When great pools of standing water shine day-break orange out along the Little Colorado, and I see spray from Grand Falls without my binoculars, I begin to think, “Outta here.” When a lightning-struck dead snag burns like a chimney but doesn’t start wet pine needles on fire, my mission shifts. This morning before sunrise, there I was bent over the beam of my six-cell Maglite re-setting the screw that loosens on my glasses every other month. To start my day groping for a popped-out lens on the floor nudges me to consider visions.
What shape will winter take? It’s a question you might have bumped into around town as assorted river guides, park rangers and fire-fighting folk rummage in storage units and peer at computer screens prepping their coming months. You can hear us in coffee shops and on tailgates at parties throwing out this scheme, trying out that idea. Or wondering aloud if it is time to buckle down to regular year-round work, give a “real” life more credibility. (It’s been most interesting in a recession economy to have others catch up with us camping out in the woods between gigs. “Real life” didn’t turn out to be that dependable after all.)
As I put uneaten cans of salmon into a cardboard box, I kick around names for this summer. Some seasons do wear a name tag: there was River Year, when I took leave in August to help friends with a trip through the canyon. Frozen Year was that fall when snow caught me up on Mt. Elden and I had to a wear a hard hat to get up the steps because of icicles blowing off radio towers. This year could be Flower Year because of the masses of red gilia on hillsides competing with the usual yellow flocking. Or Raptor Year. Along with the common company of two golden eagles and a peregrine, this week I’ve seen this trio of red tail hawks playing over the saddle between tower and truck. I raise binoculars to watch their wrestling matches mid air and their floating scouting for lunch, their red tail feathers that ruffle like piano keys played by a ghost.
Montana Year was when I was still red-carded to fight fire and I was hanging around the office waving my hand when dispatch put together the Prescott Regulars to send to a bust way up north. The smoke jumpers high on a ridge in the Frank Church Wilderness must have thought their season was pretty desperate to have an Arizona gal from a lookout show up to fight their fires. Maybe they named their season The Year They Scraped the Bottom of the Barrel.
Hearing of these years, a hiker marvels, what an adventurer you are! I wince. I am not an adventurer. I’ve met too many adventurers whose tongues trip merrily with names of exotic places, but when I take a step closer to look for truth, it is suddenly time for the adventurer to run, run, run. Got a plane to catch, a peak to bag, a rapid to run left or right or upside down. Surely that’s not me.
That settled, there remains taking the deep breath to plunge out of beloved habits into uncertainty. For months I’ve had everything just so at my fingertips: the book I’ve read and want to lend on a chair by the glass-footed stool. The next book to read in the pile by the pale green Smith-Corona typewriter. Watercolors next to the mug full of pens. Life within reach at all times. Ease.
I’m such a squirrel in my daily habits: wanting to find this nut just where I put it, truly! (A professional hazard? Do not go into a fire lookout and move anything out of place. You will be bitten!) Now I’m headed into life out of a truck for the days it takes to get to a house in Maine. I will surely find myself at a rest area somewhere in America rooting through a box behind the back seat desperate for That One Thing I Can’t Find. Which as we all know, will be certainty.
I’ll think what will save the day is that CD with the great mix of music a friend made for my hours between here and there. Surely the right soundtrack will ease the way. And it might. Maybe the name of this winter will be: Song-Blessed.
