Body Topography

“If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.” —Agnès Varda

Cactus Spine 

The spines of Engelmann prickly pear are white and about three inches long. They protrude from the cacti’s broad fleshy pads in clusters of two to five, rooted in areoles golden with tiny, barbed hairs. In Gram’s yard in northern Arizona, adjacent to the gravel driveway, a gang of them grew in a long, curved clutch. There was grass of some sort back in 1977, enough to justify owning a power mower. It was my job to mow. It was summer. I wore shorts. I backed into the cactus. 

The tip of a white spine protruded from my right calf. I called for help. Gram trotted out from the house, tweezers in hand. It was no use; she couldn’t get a grip. I hobbled into her dusty Nash Rambler and she drove us to whatever clinic was open. There, a doctor dug into my leg, deeply, repeatedly. Gram and I cringed as the hole widened, white and pink flesh reddening, angry, and oozing around the futile intrusions. He kept digging. We became exasperated. 

Gram got a hold of a different doctor, one she knew and liked. He took one look and clucked at the mess. He firmly took hold of my leg with both hands, and with a quick flick of his wrists twisted my calf muscle in opposite directions. Out popped the spine. We were wowed. Relieved. Jokes were made. A bandage applied. The mowing left for another day.  

Living in the high desert, without injury, without dying, requires a sensibility attuned to its specificity. This red-dirt landscape evolved to defend itself. Nearly every plant, animal, reptile is armed. The red and pink sandstone mountains are slippery, stony, and carved with crevasses, precipices, crags. Conversely, the human body, driven by a hubris-charged or merely unconscious mind, presents flesh tender for piercing, scraping, slicing, burning. Bones for breaking. Organs for dehydrating. Limbs for fatiguing. I’m no exception. I’m also prone to lapses in proprioception after ecstatic reveries and a loss of bodily awareness while composing thoughts. 

In 2021, I had most of that prickly pear, which can live twenty to thirty years, dug up. This specimen beat that by more than a decade. It may have come with the property, which Gram bought in 1962 for its glorious then-unimpeded views of the spectacular mountains. Or she might have planted that cactus. Now, it was dead or dying. In part due to drought. Also, because of a packrat nest—sticks, duff, and red rock shards mounded between paddles cracked and scabbed. But the cactus hadn’t yet desiccated into a woody lacework of skeins woven into cells. Like the heaps of skeletal prickly pear along the hiking trails. 

On my desk are swatches of prickly pear skeleton, gauzy networks of vitality reduced to dry delicate nets. Looking through them, I see my own skin, tissue, fat, and muscle fiber reduced to the spongy red-marrow latticework of my bones. The Fibonacci spiral within shells, flowers, human ears. The homologous structures within the limbs of cats, humans, whales. The ecosystems of mites, microbes, bacteria hosted on the landscape of our skin. “All things are delicately interconnected,” goes one of conceptual artist Jenny Holzer’s “Truisms,” in black on a gray t-shirt I wear.

My fingertip traces the fibrous ridges of cactus netting. My fingertip finds the faded patch on my calf, a white indentation with a scar the length of a prickly pear spine. A place of encounter. Of bodies intersecting. The desert of my youth has long lived in my mind, its structural systems inherent to my body. This was its first mark making to my flesh. 

Skins: 1 

After living with Gram that summer, Dad looked at me and laughed: “My God, you’re even the color of the dirt!” My skin was orange, tinted by my body’s failure to process carotene. I think back on how hypothyroidism had rendered my childhood skin dry and scaly, alligator skin we called it, like the raised bark of alligator juniper in the canyons. 

In the national forest, the shaggy juniper’s bark peels from its trunk and sways like skeins of my now-graying hair. Where the trunk is bare, the skin is kaleidoscopic in its variegations, like my teenage mane thick with blond, brown, and red tones, and plaited, by Gram’s nimble fingers, into French braids. 

The limbs of the Arizona sycamore along the creek are mottled pink-brown, light-blue, pale-green in a changing mosaic. Mottled, too, is my fair skin, not only with freckles, moles, and scars, but with white waxy spots, a decrease in melatonin, causing skin cells to shed in quiet protestation, creating a motley patchwork of evidence: aging. 

Breaking

Back then, I couldn’t stay. In this then-ramshackle town embedded between behemoth red-rock mountains, surrealist in their splendor, there wasn’t much for a lost girl to do. Being with Gram, in her house, in this landscape, was haven. Was home. 

But I felt beholden to parental figures both generous and mean. To a barbed love transactional and cruel. My worth predicated on an effervescence flattened by disregard. It was also what I knew. So, I went back North. 

Away from this place for decades, I’d ache to walk its rocky terracotta soil mottled with sage and pinyon green, gray twisty juniper trunks, and the ruby-rose-cream layered sandstone mountains on which some design intelligence writ a narrative of abundance amid scarcity, resilience after trauma. Away from this place, I’d imagine stumbling through dust, the sun and sky bearing down on my bones, a hole gaping where my heart should be. That hole, black with despair, willed my mind across remembered desert, so as to dissipate, disappear myself right into its terrain. 

As Gram is now. Scattered beneath a sandstone spire. Her grit, that morning, blowing back into my face, hair, the wool vest with buttons of petrified wood she had knit for me. I rubbed my palms together, absorbing what remained of her body into my skin, lifting my eyes to the azure sky, watching gray bits floating over the junipers toward home. 

Dustings of ash are frequent beside hiking trails, atop mountains, in crevasses. People. Pets. Out of desire. To meld with a magnificent landscape of color and light imbued with memory. I once overheard a woman say, “The red rocks must be so tired of our bullshit.” Was she referring to the now-rampant tourism? The energy seekers and vortex hunters desperate for red-rock absolution? The unprepared in need of rescue? The desperate refusing safe keeping? Was she referring to me? 

This is not bullshit. Here is my deepest desire, the wish occluding all other wishes: To rest within this landscape’s embrace. To meld with, to seep into, to become this landscape. Only here, grounded in the red dirt and the mountains that shed it, am I sane. It fixes me. Even as we break into each other. 

Skins: 2

In 2020, I started living most of the time at Gram’s, a vacant family-owned house. A wood-sided shell with rattling 1960s-era windows. A porous skin in a landscape seeking a way in. 

No-see-ums wriggled through the screens, welting my face and arms. A scorpion crawled into the bed covers, under my nightgown, stinging my back. Photinia roots tentacled through the bathroom pipes knitting with strands of my hair into haven for a young kingsnake, who turned tail back down the drain. 

A translucent salamander slithered around the floor until shooed outside. A rat invaded the kitchen via a crawl space. Lizards climbed the stone fireplace. Wolf spiders nested in firewood. 

The small rill beneath the house seeped up during monsoon, flooding the breakfast nook. Javelina brawled beneath my bedroom window. A gopher snake slid out from under the deck, licked the air, slipped away. Ivy crawled up the outside walls, under stones, through cracks in the cement. The landscape’s red dust coated every surface and filled every corner, searching for me. 

Juniper Twist: 1

The Utah juniper is nearly as charismatic as the red rocks. Its branches splay into low, broad sheltering eaves from outstretched trunks that twist in artful expressions of circumstance or disposition. The so-called vortexes here, energy systems emanating from the red rocks, are the culprit, according to believers. The stronger the vortex energy, the more dramatic the axial twist—sure evidence of invisible forces. But what about the junipers rotating far away from these over-worshipped sites? Helical stress, according to science, due to wind, especially in exposed locations—another invisible, yet felt, force. 

On slopes and shrub land, juniper’s tap root may dowse twenty feet into the earth, while shallower rootlets vein out ten feet from the trunk. Wind and water often expose these roots, as do millions of footsteps compacting the earth on hiking trails. 

One late-spring morning, after driving to a trail rarely overrun by tourists, I’m excited, ecstatic, to be here. Ten minutes in, I set down my poles to fling open my arms in buoyant embrace of my surroundings. Juniper, prickly pear, manzanita, yucca, arroyos, red rocks all around. I think, “I don’t need poles!” Tuck them under my arm. Turn and step. And go down. Hard. On hands and knees. 

In the agony of impact, I roll my legs out from under me and assess the situation. My right palm is shredded and lodged with grit. My left knee is so abraded I see the white, reds, and purples of a cloud-filled sunset, as torn rivulets drip blood into the vermillion dirt. Dragging myself across the path into juniper shade, I consider: the hurt, that I just started hiking, that I’m disgusted by my carelessness. I plant my poles, haul myself up, and limp on. 

Scrapes and punctures, twisted ankles, sprained toes, cramps and menorrhagia. I’ve hiked through it all. This feels different. I am alone with my suffering and recriminations. With each step, I consider: How much farther? How tough should I be? What am I proving and to whom? Two young women bounce past me. “Are you alright?” “Yes,” I answer through gritted teeth. When the back of my knee swells with fluid, that’s it. I turn back.

After six months in a full-leg brace, my fractured patella healed as my knee bloomed with long pale scars like miniature arroyos rain-carved across desert grasslands. As I set out on the same trail, my knee ached in remembrance, the patella’s fault line sighing under pressure. I thrust my poles into the ground, as sturdy as fence posts, for support. Where did I fall? Here. Upended by juniper’s root; dusky and bare. 

In this landscape, earth’s body and human bodies regularly intersect, with earth bearing the brunt. Peoples’ boots and bikes lay down tread and dislodge lifeforms knitting the desert together: tiny black towers of cryptobiotic crust, castle-like with nourishing keeps; brush rooted in stone wrinkles; fleshy prickle pads propagating across flat expanses. ATVs churn soil to dust, smothering juniper’s breath. Tourists carve over indigenous mark making left in sandstone centuries ago, and into sycamore flesh, leaving trees to suture their wounds with sap. 

We inflict violence on the landscape. The landscape delivers violence to us. Whether due to inattention or human-centered exceptionalism, people die summiting the mountains here. They fall. Far. Much farther than I have. Whose body, earth or human, is more sentient? More broken? Did juniper’s root, while catching the leather toe of my boot, message its subterranean sisters? Did the ground feel my full weight upon it? Did the microorganisms within the soil taste my flesh and blood? Did our cells reshuffle at the interface of interaction? I want to believe my falls, non-lethal but injurious, have brought me deeper into relationship with the landscape; into a kinship of mutual respect. 

Juniper Twist: 2

Juniper limbs make good fence posts, the first white ranchers surmised. They were right. After the U.S. government forcibly removed the Yavapai and Apache from this land, the pioneers took over their orchards, gardens, and grasslands. They hacked off juniper limbs to use as posts, strung them with barbed wire for fence. Claiming ownership. Demarcating land as possession. Keeping bodies in. Keeping bodies out. 

I see them. Two strands of rusty spiked steel downed between old posts. It’s the end of our trek. I’m tired. I’m wearing shorts. “Lift your feet. Step over,” I tell myself. Then. Sprawled front-forward on the ground. Poles akimbo. Palms scraped. Legs tangled, hooked, and bleeding. But I’m not alone. 

Resting my forehead on the ground, I hear Uncle Paul’s smooth boot steps and low sigh. Gram’s youngest, now eighty, ever calm. He gingerly frees one barb from behind my right knee. Then warns, “This next one is going to hurt.” Twist. Pull. Release. Blood flows down the back of my leg as he helps me up and we walk to the car. Marked again. Spines and barbs. Roots and posts. 

“Whether we’re talking about the naked desert or the body, let us no longer duel in dualities,” writes Amy Irvine in Desert Cabal. The scars, two white lines, align in my flesh like railroad tracks, trails, roads worn into the desert by white settlers and all who followed. 

Question 

She asks, “What did you feel each time you were punctured or fell?” 

“Pain,” I answer. “Often excruciating pain.” 

Ecotope

On a late afternoon by the creek, while walking across sensuously molded slick rock, I see a woman folded into its curves. Spooning. In ecology, when a landform, rock, and living creature share space, they create an ecotope. What new world emerged from their meeting? From my observing their meeting? One of hope. 

As the prickly pear dies, its flesh, fibers, bones desiccate in the sun, crumbling into ash flecked with hard bits. It cremates on the pyre of its existence. I won’t be ash for a good long while. And I no longer fall. I lie down in the red dirt, scarred limbs stretched out, back pressed into stone, hands cupping soil, hair collecting pine duff and pebbles. At rest. 

Camille LeFevre lives on Hisatsinom, Yavapai, and Apache land in Northern Arizona. Her poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared in Bridge Eight, Thin Air, The Ekphrastic Review, and other publications. She received the 2023 Scuglik Memorial Residency in ekphrastic writing. She teaches writing about art at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe.

Published October 15 2024