Downhill dirt roads do focus one’s attention, so as I rounded a curve on a switchback from the lookout this week I easily spotted branches across a narrow stretch ahead. I cinched the parking brake and got out of my truck to clear the way wondering which wind event had broken branches. As I bent to the chunks of pine I saw a message scratched in the dirt. DONNA it announced in foot high letters, and underneath I saw two smaller words made with broken sticks: WAS HERE.
I marveled to find a message on a road I’ve driven a hundred times where the usual messages amount to the length of shadows telling me how much daylight I have left on my way to a fish taco at Criollo. Standing back to consider someone’s effort, I thought the branches placed uphill from the words was clearly a design to make a downhill traveler pause.
DONNA WAS HERE. I could think of one Donna who might walk up the mountain to see me and then leave word if she didn’t make it. Or it might have been a Sunday hiking party split up by differences in pace and a Donna unknown to me wanted others to know how far she’d come before turning back. “What fun,” I thought, but if I’d been in a hurry I might have crunched right over it. As I motored on I mused upon messages sent with fingers crossed.
In a pre-cell phone era my river guide sweetheart would leave my lookout cabin on Towers Mountain headed to Lees Ferry and always pause at the base of the Bradshaw Mountains to flash me with a signal mirror. It was a brief star-like salute to honor our bond before weeks of separation: a tender farewell, truly. But what if I hadn’t looked up at the right time to see it.
This summer I’ve been putting letters to mail in the hands of strangers who are hiking off the mountain. I hope they get posted but maybe they end up in the bottom of a daypack mixed into a melted Hershey bar. My inspired paragraphs might well go missing—foolhardy perhaps to leave heartfelt utterances to chance. But maybe the peril of chance is exactly what it takes to scoop an important message out of a habit bound heart.
Once a gal I was keen to get to know showed me the route of her planned solo-with-dog camping trip from Arizona to the Northwest and back. On impulse I told her to be sure and ask at the post office. “Here,” I said, pointing at a likely one-post-office town on the map. “And here. And maybe here.” I sent three letters to three different zip codes to her care of General Delivery. I know, it was a haphazard kind of courting, but she did get two of three letters I sent and steered back through Flagstaff to tell me so, which did lead to fond and more certain nose-to-nose communication between us. Maybe the surprise of a message getting through helps it to be received tenderly.
Awhile back my sister sent me a cassette tape left behind after my favorite uncle died. She had helped my mother empty and clean off the kitchen table where he listened to classical music with his coffee and cigarette. “Mozart” it said in his careful handwriting on the tape. I kept it in my truck for over a year before I finally popped it in to accompany sunset as I drove from the South Rim to Flagstaff. Lovely string sounds rose above engine hum until I made the left hand turn at Valle, and then suddenly there was my uncle’s voice filling the cab. He had taped over the tape he’d made of Mozart. Now his voice described a poem by Rilke. As he walked with a recorder across a field in Maine, he said the poem in its original language “sounds like this water on its way to the shore.” And there from a tape marked Mozart came the accents of a small brook traveling between farmhouse and tidal river followed by his voice stroking Rilke syllables in passable German. I heard what he might never have said alive and out loud; driving into the dark in my truck, the message was received: he, too, was a quiet mystic in love with the sound of poetry which was inspiring news to that stanza-savoring niece he so often teased.
