Here In The In-Between

On a night in Corpus Christi, along the old Gulf Coast, I came up from quiet water to see the Nehi moon. It was orange, the color of soda, but instead of effervescence it hinted at airborne filth, a heavenly stain turned loose by an earth so long ignored by the selfsame sky. Rain had forsaken the land.

Buoyant, borne up by Adam’s so-called ale, I lay cleansed of what hovered above the body, purified, if only or a time, of the pollution that the fires had pushed toward the moon. A scattering of light had erased the white from lunar luminescence, hijacking the 1.2-second journey with the longer wavelengths of red and yellow, the colors of blood and the sun. Life and dying, and with them a season of menstrual flow, had taken hold of the spectrum, turning the atmosphere into a steward of the in-between.

Cradled in a kind of irony, embraced what could have prevented the fires, I kept floating in the warm September water, weightless, at ease, holding my breath so as not to fall from existence. Ancient rains, having passed through the tears of Jesus and the piss of Hitler and the sweat of the strangers conferred to the soil, had gathered here, in the space around my skin, and I hovered in a brief deferral from gravitational force, a man forgiven, it seemed, of the laws of physics. Nearby, palm fronds rattled in the smoke-filled wind, and only time would see the passing of the ash and bitter fumes, or so did the mind conceive. So did the mind, split from the body by a Cartesian blade, bring into being or view. For the time being, the wind could not remove the filth it carried; it could only replace what had already passed.

Meanwhile, the moon, that old timepiece, keeper of uneven months, seemed to push against the soot, resisting the defilement that had colored its light. It seemed to drive steady in a stubborn frame, braced against the assault, holding its position like a rock in a toxic stream. Though stable, it was never still, without the motion that had held its celestial place. Born of a very old marriage to Earth, its synchronous turns had made the face familiar, a profile of craterous gray and solar white, so cool and warm at once, but now the color of flame had stolen all the moonlight, and Selene was no goddess but only a girl, birthed, it seemed, into original sin, upshot of the fall from grace.

Earlier in the day, a Sunday clear and bright, I had gone to a Catholic cathedral to witness a baptism, that of my nephew, a christening into the body of Christ and the life of the church, with all its forgiven sins. A prayer could have gone to the heavens, an invocational seeding of the sky that had so cruelly denied us rain, but on this morning, with a rite of passage fixed to the slate, we would not issue a plea specific the ongoing drought. The dry spell, Texas’s worst, had gone on for most of the year, and with it a string of temperatures that had scorched the native turf, but as the service began we had no way of knowing that new blazes would threaten our Austin homes.

Beneath stained glass and a skyward steeple the priest called the boy to the font. Cradled in his father’s arms, the baby lay silent, as if asleep, his black hair sprouting from beneath the bonnet, white like the ancient moon. Around the water the four of them gathered, the Father, the dad, the mom and the son. The people sat quietly, waiting, watching, an ecclesial confirmation that everyone cared, that this child was soon to join a community of faith. Behind the priest and the triune family, and elevated in the eyes of the church, an oversized Christ remained nailed to an oversized cross, a messiah in the same pose, a cruel execution, for all these centuries of life, of human evolution. His death, it was said, had atoned for humanity’s sin and made salvation possible, made life on Earth something less than a way station en route to a permanent trip to Hell. And his resurrection, some believed, had given rise to eternal life, an existence beyond Corpus Christi and in the heavenly sphere, where great white clouds would defeat the relentless fires.

The priest began to speak, his word echoing to keen reception. He explained, as if anyone needed the story, that baptism is necessary for salvation, that we are “reborn of water and the Spirit.” And with his right hand he touched the water and placed it on the child, a sacramental immersion that meant the baby had been birthed again, into a world apart from eternal fire and crying.

In the night the wind blew across me, and I let out borrowed breath. Beneath the surface I went, slowly, sinking to a liquid hold. And from my suspension I watched the orange moon, wobbly now, its luster disturbed by the ripples.

                                                              —

Sunrise called to ignition, and we started the cars. By now we had heard of the fires in Bastrop and Austin, and the air around us, even so far removed from the source, smelled of the worst campfire imaginable, a campfire without the fun of ghost stories and s’mores. And just as the smoke had sullied the moon, staining it an unnatural orange, it now stole the same color from the customary sun, snuffing it with a lingering miasma of gray.

My siblings-in-law – husband, wife, three daughters in one car; wife, husband, one daughter in another – had remained philosophical, as they say, almost unperturbed by the stygian turn of events. Their Austin neighborhood had been evacuated, and a couple dozen homes destroyed, yet they had expressed the same sentiments you sometimes see on TV, the ones that seem false justifications for a faith in immaterial sources of satisfaction and joy.

“It’s only a house,” a brother-in-law had shrugged. “We have insurance. We can always rebuild. So we might as well enjoy ourselves while we’re here.”

And we had indeed found sanctuary, even if none had been sought, in the joy of uncontrolled laughter, sparked by his flub in a friendly game of pool. Like fresh water from a drained cliché, tears of laughter had streamed down our faces when he followed a boast of  “read ‘em and weep” with a near-miss of the cue ball, the sphere turning slowly and finally stopping, still bright white, in the bounds of empty space. It was true then, as it had been before, that Helios, bringer of fire, would start his journey in the morning, and Selene, freshly washed in the waters of Earth-circling Oceanus, would follow, beginning her circuit just as darkness covered the Earth. Mortality was marked by the phases of borrowed light, with death portended by the waning and life implied by the waxing, even if smoke had polluted the glow.

Now we drove north, in separate cars, toward fires about three hours distant. Only time, shot through with speed, would bring the blazes to view. In the interim, vowed by the hours between departure and arrival, not-knowing would advance into angst, filling the breadth of uncertainty with an emotion just shy of panic. The middle distance would test the depths of impotence, yes, challenging the inability to act with an aptitude for imagining the worst: hellfire, erasing the artifacts of our lives on Earth; hellfire, destroying the atomic symbols of intangible memories and the space, under the roof, of all the times to come, the moments when laughter or making love are given over to the time that passes behind us, into the place that seems eternal.

For their parts, my in-laws had remained easygoing, almost carefree; the families were belted, inside the cars, and on the cusp of destruction they’d stop for lunch. Burgers and fries would become a kind of eucharist, a sacrament wherein the celebrants, gathered within the walls, might find the spirit of the moment inside the anatomy of time. As for me, while heading out of Corpus Christi, I kept seeing what had not yet happened and what I truly feared: I saw my photos and keepsakes turning to blackened ash, the simulacra of bygone adventures sacrificed to brazen displays of entropy and the lassitude with which destruction conducts its business. I saw my sofa going up in a superheated blaze, and all my TV shows, committed to the security of the DVR, surrendered to the storehouse to which no key is given, the place where roads-not-taken are perpetually kept. I saw my second-story deck, a cherished place, quickly vanish beneath a cloud of smoke, and with it all the times I’d have sipped a beer and stared at the moonrise, so beautiful I’d have wished it framed into permanence rather than given to the rounds.

According to reports, my neighborhood hadn’t yet caught fire, hadn’t yet become a Channel 8 curiosity and a cue to the tenants of other zip codes to thank their lucky stars, yet I knew with the certainty of which worry is made that my home stood just three miles from the blaze that that had made two dozen homeowners homeless, unwilling tenants of the tenacious in-between. A shift in wind, I imagined, would erase what architecture had supplied to own my address, and render my foundation a slab over which the smoke, this insensate thing hauling with it the waste of blankets, would float.

Meanwhile, my other siblings-in-law, the ones whose child had entered the Church, remained at home in Corpus Christi, where I assumed they’d be safe from greedy fires. As I merged onto a highway near the edge of town, however, I saw a grassfire at the side of the road, its smoke mingling with that of a larger fire outside the city’s outskirts, as though Hell had annexed scattered properties via the action of eminent domain. Through a thick gray haze I also saw the smoke from nearby refineries, churning around the clock as if the needs of some great master had enlisted the pulmonary outputs of weary invisible men, each stooped beside the hydrotreater or bent beneath the hydrocracker while waiting for his shift to secede from eternity. Everything seemed combustible, everything an exothermic reaction just waiting to happen, ready with its fuel and patient for its oxidizing demons.

Bereft of options and, like a Calvinist bound to a predestined path, consigned to a unicursal road, I motored on, through the smoke and toward the fires and focused on the images that the mind’s eye had conjured, scenes that by now might have shifted from the imaginary to the molecular, with reality having stolen from creative power the hellfire I feared. White ash had fallen on my morning shoulders, drifting into Corpus from Lord knows where, and now the sky above the prairie had taken on the look of a widespread stain, something whose clarity had been corrupted at a distance.

Land and hours kept passing backward, into the wash of which histories are made, but there was always more land and more hours to replace what had passed, a constant and seamless supply of fodder for analog existence. Time, as it stood, was divided by songs I didn’t hear, four-minute packages of word and meter that meant nothing but a slight distraction, sound waves that couldn’t so much as disturb the sunlight or push away the smoke. The outside air had met with rolled-up windows, as if stained glass could truly separate the renter from the reality he occupied, but still the wind announced itself with car-jarring bursts that threatened to send me into some other path, more threatening to the interloper who’d veered outside his lane. Fed by a storm that had brought zero rain to the drought, the wind had irony in its wicked teeth.

An observer might have noted that Mother Nature has a mean streak. A cynic might have said that God has a wicked sense of humor. As for me, I just kept on driving, in the space between Corpus Christi and home.

                                                                 —

Exactly one week later, on the morning of Sunday, Sept. 11, I boarded a plane and took to the heavens, 30,000 feet removed from an earth to which I’d inevitably return, whole or in pieces, dead or alive. Gravity didn’t care. Gravity wouldn’t bow to the miracles people prayed for, the adjournments of terminal velocity and the suspensions of mass-times-speed-equals-force. Fate, always inexorable once its billiard-ball physics had been set in motion, would never cede jurisdiction to the supernatural appeals and metaphysical petitions that issued from superstitious primates, these curious hominids who’d responded to the uncertain space between birth and death with a multiplicity of myths and creeds, explanatory of the beginning and end.

Still, as we reached takeoff speed, with the 737 rattling down the runway on pneumatic tires, I crossed my fingers, something I had done since childhood. Everybody knew what day this was. It was the 10th anniversary of the day a group of disciples brought down planes and towers, using both faith and physics to achieve, and even eclipse, their devotional aims. For one day, jihad had merged perfectly with force and gravity to send human beings to earthly soil, itself a sojourn before the afterlife – going up or down? — or an everlasting if entropic resting place, ashes to ashes, dust to windblown dust.

And if the apostles were to strike again, then there was no better time than the tin anniversary of the day 19 pious acolytes were born again to the immaculate vaginas of compensatory virgins, and there was no better place, really, than on a plane bound for San Francisco, USA, a city named for a man who, during the Crusades of 1219 A.D., sought martyrdom at the hands of Muslims; who, in 1224 A.D., reportedly received the stigmata; and who, in 1226 A.D., reputedly died while singing Psalm 141, which ends:

Let the wicked fall into their own nets

While I fall into safety.

At liftoff, with my life given over to a higher command, I heard the whir of hydraulics and the thump of the landing gear as it retracted into abeyance, ready for its planned redeployment in the safety of a separate time zone. As a child I had thought these the introductory sounds of imminent doom, as if the whirs and thumps were fair warning that the plane was soon to fall apart, but as an adult I’d grown accustomed, if not altogether comfortable, with the inherent noises of takeoff, so I sat back with my eyes closed, hopeful of safe departure but still imagining the worst: my body, hurled from a broken-up plane, high above the land but still obedient to gravity, my eyes fixed on the distance between the flashing life of legend and the certain death in truth.

Now, as the wing flaps retracted and the plane sped upward, I felt a sinking sensation throughout my body, as if the ancient Omphalos had kept its umbilical claim. The globe, a stubborn old thing, seemed to tug at my own navel, pulling me back, unwilling to grant release and unprepared to acknowledge that times had changed, that heavier-than-air flight had traded myth for fact, sorcery for the physics of aerodynamic lift. Witches and angels had been here, airborne on broom and wing. Satan had fallen and Jesus had risen through something like this airspace, sharing a vertical plumb line if not exactly a route. But mythos had never offered beverage service, and once the captain had given the go-ahead, I would order a Coke.

As we neared cruising altitude, I uncrossed my fingers and relaxed. I had always believed that if something catastrophic were to happen, it would happen during takeoff or touchdown and not (Lockerbie notwithstanding, in addition to the opening stages of hijackings a decade old) in mid-air, where quiet supplications give way to roasted peanuts and hard-cover books.

Turning my head to the left, I gazed out the window at the now-dawning sky, still smoky, as if permanently so, yet suffuse with pink and orange.

                                                               —

Thick and black, great clouds of smoke are billowing from the forest on the east, turning the union of Heaven and Earth into a swath of contamination, as if Jacob’s ladder, widened by the demographic demands of the modern world, has been doused in fuel and set aflame, its end now scripted in chemical change.

I remembered it, and remember it, from up in the air. Life is a story we tell ourselves, unfolding all the time, and tenses interpenetrate, turning the four dimensions into a crisscross of memory and expectation, uncertainty and resolution, all tied together by a present tense that takes on many forms, from simple present to emphatic present to present perfect progressive, but that always locates the moment in what we call now, whenever it may be.

Now, as I drive north while flying west, peering through the frames that the moment always supplies, I glance again toward Bastrop, at the heaving smoke from a wildfire that has thus far devoured thousands of acres and hundreds of homes, putting neighbors and strangers into a limbo they might not have foreseen. It is a purgatory whose “temporary punishment” defies doctrine by hinging on homeowners insurance and whose “purification process,” if such a term applies, makes temporal use of the purgatorius ignis, said to save transitional souls from the everlasting flames of Hell.

We went through fire and water, says Psalm 66:12, but you brought us to a place of abundance.

The abundance, for the time being, is of combustible pine, parched grass and 40 mph winds, which have combined to turn a spark into hot brutality, the violence rising to an airspace that airplanes normally share. Gazing through my window, I see little but a thick nimbus of smoke, surging, swelling, crowding out the sky-blue rule of the wheel. It looks for all the world like the work of Vesuvius, I tell myself, burying beneath its ash a future excavation of bygone life and death, an archaeological unearthing that lays bare the posture a corpse maintains after the pneuma has left its lungs.

Entering Austin on I-35, and sitting, too, in Seat 22A, I note that the smoke is silent, yet I imagine that the soundlessness of its passage is inversely proportional to the fury at its base. To this day, Pompeii testifies that even the loudest cries can go unheard while the rest of the world, detached by the necessary distance, carries on in its ambient noises, the laughter of the sitcom, the cheers of the partisan crowd, the moans of climax and the groans of regret, the announcement that your burger is ready and the moment of silence that separates grace from ingratitude, even if they forgot the cheese.

Traffic is humming along. What else, one may ask, is traffic supposed to do? Meanwhile, the captain has turned off the seatbelt sign. I decide to leave mine on, buckled tightly. You never know, I tell myself. Really. On a highway near home I look to the right and then to the left, at the wall of smoke towering behind downtown Austin and at the smaller column just a few miles to the west, near the homes of my in-laws. Their message has come by text: Stopped for lunch and bathroom. Be there in about an hour.

                                                         —

San Francisco sits on a fault. It always has. The fault predated the city, but there is no guarantee the city will outlast the fault. Still you walk its tilted streets and sip wine beneath its towers, secretly hopeful that The Big One will be somebody else’s business, just as it was at 5:12 a.m., April 18, 1906.

Geology has told us the story, jumbled but gospel in its truth: The beauty of the region, with its crystal bays and rolling hills that rise through a foggy blue sky, is the product of its inborn danger, the strikes and slips of the transform fault that runs the length of California, as if beneath this earthly pageant the bomb could go off at any time, a.m. or p.m., midnight or noon.

On the night of Sept. 11, safely ensconced in the City By The Bay, we sat in a tiny Thai restaurant and watched as America’s Team suffered a precipitous fourth-quarter collapse and lost to the Jets of New York. After dinner, we returned to our hotel room and set the alarm. The way it worked was that tomorrow was another day. In the morning I poured a cup of coffee and began the story that I am writing and that you are reading right now. The story began, as it always will, with my time in the water and continued with a morning of caffeinated recall: In late afternoon we stand on the balcony and gaze at the great circumference of filth, the smoke from the eastern and western fires having banded with smoke from northern and southern fires to form the polluted ring. My home is still standing, yes, and for that I am wholly relieved, but an equally pertinent fact is that we are surrounded.

My in-laws, still prohibited from entering their neighborhood, have at last arrived, and soon the kids are playing in the backyard pool. Screams and giggles cut upward to the balcony, slicing soot and the smell of pollution with a sinless chorus of joy. Meanwhile, the TV news is reporting live from various hotspots, a high-def demo of the simultaneity of safety and danger.

After settling on a theme, I took to the streets of San Francisco. I was on vacation, after all, and the seismic city was calling. The work could wait.

The story wasn’t going anywhere.

                                                           —

Midway through the hike, with a blind curve looming and a freshwater pond nearby, we began shouting, clapping and finally singing, choosing a song from whose annoying chorus the bears would surely retreat. In recent weeks, Yellowstone had seen two fatal bear attacks, its first in 25 years, and though equipped with bear spray and noise-making bells, we needed a third weapon against the ursine threat. We needed, indeed, a more immediate form of petitionary prayer, a verbalized indemnity against a lethal event, even if the cause-and-effect relationship of such an utterance might never become clear.

And so we brandished our voices, immaterial ordnance aimed directly at built-in risk. Your body is a wonderlaaaand, we sang off-key and often, using repetition and volume to frighten any grizzlies and keep our bodies intact. The thing about bears is that even though you don’t necessarily see them, you necessarily fear them. Down in the woods or deep in the outback, you must know them as constant threats, as if the wilderness were rigged with hidden dangers, baited traps, potential ambushes whose principal actors are red in tooth and claw and hungry to guard their young. Predators, even reclusive ones, are dependably reproductive and protective of their spawn, the instinct for self-preservation having given its blood to the line of descent.

We had heard often and in detail about the fatal grizzly attacks, the latest having occurred less than a month before, and not very far away. Hikers had come upon pieces of the poor man’s body, gnawed and disarticulated from the life-hosting form. Your body is a wonderlaaaand, we kept singing, loudly, in a state somewhere between irony and sincerity, terror and joy.

                                                                —

On the return flight home, with my Coke about halfway finished and the bookmarker wedged between pages, I stared out the window at the world below. Framed by a tiny window and mounted in its own immensity, the land seemed to have entered a permanent state of suspension, a position in which the past and the future had merely secured the primacy of the ongoing now. We were traveling at 400 mph, and the Earth, for its part, was humming along at a variety of speeds, 1000 mph at its equator and 67,000 mph around its star, but still, for the time being, we seemed to be of a piece, the Earth and I, motionless but for the push and pull of the necessary air.

Some 30,000 feet below me, people were going about their business while simultaneously exposed and concealed in the light. They had been born to a place of obituary, each illuminating some details while placing others in shadow, and so turning objective reality into something like myth. Simply put, human life is a self-sustaining process, autonomic in its basic work, but its meaning, you could say, is in the narration, both spoken and heard.

“Have you taken a look inside?”

The question has come from a well-dressed man in the shadow of the Transamerica Pyramid, in the heart of San Francisco. I slow my pace.

“It’s a beautiful building,” he goes on, motioning with his left arm.

I turn and look. From the outside, the building is beautiful indeed.

“Not interested,” I reply, leaving the Church of Scientology behind.

The sidewalk hasn’t ended and I walk on, through a nighttime corner of hookers and pushers and into an Irish pub, where dark ale lubricates a trivia contest and the uncertainty that accompanies the Q and A. Days later, on sunny Stinson Beach, I stroll directly along the San Andreas Fault while recalling an earlier stroll through Chinatown, on the occasion of the annual Moon Festival. I have to ask: The Moon Festival? As it turns out, there is more than one answer. Chinese cosmology holds that while the sun is yang, comprising the masculine aspects of being, the moon is yin, comprising the feminine aspects of being, and together they form the complementary opposites of an integrated whole, the light and darkness of a mortal life.

Designed in part to celebrate this lunar component of an Eastern worldview, the Moon Festival also honors a key Chinese legend: A beautiful woman, Chang’e, and her husband, Houyi, were immortals living in Heaven when the ten sons of Jade Emperor suddenly turned into ten suns, scorching the Earth below. An expert archer, Houyi shot down nine of the sons, sparing one to serve as the sun. Angered by Houyi’s solution, Jade Emperor banished Houyi and Chang’e to Earth to live as mortals. Depressed, Chang’e then swallowed the pill of immortality and flew to the moon, where, joining the ranks of other lunar deities, she has reigned as Moon Goddess ever since.

Having entered through a gateway inscribed with the words “All under heaven is for the good of the people,” I walk the streets of Chinatown, smelling the dim sum and sampling the mooncakes. Mooncakes? As it happens, the Moon Festival also honors a key episode in Chinese history, and mooncakes, which are pastries filled with lotus seed paste and imprinted with Chinese characters for terms such as “longevity,” are said to have played an important role: During the 14th century, when China suffered under Kublai Khan, Chinese insurgents decided to time their rebellion to coincide with the Moon Festival, which celebrated the bounty of the fall harvest. After receiving permission to distribute mooncakes, rebel leaders placed inside each a secret message, a received wisdom: Kill the Mongols on the 15th day of the 8th month of the lunar calendar. And on the opening night of the festival, in the light of the harvest moon, the rebels launched their attack and overthrew the regime, ushering in the Empire of the Great Ming and its three centuries of order and stability. (How could the rebels have known that the Ming Dynasty would itself fall to a peasant rebellion? How could they have known that a new but ultimately short-lived dynasty, the Shun, would begin on February 8, 1644, the first day of the lunar year?)

The trails run together now. I look back, from my place above the slate, and try to recall the walks and hikes of recent months, each a distinct series of steps but each, too, just a line that merged with other lines to culminate in the position I occupy. In what order did the steps arrive? In what arrangement do I recall them? How do I avoid the confabulation that places a Muir Woods trailhead on a Grand Tetons hike, or a Yellowstone waterfall on a Muir Woods trail? How do I reconcile the competing ideas? — that it does and does not matter? And yet no matter the answer, here I am, as if the variety of hikes has become this inexorable march, and this inexorable march has become this blinking cursor, and the blinking cursor will become, has become, these immutable words. And these words, in turn, will give way to this punctuation, this single period in time. And still the story goes on. . . .

                                                                —

You Are Here.

I replied, predictably, “How does the sign know where I am?”

Honestly, I could have been anywhere. But there I was, just as the sign proclaimed, on a trail near Lower Falls, along the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone National Park. Above me, the sky was a sweep of the deepest blue, otherworldly, like a color from a color wheel a painterly god had made, pellucid, like water, but impenetrably true to the pigment it had culled from scattered light. Nearby, with a sound that spanned the ages, the waterfall roared the fact of its presence, like a myth made real, first, by its insistence, and, second, by the molecules that confirm your belief. And I followed the noise toward its source, moving along a well-trod pathway and down a steep flight of stairs. (I hadn’t needed the sign, but there it stood nonetheless, a guidepost in a cultivated wilderness, not far from the parking lot and toilet.)

The sound grew louder as I drew closer, as if to validate my faith with testimonial proof of its truth, a gospel of hydrogen and oxygen compelled by the fourth-strongest force. And this force was invisible to the would-be witness but verifiable to the soles of his shoes. I kept walking, along the path and down the stairs while holding to its handrails, until at last I glimpsed the waterfall, white like a downward cloud and steady with inherited strength.

The roar filled the canyon like the air fills a breath, completely and without reserve, the sound waves bouncing off old volcanic rock and passing through a rainbow composed of mist and sunlight, with all the little prisms of their passing touch. I walked on, to trail’s end, and from the viewpoint provided I stared at the falls, 308 vertical feet of constant water, a mappable cascade whose stable identity was born and sustained by its flux.

I stared into it, transfixed by the constancy of its change and the fluidity of its fixed position, so steady that history had passed it along to tourists who might take it home in their heads. Its name was Lower Falls. A photo could frame its existence, still the falling water in a falsehood of immobility. Yet it was never twice the same and never once a reincarnation, familiar to its course. Its continuity, its undeniable being there, was little but a renewable outcome of the change moving through it, the motion that makes for the structure that gives transformation a name and an ongoing space in time.

                                                          —

Before me, the bare gray mountain has given its likeness to the smooth alpine lake, and I raise the camera, frame the subject and commit to digital bits the ancient photons that permitted the mirror image. So calm is the lake that the mountain seems doubled, the source and reflection so alike that each could replace the other and no difference would lend a hint. Truth and its rendering would remain interchangeable, a gospel without surface distortion.

In reality, the mountain is a thing of mass and volume, composed primarily of granite and gneiss, while the image is photic and fleet, a collection of waves and particles that wait for sundown to cancel their show. The truth is that no trick of light or magical thinking will trade the mountain for the image or the image for the mountain. Only the water pretends they are twin.

In time, upon hearing the crunching of twigs, we turn to see if a bear has at last decided to separate our heads from our necks. Instead we see a middle-aged couple, and we exchange the usual greetings. Hello! Beautiful day! Noticing our camera, the woman asks if we’d like for her to take our picture.

“Here,” she says after snapping the shot. “See if you like it.”

She then sees the canister attached to my pack.

“Bear spray,” she says. “Does it work?”

I’ll be honest.

I wanted to say, “No, lady, it doesn’t work. I sprayed the bear and the damn thing still had the audacity to eat me. I guess it didn’t read the directions.”

I also wanted to say, “Obviously it works. I mean, I’m still here, right?”

Instead I said, “Well, I have no way of knowing.”

                                                              —

At home, having thanked the house sitter for “not burning the place down, ha ha,” I began unpacking my bags. Mobility remained a peculiar aspect of modern life, abiding in the planes and Samsonites that Homo sapiens, evolved from Homo habilis but not yet morphed into the time-traveling species of futuristic tales, had fashioned from earthly matter. I had begun the day in Wyoming, where sunrise showered pink upon the Tetons, yet here I was now, hours later, at home.

The passage had ended where it had begun.

After unpacking, I threw my clothes in the wash and turned on the water, just like that. The push of a button had brought it forth, and for a moment I imagined an ancient god pushing a magical button to dispatch the needed rain. It roared in my head like a fabled downpour, the stuff of myth and faith, even as its tangible counterpart roared in the mudroom as part of a distribution system whose allotments had rarely squared demand and supply.

In time I grabbed my camera, stepped out to the balcony and began looking through vacation shots. There I am, in front of Old Faithful. There I am, along an alpine lake. There I am, still before the waterfall. Looking up, I gazed at the earth before me, a canyon of mountain cedars dying from the ongoing drought. Above me, the skies were beautifully blue and cloudless, wiped clean of visible smoke. Still a memory lingered: Earlier in the day, while flying into Texas airspace, I had stared out the window at the high-level haze, remnant of the wildfires that at last were extinguished.

Camera on lap, I continued to stare at the sky, a high space open to knowledge but impervious to whole understanding. At the moment, its stillness betrays its pathways, the routes across its hold. The sun along the ecliptic is flaming toward the dusk that always delivers the morning, often with orange but never, in truth, behind the chariots of Aurora’s reign. Meantime, the waning moon is primed to set at 5:52 p.m., honoring the mechanics of its orbit and the clock of its sidereal demand. The next new moon, a whole but imperfect sphere, will rise again in two days’ time, with a whiteness that will always wait for its shading.

I look again at the canyon. I look again at the sky.  I’m agnostic, goddammit, but Lord knows, here I am, at the cusp of the New Year, still praying for rain.

Images: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

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