One of Claire Reynier’s jobs at the Center for Southwest Research at the University of New Mexico was to preserve the papers, the legend, and the memory of the writer Jonathan Vail. There was little in his own words—a few letters, a novel, and a journal that had remained in print for more than thirty years—but volumes had been written about him. Claire liked to think of Jonathan as the literary West’s phantom limb. In 1966, when he was twenty-three, he vanished on a camping trip in Slickrock Canyon in southeastern Utah. The journal he was keeping at the time was never found. But, as a brain continues to receive signals from a limb it knows has been severed, people who cared about Western writing continued to receive stimuli from Jonathan Vail. For years after he vanished there were sightings all over the West, in Mexico, and in Canada. His initials were found carved in caves and on canyon walls. Southeastern Utah is a good place to start a legend: the mesas are vast, the canyons are deep and often invisible until a person stands right on the edge, the rocks are whipped into suggestive shapes by the water and the wind.
What do You think about The Vanishing Point (2012)?
