A parched desert doesn't heal by inches - it drowns in the crazed lightning of a monsoon and turns green overnight. Soma is quietly hoping for the same miracle.
Travels with a Slumber Queen: Tales of the Southwest is the latest chapter in Thomas E. Towle's ongoing chronicle of his restless alter ego, Soma - first introduced decades earlier in The Pilgrimage of Amos. Freshly grieving the death of his ninety-nine-year-old mother and the collapse of a long, difficult relationship, Soma retreats to the one place that has never turned him away: the Sonoran Desert, in the seat of his rickety 1987 motorhome, the Slumber Queen.
What he finds there is not an untouched Eden. The Colorado River runs dry before it reaches the sea, drained for lettuce and cotton and subsidized crops. RV parks bloom like white fibreglass tumors across land that once belonged to nobody. Old growth is bulldozed for gated communities named for the very wilderness they replaced. Soma watches the desert being scoured down the same slow, careless way his own life has been scoured down - by age, by loss, by the years he gave to people who left anyway. The wound in the land and the wound in the man start to look like the same wound.
But the desert Soma has come to love doesn't merely survive - it resurrects. Ground that looks dead and cracked for months explodes green in a single night of monsoon lightning; a dry wash that hasn't run in years will roar for an hour and leave the whole valley blooming for a month. It is a landscape built on rebirth, not just endurance, and hiking its ancient peaks with two old friends - Boswell, an incorrigible romantic, and Petrovich, quietly fighting cancer - chasing a half-serious rumor of wild peyote that might cure him, Soma starts to wonder if a life can do the same thing: whether his own thirst for friendship, for company, for one more chance at love, might come rushing back just as suddenly and completely as a summer storm. He collects a string of desert characters along the way who seem to prove it possible: Stan, an aging beatnik outrunning an ordinary life since the 1950s; Maverick, a machete-carrying guide who reads the land like scripture; a lonely man who swims calmly among Pacific sharks; a diner waitress who is a dead ringer for the girl who broke Soma's heart forty years ago.
Every hike becomes a small negotiation with mortality - his friend's, his mother's, his own. And slowly, without ever quite admitting it, Soma starts to take his cues from the land itself: how a place can be scoured to bare rock and still, given the right storm, come back green. By the time the trip ends - at his mother's bedside, and later at the edge of a state park being swallowed by ever-bigger motorhomes - Soma hasn't fixed anything. But he has felt, at least once, that same crazed lightning-strike of a thirst answered: for life, for friends, for love, rushing back all at once like a desert in bloom.
Travels with a Slumber Queen is a picaresque, deeply personal travel memoir dressed as a novel - equal parts Edward Abbey and love letter to the monsoon season, and proof that even a life scoured down to bare rock can green up again, given the right storm.
