The evening the mountains opened up, I’d been camping without human company for twenty-one days. It was September, and I had come to a part of the Mojave Desert known to locals as Jawbone, short for Jawbone-Butterbredt Area of Critical Environmental Concern. I’d felt drawn to Jawbone for some time for reasons I didn’t fully understand, and, being a psychology doctoral student, I’d devised an ostensibly rational excuse to go there: a research study on human relationships to more-than-human nature.

I’d long been the nature-loving type, though far from outdoorsy. At Jawbone, I camped alone for the first time in my life, bedding down under the sky in a 187,000-acre area with no roofs. I arrived an uneasy and ungracious guest, tensing every muscle against the many ways the desert tried to touch me—the heat that liquefied my executive functioning, the host of beings who seemed poised to sting, bite, or needle, and, above all, the wind. My early days centered around learning to live with the blow-the-toothpaste-off-your-toothbrush gales that draw wind farm developers to that part of the Mojave. Jawbone stole my stuff: the red plastic bowl I brought for bathing, a box of band aids, a map. It sprayed me with urine when I squatted to pee. It rendered tent-sleeping a raucous affair, comparable to overnighting inside a clothes dryer packed with sneakers, driving me to ditch the tent entirely. Many evenings, when gusts barreled down from the Sierra Nevada into the creosote-studded valley where I made camp, I found myself performing an inadvertent desert striptease as the wind slipped the top button of my cargo blouse from its worn-out buttonhole and flung my hat from my head. At the exact moment I lunged for my airborne hat, I could expect invisible fingers to pluck my sunglasses off and lob them in the opposite direction. Wind lined the gutters of my notebooks with sand as I scribbled observations of shifts in my relationship to my environment and mind.

All that bustling air made it hard to feel grounded. A meditator since long before visiting Jawbone, I concocted a practice to root myself. Every evening before sunset, I tucked a little meditation bench under my arm and climbed from my camp on the desert floor up to a low ridge. There, I meditated in the gaze of the mountains that framed Jawbone. From the ridge, I looked out on the Scodies, a squat subrange of the Sierra Nevada. The basalt-dark Coso Range lay to the northeast, where, on a clear day, I could make out the higher peaks of the Panamints seventy miles away. To the southeast, the Rand Mountains lifted their unassuming chins. Closer in, the El Paso Mountains—the Pasos, as I called them—draped along the southeastern horizon.

On my twenty-first evening, I took comfort in believing that after three weeks of meditating in the same spot at the same time, I knew what to expect from my ritual. As I topped the ridge, wind butted me from behind as though trying to burst through a door. Keeping the gusts at my back, I settled into the sand to face the Pasos, anticipating the stillness of the mountains.

It was the wind that had brought me back in the first place. I’d encountered Jawbone just once before, two years earlier, for less than twenty-four hours. On my first road trip through the American Southwest, Jawbone was to be little more than a layover—a place where my friend Darren and I could overnight for free on our way to elsewhere.

I’d never camped anywhere that pandered so little to my convenience—there were no outhouses, no dumpsters, no running water. Most of the roads were glorified ATV trails, with patches of shade no wider than a Joshua tree. When we arrived, my eyes were weary from too many breathtaking landscapes in too short a time, and I remember my relief upon sensing that there was nothing sexy about this low, sandy, scrubby place. As soon as the tent was ready, I disappeared inside to sleep.

Darren’s voice woke me that night, calling me to come outside. “Listen,” he said. I stood, sloughing the sleep from my body. My ears searched the night, straining toward a sound I now understood I’d woken into: on the far side of broad-backed silence was a single note, constant and concentrated like the low-pitched droning of massive bees. It was coming from somewhere high up and due west. I rubbed my ears, then held still. It sounded, I thought, like Jawbone was speaking.

Darren had spent time there before. He translated: it was the sound of the wind that would surround us in a few hours, working its way through the Scodie Mountains.

As I took in his words, something about the situation undid me. Stamping my feet to warm them, I stood at a confluence of strangenesses. The realization that this place was so quiet I could hear the wind hours before feeling it. The uncanniness of hearing my travel companion decode a message made of mountainsides and rushing air, a message I’d have mistaken for mysterious noise. The supernal voice pouring toward me through the Scodies and vibrating in my sternum, making me feel addressed.

I sat down hard, not onto the sand but inside myself. The feeling was jarring, like love before you’re ready. Hours later, when I woke with a gasp to the tent bucking wildly, collapsing and billowing out like a lung taking sharp breaths, I was surprised that my stubbornly hypervigilant body sank back onto the mat with a yawn as soon as I remembered where I was.

As Darren worked at tying our shelter to the wheel rim of his Subaru, I closed my eyes to listen to the wind. I felt a calm so profound that the boundary between sleep and waking eluded me. As I began to drift to sleep, a part of my awareness lingered behind to savor the storm. Underneath the ruckus of nylon and thundering air, something else moved—not a sound, but the start of a tug at my center. It felt like the smallest convulsion, like something that had wound tightly in on itself years ago was now stirring, dreaming of unfurling.

As a child growing up in a northeastern Pennsylvania village, peopled enough for multiple churches but too remote for a post office or sidewalks, I knew what it was to be part of a landscape alive with beings and presences, all voiced, all carrying messages. Lenape syllables—Susquehanna, Tunkhannock, Wyoming—tumbled through the names of the rivers and valleys that traced my horizons, though at that time I lacked any notion of the human history that pre-dated my adventures there. I belonged to dirt roads, low mountains that sighed fog, and deer that calmed the fields after antsy cattle lumbered back to their stables. I often talked to the more-than-human parts of the landscape. I sang to them too. But I also tried to listen for the feeling of our connection, the same way that, later, as a therapist, I would attend not just to what a person said but to the texture of the space between us, what that said about what was needed.

I knew instinctively how to find belonging in that world. When face to face with a doe, grow still. Let her move first. Leave offerings of gooseberries for the fairies who live in the lilac beside the shed. Whisper secrets to the moon, who sometimes gets lonely. I didn’t grow up in a neighborhood full of children to play with and I had no siblings close enough in age to make discoveries alongside me. But I felt grounded and contained by my points of contact with the more-than-human world.

I’d left the countryside that raised me at seventeen, eager to unburden myself of dirt roads that seemed to lead nowhere.

By the time I awoke to a thrashing tent that first night in the desert, my adult self could talk a good game about how humans are part of nature. This perspective was, after all, my birthright as a liberal arts-educated, leftist millennial. But it would take years and a return trip to Jawbone before I could make sense of the calm I felt that windy night, the tug at my center. On that initial stopover, it didn’t occur to me that it had been a long time since I’d known in my body a connection to a landscape I felt part of. I’d left the countryside that raised me at seventeen, eager to unburden myself of dirt roads that seemed to lead nowhere. In the cities where I lived for a year or two at a time, I still interrupted showers to escort spiders out of the bathtub, still raised a hand in greeting at constellations that managed to breach the skyglow. But I’d become well-versed in the dissociated rush of the white, middle-class circles I was born into, where it seemed growing up meant growing anthropocentric, learning to devote more attention to the various containers separating me from the ground than to the ground itself. I’d learned to channel that rush inward to perform well in school, and my psychology program was carrying me farther afield from the more-than-human dialogue I’d grown up with. The human psyche loomed wherever I looked, manspreading across my every conversation, purporting to be the most important thing of all. Intellect felt increasingly like an exoskeleton.

Though the desires at play would only reveal themselves after I made my way back to the desert years later, Jawbone’s voice had reminded me of my capacity to root into something infinitely more complex than any one species. On my first night there, somewhere beneath my conscious awareness, I was pulled to remember what it was like not just to think ecologically but to feel embedded in relationships both mutual and mysterious, tender and impersonal—to embody the adult version of my childhood at-home-ness in nonhuman community. Before I fell back to sleep, with scraps of time and memory circling the tent like the chicken coop and granny-in-a-rocker outside Dorothy’s window before her touchdown in Oz, some part of me had decided I would do whatever it took to come back.

At my graduate program in Pittsburgh, I already had a dissertation in the works on the psychological aspects of labor trafficking. When I returned from my road trip, I scrapped that project, feeling ridiculous and exposed but adopting the demeanor of a cat who pretends to have landed gracefully. I explained to my bewildered advisor that I’d decided I needed to research the human-nature relationship. I wanted to launch an autoethnographic study—a scholarly interpretation of a researcher’s own perceptions, roughly the psychological equivalent of a virologist testing a vaccine on herself and studying her own reactions. I would base it on my experiences in an environment where I could be immersed in an encounter with nonhuman nature. And I had a specific location in mind.

I chose a new research director—a professor with an unaffected laugh, a knack for reproducing bird calls, and a keen interest of his own in the psychology of human-nature relations. I was honest with him about my confusion, confessing that I didn’t even have a research question, unless What the hell just happened to me? counted. Still, many months later, when my department gave me the go-ahead to spend a month at Jawbone, I felt I was getting away with a scholastic felony. Now that I had my ticket, my preparations could begin.

I hoped to get to know one part of the landscape intimately rather than barely make the acquaintance of many successive sites. My plan was to establish a low-impact base camp. I might spend long days hiking, but I would always return to base. This strategy had an added safety benefit: I could keep within a mile of the car at dusk, when pit vipers and mountain lions were most active.

I practiced awareness of where I placed my hands and feet to reduce my chances of surprising scorpions and rattlesnakes.

I spent half a year preparing. On daily walks through Pittsburgh’s parks, I practiced awareness of where I placed my hands and feet to reduce my chances of surprising scorpions and rattlesnakes. I gathered topographical maps and studied diagrams of improvised slings, swathes, and splints. I read guides to backcountry camping and memorized ground-to-air signaling code. I learned to use a GPS tracker that would hang from my belt, pinging coordinates to a bevy of friends back home—or, if I held down the SOS button, signaling search and rescue via satellite.

Then I drove from Pittsburgh to California, belting entire albums aloud to muffle the part of me that suspected I’d staked the completion of my Ph.D. on some sort of hypnagogic delusion. I did not know how, or if, I would make my way into the relationship I was after with Jawbone. I wasn’t even entirely clear how I would recognize that relationship if it found me. I’d deliberately written in my research proposal that my project required “minimum structure and maximum improvisation.” I had no plan, other than to pay attention.

Three weeks in, I knelt in the sand atop the ridge, looking toward the Pasos as I readied myself to meditate. Since my first night at Jawbone, the Pasos had been a prominent presence on the eastern horizon, like a guarantee of sunrise. Lately I’d noticed that when hiking through unfamiliar territory, if I could locate their familiar face, I felt less skittish, more trusting—I felt found.

The western face of the range, the part I now viewed from my meditation spot, lay about ten miles from me. The Pasos have long been a place of religious significance to the Nüwa (a group sometimes referred to by the exonym “Kawaiisu”). Nüwa history in Jawbone and the surrounding area dates back at least 1,500 years, but they are still fighting for recognition as a Native Californian Indian Group. There has never been a term in the Nüwa language for the territory now called Jawbone, whose boundaries were determined not by any history of human habitation but by intersecting settler agendas: government surveys of “unwanted land” left over after the Homestead Acts and their sundry amendments sputtered out, conservation efforts to define protected areas for vulnerable species, and settler archaeology’s interest in preserving sites of historical value. Jawbone’s current range, delineated and overseen by the Bureau of Land Management, is continuous with Nüwa homelands in the broader Mojave Desert, known in their language as mah-yu’niya-va’a-dü=aka.

But there must have been a Nüwa name for the Pasos before they were designated “the passing-through place” by the Spanish, for whom the mountains were a travel corridor. As I adjusted my little wooden bench beneath me, I recalled that I’d looked the range up in the glossary of Nüwa places I’d brought with me on my trip. I’d found no Indigenous term for the Pasos. But, scattered throughout the glossary, phrases like “Name of a mountain with unknown location” and “Placename of unknown location” indicated numerous Nüwa place names for which the original referents have been lost. Looking at the Pasos, it occurred to me that any of the estranged syllables in my glossary might have belonged to them. It was the dispossession of the Nüwa and neighboring groups that paved the way for Jawbone to come under the control of the Bureau of Land Management and for me to perch atop this ridge, a newcomer hungry to connect with land. I shifted my hips to ground my weight, the little mountain of my body humbled by the expanse before me.

I began to meditate in my usual way, with my eyes and other senses open, turning not so much inward as toward the shifting boundary where my body met the animated landscape. As happened every evening, gigantic dragonflies sped past my seated form, their buzzing low and serious. Wind exploded around me in little spurts, attempting to make confetti of my attention. I checked in with my body. It had been unnerving to admit, soon after arriving at Jawbone, that my default sentiment toward the desert consisted of tightly wound fear paired with a wish that the place would behave itself. But my clenched body was learning to surrender, by imperceptible degrees, with each passing day. In that moment, as I sent my awareness into the places where the clenching wasn’t, a soft, pliable ache settled across my sternum like a sun-enchanted lizard. I sat and breathed. A chorus of crickets, camouflaged among creosote branches, rasped into the cooling air. My gaze drifted, then rested on the highest section of the Pasos—a broad, slightly indented sweep of rock that called to mind the crown of a Panama hat. I looked toward the range, expecting to surrender to its nightly demonstration that mountains sit far more still than I ever could.

As the range stretched hungrily east, I was caught by a corresponding feeling of sliding westward, in the same way that when I wade in the ocean, waves rushing past my ankles toward the sea create the illusion that I’m falling backward.

But that evening, the Pasos behaved unexpectedly. Before this, I had looked toward the range and seen a more or less continuous slope of rock surging north to south across the desert plain. I’d read ripples and bumps in the slope as peaks set beside each other along the horizon, like words on a page from left to right. As I knelt there, that image of the Pasos dissolved before my eyes as the mountains suddenly seemed to move, as if unfolding. The Pasos looked as though they were sliding east away from me, like a rattlesnake extending to full length from a coiled position. As the range stretched hungrily east, I was caught by a corresponding feeling of sliding westward, in the same way that when I wade in the ocean, waves rushing past my ankles toward the sea create the illusion that I’m falling backward.

The unfolding lasted perhaps ten seconds. When the movement stopped, I found that I had heaved forward onto all fours and was clutching at sand with both hands, as though the ground were a flying carpet liable to lift off. I blinked hard, then squinted. I could see only peaks beyond peaks beyond peaks. I was reminded of the Magic Eye pictures I spent hours crossing my eyes at as a kid, trying to free the three-dimensional image trapped inside each two-dimensional pattern. The crown of the Panama hat, I realized, was not sitting at the western boundary of the range as I had imagined. It was much farther away. Multiple peaks, gradually increasing in elevation, undulated away from me, covering perhaps miles of distance between the western edge of the Pasos and their highest point. My lazy vision had collapsed all that distance into a two-dimensional rock face, as though the range were a mere silhouette of itself, not a place to pass through.

I had looked out upon this range dozens of times a day every day for three weeks thinking I was seeing it. Yet somehow, until that evening, I had been unable to see its depth.

I gaped, then laughed aloud. I’d heard my own laugh so little in the preceding weeks that my ears registered the sound less as human and mine and more as animal and belonging to the place. The latter impression, I realized in that moment, now seemed more accurate.

I thought about the days I’d spent wandering between mountains at Jawbone, planting one foot before the other as my body gauged the difference between how far away a peak appeared and how far away it actually was. Many times, I’d turned back when a slope I had imagined reaching in a matter of hours loomed no closer by midday. The routes that called to me here were roadless. I could not speed over the desert as though skimming a surface. I had to pass through at animal pace, immersed. In the last week, I’d noticed myself making sharper visual estimates of distance. A lesson about the hidden depth in the landscape had been welling up, all this time, from the sand into the soles of my feet. Atop the ridge, as I brushed gravel from my palms, it hit me that the lesson had finally reached my eyes.

In those moments following the unfolding, I felt the Pasos had unlocked themselves and opened up to me, as if to say, “Come on in.” Giddily, I allowed myself the fantasy that, maybe, they’d decided I belonged there.

When the time came for me to leave Jawbone, to go back to my graduate program in Pittsburgh and somehow weave together a dissertation from the strands of what had happened to me, the way it felt to be a person in a place had capsized. I could not, at that time, explain myself. When I tried, I waxed psychedelic in my notebook: “Space—the dimension—looks and feels fundamentally different. I mean everything looks the same as before, but it’s like everywhere is a cathedral, or like I went through a portal and space is thicker on the other side.” I knew I was having a different experience in my body. I knew also that as my perception had changed, so had my relationship to Jawbone: I wanted to belong there, as sincerely as I craved the belonging I have with the man who became my husband. I did not want to leave.

When I did leave, the change followed me to Pittsburgh. I wondered, perplexed, if a crop of other oddities was connected or unrelated: My footsteps felt heavier, as though I wore weighted shoes, and I made a chiropractor laugh by asking if my gait looked “stompy.” Speed was suddenly terrifying. I spent a week driving twenty miles below the limit on highways, hazard lights blinking while I watched the windshield gather up the oncoming landscape and hurl it toward me like a tsunami. I started carrying a handkerchief on walks to deal with the tears that inexplicably filled my eyes when I looked up into the sycamores lining the city street where I lived, which seemed taller and somehow more animal-like than I remembered. Pittsburgh itself seemed to have morphed into a sort of body, as alive as Jawbone—as alive as any wilderness. I felt claimed by its strange, new thickness, the ground flexing beneath me like muscle even while I waited in line atop squares of supermarket flooring. I’d developed mild headaches before leaving the desert, and as a wearer of glasses since age fifteen, I visited the eye doctor in case my vision had worsened. It hadn’t; it had improved, and a new, weaker lens prescription spelled the end of my headaches.

Months later, still searching for language that could converse with my experience, I came across an essay about depth by philosopher and ecologist David Abram, called “Merleau-Ponty and the Voice of the Earth.” Abram argued for the importance of “recognizing [one’s] own embodiment as entirely internal to, and thus wholly dependent on, the vaster body of the Earth.” He called this the experience of “genuine depth perception.” Seeing his phrase, I felt my whole body nod in recognition. This was it: genuine depth perception, the realization that depth is made possible not merely by a transaction between my retinas and visual cortex, but by the very condition of being inside something. My encounter with the Pasos was one distinct stopover on an inconspicuous migration out of the assumption that I lived on a planet and into the perception that I live inside the depths of one.

In the moments after finding Abram’s phrase, I remembered the barrier I’d sensed between myself and the places that homed me, the loss of the intimacy that once tethered me within the living world of my childhood. Intimacy. From the Latin intimus—innermost, deepest. In the years leading up to Jawbone, I’d inhabited an experience of distance that required an Earth I could be on top of, like a game piece on a Monopoly board. This depthless framework for distance had encroached easily and fluently like an invasive vine, dovetailing with a perspective that I encountered everywhere in the sciences I studied: that humans are above and separate from a world that can be analyzed and perhaps mastered from the outside. I understood without being told that being “on top,” being “separate from,” and being “dominant over” were synonymous in the cultural worldview that fed these scientific ways of seeing.

Such a path threatens the dominance that comes of planting a flag in the soil, the lab, or the technosphere.

That worldview molded itself around something even harder to see: the uniquely settler-colonial conundrum that there’s a kind of belonging to Earth that’s guaranteed, yet there can be no straightforward belonging to colonized places. My mother has an early memory of hearing her grandmother lamenting about the family’s freshly acquired New Jersey farmland. This ancestor—whose surname, Marino, meant “of the sea”—cried out in Sicilian, “What a place, where you can’t even see the water!” My own love of land, when I connect with it, invites not “becoming native” but walking a path that links the grief of my homesick ancestors with the grief of those displaced to make way for them—displaced, still, to make way for me. Such a path threatens the dominance that comes of planting a flag in the soil, the lab, or the technosphere. But there is no easy way to resolve the tension between the call to intimacy with Earth and the formidable cultural enterprise of domination over nature. Better, perhaps, to flatten belonging into ownership. Better to distract entirely from the question of how to belong well to the body of Earth. On my way to adulthood, as I navigated the routes laid down by the culture I grew up in, I didn’t question that distance was something I could express conveniently in quantities. I’d always asked how many miles, not what sort, or what stories inhabited them.

At Jawbone, nights after the Pasos opened wide, I bedded down under a star-steeped sky that had become unspeakably deep, my whole body a gasp. Wind enveloped me, ever on the move, like a nervous system ribboning its way through a collective body. I peered into the gulf of stars and conceded some things: That with land as with people, it’s the intimacy of rooting into another that opens a pathway into belonging. That belonging with someone, or someplace, is a vulnerable affair. Their spirit becomes our element. And as we drop down into belonging, the illusion that we are in control starts to seem rather silly. Opening ourselves—to a person, community, or place—entangles our fate with theirs and makes us dependent on our belonging for a sense of home. Even before I watched the Pasos unfold, Jawbone was teaching me that depth is the dimension of belonging. 

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