lucky us
We plunged zombie armed into the fabric of night, a homogenized, untouchable, lightless velvet that cloaked the pines. We groped through the darkness for a spot to pee with fingers extended, ready to touch god, or be obliterated against blackjack trunks. And on the way back, we took cautious steps until we jammed our digits into the 4runners steel door and slid our hands along its curves to find the handle and go back to sleep. A last look at the sky out the window revealed ponderosa silhouettes, pine shaped off-black cut outs in the stars. So many stars. None of them ours.
The sun is a dark pinhole compared to the biggest and brightest stars, but it’s our star and it was rising soon. And the Grand Canyon is a ditch carved by time and weather, but it’s our ditch, and watching the one rise over the other is a site we feel lucky to see. So we drove out of the forest in twilight to catch the dawn properly on the South Rim of the canyon.
After the South Rim ritual our pilgrimage took us to another ditch. A megalith beneath the street. An overlooked feat of civil engineering. A wayward home for some, or a place for underworld love, or a place to leave messages. For us, it was a place to catch the simple but timeless feeling of the carve. Alba libellorum, an interpretive site we interpreted for the rest of the morning.
