“Cortez Canyon,” an excerpt from Terry Engel’s book, Artifacts, due out next year, is deeply rooted in place. This coming-of-age story brims with subtle tension as the narrator begins to find himself and, in the process, pulls away from his off-the-grid family.
The summer I turned eighteen, the summer before 9/11, my father and brother and I rounded up cattle my father grazed on BLM land without a permit. We had no idea what was coming and how it would change our lives. We’d ridden all day, ranging in and out of side canyons in the early August heat. I liked playing cowboy, and I lived for those rare moments when my father watched my work and nodded, which was the closest he ever gave to offering praise. My father worked each side canyon patiently, beating the brush while I herded the stock he drove out into the main canyon. Jacob was supposed to be working the opposite canyons, but more likely he was looking for cliff dwellings and artifacts, water seeps, access to the canyon rim. He was always sketching in his journal and writing out detailed notes each night by the fire. Drawing maps. Late in the afternoon we set up camp. I rubbed down the horses and fed them, and I came to the fire where my father was frying bacon and eggs for our tortillas. Jacob sat on the ground, using rocks for a backrest. It was still close to a hundred degrees and the sun just setting behind the canyon wall.
They had been going at it for a while. My father was smoking over the skillet, sweat sliding down his temples into a four-day beard. Jacob’s eyes sparkled and I figured he’d smoked a joint before bringing his cattle in.
“I know they got a legitimate complaint,” my father said. “But martyrdom’s not my style.”
I sat on a rock across the fire from them. I was hungry.
“What’s the point of blowing yourself up for freedom?” my father went on.
“I don’t want to kill nobody,” Jacob said. “I was just talking about the technology. If they’d got the car closer to the lobby it would have done a lot more damage. Nichols and McVeigh took out a city block.” Jacob had found a copy of the Anarchist’s Cookbook when he was my age, and he and his buddy Seth experimented with pipe bombs and stole dynamite from construction sites he worked on. They liked to blow up abandoned cars and old shacks.
“I don’t care for what they did in Oklahoma City either. Killing innocent people, especially children. Why do you want to mess around with bombs?”
Jacob shrugged his shoulders.
They were talking about a suicide bomber who had blown himself up in a car outside a disco in Israel, killing teenage girls. I had never heard of Tel Aviv until then, and it confused me that Muslims lived in a Jewish country. During the Waco siege, my father shook his head and stared at his coffee cup while we listened to the radio reports. Jacob fumed. It made sense to me to hate the government for what they did to those people in the compound. But then came Oklahoma City, something so big that I couldn’t get my head around it. Now six years after the bombing, Timothy McVeigh had finally been executed. Jacob took to wearing black in the month since the execution.
“Only thing it does is bring them down on you. I say take care of your land and help your friends and try to live quiet. Government’s not going to mess with you if you don’t call attention to yourself.”
“I know that,” Jacob said, “but I just want to speed up the Lord’s work, since he’s too lazy to send one little precision earthquake down under Glen Canyon Dam.”
My father rolled his eyes, but he grinned around his cigarette and forked out strips of bacon onto the tortillas set on enamel plates. Jacob had given me a worn copy of The Monkey Wrench Gang when I was a kid. I had read it at least a dozen times and Jacob more times than he could count. My father hadn’t read it that I know of, but Jacob had talked about it enough that he knew the plot. As a result, we didn’t mention the Colorado River without quoting Seldom Seen’s prayer that God take out the dam and set the river free. Jacob started in on the sermon I’d been hearing for years. It was his favorite subject, how the government damming the Colorado tied up the Southwest in a concrete bow. He told us again about the maintenance tunnel drilled through rock from the canyon rim down to the base of the dam, guarded by a chain link gate and a padlock. He wouldn’t even have to cut the lock. He’d stolen a keyring out of a nine-passenger van while a Forest Service crew was cruising timber. Most government padlocks were universal, Jacob explained, so forest firefighters could get to a fire, regardless of which agency managed the land.
“You’re not going to take out a dam with a car bomb,” my father said. “You couldn’t do it with an eighteen-wheeler.”
I believed my father in all things natural, animal, mechanical, electrical, and hydraulic. He could get any engine running again, no matter how far gone. He could operate any type of heavy equipment. He could manage any animal, from the meanest dog to the stubbornest mule or pissed-off bull. He had taught me and Jacob how to wire blasting caps and set dynamite charges on various projects around the ranch.
“I don’t need to take it out,” Jacob said. “I just need to weaken it enough to get a little crack started close to the edge. Water pressure will do the work for us.”
My father gave a noncommittal nod and cracked eggs in the skillet. Jacob went on talking about the tunnel that led to the maintenance station at the base of the dam. The gate at the top was chain link and not guarded—before the Twin Towers nobody really thought it was necessary. Tourists walked all over the dam during the day. Jacob could load a U-Haul with fertilizer soaked with diesel fuel, the panel sides of the box lined with welded-steel plates to concentrate the force of the blast; wait until late at night and cut the lock on the gate and drive to the bottom; park it and lock it and jog to the top where he would be picked up and be fifty miles away before the charge went off. No one would be there to get hurt in the explosion, he said. The blast just had to weaken a seam, enough to let all that pressurized water at the base of the dam work its way through the cracks and fissures, eating away at the canyon’s sandstone walls, sedimentary rock that never should have been expected to anchor a concrete dam holding back years of Rocky Mountain snowmelt. The hydro-engineers would inspect the dam and the canyon walls after the explosion, noting the increased amount of water seeping through the sandstone day by day, growing from a trickle to a pressurized spray to a fire hose, and then a flume. There would be time to warn people downstream. Marinas and campsites and commercial rafters and Phantom Ranch would be evacuated. They’d have to draw down Lake Mead to protect the Hoover Dam. Eventually the river would push apart the dam and set itself free.
“I don’t think they could pour concrete fast enough to hold it together,” Jacob said. He went on thinking out loud about how long it would take for Glen Canyon to recover from almost forty years as a bathtub.
“It’ll never be the same,” my father said. “Not in our lifetimes. Maybe in a thousand years. The beaches would come back, and then the vegetation. Bighorns and deer and everything else would come back down the side canyons once the plants got ahold. No telling what sort of old Indian sites you might find up in there, but they’d be ruined.”
The sun had dropped below the canyon and dark fell quickly. The temperature dropped ten degrees. Before long there’d be a welcome chill.
“I got enough sites to last a lifetime,” Jacob said. “I just want all those houseboats and water skiers and tourists to go away. Too many people. Get rid of that lake and most of ‘em would have to find somewhere else to piss in the water.”
“There’d still be rafters going down the river,” I said.
My father and Jacob looked at me like they’d forgotten I was there.
“They ain’t hurting anybody,” my father said. “Bring in a little money to keep the hippie raft guides in marijuana”—he gave Jacob a look—“but I guess that’s okay too. Government’s got no business telling people what they can smoke or drink. They keep their hand in everything, selling permits so people can put a rubber boat in a free-flowing river like they own the damn thing.”
“I wouldn’t mind getting on as a raft guide,” Jacob said. “Two weeks through the Grand Canyon, take a week off, do it again. Work six months a year and play in the desert the rest.”
“You barely work six months a year now,” my father said.
Jacob winked at me. “You row a boat all day and cook and bow and scrape to the customers, but once they’re settled you drink beer and sit around the fire. Women take those trips just to hook up with a rugged outdoorsman.”
“You see any of them in this bunch?” my father asked. He pushed a plate-sized tortilla loaded with bacon and eggs and chilis and onions at me.
“What about Penny?” I asked.
“What about her?” Jacob was still smiling, but he pulled his black Caterpillar hat low over his eyes and crossed his arms.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing hell,” he said. I rolled the tortilla so I could get my mouth around it.
“I didn’t work you boys hard enough today,” my father said, handing Jacob a tortilla.
“Go ahead,” Jacob said.
“Go to hell.” I stood and set my plate on the rock and dusted the seat of my jeans.
“Go ahead.” Jacob was a dog with its hackles up.
“I thought you two were together,” I said. “I figured you’d get married some time.”
“Did I say we weren’t?”
My father chuckled and sat back with his own tortilla, watching me and Jacob like we were television. I walked into the dark, toward the horses.
Penny and Jacob had been on again/off again for years. She was Jacob’s age, and it seemed like they’d been together forever. She talked to me like I was the same age as them. She got a kick out of flirting with me in front of Jacob. When I was fourteen it was her idea to take me backpacking up the Los Pinos. The valley had been cut by a glacier that pushed the earth ahead of it like the blade of a bulldozer, so the sides rose steep and thick with evergreens running to the ridgeline backed by mountains, and the river flowed fast and flat with only a few small rapids. It was early September and aspen groves were turning yellow high on the ridge. Penny hiked in a long skirt and sandals, and even with a full backpack she looked good, like the young Linda Ronstadt I’d seen in the music section at the library. She seemed both possible and out of reach at the same time.
The trail was wide enough for horses and well-worn, but it was still early and elk season was a month away so we didn’t see many other people. It was unusual for Jason to go to the mountains above Durango, but Penny wanted water and woods and cool weather instead of red rocks and sand in Utah, where Jacob always went. He complained that we wouldn’t find any sites in those mountains, but Penny’s vote trumped him. Before long the mountains would be snowbound, she said, and then we could go to the desert, which she liked better in the winter.
After hiking all morning we made camp in a small meadow with tall brown grass framed by aspens on one side and a talus slope on the other. The river flowed a couple hundred feet below us, next to the trail, so we were unlikely to be bothered by anyone. Jacob was mad because he liked to move fast on the trail and Penny liked to dawdle, picking flowers and looking at rocks and running her hands along the trunks of trees because she liked the texture. But she found a falling down log cabin with a pile of rusted cans decayed in the woods across the meadow, and she took Jacob over there to look around, which improved his mood. There was nothing of interest inside the cabin except for an old wood stove. Jacob tinkered with it and thought aloud about packing it out on horseback, but it looked like a lot of work and he wandered off, lighting a joint. When there were no Indian sites to explore, he bored quickly.
We made camp in the shade of the meadow so the afternoons would be cool and the morning sun would drive off the night chill. For Jacob, making camp meant spreading a ground cloth and a sleeping bag and sending me off to find firewood. He said he was a warrior and his only jobs were hunting and fighting. He hated tents because of the weight and the rustle of nylon and not being able to see the sky or hear approaching danger. We used blankets instead of sleeping bags for the same reason. Listening to Jacob you’d think we were old-time mountain men and enemies lurked behind every tree. If it rained or the wind was really blowing cold, he would set up a tarp, but that was all. After I got enough firewood to last the night—it didn’t take much because Jacob only allowed a small fire—I sat on my sleeping bag and read a paperback and slapped mosquitoes. Jacob grabbed his sleeping bag and pulled Penny to her feet and led her across the meadow to a patch of sun.
I watched her cross the meadow. She laughed and every few steps she leaned in and bit Jacob on the ear or pushed him to throw him off balance. He slapped her on the butt and she yelled at him, but she was still laughing, so she liked him doing it. They sank into the grass and a flock of ravens scattered from a dead pine on the edge of the clearing, squawking. Mosquitoes buzzed over the sound of the falling river. The sound of a running river always tricked me into thinking I heard voices. The wind blew high up in the mountains and the aspen leaves quaked and rattled like the sound of sleet falling on a roof. None of it covered the sounds Jacob and Penny made.
I tried to get back into the book, a worn copy of When the Legends Die. I had read it more times than I could count, but we were in Ute country and it told the story of a Ute Indian and his wife who flee a company lumber town after the man kills another Indian for stealing his lunch bucket. The man and woman are tired of working for the company and white ways, so they run to the mountains with their son Thomas Black Bull and hide in the mountains and teach him the old ways to hunt and pray and how to make peace with the spirit of the deer after killing it. But his parents die, leaving Thomas to live alone, until an old reservation Indian brings him down from the mountains to go to the Indian school, where they cut his hair and make him learn about modern life. I liked the book because at fourteen, I wanted no part of modern life. My parents and brother had me convinced that it was a matter of time before the government came in to take away our freedoms and our lifestyle, just the way they had done to the Navajo, Hopi, Ute, and Zuni a hundred years before. I pictured myself living in the mountains and knowing the land the way Tom Black Bull knew the land.
Of course, my version of that life included Penny, and I imagined her doing with me what she was doing with Jacob across the meadow.
I couldn’t not hear the sounds they made, so I got up and took my book down to the river and hopped from rock to rock to a large boulder several feet from the bank. The water flowing past drowned out other sound, and I took off my boots and dangled my feet in the cold water, a luxury I didn’t often get backpacking with Jacob in Utah. I tried to get back into the book, but I couldn’t focus and instead watched a late hatch of insects hover over the water, bringing trout to the surface where they dotted the smooth fast-flowing water with rings that quickly washed away.
I didn’t hear Penny wade out to me. Her shadow fell across the water and I looked up to see her holding her sandals by the straps in one hand and her long skirt gathered in the other.
“Got room?”
I scooted over and she stepped onto my rock and sat beside me. I caught Penny’s scent: patchouli, sweat, pot and tobacco, wood smoke, and the warm smell from the meadow.
“I figured you were down here.”
I showed her the book. “I like the sound of the river.”
She took a joint from the pocket of her flannel shirt and held it out to me. “I brought you a present to make up for abandoning you.”
“Where’s Jacob?”
“He fell asleep. Mosquitos will eat him up.”
“They make the fish happy.” We watched the river catch the last light. The riverbed was dark now, where the earlier light had shown off the rocks and gravel and sand bars of the bottom just a few minutes before. More trout were on the rise and the fast smooth current looked like rain sprinkling across the surface.
Penny took out a book of matches and lit the joint and took a long pull and held it. She reached and took my chin and pulled my face to hers and blew a long stream of smoke into my mouth. She called it shotgunning. I had seen her do it to Jacob. She held my eyes with hers, sparkling and green blue, her pupils dilated to a full moon. Her lips were pursed and the smoke a scented mystery. Her hand on my chin, the light pressure of her fingertips. So close.
It took me by surprise but I recovered in time to breathe in and hold her breath.
She leaned back and smiled, enjoying my discomfort. I blew out the smoke and coughed. Penny took another hit and passed me the joint. I took a long pull. I’d never smoked marijuana before, only cigarettes stolen from my father. I wanted to be cool, to be with her the way Jacob was with her, funny and in control, smart about the woods and canyons and the world, a little dangerous. I passed the joint back to her. It had burned down so she pinched it between her fingertips, but I fumbled the exchange and she almost dropped it into the river.
“Shit,” she said, and laughed a goofy laugh. She smushed out the burnt end and dropped the roach into her shirt pocket. “That’s powerful stuff. One hit wonder.”
“Maui Wowie.” I’d heard Jacob call it that.
“You bet your ass.”
I felt time slowing down and everything around me moving in slow motion.
Penny caught me staring at her breasts, the deep cleavage beneath the men’s tank top she wore under her flannel. She laughed and adjusted her shirt. I looked away and pretended to scan the slope across the river the way a mountain man would look for enemies and game.
“Hey,” Penny called me back. She stood on the rock and dropped her skirt. “Let’s wash some of the dirt off before it gets too dark.” She pulled off her flannel so she was wearing only panties and the tank top. The shirt had been cropped to the bottom of her rib cage, but her breasts lifted the fabric away from her flat stomach.
Penny stepped into the water and squealed at the cold. The river came to her knees and she turned her back to me.
“Come on. I won’t watch.”
She waded out to her waist, the water breaking around her, while I balanced awkwardly to pull off my pants and shirt. She held her palms flat against the flowing water and spun slowly, her hands skimming the water like a skier. She seemed fascinated by the motion of the water under her hands. I dropped and slipped into the water. The cold took my breath. Penny noticed me then and giggled in that way that made her feel possible. She took my hand and pulled me out to her, then turned and slid into the water, facing upstream. She dipped under and came up swimming against the current with long, graceful strokes, but the water pushed her downstream and after losing a few yards she stood up, struggling to keep her balance against the push. Her shirt clung to her breasts as she waded back to me. Her eyes were bright in the falling light and water drops clung to her nose and chin. She pulled her hands through her hair and dropped it behind, then leaned in and kissed me on the lips, and I felt the brush of her breasts against my chest. After what felt like forever she pulled back and waded back to the rock, collected her clothes and sandals, and climbed up the bank. She stood there a moment, shaking in the fast-cooling air, grinned that lopsided grin, and started back to camp.
I had watched her go, then dipped into the water and swam against the current as she had done, doing no better holding my position than Penny had. I had stood and waded to the rock, my feet slipping on the rocks, retrieved my clothes, and followed Penny back to camp like a lost puppy.
* * *
When I came back to the fire Jacob poked my father in the ribs and nodded toward me. He made a jacking off motion with his hand and hooted.
My father frowned. He didn’t like sex talk.
“I been wondering,” my father said around the last of his tortilla. “What are you going to do this winter, mister high school graduate?”
“GED,” Jacob said.
“At least I got one.”
“All you did was get your name on a legal document. One more record they got on you. You don’t need a diploma to work for cash.”
“He knows that,” my father said.
Jacob sat back and pushed the brim of his cap back so we could see his eyes. The black CAT stood out against the yellow patch. He put his fingers to his shirt pocket for the joint I knew was there, but he looked at my father, who was still watching me, and thought better of it.
“Point being I won’t have much work for you after September,” my father said. “You want money you’ll need to hire out, or else go hunt for pots with Jacob.”
“He’s afraid of offending the Indian spirits,” Jacob said around a bite of tortilla.
“Not the spirits you got to worry about. It’s undercover agents pretending to be art dealers from Taos.”
Jacob dismissed my father’s worries with a wave of his hand.
“So, what are you going to do?” my father asked.
It was full dark now, and I hoped to put him off long enough he’d quit and go to sleep. It had been a long day riding. I thought about another time with my father and Jacob, when I was nine or maybe ten. It was a couple of weeks before Christmas, and we rappelled down into a three-room cliff dwelling set in a small alcove. It was perfect. Built by Ancestral Puebloans—my father still called them Anasazi—a thousand years earlier. The stone walls of the rooms were tight. We found some good pots. My father held up one and said, “Here’s my down payment on a new frontend loader.” Jacob came out of another room with a broken ladle, black on white with ziz-zag patterns running up the handle. They scoured the rest of the site and compared their finds, wrapped the good pieces in our sweatshirts and placed them carefully in a pack and left the broken shards. My father found a sunny spot and lay down for a nap, resting before having to ascend the ropes to the top of the canyon. Jacob sat on a stone wall and wrote in his journal, diagraming the dwelling floor and updating his site map.
I wandered over the site, running my hand over the stone walls and handling the flint shards flaked from an arrowhead or stone axe. At that age I had just begun to think about time and the days and years of sunshine and rain and snow and frost and wind and how the room hadn’t changed—other than the shifting of gravity and the compressions of the earth and the slow erosion of the wind—since men and women and children, most likely a family, had stood in this exact spot. I wondered about who they were and what they talked about. What they thought. Were they happy? Did they find beauty in the canyons the way I did? Did they dream of a better life, perhaps as part of the large community on Mesa Verde? Who did they pray to? How frightened were they when the fires died down at night and the fear of enemies finding a way into their home rose, or how worried were they when the temperatures dropped below zero and spring and the promise of new fields seemed so far away?
Running my hand into a recess of the back wall, I found a figure woven from split twigs. It fit easily into my palm, and it looked like a bighorn. I imagined a father weaving the piece on a cold winter night, working by firelight, thinking about the expression on his son or daughter’s face when he presented her the toy. I imagined a kid my age. The figure would make the long winter bearable. I imagined the boy standing on a rock and tucking the sheep into the recess to keep his brothers and sisters from finding it and playing with it. And I imagined the pain the boy must have felt, when an enemy or a drought or hunger or some other threat drove the family away, and how he must have begged to go back and retrieve it after realizing it had been left behind.
Jacob’s eyes lit up when I showed him the sheep, and he and my dad spent the rest of that trip scouring the site for more. I’d planned to put the piece back. It felt wrong to take something that had been a part of the site for hundreds of years, preserved in the dry air of the desert. I can’t really explain what I felt at the time, but years later, when a poet I knew in grad school told me how he cried standing in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey, that timeless sense of beauty and the sacred, I knew I had felt the same thing fifteen years earlier. My father took the sheep and sold it for a lot of money, a new front-end loader’s worth, and I lost something I had felt for him before that time.
“You ain’t sitting at home all day,” he reminded me, pulling me away from the dwelling and back to the fire. “I let this one get away with that when he was your age and look where he is now.”
Jacob chuckled. “I never sat at home. It just pissed you off not knowing where I was. Didn’t have nobody to yell at come five in the morning and time to get to work. He was too little and always reading a book or daydreaming.”
“So?” My father stretched out in the dirt and lit a cigarette. He leaned back on his hands and stretched his neck and I could see by his silhouette he was studying the sky, probably thinking about the weather more than my future.
“I’m going to college,” I said. “Over in Boulder.”
The quiet felt like a forest after a gunshot. Then Jacob laughed like someone who’d taken a minute to get the joke. The way my father studied the early stars against the light afterglow in the west, I thought he might not have heard me
“Bullshit,” Jacob said, his voice uncertain.
“I am.”
“College,” my father finally said. “Boulder. How do you figure that?”
“I did good on the SAT. I got some scholarships and a grant for low income and first-generation college students. I don’t have to pay anything except for room and board and I got a student loan for that.”
“The SAT?”
“I studied for it at the library. They got books that help get you ready.”
“Ain’t no way,” Jacob said.
“I did good on the test,” I said. A 1440. I’d wanted to tell someone, wanted them to be proud.
“I think you mean you did well,” Jacob said.
“Well.”
My father remembered the cigarette burning in his hand. He pulled on it and flicked it into the fire. He leaned forward and took his hat off and rubbed his head, then put the hat back on. He looked at me.
“First generation student. Low income. That means you told them how much money I make?”
Jacob laughed and lit his joint. Nothing he did that night would matter now.
“No sir.”
“How do you figure? It’s my income determines all that.”
“I didn’t use any of your information. I got a dependency override to get my financial aid.”
“You what?”
“A dependency override. It means you’re not responsible for me financially. I’m on my own.”
I had never gone to a real school. My mother taught me all she could in the kitchen, and when she couldn’t teach me any more I got the rest of what I knew from books in the library in La Plata. I had gotten advice from a counselor at La Plata High on days I was supposed to be reading. She’d suggested I talk about my family’s politics in my application letter. She’d wanted me to spice it up, talk about living off the grid without electricity or running water and studying by candlelight just like Abraham Lincoln. She told me that the liberals at Boulder would eat that stuff up. They loved it when poor kids had to overcome obstacles to score so well on the SAT. I had written the letter, but I hadn’t lied.
“You know I never bought a license to drive or marry. I don’t register my guns. I don’t register my cattle. I pay cash for everything and keep my business quiet so I don’t pay taxes. Now you’re saying you got a problem with how I raised you?”
Every year, after the hay was done for the summer and we got everything settled for winter, my father would tell me to put away my schoolbooks and load horses into the trailer. Even when Jacob was still school age, he barely studied and nothing my mother said to him could make him complete the curriculum we got through the mail from Denver. My father gave us our real education in the Utah canyons. I loved to ride, but my father always said, “You see more on your feet than you do in a saddle.” Ten times an hour he’d dismount and crouch, reins in one hand, and he’d motion me forward and I’d crouch beside him. He taught me how to read the tracks and scat of bobcats, coyotes, mountain lions, jackrabbits, bighorn sheep, lizards, rattlesnakes, and mule deer. He showed me where animals had grazed on plants or rubbed rocks and trees. He pointed out snakes and lizards, fossils and dinosaur tracks, all invisible to me. Jacob stood back and scratched himself and yawned, having been through the training eight years ahead of me, but as bored as he looked his eyes were never still and he scanned the cliffs above us and often nudged my father and pointed out a cliff dwelling a hundred feet above our heads, and my father would stop his lesson and look up, annoyed, and he’d take out a folded map and make a mark and then go on teaching.
The Utah desert: The ground a checkerboard of slickrock and sandy washes and a living crust of cyanobacteria, sheer cliffs eroded into the Colorado Plateau Uplift and a maze of steep narrow canyons fanning out like veins in a leaf. Thousands of years of water trying to find a way to the Gulf of California through the Colorado River. My father knew the geology of the plateau and he explained it, but more important, he knew the history. He talked about Mormons and cowboys and the Utes and Navajo and how they lived in hard country, and how they felt about the country and how they fought for it. He talked about the uranium boom that followed World War II and how every jackass in the country bought an army surplus jeep and a Geiger counter, planning to become a millionaire. He talked about nuclear weapons tests melting the sand into glass. He talked about the growth of the BLM and the federal government takeover of the public lands, and how the BLM and the Corps of Engineers raced to dam every river in the west and divide and allocate every drop of water flowing off the Rocky Mountain snowmelt. The Mormons and ranchers and the Indians felt a connection to the land that came through work and hardship, living and dying. The others came to make quick money, but they did not belong.
“No sir,” I said. “I got no problem with any of it.”
The bulk of my application letter was about my love for natural history and Indian studies, about being a hard worker, and how I thought a university education could expand my perspective. I got Mrs. Guerin, one of the librarians, to write a letter about how much I read and how she was always helping guide me to new resources. She said I had an “inquisitive” mind that couldn’t be bound by region or family traditions. The high school counselor had been right. I got in.
“Does your mother know?”
“No sir.”
My father stood and walked into the dark toward the horses.
“You done it now,” Jacob said. “Want some of this?”
He held out the joint. I shook my head.
“What do you want to go over there for?” He sounded more hurt than puzzled. “Bunch of rich assholes. Living off daddy’s trust fund.”
“You never been there.”
“Don’t need to. Anyway, what are you going to study?”
“I don’t know. Geology. Anthropology maybe. Indian stuff.”
The firelight lit his smirk, then the narrowing of his eyes as he drew on his joint. The tip flared and he exhaled. I thought about Penny on the Los Pinos River.
“You don’t know enough about Indians already?”
“It’s more than that.”
“You think getting away from us is going to change who you are?”
“I’m fine with who we are.”
“Right.”
The horses nickered and I heard my father’s footsteps. I braced myself, but he walked into the light cast by the small fire and sat on his blanket with a grunt. I waited while he pulled his boots and covered himself.
“Better get some sleep,” he mumbled. In a few minutes he was snoring.
Jacob stood and stretched. I felt him lean in close and I realized he was holding the butt of the joint out to me. “Finish this off, college boy. There’s a lot more of this where you’re heading.”
I finished the joint. Jacob was snoring not long after that, but I lay on my blanket and stared up into the sky, my mind going everywhere and nowhere at once.
It was different with my father after that. Different with Jacob too. In the weeks before I left for Boulder, my father talked to me like an employee, a hand he hired to bring in the hay. Orders. Criticism. Not a wasted breath. Hurt. Jacob couldn’t get his head around the idea of voluntarily moving to the most liberal city in Colorado and spending eight months out of the year sitting in a classroom and writing papers and studying for exams. A week before I left he took off for Utah with vague promises of coming back to say goodbye, but the day came and I loaded my jeep. My mother packed sandwiches for the drive and gave me a hug and stood by the jeep while I made sure everything was lashed down. My father stood on the porch and watched until it was time to say goodbye, and then he just gave me a kind of nod and turned back to the house.
A Mississippi native, Terry Engel grew up dreaming of white-water rivers and mountains, and he has traveled widely and lived in Tennessee, Colorado, and Alaska. He has worked in the particleboard and wood preservation industries as quality control and production supervisor, and as a lineman building high voltage powerlines. He earned a PhD. in writing from the University of Southern Mississippi and his work has appeared in a number of literary journals and magazines, including American Literary Review, The Sun, Mississippi Review, Georgetown Review, Open City, Buffalo Spree, Cream City Review, Dreamers Literary Magazine, Cave Region Review, and River River Journal.
Engel’s first novel, Natchez at Sunset, was published in 2021. His novel Artifacts won the Wolfson Prose Prize and is forthcoming in 2026. Another novel, tentatively titled Union Ticket, will be published by Stillhouse Press in 2027.
Engel teaches creative writing and literature at Harding University in Arkansas.