02: The Land of Fire and Ice

I drove three hours into the New Mexico desert, guided only by a fraction of a memory that had left a mark on my soul.

Somewhere around mile twenty, the signal dropped. I felt it in my chest before I registered it on the screen. I pressed my foot slightly harder on the gas.

The road stretched on and on, the kind of empty that makes you feel you are the last person on earth — flat red scrubland running to the horizon in every direction, not a building, not a gas station, not a single interruption for hours.

The me from two hours ago had promised herself coffee somewhere along this adventure. The lone structure along my route was a campground with a sign that said open in cheerful letters that meant absolutely nothing at all. I drove past empty-handed, the desert offering no apology. Just the hardened glare of the midday sun off sun-baked earth, the endless road continuing to unspool ahead.

Rhea was fine. I knew she was fine. Tucked into a spacious yard with a woman who had kind eyes, a bowl of cool water and toys to keep her company. She was probably sprawled in a warm patch of sun somewhere, completely unbothered, living her best life without me. I knew this. I told myself this like a mantra whispered in a gentle grounding meditation. The gas pedal disagreed.

The miles ticked down and the questions crept in, as quiet and persistent as the long stretches of road. Would it be like I remembered? Would it be smaller, dulled, stripped of its magic in the way revisited places sometimes are, shrunk down to their actual dimensions? Was I about to drive three hours into the desert heat just to stand in front of a disappointment? To tarnish a cherished memory I'd kept perfectly intact for more than twenty years, sealed like pressed flowers in a beloved, aged novel?

The road offered nothing back. Just the shimmer of heat off the asphalt, and the wide open sky, and somewhere ahead a muted whisper — an answer.

The desert gave way to mountains. Around a bend, I slowed. A large sun-bleached sign appeared through the windshield: Greetings from New Mexico's Land of Fire and Ice. The last stretch of dirt road was the final few moments of that small, quiet doubt still burying itself in my chest. The driveway ended and a modest trading post appeared.

I stepped out of the car, my feet landing on the parking lot.

Both six years old and nearly thirty at the same time.

In front of me, the mountains had transformed into ancient black lava rock pushing up through the earth, twisted juniper and ponderosa pine growing right through the stone, their trunks corkscrewing toward the sky in beautiful, stubborn contortions, roots splitting volcanic rock just to find purchase.

The earth here split itself open ten thousand years ago and poured twenty-three miles of molten lava across the valley floor and then went quiet, and has been quiet ever since. Standing at the rim, you feel that silence in your bones; the silence earned when the most powerful work is done and there is nothing left to prove.

She arrived the moment I stepped onto the trail.

I felt it with every step. The decades between us folding softly, two timelines collapsing into a single breath, a little girl matching my stride through the twisted trees and the ancient black lava rock. Both of us moving through the same trail, I could feel her wonder like a second heartbeat.

I stood at the lookout fence and she was right there — small and furious, gripping the rail with both hands, staring down into the crater, wanting the trail to continue on, with the absolute conviction that the top of the world should belong to anyone brave enough to reach for it. I sat on the top rail, just to be a little spiteful in her honor. We laughed together as I told her she was right about the fence. So many years of living between us, and yet so little had changed in the ways that mattered.

The ice cave holds a different kind of magic entirely.

The temperature drops with every single one of the seventy-two stairs; cold rising from the dark, clean and absolute, the cleansed breath of a place that has been solidly frozen for generations, ancient secrets embedded within its layers. An eternity as a winter lake.

We descended the steps together, in two moments of awe, identical and simultaneous, echoing across twenty-three years. The chill in the air moved through my hands the way it had when I was six, straight up through the wrists and into the chest. I stood there in that blue-green dark side-by-side with the little girl who had stood in this exact spot, in the summer of 2001 with her whole life still ahead of her and her little mind completely blown by the fact that the earth could hold ice in the middle of summer.

We walked back up together into the bright open air, through the twisted trees, along the black rock path for the last time. I felt the clock running behind my sternum, Rhea at the edges of every thought, the knowledge that I had stayed exactly as long as I could and not quite as long as I wanted.

At the edge of the parking lot, I felt her leave my side. Felt the timelines peel gently apart the way they must. She hopped in the car that held her parents, toward the long road east, toward the whole enormous unwritten life still ahead of her.

Go, I thought. I've got it from here. I pointed my car west. Back toward Rhea, toward the woman I am still becoming, a future being written day by day.

The road home was the same road in reverse and somehow shorter, the way every road feels shorter once it has already shown you where it leads. And yet, I felt lighter, the gentle contentment the heart feels when a profound question has finally been answered. The signal returned somewhere just shy of our current homebase and my phone lit up with a photo that had been waiting all afternoon to reach me — a content dog who had spent the day in a state of pure, uncomplicated joy and had not once, in the entire course of it, wondered where I was.

All those miles of white-knuckled worry. That low hum of anxiety masquerading as love. She was fine. She was always going to be fine. The only one who had needed anything from that drive was me. One hand on the wheel, I let the other glide through the warm evening air breezing past the window, and felt, for the first time all day, entirely present. Completely at peace.

Some places don't just leave memories. They become threaded into the fabric of who you are. And if you’re lucky, somewhere between the going and the returning, between the girl you were and the woman you've become, the timelines touch — just briefly, just long enough — you feel the magic of the childlike wonder thread through you as she holds your hand and looks up at you and tells you she’s so excited to be you someday.