Douglas Pass (11/30)

We spooked up a herd of elk, around thirty head. Some of them still shagged out for the winter. On the far side of the valley the hanging on snow caught the wind and give it a chill you could feel on your neck. There at one of my oldest stomping grounds, I held the Scout at a crawl through the canyon, elk scampering ahead and on up the steep hill of Uintah and Mt. Garfield sandstone. The beach rocks full of shrimp burrows and worm tracks led their trek. Up and away from the noise of the foreign and up into the cold altitude they know men to dislike. If I had been in my old half-ton Ford, with its larger cargo area, one of the younger cows would have been sent to its end of the real with a .357 slug. And tonight I would be eating good and red meat. For those raised on beef, or worse, no meat at all, the hematite maroon seems a totally unreasonable color for food. When a flank strip of elk is breaded and fried, the crisp golden outer shell takes on a beauty borne out of contrast with every slice, with the brick red and bright blood showing through.

And the Colorado I have known still lives on in cold corners. A golden field of memory, hanging heavy with ripe grains beats in the breeze and on the wind of You.

I do, but not desperately.

The burning cedar and juniper raises up out of the pit assembled far inside the crotch of a wash. Orange and yellow snapping flames, unique to burning these high altitude trash pines, crawl into the air and cast Mabel and I into shadows on the trees and the sage brush. Mabel lays down in sight of the fire, but not next to it, and she stares at us. She is as at home here as she is anywhere else, which is not at all. She seems a creature in constant transience. I remember some the stronger older widows of the Old Church. Even with their abodes solidified into the ground and their gardens producing a host of canned jellies and, sometimes, sweet wine, they seemed only temporary. The tragic deaths–the most common kind of death in that religion is tragic– of husbands and children preyed upon their welcome and abundant beliefs in some real home far away in the clouds. The widow sisters would live on, and they made all of their life count in a very real temporal way, but they were not of this World. They never set foot on unstrange land, not as long as they breathed in this world’s rich and full air. But they would be home one day. They only wanted their name on the roll called up yonder and just a little cabin in the corner of Gloryland.

The odor of burning cedar bears my rational mind away on its silv’ry or snow white wings, to my immortal home. Back into the shadow world of anointing window sills and doorways with olive oil and elders praying over sick mothers. And pleasant Old Church dinners where everyone knew everybody, often with pan fried backstraps of elk or venison chops simmered all day in crockpots older than I.

Prophesies and prophesying eat away at a person’s sanity, over time. Often, it was those with a piety born of tragedy who were the most eloquent and frightingly accurate mouthpieces for the Almighty God who still had no problem smiting people. Indeed, a few were still smote from time to time, depending on who got the blame for fluid filled lungs or tumors eating away a person’s mind.

And as the gray and lightning blasted logs burn away to white and bed down into all night hot coals, I wish I had known you long enough for you to have met that old and ancient part of me that is at the root of all I say and do. They are all so different from you and from me, though they left a forever stamp on the soul I don’t believe I have most days. They are a tough people, a group marginalized and persecuted like the cedar and sage glades and rims they cling to.

And the golden frosted sage fields of a Colorado you will never know live on in my mind. They carry the hope, old and ancient as the taste of juniper berries in cowboy coffee over the fire, that you will meet them. I do not lie to the sage and red dirt, but I do not tell it the truth. That you will never know them.

And I do again, but not with remorse.

In the dark, while I lay in the thick bedroll and the mostly full moon turns the world a monochrome silver and the snow into clouds, I stare up at the stars. Mostly the same stars I have known my life through. Whether on the fantail of a vessel on the ocean or laying on the hood of my old Ford drinking cheap beer and philosophizing with the sort of friend you would never talk to. Satelites cut through the fields of stars and the Milky Way runs away from sight. A high lonesome cirrus bursts into the pale silver blue flame, ignited by the languid moon. This is the world you will never find within walking distance to an outlet for a curling iron or blowdryer, I can’t remember which. In the slowly circling and traveling field of stars, and the stretching out Milky Way (the wheel within the wheel way up in the middle of the air) I can see you warm and safe, and so lost to me and my world forever.

And I do, but not with asphyxiating sadness. Not with remorse. Not with desperation. But with the sage and cedar and the high lonesome, I miss you.