I ascended out of the Valley of Hell and Insolent Pre-Teens. The Phoenix air had that late August hadistic quality of high humidity, intense heat and unhealthful levels of ozone. They wouldn’t let me out. Not one, but two major freeway arterials were shut, SHUT! all weekend long to allow sweating workers to lean against ADOT trucks and await whatever heavy equipment might be passing their way. Grumble, grumble…wouldn’t ever happen in California…grumble, grumble. I threw myself and truck into the merciless interminable grid of suburban streets on this sweltering Saturday morn, pissed off and longing for escape. Hope billowed and ascended far to the north on burgeoning anvil clouds. Lightening playing about the bottom, clippership sails at the topmasts.

Eventually I punched through the sprawl, made time on the open freeway north, and climbed into the gathering storms. My Firestone AT tires finally met dirt road, tread apparently unseparated from the spinning whole. Down came the windows. Loud Old Rock pounded the speakers as the road pounded the truck and I pounded the steering wheel in air-drum glee. Safe and sane speeds were surpassed. Rain from far above intermittently spattered the windshield. Lighting flashed on the ever-nearing range to the west, the road winding, straight, and winding again but always leading toward that rising conflagration of granite and electricity. The Bradshaws. Storms, dust and a high desert range. Dr. Abbey’s prescription in fulfillment.

As if sensing my lunacy, other trucks politely pull over to let me pass. Switchbacks over hogbacks. Bridges over sloshing washes. Cut and fill and upward grade. Puddles, potholes, washboard and berm. Pass and flash, spin and mash that pedal down. Saguaro then ocotillo then big-eared prickly pear. Higher, mesquite chaparral with sycamore in the clefts. And up into pine. The air thinning and sweetening. Sky dark then bleaching white then blue. Thunder roars and I roar back.

Presently I pass the town of Crown King, former mining center, now crowded collection of vacation homes for Phoenix weekenders. Tourists turn to see what is passing. I make like an apparition and disappear. The road narrows, and I slow. Snot-nosed kids on dirt bikes and ATV’s tear around blind corners and come face-to-face with my grill. None seem to be wearing helmets. I wonder who would be assumed at fault in a confrontation of skull and metal. Idiots and their lawyers, that’s what’s going to get me in the end. I slow further in meek fear of our system of justice.

In the full-feathered Douglas Fir forest at the crest of the Bradshaws I find a place to park and camp. It is past noon the but the day has not yet turned. More storms gather to the west and to the north. Boots replace flip-flops. Hat and pack on head and back and down the trail I go.

The morning rain has wetted the forest floor, and the smells rise, distinct and moist. When dry, the forest smells seem crowded to the margins of the sense: high, thin and acidic; low, subtle and bitter. But when wet, they spread and intensify to fill the full spectrum. Here is the sweet combination of damp leaf and needle litter. There the musky scent of Live Oak bark. Undercurrents of solid wet earth and sour Manzanita. In the streambeds mellow willow.

The trail descends through spindly Ponderosa. The trail seems half-forgotten. Recent heavy rain has washed any footsteps, and brush crowds from either side in long stretches. Light rain starts falling. I don’t have raingear along, just a groundcloth for a tent. My raingear is already set aside for the impending Grand Canyon trip, and I don’t want to risk forgetting it. I choose against keeping dry. It’s a long warm day and the rain is light. The trail follows a ridge buttress out over a deep canyon. The ridge is exposed. Nowhere I’d want to be if lightning were striking nearby. There’s a constant rumble and flash in the distance, but none close enough to threaten.

The trail dives steeply into the canyon, loosing elevation in hard short switchbacks and slides. 500 feet. A thousand feet. And then a close bouldery canyon bottom. Water trickling underneath. Sweet smells of water-loving plants. Mud. Flowers. Vines climbing. But no wind. Heightened humidity. Bugs. Ah life, thou art bountiful and toothy at times.

But when to turn around? Always a dilemma on a canyon hike. The next bend lures like an echoing siren. More secrets, more suprises. Darkness is not a limit with a flashlight in my pack and an easy trail to follow back. The map shows 10 more miles of canyon, slowly descending. Practically forever on a day hike started after noon. I decide to turn around at the first sighting of a sycamore tree. Meanwhile boulders and bends lure. Thoughts cascade. I enter that solo-hike thought zone. A weaving of environment and memory, worry and daydream.

And if the music stops
There’s only the sound of the rain
All the hope and the glory
All the sacrifice in vain

Snakes course through my dreams, crawl in my pants, whisk past my lips. They wake me early in the predawn, their skins scratching like stones, one on another. Catclaw bushes snag at my shinflesh as I run on wooden legs. Serpentine lightning coils and strikes on the near ridge. The report is deafening cannon fire: hiss Flash CRACK rumble…hiss Flash CRACK rumble. The storm hammers this egg of an earth as if to crack and crumble it under the Thor-bite of its teeth. A bearded man has chained himself to a high crag. His wild eyes wilder after the ravens have pecked and gorged. He spits into the squall that if they are going to take this earth then godammit take him too. Take him too. The storm rages without apparent discretion, without direction, without theme or hue.

And I dream of a world after the raging wave is passed. When soft rain falls. When clean light passes through washed skies, and the faith I had has faded into twilight. The strength I felt twisted to weakness then healed. The love blind, then blinded, and later faded. What I have given moot, as the first stars burn their gifts through the firmament. When I have left this day, this woman, this watering sky to walk again humble before the night.

And if love remains
Though everything is lost
We will pay the price
But we will not count the cost

I come to a place in the creek bottom all smooth granite boulders and grasses. A patch of scarlet penstemon. I pause. Hummingbirds churl and chase. One stops and smoothly hovers before my left breast. This flying nectar beast. This fluttering heart wrapped in skin and fluff. If I outstretched my finger might it light with a weight middling between a St. Francis medallion and a wedding band. It advances to the red corporate logo on my shirt. Probes once. Probes twice. Tasting of me with imperceptible touch. Unsatisfied, it shows a shimmering purple throat patch and arcs off in search of greater sweetness. Turn around time.

I climb out again, the way up the creek marked with cairns. Sweat drips from elbows, from nose, from nipples. I lose the clouds then gain them again. I reach the exposed ridge again between storms. The manzanita is blackened by lightning past. The sky south is dark. The sky north is dark. Above is ultramarine. I am spared my nightmares. I check the high crags for a bearded one, and seeing nonesuch, find at my feet multitude clusters of 8-spotted ladybugs mating before the coming storm.

The trails climbs once again into live oak and ponderosa. Thunder rattles and smashes the windows of the world. As it has done all day. As it will do as long as the sun warms this good earth. The rain advances slowly from patters to soft wet splatters to sheeting pours. Overheated, I don not my silvered tarp, but my natural born skin coat. The salt funnels and stings in scratches. I am chilled, genuinely chilled, for the first time in weeks. Not an artificial air-conditioned cold, but an honest-to-god bare skinned under the sky kind of chill. Feels good, feels clean. Things are moving toward right in this world.

At camp are dry clothes, warm food, fortifying spirits, and the second book about an imaginary boy named Harry Potter that adults call a children’s book because when we reach seventeen we grow a big deaf Muggle heart that can no longer hear the magic moving all around us.
 
 
 
 
 
 

The rhyming quotes above are from Bravado, by Rush.