Backroads to Myth: How a Desert Hike Sparked My Creative Process and Inspired My Novel
At the edge of the known, I found the bridge between worlds: the road taught my body how to listen, and that listening opened the door to Ophia.
Departure
A three-month sojourn through the Arizona and New Mexico deserts cracked open a seam into a new phase of my creative process. At the airport, I checked a bag that was my room, pantry, and hope chest. Alongside my tent, headlamp, filter, and other necessities, I carried the kind of courage you don’t feel until the plane door opens and there’s no turning back.
I didn’t leave to reinvent myself. I left because the self I kept dragging through the nights alone and the days on fire needed open skies in which to breathe.
New Mexico initiated me with thirst. The maps saying “water source” really meant a cattle tank covered in green algae. I beseeched the gods of filter, phone battery, and shade, knowing that the desert cared little for any other narratives. The desert waits—forever patient—for us to awaken enough to decipher its wind-swept script.
Out there, my mind got quieter, not because I conquered it, but because my body finally had seniority. Feet cried out for fewer rocks. Shoulders begged for a kinder strap. At night, I wrote: Maybe the point isn’t accumulating miles. Maybe I’m here to create a vessel that can hold the trail’s revelations.
There’s always that war within the heart of the traveler, between the allure of the longed-for destination and the beauty of the myriad places in between—all of which, when you think about it, serve as the object of someone else’s most cherished dream in this vast world.
Bridging Worlds
A few months before I left, I’d finished a novel I loved—The Authors of This Dream—about a visionary musician trying to fit the brilliant and somewhat unhinged contours of his mind into a world that kept changing the rules. I planned an art film: interweave hike footage with passages from the book, score it with the music I’d composed in New Mexico years earlier. It would have been beautiful. It also would have kept my creativity consigned to one world.
Walking—relentlessly—cracked that ambition wide open.
The more the landscape taught me to feel first, interpret later, the more I realized why epic fantasy had always tugged at my sleeve. Contemporary memoir opened my heart to wonder; myth let me build a place where wonder could take seed and flourish. The road didn’t oblige me to choose between them. Instead, it offered a bridge.
Desert Vernacular
What happens when the road ahead appears insurmountable, and nothing out of the whole sweep of your past can offer guidance or encouragement? When you come to that juncture, your only salvation lies in finding a new conception of self. Maybe you need to dispense with definitions entirely. The hurdle, after all, might be insurmountable in the eyes of who you were. But that person is not the same one who’s standing here now, and such odds may be entirely meaningless to the person you’re becoming.
That becoming is the creative process.
But my becoming was still raw and new; there weren’t any words, yet, that could demark its character. I didn’t have the language, but the outlines were asserting themselves: a woman from our world whose listening is so honest, whose longing is so keen, that it cracks a seam in reality. Colleen. The friend who stays up with you at 2 a.m. and hears the unspoken fragments of your heart and the currents beneath your words. The twin whose other half lives in a place called Ophia. She arrived like Trail Magic—tentative at first, then insistent.
The pack on my back had made room for her.
By the time I turned back from the harshest stretch of the Continental Divide Trail (due to a dearth of water), I knew this quest hadn’t been a failure. The outer journey had done its job, teaching me to carry less, listen more. I flew home with less film than I’d hoped, and more world than I’d dreamed.
Some nights now, I shoulder that pack in memory and step into the kitchen. I boil water. I listen for the quiet underneath. That’s when Ophia’s maps begin drawing themselves.
