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Shouting at the Sky

Troubled Teens and the Promise of the Wild

By Gary Ferguson

Now these smudged, sweat-stained girls, kids who never knew of or cared a damn about the Paiute's brother gods, lying here in the shadows of these same ancient canyons, wrestling with Coyote things of their own. With their habits of crank and speed and crystal meth. With late-night trips to the police stations, to the streets, to the suicide wards. Early in the afternoon with girlfriends at school, in the toilets, throwing up lunch. Hammering together pieces of whatever's in reach, trying to survive. Like Nancy a couple of days ago, walking down that dusty trail, talking about her bulimia: "How could I deal with things if I didn't throw up?" she said. "What else is there in my life I can control?" Then later, around the fire, before bed, she starts rapping on the bottom of one of the tin cans we use to cook in, and then someone else starts in with her thumbs against the bottom of her blue porcelain cup, and then three more cups and a pair of wooden spoons, until there's this heady thrum drifting out across the desert -- in some moments disjointed, but in others, perfect. And right in the middle of it a coyote comes up to the edge of the bench that runs along our camp to the south, gives three bright barks, turns and walks away. All of us sitting there looking at one another, amazed; never slowing the rhythm, though, never stopping that drumming.

"That coyote," Nancy says over breakfast the next morning, as if only then was it was proper to talk of it. "It was awesome." And she slipped that memory into her pocket and she's been walking with it ever since, all across this empty desert, drinking from it like a spring, smiling over it when the weight of her pack, when the long, black nights start pressing on her shoulders.