Slope

Last week I went on a trip to the canyon with Sarah, Andrea and Seth. I wanted to replicate the awesome (!) journey mom and I had up the river two summers back, so I took us to the same place where my mom and I made our dangerous descent (and ended up having to walk up the stream, climb up the waterfall and navigate Colorado's equivalent of Emyn Muil). The problem was that two years of erosion managed to wear away what little slope the sides of the canyon had, leaving only crumbling dust that held together what looked deceptively like solid rock--about fifty feet to the bottom of the river.

For about half a minute I thought we could (carefully) make our way down a small crevasse that gave way twenty feet down to crumbling dust, leaving a stretch of near-vertical descent to the canyon bottom. I should have realized after a few steps down--the tumbling rocks, the shifting sand--that any further movement would seal my fate. I should have turned around. I'd gotten Sarah to come down after me and I shouted for her to turn back just as my footing slipped and I slid vertically 30 feet to the base of the canyon. I started up a miniature landslide; rocks the size of my fist skipped down in pairs, narrowly missing my head. The whole time my mind was ablaze--I was terrified. I couldn't stop sliding down. My only hope was to keep my balance, keep from tumbling headfirst so I wouldn't snap my neck or impale myself on a jagged piece of dry timber.

When I reached the bottom I turned around, stared up to see my sister pumping her feet, trying to clamber up the side of the cliff which, from my vantage point, was obviously vertical (how could I have ever thought it wasn't?) My invincibility--the confidence I wield on every walk out to the open space, skirting the edges of cliffs, the crannies where rattlesnakes lay, coiled, trying to escape the sunlight--evaporated in a single moment as I realized that I had absolutely no control over anything. This fear of death, the realization that I was anything but safe, stayed with me as I traced the water upstream. My sandals (a buck from Old Navy, those bastards) broke as soon as I set foot in the creek, and I had to make my way barefoot a half mile to what was left of the waterfall I'd climbed in 2009. It had been a generous ascent before; caked mud and jutting rocks had let me carefully scale the meager 15 foot waterfall, but again, two years changes everything. The holds for my hands and feet were worn smooth, the mud long gone. I was forced to climb around the waterfall, a sheer forehead-slope of cracked mud which looked deceptively like worn rock. It was twenty feet up that I realized again, as I rounded the slope to the top of the waterfall (my path looked something like a parabola--a large inverted U, a steep hump): if I so much as slipped, I would actually fall onto the rocks at the base of the waterfall, and probably break both my legs if I was lucky. The only shrubs I could grab were withered and came out at the roots, and I felt the earth give beneath my right foot; I looked down, saw several clumps of dirt skip down to the waterfall. The grass snapped in my hand. I latched onto a nearby rock and pulled myself forward, crab-walked down the remaining slope to the top of the waterfall, and laid back into the water.

And then ABBA broke in

What's it worth to be a fiction writer in our contemporary culture? The stuff people look at is on the internet, game menu screens, film. What's the place of literary fiction, short stories, novellas? Why does only the pulp get the buzz?

Something else.

I think yesterday I had the perfect moment--a grey Colorado sky, tea in one hand, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard in the other, cradled on my bathrobe, and Bon Iver's Beth/Rest in my ears while, behind me, the cinematic monstrosity that is Momma Mia! was playing on my parents' flat screen TV, blissfully drowned out. I kind of stopped and thought, "Holy crap. This is perfect." And then ABBA broke in.

VI: Town Sketch

(Impressionism--working on the novel ideas. Things evolving.)

Pines fringed town, the black water –lapped shores and fishing men in white sailed boats. An old man and a Labrador out for the morning walk, shadows etched against the fog and spray. A calm day. Five two story red brick buildings, the eaves frosted with the early winter snows, a clattering diner on the cobbled main road, and a lone figure, pack slung over his right shoulder, walking down the road, cracked leather and flannel and scuffed hiking boots.

Round white stones. The sound of birds and the quiet sough of the lake in the morning, and the sour breath of fishermen. Five men work in a small mine, pointless venture begun generations, a hope of gold or diamonds, kept aloft only by the occasional windfall. Tourists unwelcome. Founded in the latter half of the 19th century by enterprising Frenchmen who promptly forgot they’d built their new home on the edge of the world, at the farthest reaches of hell. It’s a cold town, a drowning town, a whispering town: ten plump middle-aged women, ten greying mid-lifed men, and the few children who’ve stayed to tend the shops and their grandparents staying home.

There are two ways out: the rustling crick across languid waters, or fifteen miles of old pavement, past the parish and graveyard, to the backroads to the seven eleven to the ridges of mountains and rivers. It is this quiet, prized life the wandering man seeks. He walks into the café, bell-rung door, sits on a creaking bench to be seated. Seven AM and the men have gone to fish, the tourists have bought their tickets and the coffee has begun to settle, to thicken. The newspaper is two weeks old; the dark wood of the café smells of smoke and beans, and the air is warm, so the man sloughs off his jacket, rises and rings the bell on the counter.

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