It was late when I took this, after a day of temperatures in the mid-100s, and the temperature had fallen down into the double digits. Matthew and I watched one thunderstorm after another track past. One of them lit a small fire on the north slope of Clark Mountain, a dozen miles away. We watched it burn. We had just walked through the edges of the Hackberry fire, put out only a month earlier.

Sometimes I wonder if the Hackberry Fire, and all its kin that burned across the Mojave and Sonoran deserts that summer, were as much of a blow to my life that was as that more intimate familial loss that burned through my mind a year and a half later. For a few years I told myself I had the life I wanted, that I could keep it, the smell of sagebrush and Jeffrey pine and Sierra granite greeting me reliably year after year. 25-year-old Chris goes into the desert, and 75-year-old Chris goes into the desert, and nothing changed between the two visits, I expected, except a few trees gone, a few fatter around the trunk.

But of course time is change, and of course change doesn’t work that way. Only one straight line exists in nature: the trajectory of one who plummets. Even that course is subject to alteration, interruption by a finger of rock sticking out of the cliff face you fall past.

I wish sometimes that I did not see these things. I wish sometimes that I could go about a life unburdened by importances, to live in blissful ignorance of the price the world is paying for us.

1. 
   Bill 2010 05 05 at 5:56:10 am

   This photo really captures my imagination, and perhaps the imagination of the desert as well.

   In the past I have wished for utopia only to remember that it is all the accidents of nature that have created our present, beautiful and not so beautiful alike.

   I often wonder if the largest accident of all time in the natural world, the evolution of homo sapiens, will lead to something bigger, more beautiful, perhaps without us. 

   I just don’t know.

   Bill:www.wildramblings.com

2. 
   Rebecca Swan 2010 05 05 at 8:16:23 am

   Thank you so much for sharing that photo. Having lived in the Sonoran desert for many years, I know how rare such moments are and how treasured. It brings back so many memories. Beautiful . . . swan . . . .