Prodigals Read Free Page B

technology was isolating us as it seemed to be connecting us, replacing the passions with wan counterparts, so that loving became liking, happiness fun, and friend ceased to refer to a person but to a thing you did to a person, the noun “friend” retired for a cultlike horde called “followers.” Even a few years later, recalling this, I feel just how tired the complaints have become, but at the time it all seemed more poignant, not the conclusions, exactly, which were even then proto-clichés, but that The New York Review of Books existed at all, that it continued to devote such good minds and scholarship to what after five minutes in the desert sun, driving with the top down by imitation-adobe strip malls full of nail salons and smoothie shops and physical therapy outlets, was almost painfully irrelevant. And then I wondered, What is our fucking obsessions with relevancy ?
    I didn’t follow this line of thinking quite so far until we were on our way to the hike that afternoon. It was another perfect day—each one was—and we had mobilized early, nearly two hours before the closing time, which by that point had been embossed forever on our psyches. The sun hung in the southern sky at the height of a double off the left-field wall, hot and pleasant and a whitish color, slipping at its edges into a pale powdered blue that had the particulate quality of noise in a photograph. I was glad we were going for the hike. It felt almost moral in the context, and even if it was a relatively level hike and only about an hour round-trip, and there was a waterfall at the end hidden among the sere folds of rock, I thought at least we will have to put something in, something of ourselves, to get whatever out.
    Our friend the ranger was waiting for us at the gate, and this time we approached him with an air of triumph, as though he had doubted our resolve, but we had persevered and now things would be different.
    â€œHey,” we said.
    â€œHello,” he said, perhaps smiling a little.
    We looked at one another for a minute.
    â€œTrail’s closed,” he said. “Closes early today, on account of the holiday.”
    â€œOh, come on ,” Eli said. “You realize we’ve been here every day this week.”
    The ranger actually had his hands on his hips, as if posing for a catalogue. The olive-green uniform hung on him so perfectly that I wondered whether he wasn’t perhaps the fit model for the entire clothing line.
    â€œPark reopens January second,” he said. “Eight a.m. sharp.”
    â€œIs it because we’re Jews?” Marta said.
    The ranger’s gaze, emerging from his tan and handsomely creased face, cast out to the distant escarpments on the far side of the valley.
    â€œSame rules for everyone,” he said.
    â€œWhat if we hike really fast?” said Marta. “You just let that woman with a walker in. We’re definitely going to be faster than her.”
    â€œHike takes one hour, thirty minutes. We lock the gate in one hour, twenty minutes. You do the math.”
    â€œI feel like you’re not getting my point,” Marta said.
    â€œSame rules for everyone,” he repeated.
    â€œWhat is this, Brown versus Board of Education ?” Marta said under her breath.
    â€œYour hike is a piece of shit,” Eli informed the ranger.
    â€œYou can always hike the Sagebrush Trail,” he said, pointing vaguely to a boulder-strewn slope in the distance that seemed to rise, precipitously, toward nothing.
    â€œAnd the Sagebrush Trail has a waterfall?” I said.
    â€œHa, ha. No.”
    â€œSuch bullshit,” Marta said, laughing lightly, such warm placid annoyance in her tone that it seemed to me suddenly a master class in the management of emotions in a public capacity, the decoupling of an emotion’s expression from its affective consequences. And it came to me then, as we hiked the Sagebrush Trail, just how public most