我和伙伴们也热爱这里的自由。下午的时候，我们经常四处探索、漫步，到处搜寻动物的骨头和沙漠里少见的溪流。生命的头十年我都是在东北部一个绿化很好的郊区里度过的，主街两旁绿树成荫，糖果店里甜甜蜜蜜，这风沙肆虐的狂野沙漠既奇异又诱人。十岁的我第一次出门远足，发现了一个老旧的灌溉炉箅，用手指撬开盖子，抬起来，就在我眼前，出现了三张网，像白丝线编织的一样。每张网上都有黑色球状的虫子，迈着细长的腿前进。这些蜘蛛的外壳黑得发亮，体内似乎有个闪亮的血红色沙漏，十分可怕。每只蜘蛛旁边都有一个跳动着的苍白液囊，不断鼓胀，马上就将有无数“黑寡妇”幼虫降临世界。恐惧袭来，我猛地盖上炉箅，踉跄后退。恐惧的原因是多方面的，首先，我学到的“乡村生存知识”告诉我，被黑寡妇蜘蛛咬一口，就别想活命了。还有蜘蛛那种骇人的可怕姿态，黑亮的外壳，体内的血红色沙漏。多年后，这个场景还不时进入我的噩梦中。
My friends and I loved the freedom, too, and we spent our afternoons exploring, walking, scavenging for bones and rare desert creeks. Having spent my previous years in a lightly forested suburb in the Northeast, with a tree-lined main street and a candy store, I found the wild, windy desert alien and alluring. On my first trek alone, as a ten-year-old, I discovered an old irrigation grate. I pried it open with my fingers, lifted it up, and there, a few inches from my face, were three white silken webs, and in each, marching along on spindled legs, was a glistening black bulbous body, bearing in its shine the dreaded blood-red hourglass. Near to each spider a pale, pulsating sac breathed with the imminent birth of countless more black widows. Horror let the grate crash shut. I stumbled back. The horror came in a mix of “country facts” (Nothing is more deadly than the bite of the black widow spider) and the inhuman posture and the black shine and the red hourglass. I had nightmares for years.

沙漠堪称是一个“恐怖万神殿”：毒蛛、狼蛛、提琴背蜘蛛、木蝎子、鞭尾蝎、蜈蚣、菱背响尾蛇、侧进蛇、莫哈维绿蛇，等等。渐渐地，我和它们都熟悉起来，甚至习惯这些小东西的存在。我和伙伴们喜欢以此为乐子，只要找到狼蛛的窝，就逮只蚂蚁丢在窝边，看它在那错综复杂之间挣扎着逃跑，让那绸线一般的蜘蛛丝颤抖起来，延伸到蜘蛛黑洞的中央。蜘蛛会从那空洞里冲出来，逮住那蚂蚁的下颌，后者是必死无疑。我们都很期待紧张刺激的高潮时刻。在我心里，“乡村生存知识”变得跟城市里那些传奇差不多。一开始听别人叮嘱这些事情，那些沙漠里的生物仿佛有无边的魔力，让之前在城里听到的什么鬼啊怪啊相形见绌。只有在沙漠里生活了一段时间之后，我们才意识到，有些话真的是危言耸听，就像说“鹿角兔子”是真的一样，都是当地人故意编出来骗“城里人”，给自己找找乐子的。
The desert offered a pantheon of terrors: tarantulas, wolf spiders, fiddlebacks, bark scorpions, whip scorpions, centipedes, diamondbacks, sidewinders, Mojave greens. Eventually we grew familiar, even comfortable, with these creatures. For fun, when my friends and I discovered a wolf spider’s nest, we’d drop an ant onto its outer limits and watch as its entangled escape attempts sent quivers down the silk strands, into the spider’s dark central hole, anticipating that fatal moment when the spider would burst from its hollows and seize the doomed ant in its mandibles. “Country facts” became my term for the rural cousin of the urban legend. As I first learned them, country facts granted fairy powers to desert creatures, making, say, the Gila monster no less an actual monster than the Gorgon. Only after living out in the desert for a while did we realize that some country facts, like the existence of the jackalope, had been delib-erately created to confuse city folk and amuse the locals.

我曾经费了一个小时的口舌，对一群来自柏林的交换生说，仙人掌丛中住着一种特别的野狼，会跳个将近十米去攻击猎物（嗯，就像德国人似的，出其不意，攻其不备）。然而，也没有谁真正知道，那漫天飞沙背后的真相究竟如何。有多少荒诞无稽的乡村知识，就有多少听上去十分真实可信的。比如，穿鞋之前一定要看看里面有没有蝎子，这听上去就是个能保命的好习惯。
I once spent an hour convincing a group of exchange students from Berlin that, yes, there was a particular species of coyote that lived inside cacti and could leap ten yards to attack its prey (like, well, unsuspecting Germans). Yet no one precisely knew where the truth lay amid the whirling sand; for every country fact that seemed preposterous, there was one that felt solid and true. Always check your shoes for scorpions, for example, seemed plain good sense.