I Was Defeated by a Hotel Door in Death Valley

This is a true story, and I would like to say I went to Death Valley for the silence, the geology, or some noble reason involving self-discovery. I would love to tell you I had reached a point in my life where I felt called to stand among spectacular rock formations and contemplate the meaning of existence. Unfortunately, the truth is considerably less impressive. I saw a photograph online of orange rock formations and thought, That looks like a place where good things happen to me. This is how many bad decisions begin: with a photograph and an unreasonable amount of confidence. I booked three days, packed a camera, hiking boots, and the sort of optimism you only have before a place has had the opportunity to introduce itself properly.

The introduction began at the front desk, where a woman with the calm expression of someone who had watched a hundred tourists make the same mistakes handed me my key and said, “Skip going outside after dark without a flashlight.” I laughed. It was a small, polite laugh, the kind you give someone when you assume they have made a joke and you are being courteous enough to participate. She did not laugh. This was my first indication that perhaps the woman behind the desk understood Death Valley considerably better than I did.

She meant every word. Rattlesnakes, she explained, come out once the sun drops low enough for the ground to cool to a temperature, they find agreeable. I found the word agreeable particularly interesting. I had spent the day sweating through a shirt I was beginning to consider a biohazard, and apparently the snakes were waiting for the evening to become comfortable enough for them to come outside and enjoy themselves. Somewhere in Death Valley, a rattlesnake was probably looking at the setting sun and thinking, Finally, this place is cooling off. I own a flashlight. It sat useless and proud on my kitchen counter 843 miles away, exactly where a person puts everything except the one object he actually needs.

There are, I should mention, zero streetlights in Death Valley. I mean this in the way a sentence usually contains a little exaggeration for dramatic effect, except there is no exaggeration here whatsoever. Once the sun clocks out, the darkness settles over the place like somebody has put a lid on the entire valley. It is total, complete darkness, the kind that makes you reach a hand out in front of your face purely to confirm the hand still exists. I had imagined spending my evenings outside enjoying the desert and looking at the stars. Instead, my evening plans became extremely specific: remain indoors, keep the door closed, and avoid becoming a nighttime snack for anything with fangs.

A man at the pool, sunburned in a way that suggests someone trusted a hat far more than a hat deserves to be trusted, offered me his own piece of wisdom about the heat. “This heat differs from other heat,” he explained. “We lack humidity.” I appreciated the science. I really did. There I was, dripping in a manner that suggested my body had begun leaking out of protest, and he was explaining that the heat was actually different because the air lacked moisture. I told him that I understood what he was saying, but 128 degrees, humid or bone dry, remains a number a human body registers as an emergency. You could remove every molecule of moisture from the entire state of California, and I would still consider 128 degrees a personal attack.

My hotel room, when I finally reached it, promised salvation in the form of a small air-conditioning unit mounted below the window. It rattled with the enthusiasm of an appliance that knew it stood absolutely no chance and had decided to try anyway. I admired its determination. The little machine fought bravely. Heroically, even. After an hour it delivered the room to a triumphant eighty-five degrees, a temperature I would, under almost any other circumstance on Earth, describe as unbearable. In Death Valley, however, I looked at that thermostat and felt the same gratitude a shipwreck survivor might feel upon discovering a piece of driftwood.

I slept, if you can call it that, in the manner of a rotisserie chicken left slightly too long beneath a heat lamp. Every twenty minutes I would rotate to another position in search of a cooler section of sheet, only to discover that the entire bed had apparently been preheated. There was no cool side. There was no relief. There was only me, turning myself over and over throughout the night like somebody at a restaurant who had been forgotten beneath the warming lights.

Morning showed up brutal and orange, and I decided, against every available piece of evidence, that a walk sounded like a reasonable plan. This tells you something about the human capacity for self-deception. Given enough discomfort the night before, a person will wake up and think, Today feels like a fresh start, rather than, Today features the same sun that tried to kill me yesterday, except now it is slightly higher in the sky and considerably more motivated. Apparently, I had learned nothing.

I stepped outside, and the heat hit with the subtlety of a dropped piano. Immediately my skin developed opinions about the situation. Somewhere, I remember thinking, actual functioning adults were sitting on actual beaches, sipping drinks garnished with fruit, while I stood in a parking lot that could double as a pizza oven. I had paid money to be there. I had driven all that way voluntarily. Nobody had forced me into the desert. The worst part was that I couldn't even blame anybody else. Every bad decision involved in getting me there had been made by me, often while looking at photographs and thinking things like, That looks beautiful.

Then came the doorknob.

I want you to understand that I have used doorknobs my entire life without incident. Doorknobs, as a category, had never once betrayed me. I trusted doorknobs the way you trust gravity, the alphabet, or the fact that a chair will generally remain underneath you after you sit down. A doorknob is one of those things you interact with without giving it any thought. You reach for it, turn it, and walk through the door. There is no reason to suspect the doorknob is waiting for an opportunity to ruin your day.

This particular doorknob had spent the morning absorbing sunlight the way a stovetop absorbs a flame. When I reached for it with the muscle memory of a person who had opened approximately ten thousand doors in his lifetime, it delivered a burn severe enough to raise an actual blister, an honest-to-goodness blister, on the meat of my palm. I stood there holding my hand and staring at it, genuinely furious at a piece of household hardware. A canyon carved by a river over millions of years had failed to defeat me. A hotel doorknob managed it in under two seconds.

There is something humiliating about being injured by an object that exists primarily to help you enter a room. I could have accepted a snake bite. I could have understood a scorpion. Even the tarantula, which I had yet to meet, would have made more sense. But a doorknob? That felt personal. I stood in that parking lot holding my hand like it belonged to somebody else, wondering whether I should report the incident or simply tell the front desk, “Your door has become hostile.”

Returning to lick my wounds, I discovered a tarantula stationed directly outside my door. It was sitting there with the posture of a creature that had, at some point, filed the correct paperwork and secured squatter's rights to that exact square foot of concrete. I respect wildlife. I write that with total sincerity. I enjoy seeing animals in their natural environments, provided their natural environments remain a reasonable distance from my hotel room. This tarantula, however, had apparently decided that my doorway was prime real estate.

I stood there, blistered palm throbbing, staring down an eight-legged creature that had handled the heat with considerably more composure than I had managed all day. It looked perfectly comfortable. I looked like a man who had lost an argument with a piece of metal. The tarantula seemed to understand the difference in our positions. It had survived the desert. I had been burned by a doorknob. For one brief and humiliating moment, I felt professionally outclassed by a spider.

I began to wonder whether the tarantula had been there the whole time, watching me come and go, silently keeping track of my mistakes. Perhaps it had watched me arrive with my camera and hiking boots, full of confidence and three-day plans. Perhaps it had watched me step outside that morning and immediately begin regretting my choices. Now I was standing before it with a blistered hand, and I could almost imagine it thinking, This is going well.

That evening I sat on the edge of the bed watching the air conditioner the same way how people watch a fireplace, except instead of warmth I stared at it hoping, through pure willpower, that it might discover some secret reserve of power it had been withholding from me the entire trip out of spite. I had developed a relationship with that air conditioner. I knew its limitations. It knew my desperation. Neither of us was happy with the arrangement. It offered me nothing further. Eighty-five degrees, apparently, marked the ceiling of our relationship, and there was no reason to believe it would suddenly become ambitious.

My three-day itinerary quietly dissolved into a day and a half. The hiking plans went first. Then the leisurely exploration. Then whatever romantic notion I had about enjoying the desert at sunset. By the next morning, my entire vacation had been reduced to one simple objective: leave Death Valley while I was still capable of operating a vehicle.

I packed the car with the efficiency of someone fleeing a small fire. There was no lingering over the scenery. No final walk. No meaningful goodbye. I put my bags in the trunk, got into the driver's seat, and headed toward Nevada with something between defeat and relief, two emotions that, in my experience, travel together far more often than anyone admits. I had gone to Death Valley expecting to come home with photographs, memories, and perhaps a story about how I had conquered one of the harshest environments in the country. Instead, I was leaving with a camera full of pictures, a blister on my hand, and a new appreciation for indoor plumbing and functioning air-conditioning.

Looking back at the desert in my rearview mirror, I felt oddly grateful, the way you feel grateful toward a difficult relative after they finally leave the holiday dinner. Death Valley taught me plenty. Mostly, it taught me that heat cares nothing for your itinerary, your ego, or your general sense of being a capable adult. It also taught me that a hotel employee telling you to carry a flashlight after dark is probably not trying to ruin your vacation. She is trying to keep you from stepping on a rattlesnake while wandering around in complete darkness because you thought you remembered where your room was.

Most of all, Death Valley taught me that given enough hours, the desert will happily let a four-dollar doorknob finish off whatever the temperature itself failed to accomplish. I went there thinking I was the visitor and the landscape was the attraction. By the time I left, I understood that I had been little more than a temporary inconvenience to the wildlife.

I went looking for adventure and found it. It came in the form of 128-degree heat, an air conditioner that had reached the absolute limits of its ambition, a tarantula occupying my doorway, and a doorknob that left me with a blister large enough to become the most memorable feature of the entire trip. The desert had mountains, salt flats, rattlesnakes, tarantulas, scorpions, and some of the most spectacular scenery I had ever seen. Somehow, the thing that defeated me was the door.