Creek Running North

These mountains are heartbreak to me. I will never gain the understanding of them I long to possess. The whir of jay in ponderosa pine, the aching tectonic gavotte of granite and schist, the epochal procession of the biomes, and I want to know it all, my eyes to drink the rock, my heart to pump out algae-flecked trickles.

A lifetime, or two, would be a bare start. I have but one, and it half gone. I have spent too much of my life too far from signs to warn drivers of crossing elk.

In Peeples Valley one horse mounts another. Both of them geldings, and the mounted whirls out from underneath, nips at flank, circles its companion nickering, prancing. An extravasation of valley into the air, expelled from the ground by the joyous pressure of hooves, a gloriole of dust, and then the rumble of right tire on shoulder and I pull back onto the long road. I regain the companionable silence of the long road.

These mountains are heartbreak to me. Coming out of Prescott, miles and miles of burn. The last time I drove this road Becky and I were arguing. Burned ponderosa hulks over three-year-old shrub oaks. Two hundred miles east and ten years ago I kept to the edge of the road, shards coming off my life one after the other. A life spent wandering: to choose a home is to forsake all other homes.

Kat showed me today a waterfall she loves, a smooth granite chute and algae in the pools. Two weeks ago the water was higher. Neither trickle nor flood today, it sang as it leapt off the cliff to the Hassayampa far below us. We listened. We joked and fell silent again. To be alone in those mountains with a friend who is alone with me: what more companionable solitude, there in the spaces between the words spoken? She stalked lizards, gently crouching, stroking her left palm over her vest and then reaching out in fluid swiftness to grasp, and then in failure shifting gently, stroking palm on vest and reaching out again. One escaped her by leaping onto the hand that sought it, and then away.

Spiders, gray bands on their legs like garters, walked the meniscus of the creek between the rocks. One confronted a lady beetle, red with eight black spots no larger than pinpricks, and I put my hand below where it struggled in the creek, lifted it free. It walked from my finger to Kat’s. It dried itself there for a good ten minutes, fifteen, in the warm breeze from up the canyon and in Kat’s rapt attention. I found a frog on granite, three-quarters of an inch long and pink-seeming against the rock, and she flung herself down on the rock to see it, her hand hitting just where the frog had concealed itself, the frog somehow moving through her hand unharmed. She caught another, held it in her cupped hands for a moment to show me. Then she let it go to swim in the creek, its yellow-striped hind legs kicking lazily against the scant current.

Sun-warmed smell of ponderosa pine and juniper, and a large swallowtail flitted overhead. An hour? An hour and a half? A short time spent in idle lounging with a friend who loves the place, another in the list of places I have loved if for a moment, a life full of them one well spent. Why then this ache along the road? These mountains are heartbreak to me. Why the ardent longing for the splintered granite, the sparrow in the yucca, the memory of singing rill in smooth-worn chute? The sky is dark above the Hassayampa, and sixty miles downstream its water flows beneath the ground, occulted by the rock. I stand on its bed, in midstream were there one. There is a bit of light in the northern sky.