Coyote Crossing

To what end this constant panicked flight around the southern shoulder of Cronise Mountain?

The Cronise Cat looks inward. The Cronise Cat gazes at the mountain’s heart.

To what end this relentless flinching, this blinking through dark glass at the dazzling Mojave sand?

“I wait,” the Cronise Cat replies.

The Cat has endless patience. Something in the mountain compels its epochal stare. A flicker of light reflected from the mantle of the earth, perhaps. A slow, tectonic thought. There were gigantic cats here once, swift daggered jaws that stalked the fringes of long-dead lakes. The Cronise Cat was the biggest of them all.

The last one left, the Cronise Cat stalks its chthonic prey.

Once tules grew, and willows, where the full Mojave overflowed into the Cronise Lakes. Once the land was green and held its soil.  The Mojave flows underground now, and soil blows off the dry lake bed. Countless grains of sand and dust crest the range downwind, tumble in the mountain’s lee. Two ears atop the dune, sinuous cat shoulders and rump beneath, the Cronise Cat made up of flowing sand.

“I wait,” says the Cronise Cat.

I wait as well, the Cat for company. To what end the constant panicked flight along the interstate? They speed windblown from the dusty shores of Las Vegas and tumbling toward the ocean, Las Vegas the borrow pit of joy they excavate to supply themselves, so that they might cross this bleak land without confronting it, without it confronting them. Not one in a hundred look at the Cronise Cat. Not one in a hundred of those who look see it.

I have tumbled past myself of late, one grain of sand in a million swept toward the sea. I too have come to rest in the lee at times, buffeted by the Mojave winds. Mine is a bifurcated soul: at times part of the exodus, at times one who regards the exodus from afar, knowing that in a few days I will be one unremarkable glint in that string of lights climbing Mountain Pass ten night miles distant.

What days are these where we create such unintended beauty? What days are these in which we string a moving chain of lights over a hundred desert miles without meaning to, each light in the chain under the impression that its errand is the one that matters?

Each grain of sand thinks the Cronise Cat is in its way.

I could leap upon the Cat’s head, dig my heels into its spine, tumble several hundred feet down to its haunches with as much gravitic drama as I could muster, and my track would be the faintest stripe in its imagined fur, soon licked smooth by the wind’s rough tongue.

I have been raked by the wind myself of late. I am made up of the dust of my own dead times, old particles blown free as the new accrete, the only rough constant in me my shape. I too am shaped by the rock that bears me, ten thousand pairs of eyes passing before one sees, a dessicated container filled by the wrack of disintegrating landscapes. I would turn my gaze into the mountain, would watch rapt as uranium spun itself into thorium, into lead, until wind scraped me clear of earth along with the earth itself.

“I wait,” says the Cronise Cat.

A sea of sand surrounds. Broken tires and discarded plastic float in the sea of sand. Fenders and husks of desert primrose, boards and batting, aluminum cans sandblasted free of paint to near transparency, coils of wire, paper buried then uncovered by the same fluke, passengers’ boredom and drivers’ fear, disdain and envy, hubris and humiliation, yucca pods long since bereft of seeds, plastic bottles blown a hundred miles, my footprints five minutes old and already half-refilled, desert varnish ten thousand years old, shards of glass and shards of souls: the only thing vacant about this place is the glances of the people driving past it. One in ten thousand see the Cronise Cat though it is there and plain, eight hundred feet from ears to tail.

“I wait,” the Cronise Cat replies, its voice the wind.

The Cronise Cat gazes at the mountain’s heart.