A level plain, and far away the blue Sierra wall it shimmers. I crunch across the gravel. Half a mile away the road’s obscured by dead globemallow stems, but I have walked a mile, retracing steps on North Mojave soil. A certain tree once lived here, dead a dozen years, I think, and I seek leaves, and so I cover and recover ground. And if I find a stray Astragalus atratus here, so much the better.
I find the tree, regard it, take my leaves.
A beeline for the truck, or such a line as bees would make if thwarted by the friable loose rock shot through with rabbit holes or forced to weave through Coleogyne, and one such hole gives way beneath my feet. I have collapsed the roof of someone’s house.
Next to my deep footprint is a shell. A clamshell, an inch from umbo to its edge, bright white, some desert varnish tingeing it. Thin growth lines trace contours along its flank, and a thinner hairline crack that splits it nearly through.
I look downhill. The soil is all alluvium, washed from the local peaks. The nearest lake a dozen miles away, and it is dry. In any case that tinge of red suggests an age much greater than a recent seagull stealing shorebirds’ meals, dropping them on the rock to get inside. Perhaps some traveler dropped it here, afoot when no one drove, when my ancestors shared their rooms with cows.
The lake downhill was larger, once, twelve thousand years ago, but even then it didn’t reach this high. Perhaps some older lake rose higher still, and this lay buried until a flood uncovered it. There are others who would seek that tree, and leave small pebbly offerings to it, and one of them could have brought this shell from Mexico or Ireland to leave with a bead or coin, only to lose it one-eighth mile away.
I will not know. I hang my head to say I took it home, a legal act on that one stretch of land, and one that might be ethical as well. Another winter would have split it, or another flood would shatter it to bits of calcium. I hold it in my hand and feel the sun peel off a layer of my neck, my sweat trickling along my shoulder blades.
