Except for a small misgiving that haunts the echo chamber that is my heart, I am very happy these weeks out at the fire lookout. What a relief to be done with the windy tense drama of June. What a pleasure to voyage through the shadows and rain festivals of July. Now I record an inch of rain one day, a quarter of an inch the next. The night lights up vast ships of storms near and far. And clouds, wet clouds, wrap around peaks and ridges many afternoons. And yes, lightning crashes here and there, dropping blue buckets of precipitation and leaving shattered trees, too. Crews and engines split up resources to chase smokes in every direction. And then there arrives a day when it seems like the Gulf of California has swept into the sky and stopped; rain from Mexico turns into a herd of clouds grazing outside the windows by my kitchen sink. The woods will dry out again soon enough, but for a while I can almost hear creatures doing the backstroke in puddles and plant people drinking deep and burping. I look down on cloud tops and feel tucked into a magical temple.
But something is missing. Many years in July I find ladybugs hovering at the foot of the tower. When I look closely, I see them clustered in the bark of pine trees and find them tucked into the shady core of clumps of sage brush. But none have arrived yet and it makes me feel ever so slightly out of balance, as if I am hosting a big party but somehow forgot to invite the guests of honor. Hummingbirds whine. Ravens cackle and roll in the wind. Flying ants crawl across the windows for an hour. A fluff of white butterfly darts up and down and then out and around the top of a near white pine. Lovely company, but where are the ladybugs? I look at a photo from four years ago here and wish I knew a song to sing to call in the red-and-black-dot beings to join my musings. In June I longed for moisture to climb into the sky and meet me here; now I’m longing for the company of lady bugs huddled near. Is there a poem I might write to lure them? Or a dance I should attempt?
Then on a sunny morning tucked between monsoon movements, on the day before a super full moon, I find the wind is out of the north and east so that I can fly a kite from the south catwalk. And I have just the right kite: a foot-wide plastic ladybug with a dark nose, big white eyes and a red back. It takes a little bit of playing out and then reeling in, playing out and experimenting with pressure, before she escapes the swirls around the 40-foot lookout to dance up instead of down. With cool breezes against my neck and a view of the Peaks and Doney Park and Mount Elden, I feel like a giant as 100 feet of string gently tugs at my hands. I murmur, “Come forth, dear lady bugs, come forth. From the east or the west, the south or the north. Come forth.”
Ladybug Kite teases my fingers with a long dip that seems to bring the two red streamers of her tail into a pretty dance over Lockett Meadow eight miles away. If the string was long enough maybe my kite could actually do a drone-like survey over those aspens, maybe find ladybugs there—invite them here. I swear it rained for six hours in a row up there one day. Storms gathered over Elden, over Kendrick, and then moved on north to get in Bruce’s face at the fire lookout on Red Butte. But one gnarly bubble of cumulus stayed behind and rained and rained and rained on Lockett Meadow for hours. It is a giant aspen grove sponge up there, I think, and imagine sopping wet pine duff and leaf litter smelling like the day the Earth began. The mountain drinks and water collects and springs are fed and trees vibrate with health again. And campers camp and hikers hike and somewhere ladybugs are gathering. “Come forth, come forth,” I murmur. “I am missing you. I don’t know what to do.” So I play with a kite on a fine July day and wave at summer’s incarnation in a whimsical way and lean toward the all of it, murmuring welcome.
