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Waking up this early makes my stomach hurt. I’ve been awake for three hours and the sun isn’t up yet; it isn’t right. It will be worse tomorrow, when I’m exhausted but I can’t sleep. My body has decided to get used to getting up early, which is good on days when I need to get up early, but rather awful on the days I don’t. Weekends are suddenly counter-productive, since I stay up late because it’s the weekend, and then I can’t sleep in because my body refuses. Seven o’clock rolls around and I’m awake, no matter how hard I try to convince myself otherwise.

I used to wake up this early all the time, used to watch the sunrise on my way to school.

It doesn’t matter; I have nothing to say. And twenty thousand words to say it in.

Sunrise over the airport, casting all the planes in pink. I watch the people around me, busy, worried, speaking quickly in strange accents and strange languages, reading their newspapers, picking their noses, rubbing their eyes. Here we all are, America, headed home for the holidays, packing the runways and freeways and parking lots. For most of the drive we were able to go almost ninety miles an hour, could have gone faster but even three hours before dawn I’m leery of police. There are kids playing on the tacky carpet at the gate, people carting water bottles and strollers and bulging carry-on bags. I realize I’ve forgotten my cell phone: the fear of disconnection looms. How will I call home? How will I know who to meet for coffee? I haven’t used a pay phone since ninth grade; I don’t have any idea how much it would cost to make a call to California. There’s an hour before my flight, should I try to get back to long term parking, then back here? I was already stopped once at security, might they find me more suspicious still if I try to leave and return? The lines are only getting longer. It might be interesting to go the weekend without that electronic leash, the ever-availability. I want to write five hundred words before I stop, but I should go back now if I’m going to. Indecision is the downfall of the weak; he who hesitates is swept aside.

I go back and get it; I am addicted to technology. I wonder if that is true: I am on the internet more hours a day than I ought to be, I am on my cell phone even more than that, I almost had a career in graphic design, which would have left me using a computer probably almost exclusively. I drive my car far more often than I mean to.

But when I am out in the backcountry, when I am hiking and sleeping beneath the stars, cooking over a fire, using my body to move me, I don’t miss the hum and buzz of electronics. I don’t miss the instantaneous connection to every damn place in the world. Three weeks I spent in the desert, and I never once wished for a website to check or a phone call to make. In fact, I think I would say I relished the chance to be apart, to be connected to myself, to nature, to the people physically and spiritually present with me, rather than to the whole rest of the world.

So how come I can’t avoid it when I am in the front country, when I’m in town and at home and feel the obsessive need to check my email three, four, twelve times a day? To have my cell phone on me all the time, all the time, all the time. An “obsession with connectivity” I think he put it, and I suppose I agree. When I can be, I want to be in touch with as many people as possible as often as possible. People are my connection to the world, the most important thing in my life.

The sun emerges as a flaming salmon sphere through the clouds. I stare at it as long as I can, and when I look back down to write, I am blind. But it fades, and besides, my fingers know what to do better than my eyes by now. All that time connecting, connecting, connecting, connecting: emails, webpages, text messages: at this point, my fingers know how to make the words without me.

The desert morning sky is beige and turquoise and pink where the sun isn’t blinding me. But this isn’t proper desert: This is the city, this is the airport, this is the desecration we’ve committed to the land that god saw fit to make his more inhospitable. It gets well over a hundred degrees here in the summer; now, at the end of November, at six in the morning, it is in the seventies. And that’s the day after the storm that left us with a blanket of snow up in the hills. There is nothing here inviting or soft. I simply do not understand why people chose to move here, to build an obscene, sprawling city over the good, dry, barren soil. Pump water in from the Colorado, hundreds of miles away, from the dam that ruined the Grand Canyon, the dam that obliterated Glenn Canyon, the dam that Edward Abbey (rightfully) wanted to destroy. Reading The Monkey Wrench Gang always makes me want to blow things up.

But I’m too good a citizen for that. I have too much faith in the system, and in the eventual triumph of natural law. Hayduke dropped to his knees on the rim of the dam and prayed to god for an earthquake, “precision-style”, right there. Just enough to free his own river, undo the presumptuous thing that man, and government, in their arrogance, dared to do. Throughout that book, I was rooting for them, the rebels, the outlaws, obeying a higher law. Ah, but the law of man and government has more guns, as they learned, as we all learn. More guns and more more money, and therefore more power than our individual fate.

Something in Hayduke called to something in me, that uncompromising center, the wild woman within. She wants to undam Glenn Canyon. She wants to cut the fences and remove the survey stakes and pull the bridges down. She wants to walk, the “pre-white man, pre-pickup, pre-whiskey Indian lope” across the equally uncompromising desert, wants to know how to avoid snakebite and starvation. Wants to smell water from a mile away, know how to rappel down the cliff side or climb up the canyon wall. She wants to disappear into the hills and never come out, or else only come out to tear town this airport, this unholy city, this spreading cancer of development.

But there is too much that needs changing in this world, and the rest of me knows that fire and brimstone and dynamite aren’t the way to change it. As beautiful – and I mean that literally, aesthetically – as beautiful as it would be to free the Colorado… no, in that example, I can’t think of a but to counteract. It would flood people’s property, I’m sure, maybe their homes, we would lose some electricity generated by the dam, lose all the fabulous boating opportunities afforded by Lake Powell. But to free the Colorado?

Extremism is a hard thing to be. Sometimes it seems like nothing less will do, but you know you are alienating the very people you need to convince. These days, with the Congress being what it is and women’s rights being eroded as they are, by people who seem to think that their beliefs are more important than my body, I want to make a giant sign that says Keep your crucifix out of my cunt. And I want to wear it around everywhere, and offend people, and tell them that your god has nothing to do with my rights as a citizen. But wouldn’t it be better if I could appeal to them somehow, explain that fine, you don’t want an abortion, well I don’t want an abortion either. But I want to be able to have one, if I wanted one, and I want the option to be available to women who need one. Everybody is pro-life; no one wants to kill babies. But we want to be able to know that our lives and our health and our peace of mind are valuable, that the already-living being is at least as important as the one not yet brought into the world.

It’s a hard subject; I should leave it be.

The sun is getting higher now, a hand’s width over the horizon, an hour since it has risen. It glares off the airplanes, off the concrete and tarmac and buildings. Outside, in the supine desert city, the air begins to shimmer with heat. People around me are reading, cooing to their children, talking on their phones. The airport hums with impatience. I am not impatient, this morning. The drive calmed me, hours in the darkness through straight flat roads with nothing but the flashing of white and yellow lines and the occasional silhouette of a saguaro. We passed the little desert bust towns, an hour from anywhere with nothing but a gas station and a swinging stoplight, maybe not even either of those, just some thrown-up and torn-down houses where a mine used to be.

But the mines give out, the prostitutes leave for better things, and the towns fold, collapse down into themselves, leaving freeway exits that go nowhere, with names like Horsetheif Canyon and Bloody Gultch, the colorful names of the sepia-toned past. Driving past them, even in the full dark of the pre-dawn, I imagine swinging saloon doors and prancing horses, tall men in cowboy hats, all the good clichés. Some of them were true, out here, out here in the ghost towns and the old ranches.

There aren’t so many clichés about the miners, though. These aren’t the gold prospectors panning in the creeks like they tell it in California; this is copper, and silver, and iron ore. Maybe coal, though I’m not sure. Men who died in the mines when they collapsed or filled with sulfur gas, or when the lungs of the men filled with dust and grime and blood. I don’t know their stories, but I imagine their eyes.

It was probably cooler down in the mines; that’d be a perk, at least.

I wonder if they even dig mines any more. Easier now to just blast off the whole side of the mountain, run the whole thing through some chemical bath and let whatever we want sift out, throw the rest away. Only rocks, right? They were just sitting there anyway.

Here in the desert they talk about mining water, like it was gold. We dig down to the water table, into the ground water, and we pump it up and out and we use it and we don’t put it back. I imagine it won’t be very long before it is like gold in truth, and in price. Already it should be the limiting factor in new growth, but we insist on building, expanding, developing, improving, even when there is nothing to support our growth. Lawns and fountains and shiny new golf courses decorate a landscape characterized by its lack of water. I want to scream at them: This is a desert! The whole point of a desert is that there isn’t enough water for usual things to grow. But we, in our infinite wisdom, we plant gardens and cornfields and cotton, we fill swimming pool after swimming pool, build canals to take water from places that can’t afford it and pump it to places that shouldn’t be there in the first place.

This, also, is a subject I should probably let alone. Like many things, I get too upset to discuss it rationally. The wild woman in me wants to burn it all down.

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