By Mary Birnbaum

The Featured Art is “Sea Library” by Greta Delapp

I was supposed to go on vacation to a National Park, but I don’t vacation. I mean, I did go, but I came very close to not seeing anything at all, because here is how I am accustomed to seeing: There are windows in my home office, but my desk does not face them, so light enters from the side. I am obliquely aware of the day. Sometimes I twist my body to see if the sun has risen, whether fog covers or wind stirs the big green shrub outside. In this small room in my house, I face three computer monitors and their glowing non-sun. I do a real-time job. Creation and consumption of the product are simultaneous; I make live captions for people to read on the Internet, like a stenographer does in court. I do it for seminars and webinars and legal proceedings, in Zoom or Teams or Chime or the platform du jour. My job is to listen and talk at once. What I do is called Voicewriting. It is a job of ears and mouth, an occupation more physical than cerebral, though I’m very stuck at a desk. I receive an audio feed from a remote source and say aloud what I hear as I hear it. Voice recognition software instantly converts my speech to text, which appears in a unique URL, or onscreen in a meeting platform. Someone I don’t know, someone far away or near, reads it as it unfurls. The job is sweaty and live. I’ve parroted defense contractors, nuclear regulators, pastors and poets. It’s echo, not interpretation.

There is no time to fall behind. A dropped word can be fatal to sentence meaning, a dropped sentence is dereliction. Tethered to my laptop by a web of cords, in my black microphone-headset, I resemble an air traffic controller. When a meeting has weak audio, I jack the volume up, and with my palms I press the headphones to my skull, so I am filled with sound and its vibration, then quickly I move my lips and tongue. If I get a very speedy talker, I close my eyes to eliminate all extraneous stimuli. The trick of the job is to tune out your own noise, to be a channel of syllables divorced from sense.

This has been my job for sixteen years, and soon I will lose it. Mine is a machine-like service that will very soon be performed exclusively by actual machines. But I’ll do it for as long as possible, while business remains good, in one-hour or several hour increments, amounting to eight to ten-hour workdays. I have spent a decade and a half in a dizzying accretion of single jobs. I’m self-employed and have broadened my contracts over time, expanding my reach, filling my calendar, factoring in the needs of my children, their meals and appointments. My husband and I depend on our dual income. I don’t take days off in the middle of September.

At night in bed, finally supine, when mind sinks into sleep my body jerks it awake—out of a plummet. Maybe this happens to everyone. The point is, when I can’t sleep, I think of immovable things. My time is measured hourly increments, so what soothes me is thinking of time measured in shapes. I mean time on a God’s schedule, if there is such a thing, which is assessed not in hours but in geologic layers, topographies moved by wind and water over millennia. Take for example the Colorado Plateau, its pastel windy tabletops. I’m talking about a seismic scale, a time that, when you are in it, you want only to listen and not crowd the air with your own noise, the scale in which your little stress-life figures so small it can hardly be perceived.

My family went to Zion National Park during a hot September, allegedly on vacation, far from our lives. We were to stay five days. I’d taken the kids out of school. My husband did not come. He couldn’t get the time off work and can’t work remotely. Still, we would have this week, the rest of us together—me, my two young daughters, my sister and her baby, my other sister and her boyfriend from New York, my father, his wife, one hotel room, two rented camping vans, a jigsaw of bedrolls and lanterns and books and chips and crackers and things that scatter crumbs. One duffel bulged with my work equipment and slick snakes of cords. I would work on the trip, in the finger shadows of rock minarets.

My sister and I left my house in San Diego on Monday, loading our sleeping children into the van before dawn. We were trying to make good time—which is a funny concept—so we didn’t stop en route. My niece was just 18 months old and my sister twisted around to feed her snacks as we traveled. Both of us alerted the kids to anything interesting outside that we thought would distract them from the hours.

Right around a town called St. George, the Colorado Plateau began to insinuate itself. Hills formed like bulks under a blanket, increasing to buttes and towers and the long beige planes became pink and orange, rust and red. Whenever I had cell signal I Googled what we saw, to try to name or explain sites before they were behind us. I held my phone to the window to try and take pictures, but on review the images were small and inadequate. The color did not convey.

We reached Springdale, the town right outside the park entrance and parked in a reserved spot in a campground. My sister and her baby would stay at a hotel nearby. I would use her room during the day to work. Not full days of work, I had promised. I cut the hours in half. Nearly in half. I could connect to meetings on the reliable hotel Wi-fi. The other adults had kindly offered to take my kids adventuring while I worked. They would hike every day around the park, up and down and across the Virgin River. In the weeks of planning for the trip, everyone talked of a little museum up the canyon and a big old historic lodge they wanted to see. Someone said Emerald Pool and someone said Weeping Rock. They rang like titles of fantasy stories I would not read.

The things I thought I would be content not to see, as described by me now from my desk, after the trip:

Zion comprises about 147,000 acres of Southwest Utah, at about 4,000 feet of elevation. The highest point is Horse Ranch Mountain, at 8,724 feet, which is about as high as the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, if stood on its side. Standing the basin of the park, you’re surrounded by a color record of geologic time—the codes are there in the stratigraphy. As the sun arcs up and over, shadows elongate over the scarp and when you place a hand on it, the rock face feels damp and maybe alive. Where the cliff meets the canyon floor, especially in shadow, it’s so varnished by the elements that it shines like metal.

For all the apparent stillness of the stone, the contours allude to movement, of water and wind on soil and rock. It’s a story about what happened here, the action over millennia, over spans of time where the words “slow” and “fast” seem silly. This corner of the Colorado Plateau reads like a transcript, comprised by sediment deposited over hundreds of millions of years. Transitions appear abrupt. Horizontal stripes cut

Pink

cream-pink

Rust

Orange-umber

gray black and

purple black in the bedding planes, which is the name of the place where epochs touch. Then when the sun starts to set, the mountains glow, as with some of inner light—and I mean glow gold.

As with much of what happens in Utah, the park’s nomenclature and history braid with religion. The Court of the Patriarchs, a towering sandstone trio, are named Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. There’s West Temple and Tabernacle Dome and a formation called the Great White Throne. If you hike to Angel’s Landing—a notoriously difficult trek—your prize is a view backward into the long slit of the canyon, with the Virgin River veining down and tiny cottonwood trees flickering like a disco. Maybe people who know a God in their life, who find holiness, unspoken, everywhere, aren’t surprised when confronted by these places like other planets, with pastel dust for sand, cliffs so high and iron-rich they’re blood colored; walls with purple black stripes streaking like paint, whose deep cracks dribble. The monumental walls are best viewed when supine. If you lay on your back and look up, the sky crawls through the channel of the canyon, a river upside-down. If you’re very attuned, you can separate water noise from wind.

*

The second day in, the Internet quit. There I had been, speaking and reviewing my live captions for a corporate webinar on the laptop, but also gazing beyond, through the big hotel room window, out to a cliff’s face. I was thinking how, from my cushioned chair, I could be looking at a painting of a big umber smear of escarpment, not real rock. The tableau, framed by the window, was perfectly still, unless a bird streaked across.

Then the connection was gone and my attention riveted to the laptop. Connection lost. Panic arrived, roving from my scalp to my fingers. My throat contracted and I forced a swallow. I took off my headset, tore out of the room, down the hotel stairs, out a heavy door, into a blast of high desert air, up a small hill to the detached lobby, where the concierge advised me that Internet had collapsed for the whole town.

Running back to the hotel room to try to troubleshoot, I thought of a moment the night before, as our family walked back to the camp from a restaurant. Over our heads the Milky Way was flayed, dust and stars a muted glow. The looming canyon walls were invisible in the dark, but cradled us—you could feel that. I held the warm hands of my two daughters, one on either side, now and again coming under the amber glow of a streetlight. Then there had been a single boom, a giant cannon sound that you felt in your knees and teeth. Someone said, “Transformer.” The sound was staggering as a blow, and as I recovered my mind wisped transform her, which was better and more interesting. On the run back to my computer now, panic-sweaty, I remembered that likely electrical malfunction, the invisible explosion in the night, somewhere in our canyon or the next, whose eventual, non-mystical effect might have been to compromise the Wi-Fi. I felt very un-poetic about it. The canyon seemed to press and compact air, making it too thin to suck.

*

Weeks before the trip, one day when we were on a run, I told my sister how I thought I was losing my hearing. From work, I said. Slowly, slowly, so incrementally it was hard to tell. I said how wearing the headphones all day with the volume up was damaging the little hair cells, one by one. I imagined them felled, a downed forest of miniscule trees. I didn’t look at her when I said it, not wanting to substantiate the fear by making eye contact. I didn’t remind her how losing my hearing meant losing my ability to work. We both looked forward, to the road. For safety. It’s probably not real, I said. I’m being a hypochondriac. But in bed at night after working, when I lay down and opened a book or didn’t open a book and just shut my eyes, deep in my ears whined a sine tone, unrelenting. A test screen.

*

Breathless, I asked the hotel concierge, does Wi-Fi fail a lot here? She said no, she had never known it to happen. This was weird, she said. I returned to my hotel room to draft a series of obsequious emails to my company on my phone. I couldn’t write how it was lucky I’d had connectivity at all thus far, how over the entire 12-hour drive to Utah I’d fretted over whether to call a sub for my scheduled jobs. I’d checked on the Wi-Fi availability ahead of time, but knew I would be, after all, deep in the cleft of a canyon. I could not say what was true, how I was too anxious about money, too compulsive about work to ask for time off, so I’d packed my equipment for the trip and remained in a hotel while my kids basked on hot boulders and scouted for Bighorn Sheep.

In the messages I said I didn’t know what could have happened. It came out that I was away from home. But! I assured the company, I was in a place with reliable Wi-Fi. I made it sound like I was somewhere bustling, Dallas or Cincinnati, not letting on that I was in a spot so removed that people named it heaven. They said, You should have told us you were away from home. We would have reassigned your work. There are 150 active captioners on the listserv. I did not say, That’s why I didn’t tell you.

This crawling heavy fear was not helpful or good, I knew. But work was vital. For the bills at home on the kitchen table and all the future bills. The taxes. The house, the insurance. Shoddy plumbing, termites and their dust everywhere, everywhere, and something about the flashing of the roof? Roof flashing? The lives we said we wanted—that surely we did want. So I refreshed and refreshed the page. I texted my contrition until no one responded. I looked out the window at the still, red scarp.

Early that morning my family had said they were going to the River Walk, a flat hike deep in the canyon, the last stop on the tram. A person can still drive a car into the park, but the tram is free to visitors and eliminates traffic past the hotels. The first stop is near the park entrance and the nine successive stops take hikers further in. There is no cell service and you won’t easily find your people if you lose them. People carry paper maps and mark a meeting spot. Isolation necessitates a plan. We had made no plan. We assumed I would work all day. Now there was nothing left for me but to go outside. I searched for something comfortable to walk in. I slung on a backpack and opened the door and when it closed after me, it thunked hard.

I stood at the tram stop and tried to slow my blood, which I thought I could feel racing everywhere, to my finger tips, to my knees, making me quaky. The cliffs began to blur. Over my head, tree branches kinked into knots. My neck could not support my throbbing head. I sorted potential consequences. Would I lose the contract I had worked so long to create? Would I find another company to contract with? Who would have me? What about my reputation? Was I unreliable? Like, intrinsically. How much income could I lose, and for how long? What would I be then? My cheeks were ruddy with shame, with bruisy-feeling tenderness. I felt a headache arrive. The world was so hot, the high desert breeze having gone who knows where, and yet dust clouded. Everything smelled like baked oil and exhaust from the parking lot. All that poison trapped, settling in the canyon’s basin. This is panic, I thought. This is too much. I shut my eyes.

Around me people coalesced, awaiting the tram. I opened my eyes in the growing noise and was surprised to see a group of revelers, at its core a bride and groom. Men wore fancy slacks. They were coatless but wore dress shirts and vests, with bright colored ties and boutonnieres and shiny shoes. Bridesmaids wore dark green silk dresses, ground length, sleeveless and wind-shifting, color flickering silver-to-green like leaves. They had flowers trapped in their hair, clipped to suggest the plants had sprung there, spontaneous. Older couples shuffled in the mix, looking prim and bright and kempt. Everyone talked and talked. And there, a bride, in limestone colored satin and lace as fine as lichen covering her chest, dark hair swept atop her head with flowers and jeweled bits, haloing light, letting it go. She laughed, easy as a river and dangled a white bouquet from her long arm, The group chattered and milled. I startled when the bus roared up. It hissed and settled, brakes keening. I would join the wedding party.

We lurched forward in the tram and I tried not to stare at the bride and the rest of the party. But the revelers created their own sort of weather, of giddy ebullience, in flurries of short laughter, fragments of joyous talk. Swift bright light dappled the bus as we went. The mood was catching. I had the notion that I was under-dressed.

I sat and became calm there, or sufficiently distracted. I reflected on my wracked body, how I shook, how swallowing was hard. I had brief, fleeting thoughts about the cult of productivity in America and about how troubling it is that a person—that I—could tie my worth to an occupation. Then I re-tethered myself, as I do whenever I feel tired, remembering how lucky I am to have work at all. But my overriding concern was about the wedding party getting off the bus, for surely they must. Mine was the last tram stop, ninth out of nine. I expected theirs would be sooner and I wished they never would leave, that I would ride the wedding tram for hours or days or the rest of my life.

The bride and groom sat together in forward facing seats. I watched the woman’s neck and saw vertebrae shift under her smooth skin when she turned to talk, how she brought her hand to her hair when the wind tried to unravel it. Wisps wound round her face and the groom laughed and chatted with everyone and she put her head down on his shoulder and I thought I smelled moss or damp clay.

*

I want to tell you about names and concepts I barely understand, because what little I know sets my hair on end. I didn’t know when I was there, but since then I learned that the visible rock faces in Zion reflect most of the Mesozoic era and some of the Paleozoic eras. The Mesozoic alone lasted 186 million years. I twist era names carefully in my mouth, as though this chewing will help me reckon with it all. It’s a time bookended by mass extinctions, by development and dissolution. The palette of hues that tells this tale is, on its own, hard to metabolize. The strata represent spans of time that dwarf and disappear human experience, including human worry, including human joy.

Lichen colonies—the splotches of organism on rocks and trees that I once barely noticed—can be up to nine thousand years old, and in most years the organism advances just one millimeter. Lichens have periods of dormancy but will burst into something like a bloom, depending on the season. On canyon walls lichen flares like an open can of paint has been sloshed, chartreuse or rust or rooted like a plant. Lichen is other. I’m telling you that reading about this understated force had me weeping in my desk chair.

The most competent captioner will allow you to forget they exist. It’s only when errors appear in captioning, gaps or nonsequiturs in the text, that the reader is forced to consider the fallible mediator. This is as it should be. The work is a service, it is being the conduit, not the communicator. When I started, speech recognition technology was relatively poor and it was onerous to teach the machine to understand me. These days the software is so smart that, right out of the box, a competent user can Voicewrite. They can even use a separate monitor to review more emailed jobs while they Voicewrite. I am telling you that I take on more work while I work.

In college I majored in Spanish and Italian. I thought that studying foreign languages was a good way to understand one’s mother tongue. It’s also a way of admitting faith in language, that words are an adequate device to mean. For most of my life, I have had this kind of faith. When I graduated, on learning I had a penchant for successfully replicating noises, (the talent of a parakeet) a family friend invited me to try Voicewriting—a job that was then only theoretical. She was a former stenographer who had been a court reporter but had had enough. She would convert her skills to contract captioning and was trying to grow a company. Would I like to try speech to text? I said sure, I would try. Until I discovered my real career, I thought. Until I could apply all the words to some truly poetic end. I needed a job. A few years later the stock market collapsed. And instead of the right, creative career, I had two daughters pell-mell, and I was shot full of a fear and love so heady it made it difficult to search rigorously for new work, to be rigorous about anything, really. The strata of years and belongings piling on, I was grateful to have any job at all, even one that made me disappear.

*

I shouldn’t have found my family in that space, in that ambling, uneven crowd on the River Walk. There are hundreds of thousands of visitors in Zion over the fall months—half a million, during most Septembers. I got off the tram in a shoal of strangers and approached the narrow trail head. I weaved through hundreds of people, young and old, of varying sizes and shapes. I slipped through conversations, some in English, many of them not. I caught words and laughter and grunts and sighs. Families hailed one another up and down the path.

I walked as if on a lead, parallel to the river, and after about half an hour, I looked over to a little patch of beach, and there was my sister, breastfeeding her baby on a big wet rock. And there were the rest of them, my family, ankle deep in the water, spread up and down a stretch of shady river like uneven pilings. I waved and called out.

I told my family the Internet died. I shrugged and looked the mountains up and down. I didn’t mention my body’s attack, how I had hardened and my mind became a box of darting worries. I balled and released my fists, checking for any tremor. I didn’t mention the wedding party. I don’t know why.

The revelers had left the tram at the lodge, five stops in. As we pulled away, I swiveled back to watch them stroll across the broad lawn, the wedding party arm in arm in arm, toward the tower of an ancient Fremont Cottonwood tree, a hundred feet tall, with a trunk and branches so vast that I think it spanned the whole field, the whole big, football pitch-sized field, teeming with a million flickering leaves. I watched till the party was gone, training my eye on the bride’s bright dress moving across the grass. When they were lost from view, their chatter still climbed the canyon walls.

When I returned home, I returned to work. I didn’t let up, really, didn’t reduce my hours. But now I watch old footage of Zion, of landslides that washed roads away and trapped visitors at the historic lodge for days and I imagined being there, deep in the valley. Making a life there, maybe never coming out. All day long my voice still goes, the noises converting reliably to text, and the text streams on and on but my mind is not with it, my mind is not in it, and the words attach less and less to sense. Light slants in from the window. At the end of the day, I take my headphones down, I take my microphone off, I rub my eyes.

There are records of some landslides and how they collapsed the scarp, re-contouring the canyon. Some transformations we understand, and some stripes in the record are yet a mystery. Sometimes, in the recordkeeping, an unaccountable gap persists, an unconformity, and if there ever was a word to trust, that seems like a good one. We get as close as we can to description; one must achieve meaning backwards, sideways, around the gap, if at all.

On the banks of the Virgin River I had shed my backpack and shoes and socks and joined the waders. The rock wall sheared up before us, like someone had troweled the face flat, a damp red turning to orange and higher up impending into jagged outcroppings. Higher still the sun hit sandstone, bleached white, except where the rock was riven by lines of Ponderosa pines, thousands of feet in air. My older daughter explored further upriver. I followed her along the bank. She stopped at an eddy where little boulders held carousing water. She strode into the pool to sit on a rock and leaned back to let the water pound her head and shoulders. Under a tree close by, atop a couple big boulders, two elderly nuns sat eating sandwiches. They wore royal blue habits. Their legs dangled off the rock. I checked twice. Yes, there they were. Nothing was odd or incongruous.

---

Mary Birnbaum‘s work has appeared in The Week, Tahoma Literary Review, Hunger Mountain and Potomac Review. She received the Disquiet Nonfiction Fellowship for a piece published in NinthLetter and the Nonfiction Prize at Crazyhorse for a piece listed as notable in The Best American Essays of 2020. She’s been a finalist for nonfiction prizes at Chattahoochee Review, Hunger Mountain, and for the Conger Beasley Jr. Award at New Letters. She is former Nonfiction Editor at Lunch Ticket, and was a contributor to that journal. She resides in Vista, California, with her husband and two daughters and one good dog and one super disrespectful dog. Mary is a closed captioner, by trade.