The first storm of winter will come a day from now, or two. At noon today the clouds arrived, a cirrus haze thin as a knife’s edge. Over Nevada the sky was still pale turquoise, but gray lowered in the west.
By two the sky was wrapped in gauze.
On Cima Dome at four it was too cold to sit still. The breeze made me tremble through two thin layers of shirt, and I clambered a while in the rocks to warm up. A hundred feet from the place I parked the Jeep, a mature barrel cactus grew flanked by blue yucca. I’ve slept a hundred feet away on occasions too numerous to recall, for a dozen years, and never found it until today.
My hands shook with the cold. The photos I took are blurred, but I will remember the cactus now. I will go back with a tripod, and a sweater.
I clambered in the rocks, which did not warm me.
The gray light provoked detail that summer blaze obscures. The cold drove every living thing to shelter. Every living thing save me, save a lone raven out on the roadside, disconsolate quarks ringing above the earache wind.
A flake of rock came loose beneath my boot. We did not fall. I wiggled it deliberately, tooth in a socket eight feet above the ground, hanging on to the shelf above with numbed hands.
Disconsolate quarks. This place a constant in my life if I indeed possess a constant, and each visit reveals some new wonder previously overlooked. Under my nose. I spent some time berating myself for my incuriousness, my ability to spend a decade and change in desultory visits to this place and miss a globe of bright red spines thirty seconds’ walk from the firepit. Was the fire too seductive? The bag too warm? A more systematic man would have catalogued the Dome by now, would have mapped each mile of old two-rut and run quadrant surveys over a decade’s change, pit-trapped the local rodents and counted the fleas, memorized the chemical composition of the basement rock.
It is a doubt long-smouldering inside me, and now and then the world will kindle a little bright flame from that coal. Now and then, in fact, I seek it out, afraid that I have grown too proud and I seek out something, some memory, some person that will bring me low. It is a sickness, of sorts. It is a well-marked trail that skirts the peaks.
A thought came to me, later than it should have: what if this shelf above my head will not bear my weight?
The Dome is a crenellated landscape, though. No shame in finding an embrasure I had missed. My time here over the years has mainly been spent in distracted observation, each day a set of tangents nested within tangents. Today a whim took me through a field of boulders I had not previously crossed. I saw something I had not previously seen.
A sharp pain in my shin: my attention turned inward and recursive, I’dwalked into a blue yucca. Its spines left punctures that burned for a few moments after I pulled away.
Tomorrow or the next day the rain will start to hit the valley floor. Above 4,000 feet it will fall as snow. This pile of boulders sits at 5,500 feet, and Joshua trees will likely greet Thursday morning draped in white and languid ribbons on their upper surfaces. I woke up here once a thousand years ago, with Matthew, after snow had fallen in the night. We sipped our coffee and waved our arms in glee, and our shouts fell muffled on the snow-mantled Dome.
“Earache wind” is a simply perfect phrase.
“The gray light provoked detail that summer blaze obscures”
Ironic I read this now, as earlier today Singher and I were walking through the ravine on the usual trails and I was struck by exactly what you describe. A place we have been hundreds of times offers completely new vantage when one stops to actually notice.
I hope this isn’t inappropriate, but your stern lecture to yourself about what a more systematic man would have done by now made me laugh. You’re gifted, Chris. You have many competencies and interesting qualities. You are not that more systematic man. You’re never going to be. Get over it.
Of course, seeing things your way means walking into some yucca spines from time to time. But It really does take all kinds, to begin to see what there is to be seen.