There is a point at which the breeze does not cool, the heat of the moving air still greater than your perfervid blood, the order of things inverted. Sun glances off sweltering rock walls. A hundred four degrees is high enough a fever to damage your brain, and the air is already four degrees hotter than that. You cannot drink too much water in a hike of four hours, cannot swerve too often into the shade of cottonwoods, and yet the sun beckons, and the trail.
The rocks beneath your feet seem fused of light, suffused with light. They dazzle as you watch your feet, as you try to plant soles square in mid-trail. A mile uphill and then your path loops back around a low hill, all blond granite and saguaros and horse-crippler cacti, and you drop back down to the main canyon, a bit uphill from where you started. A row of cottonwoods greets you, the scent of water. There is part of you slaked by the mere sight of water, the susurrus of poplar leaves in a pale, scalded breeze.
Across the creek the trail winds up and up, a corkscrew to scale the canyon’s southeast wall, a mere three miles to the next water, a mere five hundred foot climb in full sun. The other fork leads back down to the water and a pallid, paved, tamed walk past flip-flopped strollers. Uphill the trail winds in and out of side canyons, a coy bold stripe across the landscape, and you imagine yourself a dark speck on that hillside.
Only three miles, or four. But some other time. Your eyes are heatglazed after just three miles, your heartbeat rapid, chest constricted. One hundred eight! One-twelve, perhaps, on the slopes above, the heat reflected and refracted in upon itself from varnished gruss and granite. A reason to come back, you tell yourself, and yet your gaze pulls itself with longing from the canyon floor. It follows the trace five hundred feet above and second-guesses.
And so instead you walk three miles farther on the canyon floor, tossing your head to the right and upward toward that imagined trail. Salt crystals blossom on your eyelids, and so at first you miss the motion on the road ahead of you. The canyon a blur. A far wind sighs an arcane wish. A whispered rejoinder from the Populus leaves. But then it moves again, and toward you, and it resolves, head held a foot off the pavement, four feet long and three quarter inches thick, gray scales seeming turquoise in the dazzle, and it gauges the threat you pose, neck craned, head swaying. It fair leaps into the cacti at trailside, climbs a near-vertical rockface, vanishes.
