How She Got Her Life Back on Track

Over and over during their stormy seven-year marriage, Hannah Nyala’s husband told her what he’d do if she tried to leave him: “He was going to torture each of the children to death in front of me and then kill me in a very brutal way and scatter my body parts over the desert.”

It was always the desert.

Then, around Thanksgiving, 1990, he called from Oklahoma to say he was coming to the Mojave to get them “and would do it right this time.” Just before Christmas, she spotted him, in his car, staking out her house in Joshua Tree. “Completely panicked,” she just took off for a while.

For a time, this forbidding land that she had learned to love “came to symbolize hell.”

The memories, bittersweet, surface as we drive through Joshua Tree National Park, through places with names like Fried Liver Wash. For three years as a member of a National Park Service search and rescue team, this was her terrain.

She was a tracker, trained to find people lost in the desert. It was not mere chance that had drawn her to tracking. In her new book, “Point Last Seen: A Woman Tracker’s Story” (Beacon Press), she relates these threats on her life, telling how, from 1983 to 1995, she herself had been tracked, hunted and harassed.

“Living underground,” she and her two children had learned to be alert to any sign that he’d been around. Tire tracks. Footprints. A door left ajar.

They even took to hanging towels haphazardly, knowing he was compulsive about such things. Three times they came home to find each towel folded precisely in thirds, with exactly 1 inch between towels.

The story of Hannah Nyala--as she has written it--is both a horrifying chronicle of domestic violence and a story of hope, survival and the human spirit.

It is about a woman who, seeking personal peace, becomes a skilled tracker and, through tracking, learns to find beauty in this harsh land, its flora and fauna. Even today, she brakes for lizards, fumes when a four-wheeler swerves to squash a rattlesnake and has a quirky gait from trying not to step on ants.

Tracking is not glamorous work. It is hard and dirty. Nyala describes it this way: “Searches are made up of extended spurts of activity interspersed with brief periods of apparent inertia; even trackers have to sleep and eat . . . whether somebody is missing or not.” Nyala learned to catnap under a bush with her backpack for a pillow.

She relates a typical rescue, that of a 65-year-old woman lost on a family camping trip during wildflower season. Using her training and the information that the woman was wearing size 8 lug-sole High Tec hiking boots, Nyala was able to follow her route, drawing a circle around each set of prints, each time tying a piece of orange flagging to the nearest bush.

From the pattern of the shoe prints, Nyala reconstructed what had happened, how the woman had wandered off to inspect a pretty bush, or maybe a lizard, unaware that she’d lost her way back to the campsite. The quick, circling movements Nyala detected told her exactly when the woman had realized her plight. This story had a happy ending: With Nyala close behind, the woman found her way to a road before dark.

One day, a 9-year-old girl went to the restroom at Cottonwood Campground and didn’t return to her parents’ campsite. Repeatedly “cutting for sign”--drawing a circle, then walking the perimeter to spot any tracks leaving it--Nyala and two other trackers followed her trail. Six hours later, success. The child came running out of a wash, yelling, “I’m Mandy and my parents have gotten lost!”

Not all tracking stories end happily. Nyala was on a team that searched by helicopter for a young man who’d parked his truck at a Twentynine Palms motel with a suicide note inside, then walked off into the desert. When found, he’d been dead for nine days; he’d killed himself with a shotgun.

There are not always footprints to guide a tracker. There may be only broken twigs, bent grass, crushed rabbit pellets, pebbles pressed into the soil--subtle signs that someone walked there recently.

Often, tracking is solitary work. Nyala writes, “I could not begin to count the hundreds of hours I have spent alone outdoors, far from other humans. You become your own closest companion, the one person you have to be able to trust implicitly.

“Tracking means immersing yourself in signs and in the knowledge that none of us goes anywhere without leaving a trail behind--a pretty damned reassuring thought when you’re being stalked by someone who has sworn to kill you, laughing, saying, ‘No one will care enough to even inquire about where you’ve gone.’ ”

*

As a child in southern Mississippi, Nyala had learned the rudiments of tracking, following deer and rabbit tracks in the woods near the family farm, making loud noises to alert the animals that hunters were nearby.

A gentle, sheltered girl, she’d spend hours curled up with the classics. She’d never even been to a movie.

She spent the summer of 1976 in Missouri and, at church, met Kevin Myles, a charmer who wooed her with a poem about finding true love. (Later, she’d learn that he’d written it for another girl.) Within weeks, he proposed and they wed the following spring, a few weeks short of her high school graduation. She was 17.

Soon, she learned the dark side of her churchgoing 23-year-old husband. In her book is this diary entry:

“August, 1977. Kevin quoted the Bible to me again today. The parts about wives being submissive to their husbands and turning the other cheek. And then he hit me hard on the right side of my face with his open hand and yelled, ‘Now what are you supposed to do--or have you forgotten already, bitch?’ ”

Her sin: She had put seven, not the requisite six, ice cubes in his tea.

Kevin Myles is not his real name, nor are her children’s names, Jon and Ruth. She has changed them in the book to protect everyone, just as she legally changed her first and last names in 1994 to keep Myles from finding her.

She weighed the risks of telling her story, the possibility of reigniting his anger. Ruth, now 16, and Jon, now 19, told her to go for it, tell all, try to make something good out of the bad stuff, maybe help other women and children.

Nyala is making herself visible so the issue of domestic violence will stay visible: Too many people, she says, think, “ ‘Oh, well, just go find a shelter, dear, and everything will be fine. . . .’

“It was a watershed,” Nyala says, to feel free at last, to say, “This is my life. We’re not running anymore.”

*

In hindsight, she knows she had to be “insane” to flee Oklahoma in July 1983 with two small children and only $800. But she was married to a man who, she writes, once held a loaded gun to her head. She refused to die “cowering in a corner.”

She tells how, in two weeks, he tracked them down in Wyoming and began terrorizing them. She got a bulletproof vest and a revolver. She also filed for, and won, a contested divorce. Then, one day in 1985, she writes, her nightmare came true: He abducted the children.

Seeking solace, she would take long walks in the Wyoming hills and, confronting a lifelong fear of heights, began taking climbing lessons. This was how she met “Frank,” a Grand Tetons park ranger she would later marry.

Climbing and her need to heal led her to explore tracking. She writes, “If I couldn’t have my own children, I would at least give something back to other people,” maybe save another child’s life.

Tracking also became a metaphor for her life. She writes, “I was not only surviving, but following the footprints of other human beings, well on the way to becoming human again myself.”

Ruth was returned to her in the summer of 1986, but Kevin kept Jon, who he considered “much less trouble,” until the end of 1989.

She and Frank married in 1986 and moved to what is now Joshua Tree National Park. But, she says, the marriage couldn’t survive the baggage she brought to it, and in 1989 they divorced amicably.

Here in this desert, in January of 1991, she writes, Kevin, denied legal custody of his children, kidnapped them again to Oklahoma. He was found, given three years’ probation and ordered to leave Nyala and the kids alone during that time.

In the years that followed, she writes, Kevin would alternately demand to have the children or threaten to kill them. On the run, Nyala, Jon and Ruth slept in their car at truck stops or in battered women’s shelters, always aware, she writes, that Kevin or a paid stalker was tailing them. She worked as a seamstress, as a motel housekeeper, to feed her little family.

*

Through her story, Nyala hopes to show how, day by mundane day, love can become “a monster beyond all imagining.” She wants, too, to tell other abused women not to give up hope.

Through sheer determination, she finished the education she’d interrupted, earning an anthropology degree from Scripps College on scholarship, and is now doing doctorate work at a University of Wisconsin campus.

Her dissertation will be on intimate violence and societal response to it on the New England frontier in the 18th century, where “it was not uncommon for an abusive man to be pulled out of his house quite literally in the middle of the night and beaten.”

Says Nyala: “We’ve got to become neighbors again,” look out for one another as people do in the small Midwestern town where she lives.

In 1992, Nyala took her children to southern Africa, where she had a year’s fellowship to study tracking among the bushmen. Living in a two-man tent, they were happily unencumbered--and they felt safe. Jon and Ruth have such affection for Africa that, when their mother needed a new name, Jon suggested Nyala, an African antelope.

When her studies allow, Nyala returns to Joshua Tree to be with her third husband, whose name she asks not be divulged. These are sentimental journeys. Here, she found self-knowledge, even overcame her terror of snakes.

We walk desert paths where she helped track lost campers, homicide victims and suicides. Nyala describes how she’d “age” their footprints, note their shoe make and, with rubber bands, mark on her tracking stick the size of the prints and the space between strides.

She and the children have had extensive therapy, Ruth struggling with depression, Jon with schizophrenia. “Recovery is probably going to be a lifelong process for them,” Nyala says. “It’s a credit to them that they aren’t stark raving mad.”

She expected her book “to sell four copies, all to real good relatives,” and is genuinely surprised it is getting attention. At first, says Beacon Press publicist Lori Goldman, editors there “never dreamed it would end up being kind of a big book,” but later “we felt it was going to be very accessible and very important.” Beacon made it its lead book for spring / summer and issued a first printing of 20,000 copies.

And there is film interest. Nyala, rolling her eyes, describes one such proposal. Nyala would have “a lion-like mane of hair.” Having used her tracking skills to find her kids, “I’d then track Kevin to a rushing desert waterfall and blow him away in a blaze of glory.”

No way, she says. “In real life, there are no tidy endings” to domestic violence stories, and victims pay dearly for society “treating this like a movie.”

As for herself, Jon and Ruth, she writes, “No matter how alert we stay, if this man decides to follow through on his threats again, one or all of us may die a brutal death.”

Meanwhile, she travels as a tracker travels: “One step at a time, with many pauses in between.”