Lava creaked under my boots. I panted. Ahead of me and upslope someone I barely knew, though she and I had been exchanging email for a year or so. A friend of an old friend from Buffalo, and we met at roadside in Dorris, each of us recognizing a fellow member of our tribe, hatchback and little pickup among the F-350s. She nearly cracked my spine, there in the pullout, and then it was back behind our respective wheels for the next forty miles to the campground.
A cup of genmaicha and then a hike to straighten ourselves from the road.
Red lava clinkers and juniper. Artemisia and galleta awns. She was more beautiful than I’d imagined, and strong, Asgardian in aspect, and it was trouble keeping up with her as we tromped upslope, stretching ourselves over downed juniper.
At the top, an old fire lookout and a graded gravel road.
She lived along the Klamath and remarked on being all the way upstream. A road was once planned to end in her town, a gash cut across the high peaks to bring sawlogs more efficiently to the coast. The high places were sacred to the local natives, and they fought. The road is still uncarved after thirty years.
We went down to the hill’s base. We kept on going. A cave, and a trail inside, and we went down level after colder level. Four levels down the trail went under water, kept on going beneath the ice.
We scorched our dinner on cast iron. She had brought her guitar and we traded it back and forth, drinking beer as the night wind came through the junipers. I pulled my collar up against the wind.
Neighbors wandered over from the adjoining site, college students from Klamath Falls, a woman and two men. They asked if they could listen. My friend’s voice echoed off the stars. One of the boys was smitten, a little. He eyed the two small tents, pitched decorously at far ends of the campsite. Between songs he cleared his throat. “So… are you guys married?” I looked at her. Her mouth flickered. “Yes, we are,” she drawled. “But not to each other!” She threw her head back and laughed.
I once stood on that same hill with Zeke, with Becky, and watched at dusk as far to the north, well into Oregon, four distinct thunderstorms circled one another, threw pink and blue lightning against the sagebrush sky. Despite the noise, my dog did not nudge nor tremble, but sniffed at ten-miles distant lightning redolent of juniper. Dark rain fell in sheets onto the sump of Tule Lake. I could die complete right now, I thought, and the next day we rolled through miles of ponderosa pine toward Alturas. There is a mountain south of there made entire of sheer black glass, and on another day still I stood on it and wondered at the raven’s silence.
But Raven spoke to me that night. My friend handed me the guitar and turned, talking to one of the boys, and I set my third beer down, worked my way through a wavering Pancho and Lefty. I never hit the high notes right, but the woman from Klamath Falls moved closer, and watched, and I did a better job on the second chorus. And then the song was over and I handed the guitar back again, and as my friend played and sang the young woman moved up to me. She put her hand on my arm. She leaned in a bit, conspiratorially.
“My grandfather fought with Villa,” she said.
