By Renee Soasey
Slot canyons have always intrigued you. Alluring mystery, siren calls to explore the narrowing unknown, the way the subtle hues of dusty desert colors wind and twist into oblivion, never revealing what lies beyond the next bend. The sensual undulations, curves and swoops and arches displayed in pleasure shades of mauve and gold. It’s an irresistible draw: to press your palms against the cool surface on either side; to watch the fine dust rise around your feet with each step; the way the air becomes silent—chill, ancient, sacred—as the canyon curls ever deeper into the belly of a bald desert mountain.
One summer, in the fullness of midlife, you fulfill the urge to explore the slot canyons of Escalante, Utah; an urge to fathom the attraction of limitation.
Some paths are obviously broad, sunshine beckoning in the distance, a promise, a reassurance of spaciousness. The delight of flinging arms wide and twirling in circles with abandon. But those pathways require a different brand of courage than yours.
You were born into narrowness. The fifties, with everything that implies. Religion hovering above you, beating its eagle wings into thundering whooshes of air, like heartbeats, like warning. Childhood was narrow to begin with, and your mother narrowed it further with admonitions of worthy womanhood: obedience, chastity, the poverty of personality that awaits a man’s assent to bring it to life, an electrifying jolt from the finger of god himself. A future that requires, above all, the ability to shrink, contract, curtail. Your mind an idling engine. Your breath abated, always awaiting permission.
So you marry that future. At nineteen.
Eventually, the slot canyon closes in, forcing you to turn sideways, clenched between the unrelenting walls, cheek pressed against cold stone, barely breathing. That’s when claustrophobia kicks in. Your heart starts to hammer against the silent, solid earth. You wonder if you will be required to torque and twist into a contraction you can never extricate from. Joints frozen in place, atrophied from disuse.
You can go back, retrace the steps that got you here. Or you can insist forward, hoping—like you’ve hoped before—that the canyon widens again around the next turn, just out of sight.
One night you sit up in bed with a gasp and clutch the covers to your breast, awakened by a flash of insight as bright as a mercury vapor lamp, igniting your brain into a flame of possibility. You look to your right, at the man sleeping next to you, the man you continually daydream into death. The man whose breath you so fervently wish would leave him. Breath you’ve been taught to believe must cease to secure your freedom.
But the sudden illumination flashes neon, pulsing letters etching onto your heart: you don’t have to wait for him to die before you live.
You crane your neck in the canyon, eyes searching for a way. A shaft of light just big enough to squeeze through glimmers overhead, a beacon to self-sufficiency. You bend your knees froglike, claw and grunt yourself up toward daylight, hands grasping for the rim. You find a final toehold in the wall and will yourself the strength to heave the weight of a lifetime of lessons out of that narrow slot.
Out into the broad broad world.
Renee Soasey has nonfiction published in Oregon Humanities Magazine, Under the Gum Tree, Entropy, and The Nasiona, among others, and hopes to complete a memoir. She prefers to reside in an off-the-grid cabin that she and her husband built in rural Oregon; unfortunately, she doesn’t always get what she prefers.