[Speaking of slurry lines. From around 1996.]

An overhead slurry line from the giant strip mine on Black Mesa crosses the road midway between Kayenta and Tuba City, Arizona. This pipeline takes coal from the heart of the Navajo reservation, mixed with fossil aquifer water from Hopiland, and transmutes it into gold in the Peabody Coal Company’s coffers.

She parks on the shoulder beneath the slurry line. Leaning against the passenger door of her dusty Toyota, she looks at the moon just setting on the tilted horizon. Snow dusts the brim of her hat, a brown felt fedora given her by a friend a while back. She pretends, sometimes, that she can still smell his scalp through the felt.

It’s cold. Reaching into her pocket, she pulls out a new pack of Drum, rolls herself a smoke. The wind cuts through her sheepskin coat. Her skin contracts against the chill. It takes a few tries to light the cigarette, a few matches on the ground at her feet. She draws smoke deep into her lungs. Faces flash before her eyes, memories unbidden distracting her from the moment.

The pipeline hums, miscible solid memory of long-dead times flowing past for someone else’s profit. Of what use the giant seed ferns, the dragonflies with three-foot wingspans, the herbivorous scorpions? They died long ago, their essences preserved in this combustible form. Locked away, deep in the earth, they served their purpose well enough. Erosion would bring them to the surface one bit at a time, enough carbon for a man to mine to keep his family warm. But to what end this wholesale excavation of memory, of pain?

She checks the horizon. The moon’s last arc winks out behind her rear-view dream catcher. Glass and gravel crunch beneath her soles. A few days, a few hundred miles, and she could be in his arms. Or his. The forces that pushed her out, away, seem distant now. Maybe she should go back, but to whom?

A thin, wry smile flits across her lips. She pulls a wisp of tobacco from the pack, holds it aloft, lets the wind take it. Imagines the pipe-line spilling its cargo all over the ground. Takes the hat off, shaking off the snow, and holds it to her face and breathes deeply. Some of his words come to her. They catch her breath in her throat. She smiles again, walks to the line’s support pylon near her truck. She pats the package fastened to the struts. This should be enough. Holding the hat before the wind, she brings lit cigarette to fuse. Puffs, hard: it catches. She walks away from the sputtering spark, gets in her truck, U-turns and heads off toward Kayenta. She tries to remember how many hours’ drive it is to Denver.