These sunflower days are smearing the hillsides with a daily wash of yellow and I want the color to paint truth for me, help me tuck the summer into memory. My fire season flew by with almost no fires. My side of the mountain slept through the summer it seems. Now I watch 25 violet-green swallows make passes by the windows of the lookout as if they are pulling banners that read, “Fall is coming, fall is coming.” Snapshots begin to layer in my mind like fallen leaves caught against a fence: an arch of rainbow that looked like it was coming out of Sunset Crater, a fox standing by my red chair, a kestrel chasing a red tail hawk, a flicker of mountain lion tail against the black of lava flow and a young bobcat by the outhouse peering at trees before walking down past my truck.
Wild hikers, too, have come up my steps aglow with travel delight. This week it was four young men from Switzerland. They’d been on the North Rim before sleeping by Lake Powell. The next morning they are driving their rental car south to go to Phoenix “and then San Diego and then LA and San Francisco,” but as they approach the Peaks they see O’Leary Peak nearby and figure out on their smart phones there is a trail to the top. So they decide to go for a walk. One carries a watermelon in a Safeway shopping bag. One is wearing a pair of tennis shoes that are so bright orange I spot their approach two miles away. For an hour I peer out again and again to follow their progress up the mountain, smiling at the duck-like waddle of those orange shoes stepping up the road. When I invite them up the stairs I am quickly surrounded by a babble of syllables and gestures and cameras pointed. They like spotting Navajo Mountain. And the cliffs of the North Rim cause excited murmuring. “We will find woods in Phoenix?” asks one. I try to describe the descent and desert ahead of them, but it is hard to tell how much English they know. Lots of nodding is going on as if they are four bobble head dolls. Downdrafts from a nearby cumulus puff and four Swiss heads rock up and down up and down.
I’m still thinking about their quest to see America the next day. I have my breakfast at Miz Zip’s Route 66 Café while R & A Import Auto works on my truck. My gusto for travel is renewed as I furtively draw an Amish family—two straw hats and two bonnets in a Naugahyde booth—and after they leave I sketch a truck with a canoe on top and wonder where it is going. A train rumbling by tows my imagination into booking Amtrak to Chicago and points beyond. Oh to climb aboard in the predawn and read my way to Gallup, Lamy, Topeka, Kansas City. But I have new U joints, and the oil is changed—battery good, camper shell re-caulked. When I return to the tower, some part of me stays behind to follow the white line of the highway. August is gushing by and my urge to go and my urge to stay have daily wrestling matches. My wanderlust’s straight-arming of pensiveness wears me out.
Meanwhile moisture makes cloud paintings of each sunset. I savor the color and sleep deeply and with fewer smokes to spot, I find myself peering at memories when I look through the binoculars each day. I see that overlook by Mormon Lake where, on a gorgeous drive, a friend and I paused to watch a man with a radio controlled airplane play with the flight paths of hovering red tail hawks. In another direction are stout ponderosas by the cindery 546 road where Jayne and Ann and I set up a card table to eat moo shu vegetables with sunset. Out there between Chinese food and hawks diving, is the San Francisco Wash where Barry took me to see petroglyphs and we found a midden below an owl perch. Amongst tiny bones and fur I found a treasure, a tiny white cranium.
With a broad view of storms, sunsets and daybreaks, I am feeling soul-washed by vistas and renewed by cloud kiss. Observing the flush of delight in foreigners has me wanting to move out of habit into becoming foreign myself. And yet I sense a map of wisdoms caught in the local shadows of drainages and the outlines of rock shoulders. I have dirt roads caught in my heart calling out both memory and invitation. And I have a skull no bigger than the tip of my little finger, a bit of bone that was not completely digested by an owl. When I pick it up, I think of the place it came from, the human and animal company I kept, and I feel many wild quiet places entering me, nourishing me, passing through. I’ll go soon, or I’ll stay longer, well fed either way.
