I Just Woke This Dream

J. C. McClung

Department of Anthropology, University of Washington, Seattle,Washington.

My father was what you might call a survivalist country

person. He always said that he felt like he was born in the

wrong century, and when I was a child he bought some

property in Arizona. Whenever he had long visitations

with me, we would go out to the northern Arizona high desert and live

off the land, hunt, haul water, work on his cabin, and tend to his garden

beds made out of old tractor tires. We would wander the Desert

Mountains exploring for new kinds of filled emptiness.

By the time I was nine or ten, my dad had confidence in me to

wander around alone. Of course I always had a gun and knife on me,

but that was pretty typical of solitary desert life.

I remember there being a constant respect for every step because of

the always-present danger of rattlesnakes. Even mundane things

such as putting on shoes or taking a shower required vigilant shaking

or plugging of drains because of scorpions. I also had to be aware of

mountain lions, hantavirus, and coyotes, but most importantly,

where water could be found.

My dad was in the Navy, so there would be stretches of months that

he couldn’t be on the land. He would drive to California to pick me up

from my mom, and we would get back to the land and find coyote

scat on the porch, along with rattlesnakes nearly everywhere. The

spaces around the cabin would exhibit the signs of a mountain lion

den with rabbit and deer carcasses. And once we found an owl that

had nested around the roof.

At night bats would be so thick in the sky their flapping bodies

would block out the moon. From sunup to sundown, cicadas would

creak and croak, filling the air with their buzz. There weren’t just wild

creatures but also wild bandit sort of outcast people peppered

throughout the mountains and valleys. Antisocial folks that were too

bizarre, strange, and flat-out mean to coexist with city folks.

There was ‘‘Crazy Ernest,’’ a man in his 60s with a tangled beard,

who would either be naked most of the time or in a dress or a tutu. He

had fears that someday someone (enemies or federal agents) would

raid his place, so he captured rattlesnakes and built rattlesnake dens

and habitats all around his property as a defensive precaution. My

dad always said he had a screw loose.

There was Trip, another fella in his 60s, who was the most gnarled

and grizzled desert rat you could ever imagine. I remember being so

fascinated by his trembling crooked fingers as he wrapped his hands

around his coffee mug. His wife Andy would wear sandals year

round, and her feet were always dry and as tough as goat’s feet. They

never had kids, but they raised dogs that they loved like children. The

only thing they ever feared was dying before their dogs and their

dogs being lonely or having to fend for themselves. After their oldest

dog passed, Trip and Andy were soon gone and their ashes spread in

the cedars along with the ashes of all the past dogs. Under the

fountain that Trip had built for the hummingbirds.

In my dream last night I returned to this land, and it was gone. In

its place were paved roads, sidewalks, houses, power lines and poles,

gas stations, and thousands upon thousands of apartment complexes

of people. I wasn’t crying because I couldn’t go anywhere I wanted to

anymore but because it meant the disappearance of every bug, snake,

cactus, tree, rabbit, owl, bat, cougar, and bandit. All those people

were now talking about how there was ‘‘nothing’’ there before they

came.

But all I could see was that they were dancing in a city that stood

like a tombstone to a grave, and I cried until I woke.

Address correspondence to:

J. C. McClung

Department of Anthropology

University of Washington

4218 Memorial Way NE

Seattle, WA 98105

E-mail: johncmcc@uw.edu

Received: August 2, 2013

Accepted: September 5, 2013

DOI: 10.1089/eco.2013.0041 ª MARY ANN LIEBERT, INC. � VOL. 5 NO. 3 � SEPTEMBER 2013 ECOPSYCHOLOGY 205