Hope Is a Four Letter Word
Notes on not looking
There is a night I have not told anyone about in forty years.
It happened on the north rim of the Grand Canyon, in June, when I was young enough to believe exhaustion was temporary. Something occurred that I have never had a good word for. I don’t know how long it lasted. Then I talked myself out of it, and it went away while I was talking, and I have not been able to get back to it since.
The well comes first. The well is where I learned what I did that night, and it took thirty-odd years and ten months without running water to teach me.
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When I bought this place I was still working, still coming and going, and it was green. Grass everywhere. Long snowy winters, spring rain you could set a calendar by. I came from the Pacific North West, where water is the weather, and I did not know I was looking at an exception.
By the time I moved here for good, it was brown. Brown and dusty and going quiet in a way I had no framework for.
So I set out to get the green back.
I watered. I cleared, and I watered. I seeded, and I watered. I fertilized, and watered that in. I did this for years, with real effort and real money and a good heart, and at no point did I ask the ground a single question. Not what it had been before the green. Not why the green had gone. Not what this country does when left to itself, or what it had done for the ten thousand years before someone put a house on it.
I did not do the homework. I hoped, and then I got up every morning and worked very hard at my hope.
That is the part I got wrong for the longest, so I will say it simply. Hope is not the absence of effort. Mine had a shovel in its hand. Hope is what you feel about something you have decided not to look at, and effort is often how the not-looking gets done. Watering was easier than asking. Watering had a task in it and a result you could photograph. Asking would have led somewhere I did not want to go, which was that the place I had bought for my retirement was not the place I thought I had bought, and would not be again in my lifetime.
Hope has a shape. It has contents, a specific outcome with your name on it. It has a date, spoken or unspoken, by which the outcome is supposed to arrive. It has walls. The walls are what make it useful. The walls are also what make it a thing that can be taken.
Mine had green in it. It had no date I ever said out loud, which I thought made it modest. I carried it around this place for years and the aquifer paid for all of it.
The pump starts sucking air. I don’t know enough to tell whether it is the pump or the water, so I baby it. Shorter runs. Longer rests. I listen to it the way you listen to an engine you cannot afford to replace. This goes on for a while.
I call my pump guy. He comes out and drops a test line down the casing and stands there paying it out, and it goes, and goes, and when it stops he reads the mark and tells me I have a few feet of water left.
My stomach drops deeper than the well. It is a bottomless pit, and the only thing that comes back up is anxiety. I am standing in my own yard learning what a long drought means, and I am only at the start of the lesson.
That is when I stop watering, which sounds like waking up and is not.
Because what I do next is ration. Laundry at odd hours. Things left unwashed. One eye on the trough and one on the sky, and every month the tap keeps running goes into the file as evidence that using less is working. Rationing is not sitting still. It is action. It costs you something, it takes attention, and while you are doing it you have the reasonable feeling of a person addressing her situation. That is exactly what makes it useful. It is the small manageable thing I do so that I will not have to do the large unmanageable one, which is to accept that the well is finished and get in the queue while there is still a queue to get into.
New contents, same box. I have stopped hoping for green and started hoping the well holds out, and I have carried the whole apparatus down one floor without noticing I am carrying it.
When the well fails it fails completely. The valley is in drought and every driller in three counties is booked. New well, new lines, and a waiting list that does not care who you are or how many animals are looking at you. Ten months.
So I haul. My neighbor is rarely here and I look after his place, and he tells me to use the outdoor faucet. Containers in the truck, down the road, back. Three times a week, for months, in every weather that ten months contains. In February they freeze to the truck bed. You learn that the second week.
Here is what I did not expect. I stand at his tap on a clear cold morning and fill the containers one by one. It takes long enough that I forget to be anxious. I am just there. Water going into a jug, breath going out in front of me, nothing to figure out. It is the closest thing to peace the whole business gives me, and it comes at somebody else’s faucet, not at home.
Then I drive back and set up the pump and fill the trough and carry the smaller containers into the house, and every muscle I own hurts.
There was no hope in the hauling. Not a drop. You fill, you drive, you pump, you pour, you go back. No outcome with my name on it, no date I was waiting for, nothing anyone could take. It was the only stretch of the whole business that worked exactly as intended, and it was the only stretch where I had stopped arguing.
If I had done the homework at the start I would still have lost the green. The green was never mine to keep. But the well would have gone a while longer, and I would have known what was coming, and there would have been a queue with my name in it.
The water is still down there. It has only gone deeper. The springs that ran when I came here do not run now, the surface water is drying up across this whole country, and the new well had to go down through rock to reach what the old one used to get easily. The water does not require a keeper and has never asked for one. What failed was not the water. It was a pipe set at the depth of an older climate, and my arithmetic.
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I would like to say the well taught me something new. It did not. I had watched this happen to someone else years before, from close enough to smell it, and I had said so out loud while it was happening. Which turns out to be no protection at all.
My brother’s stepson is nineteen. He walks into a bar alone because he is lonely, which is the only reason anyone that age walks into a bar alone.
He doesn’t drink. He cooks. Pasta, mostly. His blood father is Italian, from the south, and has been in jail a long time, and whatever else that man failed to leave him, he left him that. The boy knows I don’t cook, so he turns up at my door with a pot of something and stays to eat it with me. Nineteen and feeding people, at an age when most of them are still being fed. We laughed a lot.
Some men at the bar have meth. He tells me later he was gone from the first hit. He says it the way you would report weather, because by then it is weather.
His mother calls. She calls for years.
What do you think?
Intervention. Now.
But he’s a good kid.
He is. That isn't what you asked me.
I hope he’ll be okay. I believe he will. He just needs time to work it out.
I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to make her the fool of this and she was not a fool. She was doing what I did on this mountain, on a subject that mattered infinitely more. Every sentence she said was true. He was a good kid. Kids do come out of it. Confrontation does drive some of them further off. Put those sentences in a row and you have a mother who does not have to look directly at her son, and the arranging feels like patience.
Hope that cannot expire cannot fail. Hope that cannot fail never gets anyone out of a chair.
She had a sentence about him. The sentence stood between her and the boy, and she watered it every day.
Fentanyl. Early twenties.
She did not lack hope. She had more of it than anyone I have known.
I lost ten months of running water to a case I built against myself. She lost her son to one. Same move, different price. I would like the price to make them different things. It does not.
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The first time I argued myself out of looking, there was nothing at stake at all. Jennifer has just finished articling. I have just finished media college. We have that flattened feeling you get at the end of something long and hard, so we point a rented car south and drive. The four corners country is still open. You can walk into places that are gated now, permit-only now, loved half to death now. We camp in Zion. We walk Mesa Verde in a quiet that does not exist there anymore. We walk. We climb. We listen to the bears circling our tents at night. And hope they don’t eat us.
The night before we hike down into the Grand Canyon we camp on the north rim. Cold, the way the rim is cold at eight thousand feet no matter what the calendar says. We cook over an open fire. Jennifer crawls into her tent as soon as she has eaten, paying off a year of no sleep. I sit up and watch the stars, and somewhere in the watching I go under.
I wake up running.
I am moving through the desert at night, fast, and I am not afraid. The air has a black velvet quality. Thick. Anything with a pulse in it glows. The plants, the low brush, small lives in the dark. Neon is the nearest word I have and it is not the right one. The running is light, as though the ground gives back what I give it, a bounce more than a stride. I look down at myself. I am in the body of a coyote. I am the coyote.
I am not going anywhere. There is nothing at the end of the running and nothing that needs to arrive.
For one second, and the second has no length, I am free. Free in a way I have never been. Free in a way I have not been since.
No contents. No date. No walls, which means nothing anyone can take. It is the only place I have ever been that hope cannot exist in, because hope needs a later to work on and there is no later out there. Just the ground coming up and the glow of things with a pulse and a body doing what it was built for.
Then my brain arrives, and fear comes with it, and I jolt awake by the fire. The fear is not of the desert. It is of a place with nothing to hold, and in that second I understand that hope is what I have been holding. Take away the later and my hands are empty.
The seeing does not stop when I wake. That is the part I have never been able to explain and have stopped trying to. The air on the rim still has the velvet in it. The brush at the edge of the firelight still carries its glow. I am awake, sitting up, cold, undeniably on the north rim with my boots on, and there is no line anywhere between the dream and the night.
Then I argue.
Hypnagogic. Exhausted. Days of driving. Altitude. The fire is low and eyes do strange things at the edge of firelight. Every one of those is true. They are still true. And somewhere in the building of it I stop looking at the desert and start looking at my case, and as the case improves the glow fades, and the velvet goes ordinary, and by the time I have won there is only a dark place with a young woman sitting in it.
Then I put it away, and this is the part that matters. An explanation is a box too. Contents, a lid, and once a thing is inside you can set it on a shelf and carry it for decades without opening it. I did not lose the desert that night. I filed it.
Nobody took it from me. I did the confiscating myself, and I was thorough, and it took about ten minutes.
There was nothing on the table out there. No boy, no aquifer, nothing to protect and nothing to lose, and I did it anyway, in the dark, because looking was more than I could hold. Hope is easier. Everything since has been the same move with something at stake.
Jennifer sleeps through all of it. In the morning we hike down into the canyon, which was the plan. I do not tell her. I have not told anyone until now, and the not-telling was the same case running quietly for forty years. You do not have to keep making the argument. Once it is built it maintains itself.
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That was forty years ago. Here is this morning.
It is July. I am watching the wind, which has been wrong for three days, and watching for lightning, which is how fires start here, except for the ones people start, which is most of them. There is smoke coming in from somewhere west, the kind you feel in your chest by evening. I do not have air conditioning. In triple digits you work early and then you stop, because late is no good either. The heat tops out around seven in the evening and holds, and it does not let go until it slides down to seventy sometime before dawn.
Smoke does something to light. In the evening when it is thick and the sun is low, everything on this mountain goes strange, and the air takes on a quality I recognize. Not the same. A cousin of it. I notice it every year, and every year I find a chore that wants doing and go in the house. Not looking.
I do not hope about the well anymore. I read the pressure, I call the driller, I know what the waiting list does. I do not hope about weather. You read it and then you do what the reading tells you, and the mountain charges tuition until you learn.
But I catch myself hoping the wind turns. I hope the lightning stays north of the ridge. I try not to set my hope on winter, because winter is not a promise of moisture anymore, and then I hear myself say hopefully it will be cooler, and there it is again, in a smaller box.
Every morning I read the news looking for a sign that sanity is returning. Not a policy. Not a result. Not hope. A sign. Which is the one thing anybody with something to sell will always be happy to hand me. Boxes with dates on them, set out every couple of years and gone by dinner on election night. The walls are what make them worth having. The walls are why they can be taken, and they always are, on schedule. I know precisely what I am doing when I scan those pages. I do it anyway. I try to keep looking.
So the hope has moved. I have gotten it out of everything I can put my hands on, and all of it has gone to sit on the fires and the drought and the hatred, which is to say it has gone to everything I have decided I cannot look at directly. That is not an accident and I do not think it is a personal failing. It is where the arguing goes when the thing is too big to hold.
The boy is dead. The well is drilled. The case by the campfire has been closed for forty years, and I have just now taken the lid off to see what is in there.
The forecast says a hundred and twelve on Saturday. I will be up before light, doing what can be done before noon, watching the ridge.
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Music for Hope is a Four Letter Word
©2026 Gael MacLean
