On The Trail

I AM sitting in a faded-green lawn chair on the patio behind a rented house in the desert of Twentynine Palms, California. I’m here on a two-week writing and hiking retreat with my friend, the writer Jo Ann Beard.

The plan is simple: Each day we write for a few hours in the morning, eat lunch and rest, then in the late afternoon we drive to Joshua Tree National Park and hike until dinnertime.

It’s the beginning of the day and I’ve come out to the patio to sit and look for a few minutes. I love everything about this bright, open, wind-swept place: the dazzling light laying its hands on the sand all around me, the tan landscape dotted with cactus, the deep-green oleander growing beside the house, the small shadows cast by dips in the sand. As I sit here I notice the air is filled with a low, steady buzzing: the zzzz of a fly, the murmur of the big Italian bumble bee that circles the acacia tree, and, for the briefest moment, the deep vibrating whir of a green hummingbird hovering above a cactus. The wind is soughing across the desert, and a plane is droning high in the sky. One of the mourning doves that lives in the tree in front of the house lets out a cry as it perches on the telephone wire. In this moment, I breathe deep and feel nothing but happiness.

Then I take out my cell phone and see that I have a new e-mail message. It’s from the agent who’s been considering my book for three months.

I read the message without taking a breath. It’s a very kind rejection, praising my book, saying that there’s just one little editorial issue involving maybe too much of something that to me is the whole point, that she’s not confident she could sell it because it’s a memoir, that she’s having a hard time selling another memoir by someone well known and successful, that two other memoirs she sold aren’t getting any attention. It goes on, but the resounding answer is no.