On a local mountain peak where a metal fire tower begins to shiver with the approach of fall, distant lightning arrives with sunrise one morning. To the creep of yellow and the spread of turquoise on the eastern horizon an insertion of orange meets the flashes of lightning over Winslow. Briefly bright cumulus clouds pulse for a hundred miles along the Mogollon Rim.
With that delicate rhythm of sky transformation, a flutter sounds against 360 degrees of glass windows: moth wings startle to movement as if the tiny sleeping critters were awakened by rumors of bright light and so began beating their heads against transparent glass boundaries.
The sound of distant thunder meets the commotion of water molecules rattling beneath the enamelware kettle on the gas stove. Moth wings continue to flutter as the woman who put the kettle on, now returned to bed, reaches out of her sleeping bag to light a candle to create a circle of light to write by.
Circles of light near and far away, she muses. The sound of pen point on faint rectangle of paper makes her brain cells begin to feel alive, alert, bright. The doubly repeated image of window-reflected candle flame feels like light that might blend effortlessly with the glowing horizon that spreads through plateau weather. To these images of advancing sun, sound arrives when she pours the boiling water that drowns the PG Tips teabag in a mug.
The brewing sends up delicate snakes of steam.
“How pregnant,” she thinks, “the glowing orb of new day.” She takes a reading through her fire finder on the fiery orange dot of dawn: 87 degrees, 30 minutes.
I am writing sentences, she writes, snug in the dawn dark while first light overtakes the stormy night. (How the wind rattled the windows! How the tops of trees roared with pine needle song!) I am writing sentences, I am not snoring or still ensnared in dream. I am alert by candlelight with a cup of good tea. What will this day bring, she wonders. What winds, what fires, what talk by radio to people on dirt roads with jobs to do. But what she writes is different. I remember being ten years old outside the cinder block house my father built; I remember looking at the full moon caught in the tattered clouds that laced a Phoenix sky, and I remember thinking, who else watches the sky with the wonder I feel. Can such beauty be shared? I don’t remember what my young heart decided.
Her left hand rounds a cup of tea. Her right hand cradles a pen with an easy flow of ink from an industrial nib.
I remember being twenty something, and thirty something, and forty, too, by the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. I remember being the only one up while the rest of camp slept, and I leaned toward the sound a stone makes when it rolls inside the flow of the current, that resonant wet thunk, that surprising note of geology in motion; I listened beneath those cliffs looming and I peered up to a slice of overhead river of stars and wondered, who hears this flow like I do? I don’t remember what my aging heart decided.
Now the wind gently nuzzles windows as if apologetic for fierce midnight commotion. A Clark’s Nutcracker blurts with full voice, breaking into the sound of even breathing. A bird and a woman. Moth wings stilled. Tea savored. A bit of life woven into the larger life of this dawn, this awakening, this movement of hand that becomes more sentences shared. Like dawn’s light spreading across the underside of clouds, she writes, she hopes. These sentences.
In two hours the other fire lookouts on nearby mountains call the dispatcher who sits in a windowless room in Flagstaff. A quilt in progress gets put aside. A novel is put down. A just-right omelet is interrupted. Winds are reported, precip noted. Binoculars get lifted in a calculated pattern that overlaps horizons and saturates the Coconino plateau with concentrated attention. Noticing fires is the job. The lick of lightning doesn’t always create smoke, however, which makes the real job a delicate dance to stay alert to possibility. Every day.
