Spring Creek

It's fun to find a friend, the Saturday-morning-and-we're-ten-years-old variety, and that's how I felt about the one we met in Utah. It's true I only know her now in the context of enchanted places...slot canyons and meandering creeks, tumbleweed roads and waterfalls, edge of the world overviews. Still, you either feel some sort of affinity or you don't. It's about the essence, not the details.

On the face of it, it seemed unlikely. She is someone, after all, who looks at a rock-face with an eye toward possible toe holds, uses the word "scramble" in a way that has nothing to do with eggs, is undaunted by a single track bike descent of the sort that I would have avoided even in my youth. She was wearing pale green shoes with purple soles, not because they're pretty (and they are) but because they are the best for cross-country running.

In other words, she is a competent athlete, and younger than me by two decades or so, and I guess I didn't think we'd have much overlap. I enjoy being outdoors, of course, but in my own plodding way. I don't take to heights or slippery stones, my moves are graceless, and if I bend, I don't easily unfold again.

But all of this seemed secondary and irrelevant as we became better acquainted. She wasn't a show-off, just exuberant and capable. Today we walked at a place called Spring Creek, which leads into a gorgeous slot canyon that curved and twisted and never seemed to end. At various points the red sandstone glowed, and we heard the distinctive song of the canyon wren, again and again, so near.

In the clear blue sky high above the cliffs we saw the lines of two jet trails, and we each remembered our earliest views of the world from an airplane, and she said, "I love the earth so much!"

And it didn't seem silly or trite at all, just true and earnest. It was exactly what I was feeling, in fact.

The creek murmured and yellow butterflies flitted among scarlet pentstemon flowers and a big horsefly bit my shoulder, painfully. "What would happen if you were climbing and got bit like that?" I asked.

"Oh, nothing," she said. "You wouldn't even feel it. You're concentrating. And every muscle in your body gets so completely flexed, it would be hard for anything to bite you."

Well, there's another thing I never have to worry about, I thought.

She and Steve had noticed the silver glint of a steel bolt fastened into a wall of rock and were trying to make sense of the course the climber had chosen. And then we heard the canyon wren again. It was becoming our shared song, the four of us, old friends and a new one.

"When I'm old and in my rocking chair," she told Steve once, "I'll look out at that peak and remember we went up there."

I'll remember sharing black licorice, laughing a lot, going to Torowweap, and pondering journeys, much of mine behind me, hers beginning in earnest.

And I'll remember her spirit, her sense of possibility, her being other than what dominant forces dictate.

I'll hope that she's found a good path.