The Russian poet, Vera Pavlova wrote in her notebook: “There are moments when I feel the universe expand.” I too feel these moments of expansion, barely audible at times. I am lying on my cot at Lees Ferry reading poetry under a canopy of new, green leaves. They shimmer in the thin blade of moonlight while stars dazzle in the negative space of dark sky.
Every spring it is the same. Fierce gusts of wind, lengthening days, and the songs of small birds passing through on their annual migration leaves me restless. The desert near Tucson wakes up after a winter catnap. Tiny white-petaled daisies interrupt the barren ground with cheery news. White bursage plants erupt into shades of gray-green after doing good work below the surface like so many of us emerging from winter dormancy. Now is the perfect moment to make a plethora of pollen to be carried in the wind. Possibility is everywhere.
All this new life makes me feverish for change. The urge to pick up and move with the first sign of spring is a pattern etched deeply into my DNA. I can still remember the cold, wintery April afternoon I packed my truck to move to the Grand Canyon. In the weeks between a Colorado River trip and a winter in Aspen, I squatted in the loft of a ramshackle barn behind a friend’s rental house in downtown Flagstaff.
I had spent the winter working in the service industry of a wealthy winter wonderland. Every morning I woke at 4 a.m. to scoop muffin batter into trays, then after a short nap, I served plates heaped with pasta for large tables of swanky skiers. The smell of chocolate chip cookie dough and marsala wine sauce seeped from my pores. I was ready for life to change.
The day I drove north out of Flagstaff with Humphreys Peak in the rearview mirror covered in a blanket of spring snow, I felt a hugeness in my chest. I sensed my life opening like the landscape around me. I hiked Red Butte and saw in the distance the reddish-orange cinders of the pinyon-juniper forest darken with a flush of ponderosa pines and then end abruptly at the canyon edge. I was on the very top of the world.
It was my first season on the trail crew. I shared a small labor cabin on the South Rim with a fire fighter from Lassen, in a neighborhood of cabins for seasonal workers. The community shower and kitchen were each in separate cabins and remnant seats scavenged from old vehicles were arranged around a central fire pit. We each had a single bed and enough room for a dresser and a refrigerator. We set up a shower curtain for privacy when our boyfriends visited, hers from the North Rim and mine from the Colorado River.
The start of every season was the call of the unknown—a blank page waiting to be written between wheelbarrow loads or after late night whiskey-soaked jam sessions around the campfire. I thrived on the uncertainty of it all. Would I live alone in a converted maternity room at the old clinic, share a 20-foot travel trailer on the edge of the North Rim, or live in the bottom of the Grand Canyon at Hermit Creek? Each day began with a trail commute that varied from a few minutes to a few miles and ended as a collection of moments captured in watercolor. In between there were hours with a shovel and only your thoughts for company.
When a long season of hard work outside ends, you long for a home, a comfortable place to hibernate that is not your tent or your truck. With a few thousand dollars in our pockets and loans from friends, we bought the house with the old barn. Not even a roof over your head can shelter you from unforeseen seasonal forces. Every spring when the urge strikes to move out of my house into the wilds of somewhere with just a few belongings, I lose myself in the yearning of poetry. I revel in the newness of everything green, wishing I could be like those leaves, inventing myself again and again each spring—coming alive, new to this world, awake to the wonder.
