Arches

I still can see the burnt orange of those towers of Navajo sandstone if I close my eyes. They seem to be deeply engraved on my mind's eye--a sunburn that never goes away. The fins raise their arched backs to the sky like primeval cats of red stone hunching up in an eternal s-t-r-e-t-c-h.

This sandbox that I never want to leave is peopled with ring tail squirrels, Mormon tea, sagebrush, scrub oak just beginning to change color, and jack rabbit. Also vacationing in the camp ground, much to our chagrin, was a mountain lion.* One night we discovered that the large rounded paw prints in the sand did not belong to a dog, but to an actual mountain lion. Apparently he had been stalking jack rabbits in the rounded and full mooned nights and then we barged into his territory. I had always heard that rabbits scream when they are killed, but until that frosty star filled night when I heard it--I didn't truly believe in the primal horror of that death scream. My cousin Elizabeth awoke the next morning, pale eyes wide, and never was quite the same. At night before every astonishing moon rise, the stars were overwhelming--like an overturned colander with some cosmic flashlight shinning through each of its numerous holes.

Orion danced across the star-horizon, the triangle of Leo's head winked at the poor upside down W of Cassiopeia. The milky way in sheets and streaks nestling the pleiades--the seven sisters--much like my mother and her siblings--though there are only six of them and two are boys--okay so maybe the pleiades really has nothing to do with us, but for some reason they seem like our "home" stars. At night after everyone returned from hiking we gather around the huge sparky hardwood fires made possible by my brother's flooring business and my grandma and I quote poetry to each other. I quote The Jabberwocky and she remembers helping uncle Matt memorize it for his crazy ninth grade English teacher, and she quotes The Children's Hour in memory of finding our magic cave--a little sandstone alcove about four feet up the fin covered by a juniper tree. It is still there, twelve years later. We both get stuck on Invictus and can't recite the last stanza and we veer off into Kipling and can't remember the poem or the title just the ending, "and then you'll be a man, my son." Then we slide into "To thine own self be true" which grandma absentmindedly attributes to Polonius addressing Claudius--which just makes it more funny. Then we move on to "the sound and fury--Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" the sad soliloquy from Macbeth. We are both agitated that we can't remember "Invictus" and when we both return home we search for it and catch each other through email and instant message as we send it to each other, along with "If" by Rudyard Kipling. She sends me a scan of a book that will come to me when she is gone--something I still can't quite believe will happen--of a poem that she has written my name in the margin. Overall it has been very satisfying. A hodge podge of somnolence, heat, cold, loss, joy--everything primal and powerful, the way it should be in such a place as Arches.

*Everything from here on out may or may not have happened to me or the way I wrote it, it just kind of took over, so for you who were there just enjoy it as a bit of nonsense.