In the beauty of morning, the red cliffs dance; the coming daybreak silence broken by birds calling for the wind. Shadows move slowly across the clefts left by erosion and time....torturous the progress yet inevetible the outcome, another day begins anew.
A twisted path steers me towards the canyon far to my east; calling, pulling and drawing me closer. The canyon is all that matters this day, the smell of moisture harbored in all but the most direct sunlight reminds me of a love for a time past; a time when the rain fell and swelled the canyon with a transitory roar of water that coursed downwards and out. Carving a sinuous track through the cracks of time on her way to freedom from earthly constraints, her waters appeared and vanished back into the cycle eternal.
Along the way, the gentle giants of the Sonora cast their shadows on only themselves and the rocky bajada below. A ridge of thorns is viewed in profile as the angle of low morning sun create a doublet of thorns.....a false image of pain, an illusion which makes perception seem much more sinister than reality.
The sun, already rising high on the day, is somehow still dwarfed by the crown of an elder standing sentinel over time....
Flowing closer to the canyon, my winding track pitches down across the weathered granite as my speed picks up. I take in the skyline which will dominate me soon, deep within a world of erosion.
Seeing 4-Peaks always sets me free.....freedom to over-think and over-analyze.....it is here I separate my body from my mind.....I am lataralus....."I am reaching out to embrace the random, reaching out to embrace whatever may come".
As I enter the canyon some time later, I find feelings left shattered, broken and tangled as desert flotsam left high in a cottonwood tree from a tempest during the rainy season. I walk alone in silence, gravel crunching beneath my shoes, pulling my bike through the deep sands of the channel and moving upward towards the source of the flood.
It is here I trace the movement of flood waters long gone. Empty banks call in echo's; a reverberation of memories flood this space. A thought churns the surface as the waters roil what once was calm. My heart burns fire in the darkness of flash and flood. Boulders immobile now exhibit a movement up until now incomprehensible; tossed into the path, they obstruct the slow flow of everyday circumstance. Around I go into the twisting narrows; over a jam, under a cut and through a slot. The syncopated memories course forward in random arrangements defined not by time, but by fears...but fear of what?
Torturous the water must have been to carve through this chasm; contained within the walls of rock and forced to follow the churning rocky jumble of last seasons calamity. I remind myself that we all must flow along this canyon and that this is just temporary. The permanentness we feel and dread sometimes is just a reminder that we should be thankful for being alive and breathing....here, and now.
Nearing the origin of the canyon, I sit in the dank surroundings eating a lunch of egg and rice crackers. I then stand up, turn around and mount my bike to pedal downwards again like the waters that came before me....into the sunlight and heat of day.
