Wild Lonesome Beauty

Yes, another exciting tale of this poor bastard hauling his overburdened, aging frame out into the wild. I took the same old route, now covered with snow, which in turn covers up the cactus, broken glass, and beer cans. Que bueno, ese. Everybody wins!

For some reason I want to tell you what I was wearing: good leather Italian hiking boots I got for half-price in ’09, SmartWool socks, a pair of cheap-ass Walmart cargo pants (black), a short-sleeved T-shirt, and a Marmot “Precip Jacket,” which I highly recommend. The jacket is really just a waterproof nylon shell, but perfectly adequate if you’re exercising and generating heat. I especially like the zippers and velcro closures that let you customize the ventilation. Dressed like this, I was able to slog through half a foot of snow up the mesa and back in freezing weather and feel perfectly warm, but not too warm.

The sun was setting when I started off, so I knew I’d come back after dark. I was counting on the snow to reflect the twilight enough for me to make it home, as proved to be the case (it was very cold and very pink). Evidently I was the first human to hike up that way since the snow fell— always an exciting thing to go exploring in that way—the funny thing was, though, I wasn’t really alone at all.

Now what do you suppose that is? Each indentation in the snow is roughly an inch deep at most and about six inches long. There were two sets like this about two and a half feet apart. Maybe these are impressions of the wingtips of a hawk, the only sign it left while snagging something warm and furry…

There were plenty of tracks in the snow, too, most of them from jackrabbits. I could hardly believe it: from the evidence in the snow, I was walking on a rabbit freeway! There were so many tracks, I had the idea I might be overrun by a jackrabbit stampede. What would that be like, to be pummelled into the snow by hundreds of wet scratchy paws? I remembered what our old dog’s feet smelled like, especially when they were cold and wet, and wondered if rabbits’ feet smelled the same.

At one point I came across a pile of fresh elk or mule deer poop that had melted down into the snow from its own warmth. The air was sharp and clean. A little farther along, I walked into a warm, damp animal urine smell, as if a breeze were blowing past a den of some kind. Except there wasn’t any wind, so I must have been right on top of it. I considered following my nose but thought better of it: there are bears up here, at least in theory, though it’s been six years since one has showed up close to the house.

It’s gotten to where I see magic in the dumbest little things. The AIR, forgodssake! The pink, pink light. A hot pile of poop. The imagined smell of rabbits’ feet, the coyotes I heard for almost the entire trek. But mainly, oh so mainly, me walking all alone for a whole hour, never more than a glance away from a 90-mile view, in a landscape where the spirit reaches out and grabs me by the lungs. (What IS this place?!?)

This is me, the real me, taking up the thread.

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