2005-01-06 - 9:24 p.m.
I went for a walk, a half-hearted hike, that was so half-hearted I turned back from the long cold shadow cast on Devil's Kitchen fifteen minutes later. A deer trail took me to the rim rock which I followed a ways to a warm, uplifting rock beneath the road. I had not been the only one with that idea according to the shards of glass and a name carefully written with a finger of mud. The bottom of the "S" disintegrated at my touch. It would be obliterated at the next rainfall then.
I noted where the drainage from the overhanging rim rock had created a little well in the one upon which I was sitting. Then, silence.
Silence loomed greater than the rock formations surrounding me. Silence flooded me and the canyon without movement. I strained to hear, but the only sound was my own narrative which I call thinking. I tried to still it to a whisper, then to nothing, when a car came 'round the bend sounding like the surf.
The rocks, or hills, or whatever these geological hunks of red sandstone are called looked like waves to me. Their lines were yearning, stretching, forward moving; their lines were rooted, stable, unmoving. They were what I wanted to be.
This was all it took? A sunny afternoon, a delicious morning tasting wines and fudge in Palisade, a healthful lunch, and a pair of boots. That was all it took to get me outside to sit and look and touch and smell and finally feel a part of this place. It does not compare to the beach and redwoods which were instantly home to me; yet, with time and patience this strange land will be a part of the way I think, I will move naturally in it, and it will be a home I worked very hard to get. For now I feel like those very green trees sticking out at odd angles from the rock where a patch of dirt was caught--misplaced, hanging on where they find themselves.
I looked up and thought, This land is sexy. It is smooth and dangerous and so beautiful you can't get enough of it.
I followed a rabbit back to the trail.
