I’m on the Side of the Wildebeest

I’m with my family watching bats circle through the dusk around the upper rim of the Grand Canyon when the bank calls to ask if I’ve purchased $1,279 of perfume, liquor, and cigarettes in Montreal in the last hour. It seems unexpected, the phone agent says, and I imagine the list of my actual purchases from the last two days: gas, pretzels, candy in cellophane bags, one night at a Best Western in Santa Rosa, New Mexico, where the hot tub was questionable but we all sat in it anyway because after ten hours of driving, much of it on two-lane highways in western Kansas where the whole world was feed lots and semis driven by addicts, we were willing to take one more risk.

It’s the summer my daughter turns thirteen and eclipses any human-woman loveliness I might have had. She’s cut her waist-length hair, and that seems to have focused something in her. I imagine her in five years buying perfume and liquor and cigarettes in Montreal, and strangely I want that for her. I do. At eighteen, I rode my bike in the dark drunk, darting between cars. I slid down the brick side of a two-story building on a dare. I did not count the number of strangers I fucked in unfamiliar bedrooms. Now the lines at both corners of my mouth make me look like I’m in a Dust Bowl photo. It’s hard to look forward because forward is just this but more so. I try to swear off vanity. What are my options? I’ll age in that Eileen Fisher way: thin, drapey, neutral sweaters but kind of elder ballerina on her day off. Or maybe I’ll age in that Iris Apfel way, all big glasses and ten necklaces and fuck you for trying to tell me to shrink and fade.

My daughter sits on a rock so perfectly bouldery it seems like one of those fakes people use for landscaping or in theme parks, but it’s the Grand Canyon, so I assume it’s real. She rubs at the mascara she only weeks ago started wearing, and a bat hovers in front of her face for just a second. She doesn’t flinch. She just stares at it, and I realize she’s the badass I always thought I was.

My son runs back and forth repeatedly, covering the same ten-foot path over and over. It is a thing he does that other people think is weird but that I think is endearing. Everything is orange and red and dry, and it all seems like a clear window into a very-near-future America: waterless beyond resurrection. There’s definitely a cruelty to the fact that my children’s childhood is this doomsday prophecy of climate change, micro-greens, ugly hybrids, and Trump, while mine was bell-bottoms, Twinkies, skateboarding, Soul Train, and only a shadowy sideline concern about possible nuclear war.

My son stops running for a minute and stands near the rock where I sit with my husband. “Wildebeest seems like it should be spelled b-e-a-s-t, but it’s not. It’s b-e-e-s-t, which makes no sense,” he says. He’s spent the whole day in the car watching Planet Earth DVDs with their grand aerial shots of migrating African herds. My husband, who is practically Google, likely has an explanation for the odd spelling. He knows everything, and it’s equal parts useful and annoying. “Well, actually,” he starts, so I tune him out and watch a family speaking Japanese go right up to the edge of the rim with their phones. They all take the same picture and then back away from the edge, and I let out my breath.

Apparently, wildebeests migrate in larger groups than any other mammal, except—soon, I think—humans. Gas stations will dry up. Burned-out cars will rest between charred trees. My daughter will be an adult woman, and maybe she and some person with whom she has regular sex and meals will take off in looted REI gear, along with all of us, pack animals, heading north to some place that isn’t burned or underwater.

The sun has set, and the sky is pastel and dusty and thick with bats, but there’s nothing orchestrated about their weird bat movement. They fly more like balloons whose knots have been loosened, so I can’t view them as any kind of planned, murmured warning.

We all climb into the car, which is trashed with Cheezits and gummy worms and empty cups with plastic lids askance, everything crisscrossed with cords and chargers. My daughter’s face glows its odd alien moon in the back seat, and my son puts his feet through the space between the door and my shoulder, so I can reach back and hold them in my hand.

Someone in Canada is drinking our liquor and smoking our cigarettes and spraying our perfume into showy clouds on every person in arm’s reach. A few days ago, herds of animals went racing away from the geysers at Yellowstone, and my daughter became convinced it meant a world-ending super volcano was coming, and the sooner we could get to California the better.

At a hotel near the Grand Canyon, we find ourselves in another hot tub. This one is cleaner, and there are fewer drunk people in American flag swimming suits in the pool next to it. There is a wrought iron fence around all of it, but the gaps between the iron staffs are wide enough to let just about anything in or out. My daughter steps out of the hot tub and jumps into the pool. She and my son float on their backs, while the sky turns a solid purple and the orange mountains are like actual arms around them. “Stay. Just stay,” I say, under my breath and to every single thing.