What exactly did the desert teach me?
Erica Vital-Lazare: Beautifully, Megan and I are both devotees of Octavia Butler. Parable of the Sower really is that kind of pilgrimage inward and its protagonist, in many ways like Megan, in many ways like myself and so many of us in this time, again, we’re driven out of what we know and to all manner of desert. Psychic, actual.
It’s not a place that you enter into willingly, or you enter into the desert with the understanding, the sort of pact, that you will be allowed to be absolved of all that you were.
[Ambient, meditative music, reminiscent of drifting, rises in the background]
Vital-Lazare: This desert, particularly the Las Vegas desert, is a place of hiding.
[chime]
Vital-Lazare: It's an escape.
[chime]
Vital-Lazare: It's a portal.
[chime]
Vital-Lazare: It's a vortex.
[chime]
SARA ORTIZ: That was the mystical, magical Erica Vital-Lazare.
[Introduction music plays]
ORTIZ: Welcome to Black Mountain Radio, broadcast from the Mojave Desert. I’m Sara Ortiz.
SCOTT DICKENSHEETS: And I’m Scott Dickensheets.
ORTIZ: How’re you doing?
DICKENSHEETS: All in all, Sara, I’m doing very well.
ORTIZ: But is that the truth?
DICKENSHEETS: It’s most of the truth — some of the truth.
ORTIZ: When Erica was here last week, I asked her to introduce herself to our listeners, so if you don’t mind…
DICKENSHEETS: I am a longtime resident of Las Vegas, or the Las Vegas area. I have been a journalist for 35 years at various weeklies, dailies, monthlies, and now I’m a freelance writer and editor.
ORTIZ: Yeah you are! And I love that when I asked you to help us guest edit some of these pieces for Black Mountain Radio, you said yes! I was just so happy to have you be a part of the team, even one of the pieces that listeners are gonna get to hear today was edited by you, which I’m really happy about. Oh, you know what we haven’t talked about? The new little one in your family
DICKENSHEETS: Yeah, a brand new granddaughter, 5 lbs 2 ounces, granddaughter number seven.
ORTIZ: Pandemic baby!
DICKENSHEETS: Pandemic baby, and the center of the family for now.
ORTIZ: That sounds glorious, honestly.
DICKENSHEETS: It is.
ORTIZ: How long have you lived in the Las Vegas area?
DICKENSHEETS: Most of my life — 51 long years. Maybe more, depending on how we count 2020.
ORTIZ: Would you say that the desert has taught you any lessons of sorts?
DICKENSHEETS: One thing I’ve learned is how the desert can warp your perception. That mountain appears to be a short hike away, but don’t trust your eyes — it’s a lot farther than it looks. That water is a mirage. An expanse that looks empty isn’t. Also, the desert reminds you that beauty can be deeply entwined with danger — always a useful thing to keep in mind! And not to mention all the complicated adaptations that all of these plants and creatures have had to make to live in such a harsh environment.
ORTIZ: Oh, I love that. What looks empty isn’t! That feels so true to me. Even when I go on hikes around town, I will see clusters of sagebrush, or pass a tall boulder, and I’m so aware the crevices in the rock formations, and of the snake holes underground, and wonder what living creature lies beyond what is visible. I’m reminded of how exposed and vulnerable we are out here in the desert.
DICKENSHEETS: That really prompts me to go take a hike, doesn’t it?
ORTIZ: [Sara laughs]
Joining us next to discuss their desert lessons are Megan Stielstra and Erica Vital-Lazare. Megan is author of three essay collections, most recently The Wrong Way To Save Your Life, a winner of the 2017 Book of the Year Award from the Chicago Review of Books. She is also a recent BMI Shearing Fellow - she spent four months in Vegas in 2020. Erica is a writer and a professor of creative writing at the College of Southern Nevada, where she teaches Marginalized Voices in Dystopian literature. Vital-Lazare is the editor of a McSweeney’s series revisiting classic Black literary works titled Of the Diaspora.
DICKENSHEETS: Listeners might catch our host’s name in this next segment, and it’s because Megan and Erica met at a socially distanced, small gathering at Sara’s backyard.
ORTIZ: Guilty! But not guilty. We were careful, we were outside. And we were eager to see people and connect. Remember not seeing people?
DICKENSHEETS: … Overrated.
ORTIZ: Here’s Megan.
ESCAPE, PORTAL, VORTEX
MEGAN STIELSTRA: I hadn’t stepped into Las Vegas thinking “desert.” I hadn’t stepped into it thinking: “healing” or “change” or “perspective”. I hadn’t stepped into it really thinking at all. I mean, I was trying to keep me and my little boy safe.
And in another life, I might’ve arrived in this lovely, fabulous apartment in Las Vegas with this lovely new, single life and stepped out into this city with its lights and it’s neon and it’s flashing and it’s beauty and it’s exciting people [voice crescendoing with excitement] and it’s dancing and it’s color and it’s alcohol and all of this excitement—
What I needed was the desert.
[Soft, delicate music, almost lullaby-like]
I’m Megan Stielstra. I’m a writer and educator from Chicago and I was a 2020 Shearing Fellow in creative non-fiction with the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas. And everything I currently own fits in the back of my car.
ERICA VITAL-LAZARE: I’m Erica Vital-Lazare. I am a professor of creative writing and marginal voices in dystopian literature at the College of Southern Nevada. I’m a mom. I’m a writer. I’m a lover of all beings. I’m a Virgo.
I’ve been here two decades now. My sons were born here, in this place, remarkably. I’m a Southern girl. I never imagined such.
So, every day I wake up here feels unfamiliar in some ways.
There’s a peculiar kind of white noise here I find, and that may be from the lack of a nearness to water, a constancy of water that pulls at the body.
The desert doesn’t pull at the body. It reflects back. You’re always seeing yourself here.
[Dream-like music rises and plays in the background]
What were you always?
[The sound of a car door closing and footsteps are heard]
STIELSTRA: I had just arrived in Las Vegas. This was August? August. We left Michigan. We drove across the country—a friend of mine, named Scott, did the drive with me.
It was my first time ever in the desert. I’d never been under this kind of sky before and it had been quite a year.
I’m from Chicago, but I had spent the past six months living with my young son in my mother’s basement in rural Michigan. She needed a little bit of backup during the pandemic, and, truthfully, I did too. My husband had recently left me and I was still reeling a little bit from the heartbreak and, then, the world, and those two things were kind of colliding in my body in all sorts of really fascinating ways.
So, to go from a basement immediately to the sky here, to a place where the sun was out, literally and metaphorically, felt really huge and profound.
[The sound of nighttime crickets chirping]
VITAL-LAZARE: Well, it was dusk; it was near nightfall. Very warm, balmy. Summer quarantine was when it felt really real. The fact that we’d been isolated through the spring, now we’re going into deep summer, towards fall. And it felt like a blessing—that felt like a desert, right?
Quarantine is the desert. We’re separated from that sort of nourishment, that daily watering of each other’s company. The energy you find that leaps from body to body, to go without that, I think, is a particular kind of poisoning.
It is a drying out.
[Dissonant windchimes ring in the wind]
So, the fact that Sara invited us over with the new fellows around her pool, right? So, there’s water, there’s a thing you’ve been without. And we all just dipped our feet in the pool.
It felt freeing. Though we had been meeting for the first time, I believe our natural inclination would have been to just grab each other. [laughs]
STIELSTRA: There were just six people there, and Erica was one of them. Maybe eight months, at that point, I’d just been with my mother and with my young son. And to sit and have the first person I was given be her was a real gift. You know, I think we have those moments where we know somebody up there is looking out for us, and that was certainly one of those moments for me.
VITAL-LAZARE: I love the way Megan tells that story.
[The sound of windchimes and water being swooshed, as if by a foot]
And, particularly, when Megan and I were sitting, six feet apart, with our feet in the water—there’s a current that flows through—and we were talking about the very real, very tender parts of our lives even though we had just met.
And one of those tender parts was what Megan was going through, a newness, separation, divorce. And it’s a very real and very heavy thing. I also wanted to congratulate her at the time [laughs] because, I don’t know, I was thinking about those wonderful forties films when you have the gay divorcee who comes out to the desert, you know? [Laughs] With her fabulous luggage, leather bound luggage, and a little pillbox hat and gloves.
But she’s coming to get rid of, to shake off, what had been keeping her confined. And it may not have been a freedom that she wanted.
It may have been forced upon her, or just, suddenly, she’s ejected from the space where she once was. But Las Vegas seems to be that spot where, if you didn’t know that you were about to be ejected out of one cocoon into this sort of unwanted freedom, by the time you cross the state line and your feet are dangling in somebody’s pool, and you’ve got strangers who feel like friends and you’re drinking nice wine, you know that this place has been waiting for you all along.
[Light meditative music, reminiscent of drifting, rises in the background]
I did not want to speak over all the real pain that she had yet to experience, but I did want to tell her that there was blooming on the other side, and what this desert has taught me is that dead ain’t gone!
[Soft, meandering piano joins the music]
I think, beautifully, Megan and I are both devotees of Octavia Butler. Parable of the Sower really is that kind of pilgrimage inward and its protagonist, in many ways like Megan, in many ways like myself and so many of us in this time, again, we’re driven out of what we know and to all manner of desert, right? Psychic, actual.
And, in that novel in particular, the desert is where the protagonist hones her philosophy and she finds her tribe. It’s not a place that you enter into willingly, or you enter into the desert with the understanding, the sort of pact, that you will be allowed to be absolved of all that you were.
[Ambient, meditative music, reminiscent of drifting, rises in the background]
This desert, particularly the Las Vegas desert, is a place of hiding. It’s an escape; it’s a portal; it’s a vortex.
STIELSTRA: I’m doing some work with a curator right now named Essence, and she’s also an Octavia Butler scholar. And, right when I arrived in Vegas, she shared with me an index card from Butler’s archive. And, written on that card, it said, “what specifically did the desert teach me?”
And I took a screenshot of that index card and I stuck it up on my wall in Las Vegas, and, everyday, I looked at it. So, to have my first conversation in Vegas be with Erica, and for her to begin that process for me, and for her to say, “hey, I want to turn you away from the city, and I want to show you this sky and this heat and this sun, and I want you to be aware of what that has to offer you at this time in your life,” that was like a lightning bolt.
[Dream-like, ambient music plays in the background]
VITAL-LAZARE: As Megan and I have both discovered, it is in this sort of unrealized place that you realize yourself most. The thing that you ran from or the thing that forced you out, it’s waiting in the vortex. It becomes hyper real.
STIELSTRA: It’s not possible here to hide, or maybe it is, but I wasn’t able to find it. And what I found, instead, were really wonderful human beings in this community trying to make work that let you access those parts of yourself and let you be true to that experience. So, my time in the desert wasn’t about putting on lipstick and high heels and walking outward. What I did in Vegas was not stepping into some casino to try to drink it away.
If we come back to Octavia Butler’s question, what specifically did the desert teach me, the answer is in the work. It is in the way that we find meaning out of this experience.
[Ambient, meditative music, reminiscent of drifting, rises in the background]
VITAL-LAZARE: It occurs to me that the desert teaches you how to survive. If we can survive this desert, if we can survive, just, the dire emptiness that we sometimes find ourselves in here, and we can fill it with work and with love and with new imaginings of what life is, then that is the lesson.
I think we romanticize the desert quite a bit. And yet, when this pandemic fell upon us, I felt as though we had been consigned to the desert in a new way, in a more real way, less literary, less poetic. We’re all in desert spaces at this point.
[Wind is heard blowing over the music]
STIELSTRA: Erica recently sent me a paragraph from Octavia Butler that she thought I needed:
“I’m learning to fly, to levitate myself. No one is teaching me. I’m just learning on my own, little by little, dream lesson by dream lesson. Not a very subtle image, but a persistent one. I’ve had many lessons, and I’m better at flying than I used to be. I trust my ability more now, but I’m still afraid. I can’t quite control my directions yet.”
[Ambient music fades out]
DICKENSHEETS: I love the way Erica equates quarantine with the desert; I think that's a deeply insightful way to frame it — two very different experiences as part of the same continuum.
--
DICKENSHEETS: In 1971, Hunter S. Thompson chronicled his drug-fueled haze during an off-road-desert race, the Mint 400, in his novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The Mint 400 is alive and well, yet most Las Vegans don’t realize it still exists. Fifty years after Thompson’s escapades, writer Soni Brown set out to reconsider what’s left of the elusive race — for her own very personal reasons.
ORTIZ: And if you listen closely, you’ll hear a very familiar voice reading excerpts from Thompson’s Fear and Loathing.
DICKENSHEETS: Can you give us a hint?
ORTIZ: “Butterfly in the sky …”
DICKENSHEETS: What?! LeVar [bleeping] Burton?
ORTIZ: hahaha. Yes. Mr. Reading Rainbow. Scott, do you know who he is? [laughing]
DICKENSHEETS: Yes, from a different context.
ORTIZ: You know there’s actually a petition out there for him to be the next host of Jeopardy. I don’t know if you’ve signed it, but I have.
DICKENSHEETS: Having watched the string of guest hosts, I am definitely in favor of LeVar Burton being the host of Jeopardy
ORTIZ: How do you know him?
DICKENSHEETS: From Fear and Loathing in Space. No, from Star Trek: The Next Generation
ORTIZ: What’s his character’s name?
DICKENSHEETS: Geordi La Forge
ORTIZ: Some might know him as Mr. Reading Rainbow, some know him as Geordi La Forge, but LeVar Burton himself gives Soni a helping hand as she reframes The Mint 400 through the eyes of an immigrant, Black woman.
DICKENSHEETS: Here’s Soni Brown.
THE MINT 400
[Waves crash on the beach as seagulls squawk in the background]
SONI BROWN: It was the mid-eighties. I was a kindergartener in Jamaica, and the only girl in a house filled with boys. Some of my fondest memories involved watching my older brothers work on cars, the way they worked closely and quietly, handing each other tools.
Cars and rallies were a big deal in our house, and The Dakar Rally was standard viewing. If my brothers weren’t watching a race, they were talking about one, like the Mint 400 in Las Vegas, which, at 5-years-old, was as far away and exotic as Dakar because I had never seen the desert before.
[A loud, smoggy engine starts]
Although my brothers were adults by the time I was born, we bonded by watching races together. On Sundays, when we went to the beach, I would take the Hot Wheels toys my brothers gave me and pound them into the sand dunes, pretending they were the souped-up cars and trucks making the trek from Paris to Senegal, just like the Dakar Rally.
[A thin banging sound, as if a hammer was hitting a flimsy piece of metal, plays underneath]
It did not matter who won a race. My brothers would whoop and holler and our dogs would join in. Then they would head out to the front yard, under the sprawling mango tree, to resume working on cars.
[Short bursts of a power drill join the other sounds]
The earth underneath their feet was black from motor oil and axle grease. I would leave my dolls on the verandah, hike up my dress, and stumble over to them. They tried to keep me away. I don’t know if they thought this wasn’t a proper place for a girl, but that never stopped me.
Eventually, they would tell me to climb down from the mango tree and hand them a Phillips Head screwdriver. Once in a while, they’d let me fire up the tig torch on a fender they were welding.
Those are some of my best memories.
[The static sound of a torch lighting fades into the sound of waves. The waves are eventually eclipsed by the moaning of high-speed cars whizzing by]
By the early aughts, the Dakar Rally had moved to South America. I had left Jamaica for Texas, and my brothers moved to Florida. I didn’t watch races anymore because it wasn’t the same without them. Besides, I had traded toolboxes and grease for make-up bags and heels.
Eventually, I fell in love with dirt bikes because of a boy. And, just like that, I was watching racing again.
[The low growl of engines plays in the background]
Motocross is a different world than car rallies. First of all, you’re standing in the dirt with other spectators separated from the racecourse by a rope. You constantly brush dirt from your shoulders and feel the grit on your skin.
It’s neat out in the dirt watching people do tricks on their motorbikes.
But as a Black woman, I also felt very aware that I looked different. There wasn’t anything tangible to make my skin pimple with anxiety.
[Sinister music, reminiscent of a heartbeat, pulses in the background]
But after the 2016 election, it felt like this was not the space for me anymore. I became hyper aware of my surroundings, scanning faces for signs of… what, exactly, I don’t know. Something sinister? A wink? Do violent racists give a signal?
Shortly before the 2016 election, now living in Las Vegas, I was searching for car rallies in the area. I realized around this time that my adult life has been about chasing the things from my childhood that made me happy, like memories of watching the Dakar Rally with my brothers. That’s when I stumbled on the Mint 400 off-road race, as described in Hunter S. Thompson’s book, Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas.
And the Mint, that was something else.
[Rumble of cars circling each other plays in the background]
LEVAR BURTON [reading a passage from Fear and Loathing]: The race was definitely underway. I had witnessed the start; I was sure of that much. But what now? Rent a helicopter? Get back in that stinking Bronco? Wander out on that goddamn desert and watch these fools race past the checkpoints? One every 13 minutes. …?
By ten they were spread out all over the course. It was no longer a “race”; now it was an Endurance Contest. The only visible action was at the start/finish line, where every few minutes some geek would come speeding out of the dust-cloud and stagger off his bike, while his pit crew would gas it up and then launch it back onto the track with a fresh driver … for another 50-mile lap, another brutal hour of kidney-killing madness out there in that terrible dust-blind limbo.
BROWN: Assigned to write a blurb about the Mint 400 in 1971, Thompson, instead, wrote a rambling conspiracy saga. When his story was rejected, he turned it into a book that was then lauded as an American masterpiece, marking a high point of counterculture literature and gonzo journalism. This made Thompson seem so cool that Johnny Depp portrayed him twice.
[Audio from Fear and Loathing]
Benicio del Toro (Gonzo): What kind of story is this?
Johnny Depp (Duke): It’s the Mint 400! The richest off-road race for motorcycles and dune-buggies in the history of organized sport!
BROWN: I’d read the book before in a literature class, completely disgusted with the antics. Nothing prepares you for the drugs, violence and outrageous behavior that Thompson indulges in while in Las Vegas.
It dawns on you that this could only happen to a white man of privilege. The depraved decadence and over-consumption in Fear and Loathing is what lives in outsiders’ imagination of the city. The idea of Las Vegas as an outlet for America’s drunken abusiveness and excess didn’t start with the book, but its legacy lingers.
[Sound of a crowded room with faint uptempo techno music in the background]
BURTON: In some circles, the Mint 400 is a far, far better thing than the Super Bowl, the Kentucky Derby and the Lower Oakland Roller Derby Finals all rolled into one. This race attracts a special breed.
BROWN: When I read Fear and Loathing, Thompson’s version of the Mint 400 seemed as wrong to me as his depiction of Las Vegas. Probably because he doesn’t actually see the race.
[Sound of the crowd and music crescendos]
He arrives late, gets lost, crashes around the desert and only catches glimpses of the action. To him, the people in and around the race are “fools,” “geeks,” “lunatics.”
[Sound of the crowd and music abruptly stops]
But that’s not my experience. In March of 2015, I met a father-and-son team at the Mint parade downtown on Fremont Street. The feeling that day is the closest I’ve been to carnival in a while. People were in the streets jumping into the dune buggies. Some were under the hoods of the specialized trucks “oohing” over the engine.
[Sounds of power tools and tinkering with parts underneath narration]
The father and son weren’t paying much attention to anything around them. They were cleaning the side mirrors of their black dune buggy, passing the polish or cloth to each other. They told me they’d spent years building and retooling their vehicle for the race.
I could tell theirs was a bond forged years ago, tinkering on a car like my brothers did. I closed my eyes and inhaled the engine oil, letting it take me right back to Jamaica.
[The sound of an engine starting fades into crashing waves]
Out at the race’s starting point, in Jean, Nevada, about 30 miles south of Las Vegas, you can hear the full-throated growl of the trucks and snarling motorcycles. Each rev and vroom brings a sickly sweet smell of race fuel and exhaust. People mill about in denim short shorts, cargo pants, and boots.
Thompson, at least, got the feeling of the Mint right. It makes you giddy and excited. The spectators are eager to see half-ton bodies of metal fly through the air, leaving a trail of dust, which you literally eat. There is no escaping that.
If you block out the casino carnival ride in the background, you could imagine the Mint 400 was happening on Mars. The drivers look like astronauts in their jumpsuits.
There is a kinship among the crowd. No one notices me, or when they do, I am greeted with a smile. I am just one of them, a racing fan. I feel I belong. Maybe I’m one of the special breeds.
[Country music, reminiscent of a movie scene on a desert highway plays]
I don’t see the father and son in Jean. After a few days, they sent me an email saying they never made it to the race. An axle busted during practice. They were already planning for the next year.
[Country music continues to play]
This year is the 50th anniversary of Fear and Loathing’s publication. Reading it, I see how Thompson made the Mint just an odd extension of the Las Vegas he invented. The way he widely exaggerated the craziest aspects of the race left out everything that mattered to me about it, and about Las Vegas. It’s an image privileged outsiders seem to always fall back on no matter how loathsome the fantasy.
Sure, the book is canonized as literature. But when I read it, I couldn’t help wondering, “who’s cleaning up after this bozo?” The answer, of course, is someone who lives here, a hotel maid, or a minimum-wage worker. People who make their homes in the places not accounted for in Thompson’s supercharged prose.
A writer friend of mine said Las Vegas is America’s ID, a place where people come to indulge in their primal urges. For 50 years, it’s been almost impossible for Las Vegas to shake the template Thompson established. It’s why the slogan “what happens here, stays here” was so popular. But for some of us, what happens here stays here because we stay here, making our lives in the spaces between the city’s profitable illusions.
As for the Mint 400, I guess both Thompson and I saw what we needed to see in it, and in Las Vegas too. Thompson needed an out-of-control spectacle to reinforce his fish-out-of-water narrative. Well, good for him. All I really needed from the race was a way to reconnect to those happy memories of my brothers — to recover a bit of Jamaica here in my desert home.
[Country music fades in and fades out until the end]
---
ORTIZ: Scott, are there certain texts or books about the desert we live in – like Fear and Loathing or others – that resonate with you?
DICKENSHEETS: Well, nothing will top Fear and Loathing, I mean, I’ve got a Ralph Steadman face mask. .
ORTIZ: Oh my god, you do!
DICKENSHEETS: I do.
ORTIZ: Will you read the quote on there?
DICKENSHEETS: It says, “I am not like the others.” It’s one of several that I own. So nothing will top Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas for me, but several books by Reno writer William L. Fox come strongly to mind. In books like Playa Works, View Finder, and Driving by Memory, he writes about the desert in a variety of cultural, artistic, and scientific contexts. My summary may sound daunting, but his work is both smart and accessible.
ORTIZ: The exact same can be said of poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s (neh-ZOO / KOO-mah / tah-TILL) debut work of nonfiction. A New York Times best-seller, WORLD OF WONDERS: IN PRAISE OF FIREFLIES, WHALE SHARKS, & OTHER ASTONISHMENTS, is a collection of 28 essays about the natural world, and the way its inhabitants can teach and support us. Aimee’s book is one of two selected in the 2021 Nevada Reads (our statewide book club) program sponsored by Nevada Humanities. To learn more about the program, visit Nevada Humanities (dot) org.
DICKENSHEETS: Our next segment is a remixed excerpt from Jordan Kisner’s podcast, Thresholds. The full, unedited conversation can be heard on Thresholds.
Jordan Kisner is a BMI Shearing Fellow and the author of Thin Places, a collection of essays. And “Las Marthas,” her feature in The Believer, was nominated for a National Magazine Award.
She spoke with Aimee about World of Wonders, her relationship with the Arizona desert, and finding belonging on the trails with her dad.
AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL X THRESHOLDS
[Glittering rhythms of afro-house, reminiscent of a meditation or ritual, plays in the background]
AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL: I grew up in some rural areas, but I also had access to big university libraries, so it’s not for lack of looking. I just simply didn’t see that and I’m a child of the 70s and 80s, so it’s definitely better now, but I always wondered, like, where are the Asian Americans who love the outdoors? I cannot be the only one.
My name is Aimee Nezhukumatathil. I'm the author of 5 books, and I am a professor of English at the University of Mississippi.
My most recent collection is a collection of nature essays called World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments, and it’s a collection that is illustrated, featuring about 30 of my favorite plants and animals that helped me feel like a student of this planet again.
JORDAN KISNER: I’m Jordan Kisner and I’m the host of Thresholds.
NEZHUKUMATATHIL: I said before that, at heart, I’m kind of a nerd. Not kind of, I am a lot of a nerd, and the books that I grew up reading were science books and adventure books and stories of the outdoors and their observations, nature guides, you know, that kind of thing.
But when I got to the back of these books, I never saw anybody that even remotely looked like me. I was lucky to find authors like Rachel Carson or Annie Dillard --
[Afro-house music fades in]
Women, but certainly I never saw any people of color.
I don’t know if I necessarily have the answers, but I had, in the writing of this book, just a lot of questions about that as well.
KISNER: Tell me about some of those questions.
NEZHUKUMATATHIL: The very first gut instinct one was just that question of “whose story gets to be told about the outdoors and whose doesn’t?” and all the reasons for that.
[Afro-house music fades in]
KISNER: How did your dad become so knowledgeable about the landscape around Phoenix? Was it something that he took up and studied when you all moved there? Was it something that he brought with him?
NEZHUKUMATATHIL: I mean, he’s a biologist. He has degrees in biology and botany.
He read so much, that was his entertainment.
I think I just never questioned it [laughs]. As a little girl, to me, that was just infinite wisdom of him. It’s not like he had all this free time in the world.
He worked in a NICU unit, so very, very teeny preemie, premature babies, helping them breathe. He could be called in at a moment’s notice. Birthday parties, or whatever, he would be called in.
He did not have long, luxurious summer breaks. There was no off time when it’s babies struggling to breathe. As a kid, I kind of always resented it. “Gosh, who are these babies? Don't they know it’s my birthday?”, which sounds ridiculous, of course. But he’s my dad.
He’s an immigrant [laughs] and trying to deal with these very vibrant daughters.
[Laugh-talks] Dealing with these two elementary school girls that he didn’t really know--one wanted to be Madonna. The other one, I think, wanted to be a backup dancer in Wham! I think his peace was reading about the environment and then taking his vivacious daughters out on these hikes, out on these constellation hunting trips so that we knew the names for things. We knew the stars at such an early age. And I’ll be honest, I wasn't always thrilled about it.
[The sound of birds chirping in nature is heard in the background]
Many times I was like, “dad I want to watch MTV,” or whatever. But that is, oh, it’s just one of the biggest gifts of my life that didn’t cost any money. It was just simply going on these walks and having him.
[Afro-house music fades in]
Him and my mom, they have the best stories; they still have the best stories.
It was just always an adventure. There was no sense of him being bored, and, therefore, I think one of his biggest legacies is letting his daughters not be bored.
My parents drilled it into us about like, “only boring people get bored.”
We were sent outside. We were absolutely expected to find our own fun using sticks and stones and whatever we could find outside. “Oh, here’s a interesting Caterpillar.” “Here’s a garter snake,” or whatever. That was our entertainment, and I’m so grateful for that actually [laughs].
KISNER: You write so beautifully in World of Wonders about the outdoors, whether it’s a plant, or a bird, or a landscape, as a site of peace and of knowledge and of discovery and of authority. It was just striking to me that you use the word “peace”. Like it was a peaceful place. It was his peace being outside. And it reminded me of the passage in your book where you describe wishing that your front yard, when you were living in Phoenix, had a giant cactus-- I think it was a saguaro cactus-- like a neighbor’s did. I guess I’m just wondering what parts of that landscape to you really caught in your heart or in your mind.
NEZHUKUMATATHIL: Gosh, that’s such a beautiful question too. It’s hard for me to pin down one thing from the suburban Arizona landscape because I also feel a kinship with a landscape in Kansas.
I absolutely do have tangible, tangible memories of talking to Cardinals, for example, in the suburbs of Chicago and in Western New York-- this wasn’t in the book, but this is right around the time where it’s maple syrup season, you know, that kind of thing.
But, I would say, something that still holds true today anytime I visit Arizona, is just that pure, pure sunshine.
The culture was just so different then. I’m talking about summer and winter breaks--it was eat breakfast, go outside, swim at somebody’s house if you didn’t have a pool of your own. These are not super well-off kids. This was absolutely middle to upper, upper middle-class kids, but just so many people had pools in the suburbs. Come inside for lunch. We would wait because even the hardiest of us couldn’t be out at the blazing 1:00 PM, 2:00 PM.
We just spent these days just outside and finding new bugs or, “oh, look at the seeds of this plant,” or “check out the spider,” or just riding our bikes everywhere. And that hot, hot sunshine, and then seeing kind of the glint of cacti. That kind of dull green glint in the hot, hot sun of the cacti.
That to me is peak elementary school [laughs]. Cause there was also a danger, right? If we’re running around, “oh, don’t don’t fall. If you’re on your bikes and chasing each other around, don’t crash into the cactus.”
So it was something both exquisite beauty to me, but also such danger. So, I think just cacti in general, there’s too many to list, but Solaro, Ocotillo, just even the cute, stumpy Barrel Bush Cactus.
KISNER: Do you remember one of the early formative experiences of being in the outdoors that made you feel like, “oh, this is for me. This is the place where I want to be,” or “this is something I'm deeply attracted to”?
NEZHUKUMATATHIL: I don’t know if there was one specific moment, because I have so many moments, and many of them are chronicled in the book where I just had this sense of peace or this joy.
For those people who don't know, Phoenix is in the center, it’s in a Valley. The Valley of the sun, they call it.
But, when father was off, we would go hiking up Camelback mountain, South mountain.
That’s where I also saw him so confident, and nobody talked down to him. Nobody made fun of his Indian accent, his Malayalam accent. In fact, people were asking questions of him.
I think they would see him talking to his two young girls like, “oh, this is an ocotillo tree, there’s a chuckwalla lizard.” He knew the names of minerals and rocks and cacti.
And if he didn’t know the name of something, this is before cell phones, he would just really try to get a good look at it. We didn’t even have sketchbooks either. Just try to get a good look at it. Then we go to the library and try to look up that plant, or that cactus, or that mineral.
So, he was kind of an expert in this land that is not his homeland.
You know, contrasting that with observing these kind of jerk cashiers who would talk so down to him, like, “I cannot understand you. Speak English” [spoken in a broken, pejorative way], when he was speaking actual English.
[Afro-house music fades in]
It was very palpable.
I didn’t have the vocabulary for it. I’m embarrassed to say that I was maybe even a little bit ashamed of my dad. Not ashamed of my dad, but just embarrassed in the situation because I could see him, this mighty, amazingly smart man. Many girls think their dad is the smartest man alive, and then to see him so belittled and talked down to in that way...
The outdoors was a place for both my mom and my dad to just kind of be on their own and confident in their own.
And nobody questioned them. Nobody asked, “what are you? What are you doing here?” They just felt so comfortable there, and, therefore, I think that comfort was transferred to my sister and I.
I say all of this knowing full well that not everybody has that privilege. I have friends who never felt comfortable outside for various reasons.
So, I can only speak to my own experience. For me, a child of an Indian man and a Filipino woman, we didn’t have extended family here in the States. So, it was the four of us, and the outdoors was a place where nobody made us feel unwelcome.
[Afro-house music fades out to the sounds of an owl hooting and birds chirping]
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DICKENSHEETS: To hear the full, unedited conversation with Aimee Nezhukumatathil, search Jordan Kisner’s Thresholds podcast.
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ORTIZ: We truly hope you enjoyed this episode of Black Mountain Radio.
DICKENSHEETS: Black Mountain Radio is an audio project of the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute. Sara Ortiz is the host and curator.
ORTIZ: And today’s fantastic guest host is Scott Dickensheets.
Our senior producer is Nicole Kelly. Vera Blossom and Layla Muhammad are our associate producers. Scott Dickensheets is our editor. Anthony Farris is our production assistant. Fil Corbitt is our sound mixer. Art by Jesse Zhang; our theme song is by Jeremy Klewicki; and graphic design by Lille Allen.
DICKENSHEETS: Special thanks to Soni Brown, LeVar Burton, Jordan Kisner, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Megan Stielstra, and Erica Vital-Lazare.
ORTIZ: Thanks to the rest of the team at the Black Mountain Institute: Kellen Braddock, Daniel Gumbiner, Haley Patail, Kristen Radtke, Summer Thomad, Michael Ursell, and Haya Wang.
ORTIZ: Black Mountain Radio is supported by the Rogers Foundation and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Big thanks to our sponsors at Zappos who helped make this episode possible and who contribute to Las Vegas’s creative communities with playful, people-first approaches to arts and culture.
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ORTIZ: Thanks for listening.
DICKENSHEETS: Thank you, Sara.
ORTIZ: Thank you so much, Scott! It wasn’t so bad, was it?
DICKENSHEETS: No...I mean, I can’t speak for the listeners.
ORTIZ: [laughs]