“Life Elevated” read the sign. Welcome to Utah. We drove on. An ebullient mood filled the car as the red desert, speckled with muted green sage brush, flew past the window. The southwest felt like freedom, even to, or perhaps especially to, two 20 something college kids on a road trip.
I eased my car from the freeway and we cruised past the muddy brown waters of the Colorado River, cutting its way between the red sand stone cliffs. Driving until, after a time we set up camp at a little backcountry spot I knew, just outside the town of Moab – a small southwest tourist town slug between low bluffs, barely making an indent in the oppressive blue sky.
It was a weeknight and we were miles from the closest people, but had everything we needed. Campfire, great company, and a few beers to round out the night.
We drank and relaxed in the way that only those who have shared the traumas of public high school can. Stories wound into the night on the tails of embers. Soon it was late, we doused our fire and crawled into the tent. The sky was brilliantly clear, and the only sounds for miles was the wind softly whispering through the skeletal trees of the desert. Laying awake I heard, in the distance, a sound unlike anything I’d ever heard before. It was so perplexing that even years later I’m afraid that I continue to fail in my endeavor to describe it accurately.
The sound drifted through the canyon walls, it’s source obscured by echo and reverberation. A low, rumbling, metallic, howl drifted through the camp. Then – silence.
Assuming it was a one-off I tried to roll over and fall asleep as my friend already had. But then again, came the sound. It sounded alive, and like whatever was making the sound was in pain. Laboriously droning out it’s final death gasps to the heavens.
My friend, partially roused by the noise, rolled over in her sleeping bag and mumbled “they’re killing it” before she drifted easily back to sleep.
I’m sure it’s gratuitous to say that this didn’t help my anxiety.
For hours I lay awake, too scared to leave the imagined safety of our tent. Too scared to sleep. The sound came again and again, rumbling up through the canyons, across the lonely desert and into my terrified ears. A belabored, struggling, noise, that interposed a sense of foreboding into the stars and wind. The shadows outside our tent were abruptly filled with childhood monsters – born from the unknown and given form within my frightened and drunken brain
For hours I sat listening to the noise – I could tell it wasn’t getting closer, and in the early morning stillness the sound suddenly stopped. My ears, my body strained with the effort of listening, slouched forward in my sleeping bag, I finally had to accept that the howl had ceased.
The next morning as the sun rose to blazing intensity in the clear sky we hiked into the canyon, towards the source of the noise. Buoyed into curiosity by the light of day. What we ultimately found was: nothing. No people camped further in, no wounded animals, no industrial machinery. The only thing out there was miles of red desert snaking between canyon walls and sandstone monoliths.
Whatever had made the disquieting sounds clearly didn’t feel the need to stick around until sunrise.
Today, after all those years, that sound has found a place, deep within my memories, where I can still hear it floating over the dusty red earth. But I’m no closer to understanding it’s source, and – I accept – that I likely never will.