Creek Running North

“Tell me one true thing,” she said.

Up above was sky, and breezes. Up above was light cascading off the sun. It ricocheted down to them, absorbed in dank and smooth red walls. He thought for a while, silent.

A canyon wren sang, a languid glissade of notes upturned at the ends. 

“You see? You can’t do it.” She sighed, her boot heels kicking up sand behind them as she walked. “The wren can, you can’t. It’s sad.”

“I was thinking.” Said to the back of her head as they hiked.

“Not falsifiable, thus unverifiable. Only possibly true at best. Try again.”

He smirked. “We’re a mile into a slot canyon and we can’t climb out the way we came.”

She turned to face him, her brown eyes mantled, her eyelids pretending at severity.

“I ask for truth and you offer me mere fact.”

“You’re playing games,” he said. “It’s the single most important truth there is. Two miles from the truck, and it might as well be twenty. Once we slid down the chute we were committed. No way out except to go through it. No way to know if we’ll get cliffed out before the end.”

“Cheap metaphor isn’t truth either.”

Boots on sand, boots on smooth gravel. Dark stains on the rock, ten centuries of groundwater seeped slowly in to quietly sublime, leave darkening salts upon the rock, the surface slowly penetrated grain by grain into the depths. They found themselves again in silence, walked deeper into the earth in silence, had only the rhythmic crunch of boot soles to break the silence, tracing bend after sinuous bend as the walls converged, until one rounded bend revealed a flood-carved alcove. A shaft of yellow light illuminated it.

She shivered, walked into the light, sat on the sand. She pulled an apple from her pack.

“You may regret not having that later,” he said. She sniffed. “I regret not having it now.” She took a bite, and then another, and offered him the remainder.

“Not really hungry. You go ahead.”

“Come on, come on. Eat. You know: ‘The woman tempted me.’”

“I’m fine. You finish it.” She looked at him long and pointedly, shook her head a little. The light kept moving, slanting up away from the canyon floor. A gloriole of sun around her hair, he thought. She arched her back against the rock and shivered. “You’re cold,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

“Not exactly,” she said.

“Why so opaque?”

“What do you mean?”

He shook his head.

In a few minutes the light had left her. He stood. “No way out except to go through it.” He walked to her, offered his hand to help her rise. She pulled herself up unaided.

Another hour walking, then two, skating over soft sloping sand and clambering up impossibly teetering slabs of sandstone fallen from the walls, tree trunk wrack and sheer falls to hang from with fingertips, trusting that the sand six feet below their boots was dry and sound. The fear rose in him. She seemed surprised. “You’re the one who keeps bringing us down here.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We spend all our time together in these depths. I’d be up top right now if not for you.”

“You can’t be serious. You’re the one that drove us here.”

Her voice grew an edge of exasperation. “Because this is where you need to be.”

He was bewildered. “I didn’t want to come down here.”

“And yet here we are.”

The air grew abruptly dark and he tasted moisture. He looked up. Past walls that seemed almost to touch above their heads, dark clouds passed low and menacing. He saw a flash of lightning, then another, and a low rumbling came, whether from up-canyon or down or above he could not tell. A gust swirled around their ankles, a few wind-blown leaves racing past them on their way toward the canyon’s mouth.

“I think…” he said.

“I think you need the flood to come,” she said. “Each time our conversation veers toward truth, then down it comes.”

“This is crazy.”

“Yes, it is. Here you are in the desert’s heart, your womb, your refuge, and you see nothing but the storm.”

“You’re wrong. You’re wrong! I see the desert varnish in draped waves across the walls, the polished quartz and carnelian on the floor. I watch the adiantum fern make green crowns for moss-bearded seeps, the cholla stems lodged ten feet above our heads by past floods. I see the black-chinned hummingbirds drinking from scarlet blossoms of Zauschneria.”

“It’s Epilobium now.”

“You’re sorry you came.”

“If this is what it takes…”

“You’re disappointed in me.”

“I lost the capacity for disappointment in you a while ago.”

“Oh.”

They said nothing for a time. They walked.

Blood-warm water came in a sudden wave from up-canyon. It stung as it surged past their ankles.

Her shoulders slumped. “Are you satisfied?”

“I wasn’t going to say anything.”

“I know you weren’t.”

He felt the walls press closer. A dozen floods a day across this plateau, a thousand years, ten thousand, and pain as soft as water carves slick, impenetrable channels in the rock. Two hundred lifetimes of disasters wear pathways smooth to the touch. Whole boulders tumble in the flood, pine snags and skeletons of sheep, their ravage one mere tooth on long time’s rasp. He sat once by a pretty little snowmelt stream and listened, rocks the size of barrels crushing one another in its flow. Downstream the water ran red with boulder sand.

“Tell me one true thing,” she said. The flood reached their knees, their thighs. “Just one.”

“You loved me once.”

“I loved you once.”

“That’s one true thing.”

“It used to be.”

“You’re here with me now.”

“I am?” she asked, and then the wall of ruddy water took him.