worn jeans instead of shorts. A layer of denim might prevent a snake's fangs from puncturing the skin, I thought. I followed cautiously behind my father, pausing to evaluate the safety of each foot placement: Step right. Look around. Step left. Scan, scan, keep the eyes moving, scan. Should I poke? Yes, poke. Poke again. Sweep. Nothing there, thank God. Step right.

In a matter of minutes I'd fallen considerably behind. “Slow down,” I called out.

He did not answer, but continued on, knees raised high in stride, arms swinging furiously back and forth.

When my father and I had set out on a two-week road trip with no particular destination in mind other than “somewhere” in Baja, Mexico, the purpose of our journey was to reconnect after a lifetime of spotty interaction, get to know each other as adults. We'd started with no preset itinerary other than a crinkled roadmap courtesy of AAA and my father's catchphrase,
Let's play it by ear.
Midway through the trip, three hundred miles south of the American-Mexican border, he suggested a hike he'd heard about, which was rumored to lead to a remote site of minor, yet impressive, ancient cave paintings in a
respaldo
overhanging rock shelter in the middle of the desert.

To reach the trailhead: From Tijuana you take the toll highway south, which parallels the western coast for quite some distance before it veers inland and narrows to a two-lane strip down the center of a thin peninsula that straddles the Pacific Ocean and the Sea of Cortez. Nearly dead center in the middle of the peninsula, you'll cross a stretch of wasteland flats flanked by heat-gnawed mountains. As you descend, the arrow-straight road lances a forbiddingly jagged sprawl of wind-polished, building-sized boulders that perch upon one another in the center of 33,000 desolate square miles, where millions of scorpions and rattlesnakes populate a vast region nearly devoid of people. About a mile outside the 140-person town of Cataviña, you turn off the highway and follow a dirt road until it dead ends; from there, a two-mile walk drops into a boiling hot arroyo. Welcome to the middle of nowhere. Now follow the dry gulch until you locate a makeshift sign indicating where to begin your climb through and up the boulders to a high cave.

My father was a couple hundred yards ahead of me when he found the painted plywood sign. A stenciled arrow pointed away from the wide-open dry gulch and toward a maze of gigantic rock pilings. He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “This way!”

I waved the stick overhead and shouted back a triumphant “Woohoo!”

This would have been a logical place for him to wait for me to catch up. But instead, he picked up his pace. He zigzagged uphill, childlike, through spindly boojum trunks and ten-foot-tall cardón cacti, then darted behind a massive mound of rocks, out of sight.

Still down in the gulch, I
s-l-o-w-l-y
followed my father's trail, vigorously scanning for suspicious mounds. I carefully matched my stride to his shallow boot-shaped divots, sunken little patches of pre-tested safety.

Then, just as I lifted my right leg, I heard it: a rustle, somewhere off to the left. I froze mid-step. I balanced for a moment on one foot, perfectly poised, one leg still raised in arched stride, knee bent. I held my breath and looked around. Every grain of sand popped with bionic clarity. Stagnant air tickled my fingertips, and the collective exhale of cactus and sage pierced the oxygen around my palms. I still don't know what made that particular sound at that particular moment. Perhaps it was a harmless kangaroo rat, or a lizard, or maybe it was indeed a snake—but after a thorough session of poking and sweeping and more poking, I ascertained that I stood in at least a four-foot snake-free circle, which included the upcoming two or three divots.

I thought about turning back. I could have called out, yelled for my father to return, then said that I couldn't possibly continue, that it was too dangerous and we should head back for the car. But no, I couldn't turn back—partly because I needed to prove myself to my father, show him the strong, adventurous daughter he'd missed out on all these years, and partly because I was too damn curious. I needed to see those cave paintings, to inhale in their vicinity, even though I knew practically nothing about them. All I knew was that some sort of prehistoric art lay ahead, hidden in the caves high above.

What puzzles me now is that even though I learned about the rattlers fairly early into the hike, early enough to turn around, I still continued. I feel driven to account for my decision to put myself in obvious danger that day, particularly since I've had a lifelong phobia of snakes. In hindsight, I'm smitten by the link between curiosity and fear, intellectual and physical connections both innate and learned—not only how these emotions have evolved in humankind, but also how they manifest themselves in my character. I wonder if an examination of curiosity might help me locate myself on the spectrum of emotional reconciliation. How does curiosity work, and what forms does it take?

 

Fourteen

 

From a biological standpoint, humankind's sense of curiosity presents a paradox. As animals, our basic needs are pretty simple—food, water, shelter, and the ability to reproduce. But we humans tend to go above and beyond. Consider the complex world we've created for ourselves—the Internet, our marble-countered and triple-pane-windowed homes, lean-protein low-carb Stevia-sweetened diets, Captain Kirk-worthy iPhones, 355-horsepowered Chevy Tahoes—we long ago exceeded our basic needs. To a point, curiosity is beneficial. At its most extreme, though, our instinctual urge to gain extraneous, possibly irrelevant information can be dangerous.

For example, imagine an early humanoid standing outside a dark cave. For fun, let's say the humanoid is Chaka, the four-foot, hairy caveman-type character from the 1970s Saturday morning television show of my youth,
Land of the Lost
. (As a kid I'd wrap myself in a comforter and gorge on Cocoa Puffs, imagining myself one of the characters on the show, which revolved around the adventures of the Marshall family—father Rick, son Will, and daughter Holly—who, while on a rafting/camping trip, are swept down a gigantic waterfall and through a time vortex portal. The family, trapped in an alternate universe inhabited by dinosaurs and a primate-type humanoid species, takes shelter in a high bluff cave and eventually befriends one of the humanoids, the bipedal, flat-foreheaded Chaka.)

Imagine adorable little Chaka hungry and grunting and leaning his wide head into the mouth of a deep, dark, unknown cave (not the one inhabited by the Marshall family). He wonders if he might find something to eat. Or just wonders what he might find, period. Curiosity draws Chaka inside. Depending on the cave's geographical locale, he might be greeted by a coiled rattler, a poised scorpion, or a momma bear with her cubs.

Curiosity, then, seems to defy evolutionary theory. The most curious among us should've been killed off before getting the chance to reproduce, with that trait losing out to less deadly ones in the process of natural selection. We don't really need to solve the daily jumble, snoop inside the closed desk drawer, or explore the dark cave. And yet we do. Sometimes we are driven, unable to stop, unwilling to abandon the snake-riddled trail.

Remember the scorpion theft:
Alone in his house, I committed personal invasion. Snooping through his personal things was a way to get closer to the man I held at arm's length. Even if I had wanted to cease my search, it would have been impossible to stop. Impossible.

And now:
I should turn back
, I thought as I stood in the Mexican desert,
but I cannot. I must see the ancient cave paintings for myself, inhale in their vicinity.

We've long been aware of our curious nature, a trait generally revered among humans—save for that infamous period of intellectual obfuscation following the collapse of the Roman Empire: the Dark Ages. At the cusp of that shadowy era, Saint Augustine wrote in his autobiographical
Confessions
about “the disease of curiosity.” He suggests that furthering one's knowledge purely for the sake of idle gawking invites evil because such aimless pleasure distracts us from exploring our theistic nature. Detailing regrets of his arrogant youth and subsequent conversion to Christianity, Augustine links curiosity to the sin of lust—as both, he claims, involve delving into things and people that should be deemed off limits.

But sustained aversion to curiosity, of course, would bring society to a full and complete halt. To oversimplify the obvious: if not for the flowering of science, literature, art, politics, and educational reform following the Dark Ages, our current lifestyle—the way we experience the world—would not exist. We'd have no Maxwell's equations of electricity and magnetism, no television, no
Land of the Lost
, no Hubble Telescope. No crumpled Automobile Club map, no road to Cataviña,
no exhalation of certainty from the center of this particular four-foot radius of snake-free sand
. One thing leads to another.

 

Fifteen

 

Curiosity leads to knowledge, an accumulation of information that supports humanistic needs, not only in a scientific, practical sense, but also on a personal, existential level. It was the latter that fueled our father-daughter, play-it-by-ear road trip to Baja in 1994, the journey that led us to the boulder fields of Cataviña. Although I was unaware of it at the time, several shades of existential curiosity came into play when we planned that trip, shades that still evolve today, full-hued and ever-changing.