Darkness and Light in America

I spotted Doug among all the other weekend hikers. He was alone, looking lost, if that was possible, or at least out of place.

He was a bit overweight and wore casual clothes, his jacket tucked into the crook of his arm.

My wife and I were taking a late-afternoon jaunt along the shore of Lake Mead. The trail followed the old rail bed on which workers moved the concrete from a nearby facility to the Hoover Dam site, through five tunnels blasted out of the sheer rock. 

Now that the iron rails and wooden ties are gone, the Railroad Trail has become a popular hiking destination. Scenic. Elevated. Relatively flat. The kind of groomed trail that attracts families and millennials who scamper atop the imposing rock faces overhead. 

We’d started late and I knew we’d have to hustle if we were going to cover the four miles to the dam and then back again.

My wife kept pausing to take photographs. I knew we’d finish in darkness.

A mile from the dam, we caught up with him at a fork in the trail. He stood there as though waiting for someone to come along and save him.

As we walked together, he introduced himself as Doug and began to tell his story, as most Americans are prone to do. Details spilling out to strangers.

He was 54 and had recently lost 40 pounds. He admitted that he would never have been able to walk so far at his previous weight. 

He said he was from Chicago and I told him I’d recognized the accent right away— beginning with rounded r-sound, as in Chi-car-go. He smiled, amazed that just a few words had so accurately revealed his roots.

There was more.

Doug lost his electrical engineering job due to the pandemic. No longer able to afford his apartment, he moved into a long-term motel, the kind where you score drugs in the hallways. 

He’d since fled Chicago for Vegas to live with his older brother, a veteran dealer at the Orleans casino. He paid a few hundred for the room, much better than the $1,600 for that lonely squat back in Chicago.

As Doug talked, I watched my wife’s face. 

We’ve all read about personal suffering during the pandemic -- people losing family members and careers to a virus that simple will not go away; one that keeps mutating, and killing, extinguishing lives and careers.

But this was the first time we’d witnessed those vestiges up close. Not on the television or online but right there on the trail, with the glistening blue of Lake Mead as a backdrop.

There was Doug, a walking-wounded American worker. You could see the weariness in his eyes, a sense of defeat in each step he took. 

Doug shuddered as we passed beneath an electrical grid of towers and wires that moved Hoover’s commodity out to homes across the west.

“Listen,” he said, “you can hear the hum.”

Back at the no-tell motel in Chicago, he heard a similar hum and looked out his window at the electrical towers right outside. After a few weeks, his head began to hurt. 

He had headaches that only relented when he arrived in Las Vegas.

At the dam, Doug’s eyes widened at the sheer immensity of this manmade temple of progress. He looked like he wanted to stick around.

As we said our goodbyes, I slapped him on the back.

“Don’t linger, man,” I said. “The sunlight is fading.”

My wife and I headed back to toward that distant trailhead. At one point, from the top of a hill, I saw a figure moving slowly in the fleeting light.

It was Doug. 

“Good,” I thought. “This is no place to be alone after dark.”

Our pace slowed. We paused to take pictures of the lake at dusk.

Then, Doug caught up to us. There was just this innocence about him, and I was glad to have him back. We fell in line together for the last few miles.

One curved tunnel was now so completely dark it felt like we were disembodied. “It’s so strange,” Doug said. “I can’t even see my feet.”

Then we turned the corner and saw the light.

Doug was worried about snakes and the coming darkness. I told him that our eyes would become accustomed to the dying light. We’d find our way.

He told more of his story. He was lonely, he said. He missed his three children. His wife, he said, was their “custodian,” which to me seemed like language from a divorce settlement.

He missed his 14-year-old son most of all. These were years apart he would never get back.

My wife brought up politics.

I then realized that, like my wife, Doug was a conservative who had supported Donald Trump. The two bonded, pulling out the same stories of a stolen election and an incompetent Joe Biden.

As my wife launched into a diatribe I've heard so many times before, I playfully mentioned the awfully steep slope and how it'd be a shame if she just tumbled. She ignored me.

"You'd die for sure if you ever fell from here," he said.

There was a softness to Doug’s delivery, unlike my wife’s hardline stand.

At one point, he paused: “Can I ask you a question?"

Doug said he had recently begun to question his place on earth. He was overweight, jobless, far from his family. Maybe it was time, he said, to reconnect with the Lord.

My wife told how she'd found God a few years before and how I supported her new-found faith. Even as a lapsed Catholic, I said I looked forward to those moments my wife reached for my hand in prayer.

Doug had so many questions: He thought of taking a stranger's offer to attend Mormon services nearby? He needed time to think. While his son believed in God, the boy's mother still questioned.

How could he be an influence on the boy so far from home?

And what about his eldest daughter? She hated Donald Trump; he didn't understand it. Recently she'd revealed that she was an atheist.

How did that happen, he wanted to know.

Peer pressure, I offered. My wife said she had been brainwashed at school.

Go to the services, my wife said.

Let your daughter figure things out for herself, I added.

Finally, we reached our fork in the trail. 

Doug said we had all achieved something unique that day — people from opposite sides of the political spectrum having a civil conservation.

We wished Doug well in his job search, which he said would eventually take him back to Chicago. To his son. Back home.

As we separated in the darkness, I could only hope that Doug had reached his own personal crossroad, that the light at the end of a very long tunnel had finally come into view.