Sand trap

Mom held up a finger as if she’d already won the point. “If I hadn’t worried so much about water, I wouldn’t have thought to drink warm raspberry seltzer all day or refill bottles from the river.” She shook froth back into a frappuccino bottle to make her point. “Because of my heroic worrying, we have enough water for one more hike before we go back to town. In your face, Mr. Know-It-All.”

The next morning, Mom and I slept in until sunrise. Although it was bumpy, now that we knew there wasn’t anything along the way that we hadn’t overcome already, the ride back hadn’t been nearly as scary. Now, we were in a luxurious car kennel halfway back to town where the people-potty still had toilet paper and the Witch had a clear view of the internet. There had even been another car when we got there, although it was gone now. We sat in bed while Mom savored a cup of poop juice made from the last bottle of fresh water. 

“Get a load of these rock formations!” Mom held out the Witch so I could admire the stripes on her screen. “And slot canyons!” She flicked a finger, and I saw what looked like rocky curtains. Mom can’t simply enjoy an adventure as it rolls out around her without stressing about the meaning of it all. These days she decides the meaning ahead of time so it won’t be distracting when our paws hit the dirt. That way, she doesn’t get overwhelmed trying to notice all the cool things she didn’t plan for. It’s not till afterward, when the Witch beams Mom’s memories back at her that she’s able to take it all in, stop grieving that it didn’t go as planned, and enjoy the experience as we lived it.

“You’re not gonna fall for that one again, are you?” I yawned. So soon after the dooms of Oregon Mom had already forgiven the Witch’s dirty tricks and forgotten the heartbreak of broken promises yet again. “What do the reviews say?”

“Who cares?” She turned the Witch protectively toward herself, like I was too dense to understand her genius. “It says that they’re filled with water for most of the year, but after yesterday I’m not about to let a little water get in the way of something I’ve always wanted to see. The photos look pretty tame and most people are babies. I’m sure it’s not that bad.”

She stuffed the packpack with as many bottles of river water and cans of raspberry water as it would hold. Finally, she laced up her running shoes and we jogged eagerly into the morning. 

I trotted with my nose high and ears flopping as the dirt turned to sand. Rocks the shape of gumdrops, decorated with the wispy stripes of candycanes poked out of the sand. They were the size of cars at first, but grew to the size of trucks, then buildings as we ran. 

Mom dashed from one interesting rock to the next like a game of tag, asking me to up-up on each one so she could take Jillians of pictures to capture the memory for later. Every time Mom started running, another rock caught her eye and we had to stop again. 

“I don’t get why you take so many pictures,” I told her as I posed dauntlessly on top of yet another ice-cream-shaped rock. “Are you going to forget what I look like?” 

“If I take more pictures, there’s a better chance that one will turn out the way I want.”

Dogs don’t take pictures, but Mom had tried to explain it before. “Doesn’t a photo capture exactly what the world looks like?” I asked, showing her my bored look in profile. “Instead of taking a hunerd pictures, you could just take one and look at it for longer.” 

“Most of the time your subject is in shadow or blinking, and it ruins the whole thing.” She looked away from my face in the Witch’s screen only long enough to take a knee. “Lookit me. If I take dozens of versions of the same picture… Lookit me, Oscar, over here… and then edit and crop them, I can usually make one look the way I want. Then I can relive the experience with all the parts I didn’t like cropped out.”

Mom stood up, so I released my pose and followed her to a different rock whose colors swirled differently. “That’s silly. Why work so hard to gather zillions of memories if you’re gonna ignore the versions you don’t like? What’s wrong with the world as it is?”

“A photo doesn’t just show the trail as it is, it shows my impression when I saw that spot. C’mere, up-up.” She waved her fingers higher on the rock to show where she wanted me to sit. “Things look different depending on where you stand.”

“But your version is so small that it goes into your pocket and you never look at it again. That’s like having a perfect bone and then forgetting where you buried it.” I half-jumped half-fell off the rock and followed Mom through the sand. The candy-cane walls were beginning to close in, giving her fewer places to stop. “Maybe if you didn’t spend so much time trying to freeze the perfect moment, you could live all the moments in your life at full speed.”

“That’s ridiculous. We don’t run so fast that we can’t see stuff,” she said. “If I look faster, I don’t have to move so slow.” 

“But the beak on that silly hat blocks your view. When you’re looking for where to put your paws, all you see is the trail right in front of you.”

“If you go through life treating every moment exactly the same, life would be as meaningless as this sand we’re running on. The moments you choose to remember determine the path you follow and the person you become.” 

“It’s hard to know what you want when you’re living in the past and the future all the time.”

Mom turned a ferocious look on me and snarled, “Don’t you start that mindfulness crap with me.” 

I decided that Mom had had enough life coaching for the day and ran ahead, eager to turn the future into the present. The rocks on either side gradually pinched closer together, covering the sand in shadow and bathing them in a damp coolness. Mom stopped looking so hard for memories and faded into the world inside her hat. 

Without warning, my leg disappeared up to the knee into the sand. I pulled it free and ran back to the safety of Mom’s side. 

“What the goose?” I checked that I still had all four of my legs before looking back to where it happened. Everything seemed normal other than a fading paw-shaped puddle marking the spot where my leg had vanished. 

“What happened?” Mom asked the moment before she lost a foot into the earth. 

“What is it?” I cringed heroically, knowing that looking irresistibly pathetic was the only way to lure Mom to safety. 

“I think it’s… quicksand.” 

“I thought quicksand was make-believe,” I said.

“What else could it be? At least now we know to be careful.” 

I got better at spotting the quicksand with each leg it stole. The trick was to look near puddles for wet sand and steer well clear. But as we walked deeper into the canyon, the walls closed in and there was less dry sand to escape to. When the passageway narrowed to a few Oscars wide, the quicksand slurped all six of our paws at once. I escaped back to the solid sand while Mom continued forward, fighting through the sucking ground toward its puddle, which filled the whole floor of the slot.

“Come back!” I barked. “There’s nothing but wet socks that way.” 

“My socks are already wet,” Mom called in a voice that bounced back hollow from the canyon walls. She leaned over to roll up her pants above shoes that were already half-swallowed by the sand. “Maybe it’s not that deep.” 

Mom waded in. On the first step, the water swallowed her socks completely. With the second, it licked at her cuffs and slurped toward her knee. 

“If you don’t come back soon, I’m gonna have to come in and get you!” I shouted. 

Gonna get you - gonna get you - get you, the canyon mocked.

She swung her leg around looking for the third step. After a time, her paw came back to its twin. “Damn. Too deep.” 

“Ohhhhhhhh, darn.” I tried to make my tail wag in a disappointed way as I ran back up the canyon.

When we stepped out from between the tight walls of the canyon, Mom pulled out the Witch for advice. That traitor had promised two slot canyons, so who knew what kind of prank she had planned for the second. 

“It says here that we have to walk halfway back to the Wagon before the turn, and then we’ll walk that same distance again in a different direction.” She looked back down at the Witch, swiveled a few ticks, and looked up to see what the Witch was pointing at. “But it looks like there’s a trail that cuts the tangent and comes at it from the other direction.” 

“What’s a tam gent?” I asked, sounding out the unfamiliar word. 

“It’s a loop, see? The shortcut will take us over those cool rocks. We’ll get to see more than if we came in and out on the same trail. It’s perfect.” 

“Why do you suppose they built that fence across the perfect trail?” I asked.

“That fence isn’t meant for us. It’s only there to keep the cows from wandering off. Come on, let’s check it out.” 

Mom slithered through the narrow space between the last fence post and the rock wall and I ducked underneath. We climbed the steep sides of a candy cane rock and came out onto its flat roof. From the sandy canyon bottom, the rocks had seemed like buildings in the City—close together, but each one standing on its own. Now I stood on top of a smooth tabletop that stretched for many blocks in each direction. The canyon we’d just climbed out of hardly seemed like a scratch in the middle of all that flatness. 

There was no sign of a trail, only the rock’s wavy pattern, whose stripes made no more sense than the whirls on a piece of wood. The only things on the ground were bonsai cacti growing in tiny dimples in the rock and a bajillion meatball-shaped stones scattered everywhere. Some of the meatballs were cracked open and hollow as a spent tennis ball inside. 

“I wonder what these are.” Mom poked one with her toe to see how it rolled. “They look like they’re from the center of the Earth or something.” 

“Don’t be silly,” I scoffed. “They’re dinosaur eggs. From the chicken-sized dinosaurs that no one talks about.” 

“Dinosaur bones aren’t the only interesting thing inside the Earth, you know,” Mom said, obviously annoyed that I was trying to take her job as the smart one. “Mysterious things happen down there at a scale you can’t even imagine. If you know how to read their language, rocks can tell epic stories.” She looked at the rocks sinking into quicksand in the middle distance and added, “The kind of legends only a planet can tell.” 

“Dinosaur stories are more exciting,” I said, “on account of all the bone crunching and blood.”

“There’s plenty of crunching in geology and the earth bleeds lava. Isn’t that interesting?” It did sound pretty cool, until I remembered that Mom’s lava doesn’t even glow. Every time she promised a visit to a volcanic eruption, we were millions of years late to the action and all that was left was a black mess like a crushed freeway. Mom had a very active imagination when it came to rocks. 

I followed her as she hiked across the flat roof, holding the Witch in front of her like a compass. The Witch directed us to a scar in the rock that deepened to a crack, then spread to the width of an alley before disappearing around a corner. 

“This is it,” Mom said, putting the Witch back in her pocket and stepping into the crack. The stripes made a kind of staircase to the bottom. I followed her into a canyon as cluttered as nature’s basement. Rocks and branches lay in unsorted piles against the walls and scattered among the puddles on the ground. Obviously, no one expected visitors on this side of the canyon.

Another challenge was waiting for us when we came around the bend. A pool of water the creamy grey of poop juice filled the canyon floor from one wall to the other. 

“Oh well,” I said, “I suppose we’ll have to— Hey! Where are you going?” 

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