That Looks Ominous

The second time I ever hung out with the guy who would become my husband, he asked me to go stomp around some sun-blasted, stick infested, section of scrub oak filled Forest Service land. He said he wanted to go quail scouting (it was spring, so not hunting season) and generally just see what we could see.

I agreed to go, mostly because I needed to get out of the house, and we drove for a long time before we arrived at an uninspiring chunk of land where in the future, I would shoot my first quail.

That spring day was sunny. The plants were green, and new shoots of life were exploding from sticks, which, when I would come back in the fall, would be nothing but pokey, dead sharp things.

I had a book on edible plants, and we wandered around looking at things until my future husband (this fact very unknown to me at the time) found a vibrant red stalk of three leaves.

I heard him say, "This looks ominous..."

And then he reached out and grabbed the plant, squeezing it between his thumb and pointer finger.

Fast forward several years. We now lived in the desert. The blasted, sun-baked desert, and my husband decided, on one cool eighty-five degree February day, we should drive to an extremely ominous desert mountain chain and hike to the top of the range's tallest peak.

Which, I agreed to do because again, I needed to get out of the house.

Now, there are a lot of kinds of desert. This desert was the kind of place where even the cholla cactus die, and drab olive green creosote leaves seemed like tropical flowers compared to the cholla skeletons and colorless sand.

We drove to where there was no cell service, parked, and took off cross-country across the desert. Once we got out of range of even the best drunk driver's ability to toss an empty, there were no signs of humans. Which was actually saying something.

Most of the time when we hiked in the desert, if we looked under enough rocks, or in enough washes, we could find evidence of pre-historic peoples or historic cowboys. But out there... Nothing.

Within a mile of what would turn into a thirteen mile hike, it felt... ominous.

We cut across the flat plane of the desert until we came to the side of one of the crumbling mountains.

"The pass is up there," my husband, clad in a sun hoodie pointed.

I looked at the mountain. I saw a steep face bearing a boulder field and no pass. I told him so.

"No, it's up there and totally chill. You'll see."

He was right. There was a way up the boulder flecked slope, but it was up hill and hot and hard. When we neared the top I dug into my bag for my electrolytes and realized... I didn't have them.

I knew, even then, that meant I was going to get a migraine. But, in no deviation from my normal behavior, I was like, I can still get up to the top. I'll just eat my salty snacks.

Which I did. And we walked, and wove our way through the rocky slopes, no trail, having to back track at times, until we reached a section that involved using our hands and feet, and hours upon hours after leaving the car, we topped out.

The view was like most desert views, unsettling because you could see so far you didn't really feel like you were in the middle of nowhere; everything seemed so close. But that is one of the sneaky things about the desert. You think you are close to something because you can see forever. Without trees and buildings to block your view, you think you aren't that far away from the nearest thing you can see. But you are. You are certainly far enough away to die and have someone never find your body.

We started to go down. I was getting the migraine I'd told myself probably wouldn't happen, despite the fact that without my electrolytes I always got one. I was annoyed at the down climbing we had to do, and I got more and more silent because my head hurt. I ate my snacks and drank my water, but really, it was too late. I needed my electrolytes hours before.

We finally made it down all the vertical sections and to the flat wash that, conceivably had been, at some time in the last ten thousand years, the plain of a delta. I felt bad. Real bad. And I knew what was going on. I drank too much water, and if I were to diagnose myself, I had some degree of hyponatremia. It was possible I would puke. I had too much wanter and not enough electrolytes on board.

But, like always, my husband was totally fine. He was basically skipping, babbling about the austere beauty of the desert while I wondered if our car had been torched. We were close enough to the highway at that point I could see my car (although not if it'd been vandalized). We probably had about two miles to go.

Because my husband is an undercover cardio athlete who isn't affected by heat or nutrition or distance, he had enough energy to suddenly squat down and look at something under a creosote bush.

I stumbled to him, realizing I could puke on him if I moved too quickly, and I saw, he was taking photos of something.

It was a bright red, velvety looking ant. It was big, and dare I say it, ominous. My husband had his phone close to the ground, and the ant seemed annoyed by him.

"I think you should leave that thing alone," I managed, without vomiting.

"I want to take a photo to identify it later. It's probably harmless."

I swallowed, realizing the car was so close, but so far. I thought that thing was certainly not harmless, and one of us needed to be able to drive home, and wasn't going to be me.

"Don't mess with it. Seriously. I'm on the verge of a full migraine. I can't drive."

"I wonder if that velvet stuff is soft, or if it's like cactus glochids."

"Remember when you grabbed that plant, when we just met? Right as you said it was ominous?" I tried.

My husband leveled a flat stare at me.

"Remember how your brain knew it was ominous, yet you touched it? And then remember how it was actually poison oak and you got poison oak all over your hands?"

"I didn't actually get poison oak on my hands. I just told you that because, at the time, I was trying to woo you."

I had thoughts on that statement, but I stayed focused. At least for the first part of my response.

"I think you should leave that giant, bright red, ant, which is clearly annoyed at you, alone... Also, that's a weird wooing strategy. It didn't make me want to touch you."

"It made me seem tough," he said.

I thought about responding with my thoughts on that, but was afraid I might vomit, and he was standing again. The red ant meandering on its way.

A few miles later we made it to the car, and I threw up, luckily, outside of the car. My husband drove us home, chatting happily while I kept it together enough not to puke on the floorboard.

It took us an hour to get home. I made it in the house, puked some more, took some electrolytes, and was lying on the cool bathroom tile when my husband popped his head in the door.

"Guess what?" he said.

My migraine was receding, but I found his cheeriness entirely annoying.

"What?"

"You were right. That was a red velvet ant. Guess it's nickname?"

He did not give me a chance to guess.

"COW KILLER. It's apparently got one of the most painful stings in the world. It's actually a wingless wasp. Super cool, right?"

I wasn't sure which one of us was the bigger idiot. The one who went hiking without her electrolytes and decided to just keep going, or the one who could not, would not, stop attempting to touch stuff he knew was dangerous.

My face on the tile floor, I said, "I saved you. You're lucky I was there to tell you not to touch it."

He blew out some air and waved me away. "I don't need you to tell me what not to touch! I'm an adult!"

I thought about vomiting again.

We probably deserved each other.