Creek Running North

Ten years ago I was getting ready to leave a job I hated and loved, to go out into the desert for a month or two. The trip was uneventful, more or less, and yet irrevocably life-altering. I meandered. First night at Deadman Summit near Mammoth, second night at the north end of Death Valley, the third my first stay in what has become my usual campsite on Cima Dome.

Ten years I have been sleeping in that same spot, a few nights a year, a dozen or so in a good year, and each new morning there I see it with new eyes, it seems. Calochortus in the wash, sage sparrows on the blackbrush.

Tonight I ran along the levee, Polaris beckoning me. They call it true north, but if you keep your eyes fixed on the true you are likely to stumble. I watch my path, keep the true somewhere in sight.

It is more than a year since I have slept on the Mojave ground. There was a night on my way back from visiting Prescott last spring, a long hike and then a night spent covered in frost, and I felt as if I had not left, ever.

I have another self that stays out there, that awakes from his months-long slumber when I arrive. He is there now, watching in slumber as the arc of the sun move southward over days as the desert dries toward the first good rain.

He has a couple weeks more to sleep until I arrive. I will trade this urban skin for his.

The drive has been a disincentive, I admit. For the last few months I have been a little nervous about locking myself into a metal box for eight hours, with just one task to occupy me. I might start, I thought, to second-guess myself, to rethink the second-guessing, to add doubt in layers until I begin, finally, to queston whether I actually exist.

I have remembered that I do exist. I exist, and I am out there now, and I ought to go find me.

Tonight I ran along the levee and at the halfway point I heard an old, familiar noise. The owl, just above my head, and though it usually sings well-cloaked in night sky I saw it this time, a pale wing against the Great Bear and heading north.