Desert Stories

A desert storm sobbed and howled when Michael died. I couldn't cry. I couldn't speak. I was stunned by the memory of his living hand in mine. After his body disappeared into the ambulance, we rushed from the scene to the buildings and shoved towels between the glass doors and the wooden floors to keep the flood out. We couldn't. It poured all afternoon. The floor got wet, but I stayed dry, tearless. I stayed dry when the rain stopped and Michael was home, buried in Chicago. I stayed dry and silent while everyone else cried and mourned. Today is three years later, and when I remember Michael, I release my hidden tears. This is the story of what happened when Michael died.

After the accident, Michael's mother sent his classmates laminated obituaries. I keep mine in my desk. By their account, Michael Pihos died beneath a Case tractor in Deep Springs Valley, California, on 17 September 1999. His older brother, Peter, was the only witness to the tragedy. Michael and Peter had been test-driving a station wagon, which belonged to the farmer at tiny Deep Springs College, when it became stuck on a steep dirt utility road. With Peter watching, Michael attached the station wagon to the tractor with a chain and began tugging the car uphill. The tractor slipped backwards down the hill on loose, rocky soil and skidded for 15 feet before turning end-over-end several times. The first roll crushed Michael, killing him instantly.

The facts of the accident are just that to me, facts, and I feel deadened when I read the newspaper clippings. I remember the scene differently. As we approached, I saw the mangled chassis of the Case halfway down the slope at the end of a trail of orange and yellow scrap. The two giant wheels were further downhill. Against the desert mountains, I saw the station wagon still stuck above the wreckage; I saw Peter crying; I saw Michael, unmoving, clutching the broken steering wheel in his hands. I touched his fingers. They were growing cold.

I wish that I had discovered Michael's body free from the debris surrounding him, free from the gasping crowd--just Michael, unmoving, amid sand and rock and tumbleweed, face serene, palms upturned, eyes absorbing the boundless western sky. Instead, it was violent, sudden. I didn't see it happen, but the imagined accident remains indelible. I can still see how the wheels and tractor and Michael must've looked tumbling down that hill. I still smell the sweet sage twigs snapping beneath his body. I feel his tense knuckles clutching that steering wheel, his stubbornness tearing it from the machine as it toppled over him.

Physical labor, especially agricultural labor, is a major part of being a student at Deep Springs College. The college is a small, unconventional liberal arts school enrolling 26 students, all male, all dreamers, who attend for two years before transferring to more prestigious but less idyllic institutions. Deep Springs rests in a mountain valley the size of Manhattan in the eastern California desert, two valleys north of Death Valley. Geographically, it is closer to Nevada's roadside brothels and nuclear testing grounds than sunny coastal California. The nearest cow-town is 50 miles and a mountain pass away. Among those who know the program, it is highly respected; to most, it's considered strange. Parents lend their sons to Deep Springs with reluctance, viewing the college as an unnecessary diversion from more serious studies. My parents wanted Harvard instead; Michael's parents pushed for Stanford. Graduates of Deep Springs swear by the place, recounting with affection the sweat and blood and spirit they left behind in "the valley." They leave the valley, transfer to the Ivy League, and tell tales of desert life to forge new, outside-world personae, to cultivate images of toughness and ability, to woo unsuspecting women, and intimidate less rugged men. Stories become a Deep Springer's social currency, a way to barter respect from those who might otherwise consider two years in an isolated desert valley a waste of time.

The stories are outrageous. Naked hikes through Death Valley. Midnight dance-parties in the dairy barn. Mountaineering escapades in the Sierra Nevada. Hitchhiking to Vegas in a pickup truck. Visiting the local brothel to buy a T-shirt or a Sprite. Most Deep Springs stories are romanticized, all are exaggerated. The most time-honored genre of tales is the near-miss stories. Despite its responsibilities as an institution of higher learning, Deep Springs is a playground for 26 semi-grownup boys. There's a backhoe, three tractors, two pick-up trucks without windshields, 13 horses, a World War II-era dump truck, and a big red fire engine. And there are accidents. Aaron ran over his girlfriend's shoulder with the backhoe; she was fine, she'd been knocked into soft manure. Eli's horse spooked around some ornery cattle and threw him into a barbed wire fence; he suffered a few scrapes and scratches. Zach fell asleep at the wheel in Nevada, fleeing Deep Springs just before news of his affair with a married professor became public; he had mild whiplash. Trucks roll, band saws sever fingers, cattle horns rip riders from saddles--all add to the rugged, rough-and-ready mystique. A near-miss story is a stamp of individual daring, and once one story is told, everyone tells and retells his personal favorites. This collective lore of what-could-have-been makes Deep Springs seem blessed. Before Michael died, the student-made college handbook triumphantly read: "In more than 80 years, no one has ever died at Deep Springs. Don't fuck up."

Several days after the accident, the Deep Springs community gathered at twilight beside the grape arbor to remember Michael. We built a small campfire and arranged ourselves around it so that we all looked out across the valley. During late summer and fall, thick cumulonimbus clouds gather all day about Deep Springs Valley, built by convection lifting hot air from the desert floor. On some days the clouds turn dark and muster the strength for a storm. On that afternoon, they dissipated into wispy strands, reflecting pink in the setting sunlight. We started telling stories about Michael. Nick described how Michael, in a fit of asceticism, convinced him that they should remove from their room everything save two bare mattresses, Michael's mandolin and guitar, and several stacks of books. Conor recounted his goofy grin and his bleached, clown-like hair. Clark remembered handing Michael some soap and shampoo after sniffing his nauseous body odor. David recalled a wild ride from Bishop in the Deep Springs van with Michael at the wheel, the van's sliding door open, and half the first-year class sitting on a sofa in the back, drinking beers, watching the sunset through the open door, and secretly hoping that there wouldn't be an accident. The stories lasted for hours. We laughed and we smiled together. The strangest thing about that night was that, after recounting so many of Michael's stories in one sitting, we rarely spoke of him again. That was our moment of public grief, fitting because of its narrative quality, but unfortunate because it made private grief even more unbearable. There is something horrible about knowing that, in death, there are no new stories and that the remembered contents of a life can be told in one night.

Michael and I were classmates at Deep Springs. We dug trenches together, washed dishes together, wrangled calves together, irrigated fields together, rode horseback together beneath the romance of a blazing high-desert sun. We told stories to each other, and listened together to the stories told by others. Mostly, we talked about girls and music and dreams. Michael spent his first summer at Deep Springs as college cook. Naked beneath his brown coveralls, he'd spend all afternoon humming jazz riffs in the kitchen, sometimes improvising percussion on the pots. Other than Chuck, the testy mechanic, no one complained when a foot-long strand of Michael's dread-locked hair appeared in the soup. His goofy smile was hard not to forgive. Once, on a weeklong break in Chicago, I split my time between Michael's house in the suburbs and my girlfriend's dorm in Evanston. Michael came along when I visited her. Walking the campus of Northwestern in our blood-smeared Carhatt coveralls and muddy work boots, we imagined ourselves two sun-bronzed beacons of virility, commanding attention with our brawny humility and down-to-earth charm. We were really just dirty and smelly and sunburned, but it felt so good to believe that we were kings of a world that wasn't ours. We were too enthralled with our own world, the valley, to care. We were confident, assured, cooler than we would ever be again. That week, Michael fell for my girlfriend's roommate. The four of us went to dinner, and Michael did cartwheels on the street as we walked home. Back in the valley next week, he would have a story to tell.

Michael smelled. He gave up showers, underwear, and deodorant at Deep Springs, favoring swimming holes, fewer laundry loads, and desert sage. He had three retro T-shirts on a three-week rotation: one shirt per week. His favorite, a pink children's shirt, grew yellow in the armpits. His stench once led to the evacuation of a Student Body meeting. Michael never apologized for stinking; we just got used to it. Halfway through our first year at Deep Springs, I spent a week camping with Michael on the side of a snowy Sierra peak. The foulness of our two-man tent qualified as an ecological disaster, but our pungency made Michael proud. It meant that we were working hard at living, that we weren't afraid of who and what we were. I didn't use deodorant either that week and I'm sure I smelled just as bad as Michael. In the end, he convinced a few of us that body odor was in. I remember one classmate's excitement that his girlfriend said she was turned on by his "gorilla-like" scent. I still don't wear deodorant or underwear. Perhaps it's a kind of olfactory tribute to Michael.

The week before our second year began, Michael and I drove from Chicago to Deep Springs in my family's battered minivan. We hadn't seen each other since April: Michael had taken May and June off to farm and fall in love in Wisconsin; I'd spent July and August chasing a solar eclipse and a beautiful girl in Romania. We told each other stories across Iowa and Nebraska as miles passed and the minivan deteriorated. By the time we reached Utah, the car shuddered violently every time it accelerated. A mechanic warned that we could lose an axle at high speed, but we drove on with urgency, sure that we could make it to Deep Springs and fix it ourselves. Coming down through Carson City, Nevada, Michael told me about Cedar Rose, his hippie-child farming companion who told him that he "smelled wonderfully, like the desert." I was incredulous, struggling just then to tolerate the smell of his feet on the dashboard. I told Michael about Joey, a Williams student in Romania who'd taken to my Shakespeare quotations and accounts of castrating calves. Our success seemed proof that Deep Springs was working. We were riding high in a precariously unsafe vehicle, fueling our confidence on pride and dreams for the year.

As we climbed the last mountain pass before the Deep Springs Valley, the car, still convulsing, began to overheat. I opened the interior vents hoping to cool the engine. I was convinced that the car shuddered less at high speeds, so I drove recklessly around hairpin turns and between narrow rocky chasms. We passed piņons and junipers, climbing higher, both of us dripping with sweat. I asked him if he thought we'd make it; he said we would. He was beaming, singing along with the Grateful Dead to "Going Down the Road Feeling Bad." At the top of the pass, a breathtaking view of our valley appeared before us. Across the valley, we could see Deep Spring's tiny patch of green. I eased the car into low gear to take the downhill, relaxing my firm grip on the wheel. Michael reached over and slid his soggy hand into mine. It was rough, calloused, alive. We were two brothers, coasting home.

When next I held that hand, I could feel the warmth slipping from it. A curse had come to the valley; someone had fucked up. In the days of tearless silence that followed, I saw that Deep Springs was a gamble and that Michael had lost. There were risks--we had all signed the waivers--but the risks had never carried consequences, only narrative potential. Our near-misses were making us into tougher, more reliable, more desirable men with the stories and scars to show it, but something had gone wrong. Michael's death was not a story. Instead of making him, it undid him. It undid us all. The price of our stories suddenly became too great to pay, rendering them worthless. I was overwhelmed, muted. I called Joey, told her what happened in few words, and then pressed the phone tightly to my face, unable to speak or cry. I saw Cedar Rose at the funeral in Chicago, hugged her, and wanted to tell her that Michael had felt proud about "the smell of the desert," but I couldn't. I failed to tell Michaelšs parents how much I had loved him.

It wasn't just about Michael that I couldn't talk. A full year later, now at Harvard, I evaded talking about Deep Springs at all. In fact, I evaded almost all talking for fear of having to admit attending Deep Springs, an admission I felt sure would lead to talking about Michael. All the narrative arcs of my life bent toward that moment on the hill, that steering wheel in Michael's hand. I hid behind books most nights, feigning diligence but actually fearing storytelling. I avoided associating with the other Deep Springers also at Harvard. My inability to talk about Deep Springs isolated me because most of who I was remained tied up in untellable tales. Michael's death trivialized everything about those two years. I mourned for Michael in tearless and solitary silence. I thought often of his parents and their hurt, their painful second-guessing at not forcing Michael to go to Stanford, their rueful acceptance of the risk that was Deep Springs. In the minivan, his hand had felt so alive, so happy. In Chicago at the funeral, a casket handle replaced that hand, slipping from mine as Michael vanished into the earth. I felt as though I too were vanishing, becoming a speechless apparition trapped behind forbidden stories.

Nine months passed between Michael's death and my graduation from Deep Springs. Every day I woke up and stared out my window at the pink morning light reflected on the snow-capped Sierra. It was a cruel tableau: Muir's Range of Light far in the distance, the nearer, lower, drier White-Inyo Mountains at the opposite side of the valley, and then, panning across the valley to my room: eight miles of desert scrub brush, the blue farmhouse, the green stretch of field four, an electric fence, and, finally, Michael's grape arbor. He had started it on the grassy patch outside my window the week before the accident. Michael's father completed the project with stoic resolve when he traveled to the valley to make arrangements for sending his son's body home to Chicago. Between September and March, the arbor remained barren--it was too late to plant the grape shoots--but by graduation in June, four-foot creepers had begun to climb the iron uprights, transforming steel gray into pillars of shining green.

Deep Spring is built on dreams and projects, and each project tells a story. Michael's grape arbor was a classic example; it was neither requested nor necessary--Michael just thought it would be fun. It was an act of imagination, a decision that building a grape arbor would be a good thing, not just for the finished product, but for the personal growth and devotion involved in creating it. Projects tell stories of boys who actually believe that hammering a nail or driving a tractor will make them into men. At 18 and 19, we were better dreamers than builders, and most projects disintegrated after their architects graduated. Students have built, and burned down, four mountainside saunas. The hills south of campus conceal the ruins of several hermit shacks, student-built sanctuaries from the grind of life on the farm. But, despite the frequent failures, these projects embody the history and efforts of those who dreamed them. The entire valley is littered with such stories, the ambitions of students trying to make themselves better by making things. Projects always become the object of a tale, even unfinished projects. In the months immediately preceding my graduation from Deep Springs, I worked in the garden every afternoon, planting the summer and fall harvests, neither of which I would reap. I came to believe that we are always spending our time planting gardens, gardens that, for whatever reason, we may never harvest. At the time, I found welcome consolation in that thought.

But it's hard for me to be consoled now, when, sitting in Harvard Yard, I remember visiting Michael's parents. Six months after the accident, I stopped in Chicago as part of a college tour to decide where I would go after Deep Springs. I spent one silent and uncomfortable night in the Pihos's fastidiously, almost gaudily, decorated home. The Pihos's were awfully gracious and friendly, but I knew as soon as I entered the house that I shouldn't have come. As we talked casually, I was consumed by guilt. How dare I walk into this home and talk about current events at Deep Springs or my college plans for next fall? Every word seemed to aggravate the Pihos's hurt. In the morning, Mr. Pihos drove me to the gravesite. I cried when I saw the site, bawling not for my own loss, but for the waist-high mound of dead, dying, and fresh flowers piled above the plot where we'd buried Michael. Every day for six months, Mr. Pihos had visited the site in the morning before work; every afternoon, Mrs. Pihos had stopped to leave a floral tribute to her stolen son. The pile had grown higher and higher, a towering monument to enduring grief so tall that it obscured Michael's tombstone. I can still see this garden of bouquets, planted by a mother's love, expanding and decaying unharvested above Michael's grave. I wonder if unfinished stories can become projects. I wonder if the flowers of Mrs. Pihos's devotion are now Michael's story. I remember how, at the gravesite, the smells of living and dying flowers mingled. I cry.

On the hill where Michael died, an old oil drum commemorates his sudden death. Before the accident, it was intended to become the heater in the fifth reincarnation of the Deep Springs sauna. Michael and another classmate, Thomas, had cut a square hole in the drum, torn a cast iron door from a junkyard wood-stove, and welded the door to the drum. When Michael died, Thomas took a blowtorch and etched the words, "You're gonna make me lonesome when you go" in rough letters above the door. On top of the drum rests an orange crescent wrench with a hammer head welded to the handle. It's a multipurpose irrigation tool, perfect for loosening a tight pressure-head screw and banging an errant pipe into line. Michael dreamed it up. He took a collection of handle-less hammers, a few crescent wrenches, and the arc welder and built irrigation tools for the five-man irrigation team. The tool is perfect for the antiquated irrigation lines running at Deep Springs; outside of the valley, it's a curious novelty. I sometimes imagine what passing families, taking an off-road detour en route to Yosemite or Death Valley, make of this incongruous desert artifact. I think about what I would say to them if they found me sitting there today. The monument stands among rough igneous pebbles and desert scrub, perched expertly to command a view of the valley, the lonely highway shooting through it, and the distant Sierra Nevada Range. When the desert blooms in springtime, the hillside exhales the sweet smell of desert sage. It's a powerful, lovely smell. Now, when I try to describe its enthralling aroma, I pause, remembering the sprig I carried to Chicago to place inside Michael's coffin. I take a breath, open my mouth, and say: "Sage is what the desert smells like."