Two days before our wedding, Frankie and I drove around the Grand Canyon’s South Rim until we found an unmarked trailhead with no cars around. It feels impossible to describe the Grand Canyon. Both times I’ve been there, looking at that vastness has filled me with such pure, complete emotion that I started crying and laughing at the same time. My mind can’t make sense of it. In some places it’s 18 miles wide and over a mile deep. That’s enough space to fit two San Franciscos side by side, or maybe even squeeze in Los Angeles if you angle it right. The North and South Rim are so far apart that they have completely different climates and desert ecosystems. In the incomprehensible expanse between the rims, you may see California condors cruising along the thermals. With a 10-foot wingspan they’re North America’s largest land birds, but here they look like nothing more than motes of dust.
Frankie and I walked to the edge of the rim, grasping onto a piñon pine as we peered into that grand nothingness. We felt so insignificant. And so in love. With no witnesses but the canyon itself, we sat down and read our vows.
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I knew I’d love the desert forever when it almost killed me. On a very hot day in July several years ago a friend and I decided to hike a 13-mile trail in Canyonlands National Park. We had noticed it the day before: the trail snaked down into a canyon and we wanted to know what was hidden in those depths. The trailhead had a warning sign about how treacherous the hike was but we laughed it off. How bad could it really be? And so we started our descent with nothing but two liters of water between us.
If you know anything about the desert, you know this was monumentally stupid. Suicidal, almost. The first few miles were deceptively easy. It was early in the morning, still cool in the shade. Sometimes the trail would disappear and we’d have to scramble over rocks, hoping we were going the right way, but it was fun. Playful! We’d point to the tarantula hawks and joke about how much it would suck to be stung by one of those. Verdant shrubs exploded from the red rocks and the sky overhead was a sharp blue. Midway through the hike, we stumbled across some bighorn sheep. They looked confused to see us. We were the only people on the trail.
We ran out of water after eleven miles. Two more miles without water might have been okay except the last two miles had almost 1500 feet of elevation gain beneath the crushing Utahn sun. We had to climb out of the canyon, after all. I’ve never moved so slowly in my life. We’d hike up for about a minute then collapse. My brain felt hot. My friend and I didn’t talk, neither of us wanting to voice the thick panic boiling up in us. I wondered if helicopters would be able to find our bodies.
Years later I read about a family in California that died on a six mile hike. They were also hiking in 100 degree weather and also only had about one liter of water each. To this day I don’t know why my friend and I didn’t die in Canyonlands. I think we were close. But we made it back to the trailhead and sprinted to the car and chugged the gallons of sun-warmed water waiting for us there. I was so grateful to have made it out of that hellish canyon. And I’d go back again in a heartbeat. I’d never felt so alive.
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The day before our wedding, I had what I can only describe as catastrophic food poisoning. Frankie and I had stopped the night before in some inconsequential town in Arizona whose singular claim to fame was inspiring the town in Pixar’s metaphysical horror movie, Cars. Our motel room had a giant print of the character Mater. For dinner we ate at the Roadkill Cafe, where I prudently had a veggie burger. That decision terrorized me for the rest of the night.
When we finally got to Vegas, I still felt queasy. I filled out wedding paperwork at the Clark County Marriage License Bureau1 while my body gurgled and squelched, and that night I white-knuckled my way through a magic show by a famous early ‘00s magician that was so virulently racist and off-putting it actually did distract me from my digestive woes. You always think the days leading up to your wedding are going to be blissful and romantic, but sometimes there’s just bile and some mindfreak from Long Island.
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About a year into us dating, Frankie made me watch Desert Hearts, a movie about a woman who moves to Reno, Nevada in the ‘50s to get a divorce. At the time, it was almost impossible to get divorced, but Nevada made it easy: live there for 6 weeks, establish residency, then file some simple paperwork. For a while Reno was even nicknamed the divorce capital of the world.
In the movie, the aspiring divorcée Vivian meets a young woman Cay who quickly sets about seducing her. Whereas the modern take on desert lesbian romance, Love Lies Bleeding, is more immediately confident and erotic, Desert Hearts is a slower burn. Their love is complicated; Vivian already feels like she’s taking a huge risk by getting divorced, but to also be gay? She doesn’t know what that life looks like or what it’ll mean for her. It’s a scary leap.
When Frankie and I first talked about getting married, we also talked about the possibility of divorce. We’re romantic but we’re realistic. We don’t know what will happen. In some ways it’s not even logical to get married. It’s expensive to do and expensive to undo. And if you’re not even planning to have kids, what’s really the point?
There is none, except that love is worth celebrating, and some unknowns are worthing leaping into.
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The morning of our wedding was an almost bigger disaster. Our friend, and only guest, Henry2 had already zipped me up in my puffy pink meringue of a dress and was struggling to get Frankie into her much tighter latex one when, with one confident yank, he pulled the zipper right off the dress and the whole thing peeled off her. With only 30 minutes before our ceremony at a chapel downtown, Frankie was in her Naruto T-shirt while Henry was performing dress surgery.
“Well babe, maybe we just have to get married in T-shirts,” I said. At least I wasn’t throwing up anymore. But Henry, the greatest maid of honor of all time, did manage to fix the dress, and we sprinted out of the hotel to catch a taxi, Frankie still frantically gluing on her press-on nails.
By some miracle, we arrived at the chapel exactly on time and dressed for the occasion. Our officiant was a charming Frenchman in an embroidered pink suit with a bouquet of chest hair bursting out of it. We sorted out out some quick logistics (no we weren’t reading our own vows, we had already done that; yes we’d love to walk down the aisle together, the Vegas way). Then he set up the sound system and we waited.
In those few seconds of stillness, I could finally just look at Frankie. She was stunning. She looked devastating in her shiny black latex, her lips bright red and blonde hair perfectly teased. Her eyes were already watering I took her hand in mine and squeezed. Neither of us could stop smiling.
We had chosen to walk to The Cure’s “Plainsong”. As soon as we heard those first few triumphant notes, we started laughing and choking back sobs and trying our best to not ruin our makeup. None of the chaos of the last few days mattered to me anymore. I was in the desert and I was marrying the love of my life. How did I get so lucky?
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It’s been about half a year since we got married and life has continued to throw a lot at us: losing jobs, family health issues, another round of Covid. And of course there’s the ever-present climate anxiety and political dread. The future is murkier and murkier in a way that does not inspire any optimism.
After a bumpy landing back to California, Frankie and I figured we deserved a little vacation, so we took a road trip down to Joshua Tree. The first few hours through the Central Valley were boring, but once we peeled off the 5 and got to the desert, we were greeted by fireworks of wildflowers. Vivid yellows and purples and baby blues dotted the landscape, and the far-away mountains were capped with snow. The desert is never predictable, rarely pleasant, but always, always gorgeous.
In their song “The Thing” the Pixies have a line about driving through the desert: “My head was feeling scared but my heart was feeling free.” I thought about this line as we cruised into the Morongo Basin, the Joshua trees greeting us with their spiky arms. The future’s always been murky, whether now or on our wedding day or when I almost died in Utah of all places. It’s tempting to try to optimize everything and plan for everything that can go wrong but you can’t. Unknown things will go wrong, or go very right. The desert taught me that. Love taught me that. And I’ve never regretted taking those leaps of faith.
Just remember to bring enough water.
1 The Marriage License Bureau is conveniently also where you file for divorce. The waiting room is ripe for psychoanalysis. We noticed one couple that didn’t so much as look at each other for the hour they were in line; to our surprise, they were picking up marriage licenses.
2 Henry once convinced me to zip line across a 1000-foot deep canyon in Colorado, a leap of faith I never need to do again. But that too was an act of love.