For Mom, Who Asked for Description

Lisa Dusenbery

Mom asked me to write descriptions of the places I’m going. “Don’t just send photos. Send emails, letters, words.”

I’m moving to the desert with my friend, but because of Covid, I need to quarantine for fourteen days first. Thanks to the generosity of another friend, I have a place to stay in the San Jacinto mountains. I had agreed to send my mom descriptions, but when I get here, stunned by the stillness and the beauty, I let the camera do the work. Because who has time to set the scene when a phone can do it so crisply and efficiently? And who has time to describe when there’s so much to do. I need to work, make money, take a mail-in Covid test, respond to overdue emails, sew up the hole in my favorite shirt, use up a five pound bag of carrots before they go bad, decide which terry cloth robe to buy while it’s still on sale, finish two essays, learn the viral Megan Thee Stallion “Body” dance, fit in 10,000 steps a day, stay in touch with friends, tell the people I love that I love them, learn how to sing, stay moisturized. 

But I told my mom that I would write descriptions, and now it’s day twelve of quarantine. I’ll be down in the desert in two days. So here goes. 

Every day I sit out on the back deck, and even though I’m still basically a stranger to this place, this particular spot is starting to feel familiar—I know when the sun makes in over the mountain’s edge, which trees the woodpeckers go to work on, where the shadows land. I don’t know the name of most of the flora and fauna: I see everything mostly as texture and color and shape. 

Emily Rose Michaud, Cosmos (Alcove series), 4'x4', 2003.

I feel that I’m inside of an expansive bowl—the mountains curving around me like the edge of a dish that’s been chipped, exposing a jagged rim. There are the trees in the distance that coat the inner curve: variations on green with specks of yellow, orange, and purple. There’s the white-grey rock that breaks through the vegetation near the chipped lip, like enamel that’s peeling to expose the ceramic beneath. There are the trees inside the bowl with me, the ones I can almost reach out and touch. There’s very little wind, so the leaves never move much beyond a quiver. There are birds above me and at eye level, dipping in and out of the bowl. There’s a family of deer that cautiously tiptoes around just below me. Above us all: so much blue. 

I want to stay in here longer, to fill up on daylight, but I need to get to the dump before it closes. And by the time I get back, the sun has begun to set—too soon, on this last day of November. Now the bowl begins to empty and become something else. The blue of the sky deepens; the white rock turns golden, the trees along the rim turn a darker green; the trees near me at the base transform from green to black. Eventually, without the myriad shades of green, the overlapping textures, I no longer have a sense that there’s a bottom. As the sun abandons us, I’m no longer safely suspended: I’m just a woman alone in the woods. 

Unable to see near or far, my ears are attuned to every sound, and as if to fill in for what I can no longer see, my brain shows me other images, other theories: The strange man who startled me by flying his drone near the house (he’ll surely be back to murder me tonight). The surly man who seemed to consider running me over the other day (he’ll track me down to finish the job). The bubbly woman at the car rental who, when I said I was driving up to the mountains to quarantine, mentioned the name of a horror movie and then apologized (I hadn’t seen that particular movie, but I got the idea). The friendly woman hiking with her husband who excitedly told me they’d just seen deer and then told me to be careful out here alone—I mean, not because of the deer. The undefined danger—not deer—which we both seemed to understand accompanies aloneness: that’s what I think of as the sturdy base of this place dissolves into darkness. 

But it’s older than all that, too. This recurring nighttime dread reminds me of being a child, trying to sleep: Nine or ten, alert to every sound, eyes wide open, my body bracing for … something. At some point, I’ll begin pulling out my eyelashes, inspecting every eyelash, rolling each one between my thumb and index finger, occasionally placing one on my tongue and running it along the roof of my mouth. An elaborate little world of sensation, a closed loop, a trance that the fear can’t penetrate. Until eventually I’ll snap out of it, running my finger along the place where the lashes should be—the fear returning and now with regret and shame. Maybe, finally, I’ll give up on going it alone and sheepishly sneak into my parents’ room, curling up against my mom’s body. 

Now—well into adulthood, my cerebral cortex fully developed—here’s that fear. And it’s standing between me and the full moon, which I’m waiting to see rise over the mountains. With no body to settle next to, and—mercifully—without the escape of pulling out my eyelashes, I try thinking: I tell myself I’m not in danger, I tell my body to unclench. But logic isn’t working tonight, and eventually I give up on the moon and focus on the sun: tomorrow, dawn, everything I’ll be able to see.

Lisa Dusenbery is a writer, editor, and fact-checker.

Emily Rose Michaud is an interdisciplinary artist and educator working at the crossroads of community organization, ecology and civic participation. Her work highlights the social importance of marginal landscapes, engages with land as a living entity, and maintains a practice in ephemeral media. Her body of work encompasses land-based art, installation, drawing, writing, performance, and intervention. Michaud holds a BFA from Concordia University (Montréal) and a Bachelor of Education from the University of Ottawa. She lives in Gatineau, Québec.