Afterward, the breeze stirred the ash and the ash settled back down. The breeze tried again. And again. And—whooohhh. When the flakes lifted, something small and bright and green trembled under the new caress of the mildest rays.
+ + +
Toward the end of my first year in New Mexico, we stood atop the hill at the spot we called the Cross, and I opened my eyes as wide as they’d go. I let the panorama—with its glowing greens and rising dust and the turreted school cushioned by pines—fill me up. Next to me were three friends, and we draped our arms around each other and felt the pebbles roll under our feet as our bodies knocked and swayed. This is one of those special moments. Can you believe we live here? It’ll never get more beautiful than this. Our laughter laughed with itself across the tree-furred walls of the canyon.
When we lay down, the big rock stood tall behind us like a wave pregnant with water. We found the divots where the rock cupped our heads; it sloped into the earth and held us close. Up above opened another vast plane, blue sinking into a belt of apricot and ripe plum. The long slender fingers of the ponderosa pines whispered and tickled at the fringes of our vision. Sometimes they would drop a single spinning green needle. Sometimes the needles would drop in couplets and triads and quartets. We’d pluck them out of each other’s hair when we stood, the blue plane sliding up and over us like a pulled shade. We’d offer the original wearer the rescued bouquets in a grand kneeling gesture.
We were never alone up there. A rustling chorus of hushes and chirrups and brushes and mournful, long notes pulsed from secret corners of the trees and brush. Quick red-feathered breasts flitted between forest shadows. Hair-thin legs tickled mine, big and round. If I held still long enough, the little bugs understood me as a new mound in their topography. They’d touch down on my shoulder for a rest before slipping back into the airstream. Down by my feet, powderpost beetles swung their brown humpbacks back and forth as they climbed pebble mountains and scaled great rutted walls of bark. I learned to watch them quietly. All we were doing was breathing the same air in the same seconds of the day.
+ + +
I knew to seek hilltops after that. The spots where the earth gathers itself into a crest and pushes into the weightless part of the sky. Where the world below becomes vast and patterned. On hilltops, life is private and wildly resonant. Bathed in light and oxygen.
+ + +
Toward the end of my second year in New Mexico, we flocked, all 100 of us, to the flat and gentle trough of the river. We slipped our arms from shirtsleeves and slung them over arching branches. Pants piled into heaps. Our fine hairs raised and bristled where the breeze touched.
Blue grama grass leaned over the riverbank and dimpled the wet glass surface. Where we trod, the fronds pressed to the ground and splayed like paper fans. Dusty chartreuse starbursts poked up between our toes. They scratched at first; then the feel of them eased against our skin. Beneath them, the sandy soil molded to our naked feet.
We slid and swooshed into the water. It lapped as high as our hips, licked up to our chests when we walked upstream. The fresh cold made us gasp until our blood and the steady air reminded us we were warm. Plumes of mud flowered from the river’s floor where the current tripped a rolling stone or the crawfish pranced or we shuffled and kicked. Our arms gestured high and droplets flew around us like crystal flies.
Bright white light touched our faces and all of us glistened.
+ + +
And after that I knew to seek lowlands, too. Where the ground is closest to itself, where the world is framed by taller things. Where the grass flashes in verdant relief under the long rays of sun, and where I can flatten myself against the blades’ cool scratches. Where water flows and buoys. In lowlands, gravity is steady and fluid and strong.
+ + +
When a shadow stole the river’s glisten from our faces, we stirred and shifted.
We swept our shirts from the branches and pushed our legs through stiff pantholes, and behind us, the river stilled. The grass stayed crouched even after our feet had tripped back up to the road.
+ + +
The fire started in the sky. Its exhales covered the sun. When we looked up, it pushed against our stinging eyes with hard gray palms.
+ + +
On the first day away we were told that we’d be back soon. Don’t worry. We stacked our duffels into a drywalled corner. It got a little out of control. It’s being taken care of. We looked out of the windows and saw that the swath of air beyond had surrendered its color. No birdsong vibrated through the panes—only the sound of motors gurgling oil down miles and miles of the paved exit strip. Seated at the edges of plastic chairs, some nodded and some clenched their jaws and some tapped their feet as the hard-faced woman talked over the tremor in her voice.
We ate watery corn and pale pasta for dinner, all of us arranged in rows in front of plastic card tables. The gray pressed from our eyes down into our chests. Our breath felt thick and overlarge.
+ + +
On the second day, we dug our duffels from the pile by the drywall and the buses rumbled us away. Pushing against the back windows was a curtain of gray.
It’s bigger than we thought. We’re no longer sure how long it may take to contain.
The flames crowning the top of our hill leaped and huffed and snarled and bore over our school with ferocious orange might.
+ + +
The fire burned and burned and burned. The sun rose and strained to peer through the heavy thick. It did this 32 times and the blanket of trees was stripped from the canyon. At the Cross, there was nothing to stir the strange gray snow from the split stumps and empty ground. Where did the powderpost beetles go when they saw the pyre?
+ + +
Time whirled us up and out and away from New Mexico. The Cross fell back, back, back behind ranges of ridges and wide sky. The river lengthened and thinned into a line, and then thinned into dissolution. Over the hill and its flats, the smoke hung like a lid, and then it fell away too. We scattered like cottonwood seeds on the wind; we touched down and our roots probed into new soils. Between us, peaks swept up and pierced through puffs of clouds, and seas of tall grass whispered and waved, and birch forests rattled their leaves, and lakes shimmered and shivered under blustering gusts, and wherever we were, nowhere was quite like where we had been. Nowhere was quite like there.
In these new patches of land, when daylight filtered thinly through gray skies, we recalled how the light had broken over the old landscape, and we missed its glittering clarity. It took swallowing the thick musk of cities to begin longing for the air that had been so clean and clear. Now, when the sun pooled over the horizon, it was without those wild washes of color, bright as sumac and passionfruit.
And our chests tightened when what we longed for, we could not recall without smelling the sting, or straining to peer through the gray, or recoiling from the echo of pinewood, blistering and splintering. When we pictured the river, we wondered: Is its surface still a rippling mosaic of flakes? When we closed our eyes, the crown of flames leaped and pranced, untiring, over the Cross’s mirage.
+ + +
Under the ash, a new bed of grass had just begun to sprout. There poked the sapling head of a ponderosa pine. There was the pockmark left by a pillbug, no bigger than a blue grama seed, lifted on legs unfolded for the very first time.
+ + +
Beneath the fire, it had all already been growing.
