Which Way to Turn?

Hwy 186, roadside wildflowers

It’s midday on Sunday and too warm in the sun to go for a walk. Tip of the hat there to a late Michigan friend, who would never listen to complaints of a hot summer day (in Michigan) after the long, cold winter. He convinced me to say warm instead, and now I think of him every time I have occasion to say it. 

 

Sunny and I were out at sunrise and back home in the shade by 8 a.m. We could have been out earlier than that, not waiting for sunrise, but the momma was moving slowly, and I’ve pretty much kept the same slow pace most of the day, going at my packing in a random puttering mode, the same approach I usually take to housecleaning. There’s a lot of parallel between those two multitask projects. Just now, though, a nap would be welcome. “To sleep, perchance to dream”? No, I don’t consider dreaming a problem, since I’m always hoping to have a little conversation with the Artist in my dreams. It’s the getting-to-sleep part that can be so elusive.

 

But what shall it be today, books or an outdoor adventure? I have photographs I haven't posted from an ordinary morning dog walk in the ghost town neighborhood, as well as thoughts about one particular shelf of books important to the Artist and to me.

 

Say, here’s a crazy idea: I could alternate book notes with adventure photographs, going back and forth between indoors and outdoors. Does that sound completely off the wall? No matter, I’m going to try it -- and if I give up and don’t post the result, you won’t be reading this at all, so ha!

 

Where to begin?

One of many full bookshelves

Books: I’m sitting in the big chair right next to the bookcase with the shelf contents I've been thinking of sharing, so let’s start here. We’ll go left to right, the way we read a book, although the first shelf item on the left isn’t a book at all but a calendar for 2021, with photographs of our great-grandsons from 2020. Below you see the cover. My stepdaughter has chosen the photographs and put together a calendar of the boys every year since they were born. 

Then, right snug up against the calendar is a beautiful Phaidon volume of the pastels of Odilon Redon. A gift inscription inside reads:

 

I thought you would enjoy seeing one of the painters who inspired Chagall in his early days – 

I think Redon is to Chagall what Vivaldo is to Bach.

 

There are three givers’ names, but clearly only one (‘I’) of them wrote the inscription. Oddly, I don’t remember which of us, the Artist or I, discovered and purchased this book. I can only say that Redon has long been a favorite of mine and that the Artist with whom I shared a life did not disparage that preference.

Gus and Henry

Odilon Redon

Outdoors: I have two folders of Mascot Mine Road photos, as my friend and I have often found ourselves on that road, either starting out for higher ground or coming out on the road after hiking straight back uphill and through washes. Such ordinary morning dog walks aren’t the kind that require extensive thought ahead of time. We just choose alternatives as they present themselves and see where we end up. The concrete structure in the photo below, however (we’re looking up at it in this image), is one I hadn’t seen close up before, so we left the road and started toward it. 

 

 

Books: When the Artist and I ran across a reference to a book about Richard Brautigan, David was intrigued, as he had had occasion to hang out with Brautigan one fall when the writer came to Leelanau County to visit Jim Harrison. Since neither Richard nor David hunted, the two of them rode around the county together while Jim and his other buddies were in the field with their dogs. To make the book more intriguing to us, the author, Willliam Hjortsberg, is the father of poet Max Hjortsberg, married to Jim's younger daughter. 

 

Jubilee Hitchhiker is a very big book, 859 pages long, and weighing roughly seven pounds. David was rather overwhelmed by the amount of detail in the account of Brautigan’s death. I ordered the book from here in Dos Cabezas in March of 2021 and can’t say for sure if the Artist managed to read it all or skipped around from one part to another.

Outdoors: Okay, brace yourselves for the big, scary, unexpected moment, neither telegraphed nor captured in the photograph below of my friend approaching the concrete structure. As we reached the structure, I asked my friend something about it, and then, as we were gazing down over the edge, I stupidly asked Sunny if she wanted to put her paws up on the edge and look over with us. I mean, I thought she would do it just that way, but no! My puppy jumped up onto the edge and would have been over and down, down, down in a flash if I hadn’t immediately grabbed her! We called the dogs away from there and had quite a discussion on what kind of the equipment and gymnastics would have been necessary to get her out, had Sunny fallen in! It is very deep!

Books: And now, back to the bookshelf, we reach Melville’s Moby Dick, one of the Artist’s all-time favorite books – or so he said, although when it came to re-reading (my barometer for what “favorite book” means), he was far more likely to choose Wind in the Willows or Harlan Hubbard’s Shantyboat or Machiavelli’s The Prince or the classic Zen in the Art of Archery or Jim Harrison’s memoir, Off to the Side. Still, when asked what he considered the best book ever written, he generally named Moby Dick, and this Reader’s Digest edition – unabridged, please note! – is a handsome volume, perfect for picking up and opening anywhere, which is the way the Artist often liked to read his favorite books. 

Outdoors: Below you see some of the hardest sort of climbing: loose rocks. Why are we taking this difficult route, anyway???

 

 

Books: Here is one of the Artist’s favorite books, for sure. The photograph on the front of the dust jacket shows Jim pretty much as he was when I first made his acquaintance. The front flap is tucked in where the Artist was last reading, at page 118. (He had read the entire book numerous times.) A paragraph on that page begins, 

 

When I was around fourteen and became a Bible-thumping fundamentalist for a year or so it was my curiosity that stole my faith. A Baptist minister told me that I shouldn’t be reading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and that Beethoven and Mozart were the devil’s music.

        - Jim Harrison, Off to the Side 

 

Yes, those were indeed simpler times....

 

Outdoors: Now we are going sideways, approaching our favorite, near-to-home “ruins” from the loose rock slope, rather than the easy-to-walk road. I am so glad to get to solid footing at last. Very solid!

 

Books: Billy Collins, another poet. The Artist enjoyed Billy Collins, and I was happy to take him a copy of The Trouble with Poetry for Valentine’s Day when he was in the hospital in – which time was it? Chandler, I guess. That’s when he asked me to hand him his shoulder bag so he could inscribe and give me the book he had brought to the hospital. The last hospital, that was….

Outdoors: “Ruins” again, now close up. We are at mid-level here.

Books: Paris Was Ours: Thirty-Two Writers Reflect on the City of Light. He loved this book! (And Paris was ours!) It was also one of the essays in this book that convinced the Artist that he wanted, at last, to read Proust.

Outdoors: From the sublime to the comic, I give you now – dog butts!

Books: A couple of little paperbacks come next, Eugen Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery and Matsuo Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, followed by a mass market paperback, Ava: My Story, by Ava Gardner. He was crazy about Ava Gardner! 

Outdoors: For me, part of the appeal of this particular set of mining ruins was the way it reminded me of Mayan ruins in Mexico. Here we are high above and looking down on the Mascot Mine Road. If you click on the image and employ the magic of zoom, you’ll be able to see cattle grazing on the hillside opposite.

Books: The Book of Unusual Knowledge was a Christmas gift from a brother-in-law that really hit the mark. For one thing, it is definitely an open-anywhere kind of book, and for another it’s full of odd and surprising facts and stories. He loved that kind of browsing.

Outdoors: Another aspect of the “ruins” that seem much older than the early 20^th century. But then, these structures were built a hundred years ago….

Books: More books by another friend, these two novels by Ellen Airgood. The more recent, Tin Camp Road, is an ARC and inscribed “To Pamela and David, with love.” (We love you, too, Ellen and Rick! Such happy memories in Grand Marais!) Airgood perfectly captures place in her books. Also, real life!

Outdoors: Again, below, zooming may be in order. Don’t these stones look as if frost has painted their edges? I think it’s some kind of calcium deposit, but I really don’t know.

Books: We arrive now at the French connection: Swann’s Way, the birthday present he didn’t live long enough to read; My Life in France, the Julia Child memoir we read aloud to each other with infinite enjoyment; and a little paperback Simenon policier. 

 

Outdoors: Now for two obvious mineral deposits below, iron and calcium. 

Books: A slim booklet by another friend, author Kathleen Stocking, called “Looking for God’s Infinite Plan in the Footprints of Wolves,” is followed on the shelf by a heavy volume comprising three complete Jane Austen novels. I don’t know that the Artist ever read any of Austen’s books, but he knew I loved them (know them almost by heart), so he was always agreeable to watching a movie version, even the long BBC series of “Pride and Prejudice” starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle. – Oh, wait, wait, wait! One time I began reading Pride and Prejudice aloud to him, and he was pleasantly surprised to realize that it was funny. No one had ever told him that before, he said. I’m pretty sure we didn’t read the whole book, though.

Outdoors: Here we have a view of Mascot Mine Road on a different day, under cloudy skies. Somewhere I have more photos of Sunny and Yogi at the ruins, but where are they? Maybe on my phone?

Books: Peter Matthiessen is another writer David met through Jim Harrison. I have the paperback copy of The Snow Leopard on this shelf, a hardcover copy on the shelf below. Then come three more little paperbacks, these by Farley Mowat. We read People of the Deer aloud together and often quoted from the movie version of Never Cry Wolf: “Good idea!” Then River Notes, by Barry Lopez. Our rivers were the Paw Paw, the Kalamazoo, the Little Rabbit, the Crystal, and the Leland River (formerly known as the Carp).

Outdoors: But what you really want from outdoor adventures is dogs, not architecture, so here are Sunny and Yogi, together again after a separation of almost two weeks. 

AET: Always Expecting Treats!

Books: Almost done now, and here we are with Antoine de St.-Exupéry’s Vol de Nuit and The Little Prince. I have referenced The Little Prince more than once on this blog, having to do first with losing Peasy, our troubled dog, and then again after I lost the Artist.

Outdoors: I don’t know about the rest of you, but that’s about all the back-and-forth I can take, and luckily we have reached the end of the bookshelf. Your reward for sticking with me -- and a freebie for those who cheated by just scrolling for the photos -- is one last happy photo of Sunny Juliet, with her Dos Cabezas pal, Yogi. 

Thanks for enjoying our Arizona adventures with us. Sunny and I will be seeing you back in Michigan before too long. 

How I Spent My Christmas Vacation

I'll explain this further down.

Here I am (since November) in what is at present my winter home, far from Michigan, a little rented cabin in an Arizona ghost town in the Sulphur Springs Valley, mountains looming all around, where a beautiful sunrise occurs just about every morning and a breathtaking sunset at the end of each day. Southeast Arizona’s landscape is austere and can seem unforgiving, forbidding, even foreboding, but in fact, the land is characterized by indifference rather than hostility, and I find comfort in Nature’s absence of malice. I also enjoy, here in the ghost town, sufficient distance between human habitations that we don’t often rub up against each other the wrong way.

 

My own small living space, large enough to share with my canine companion, in previous years accommodated me, our dog, and my dear husband, the love of my life. Now, there’s just me and the dog, and I miss David every minute! Make no mistake about that! Although in many ways he is still here, all around me -- in his paintings, his hats and boots, his books on the shelves with mine, unlimited memories, and constant thoughts. Every day I wear his watch and one of his favorite belts, and often I’ll reach for one of his caps or pull on a pair of his socks.

Me and my girl

On the morning of Christmas Eve, my neighbor and I took our usual long morning dog walk with Sunny Juliet. We hiked high enough in the foothills to reach ocotillo territory, and then quickly turned downhill again so Sunny would not disturb cows that had climbed high on the slope for the first sunlight of the day. Due to Midwest weather, my friend’s December 22^nd flight to Detroit was cancelled, and I’d been reading books featuring travels in Mexico and Spain, re-igniting what had been until recently fairly dormant wanderlust. And so it was, as we compared notes on travels planned and desired, we decided on the spur of the moment to drive down to Whitewater Draw that very day to see the wintering sandhill cranes. 

Cranes by the thousand are very noisy, but I have always found their clattering, purling calls joyful and comforting. There were many other birds to see, as well. American shovelers, both male and female, have coloring reminiscent of mallards back in Michigan, though with much longer bills. Sweet little black coots scoot along with bobbing heads and then dive. My friend’s sudden excited cry of “Red bird!” drew my attention to a vermilion flycatcher. One waterside tree held a woodpecker (Ladderback? We didn’t have binoculars with us!), and if you look closely at the sign in the photograph below you’ll see what I think is a black phoebe.

Need telephoto for good photo of black phoebe, if that's what this is!

Long trail to largest flocks....

At the very far end of the longest path, even without the binoculars we had forgotten (along with field guides we’d also forgotten, so eager were we to get on the road), we were able to see a long line of about 100-150 snow geese, hunkered down near another even larger crowd of more sandhill cranes. I don’t ever remember seeing snow geese before, here or anywhere else, so that was exciting. 

That white line in the distance is a flock of snow geese.

 

Whitewater Draw was one of the Artist’s favorite places in Cochise County, its water scenes so reminiscent of the watery landscapes he loved to paint, that whenever we were there together he would ask me repeatedly to photograph certain scenes. He never painted directly from photographs, but he liked looking at them for inspiration, so on that sunny Christmas Eve afternoon I kept stopping to photograph scenes for him, a habit I’ll probably never break. 

 

That night I made the oyster stew (just for myself) that I’d planned for Christmas Eve supper. Lots of cubed potatoes, sliced celery, onions, mushrooms, evaporated milk, a little coarse kosher salt, and a small can of oysters. It was good. I had a second bowl. Then on my way to bed, rather than turning off my Christmas tree lights, I picked up the big platter that holds the tiny potted Norfolk pine with its battery-powered tiny lights and moved it over to the bedroom corner of the cabin where I could look up from my nighttime reading and see it from pillowland. In the morning I brought my 5 a.m. coffee and a cold blueberry pancake back to bed and shared the pancake with Sunny. “I’m glad you’re here,” I told her. “What would I do without you?”

 

My Christmas morning reading was the second chapter of The Mays of Ventadorn, by W. S. Merwin, a journey and exploration into a particular strain of troubadour poetry but, for me, also the story of Merwin’s finding a home away from home in a part of France that I too fell in love with.

 

…My vocation as a tourist has always been dubious. Reading a guidebook and then glancing up to identify what the resume has been summarizing is likely to seem to me, quite soon, like an exercise in alienation. I am more given to imagining what it might be like to spend time in a given spot, to get to know the sounds and the light, the people and the faces of the buildings, and how some of it had come to look the way it did.  

 

-      W. S. Merwin. The Mays of Ventadorn

 

This is the way I have always loved to travel and the way the Artist and I traveled together, “imagining what it might be like to spend time” here and there, which is why having a vacation “home base” – a hotel in Paris or in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the ghost town cabin here in Cochise County, Arizona – and making daily explorations out from that base was our perfect idea of travel, enriched and expanded always by armchair travel with our beloved books, often read aloud to each other, in whole or in part.

 

On the afternoon of Christmas Day, my regular hiking partner and I walked over across the highway for dinner with other neighbors and later walked home under a new moon in a lavender sky.

Then only two days later, again without planning ahead to do so, we took one of our longer, more ambitious hikes here in the ghost town environs, gaining about 400 feet in elevation and reaching an entirely different life zone, where green-leafed oak trees flourished. It was so exciting! Sunny proved herself an able rock dog, too -- explanation for my first photograph on this post.

And the day after that I accompanied my friend on a long, rainy, stressful expressway drive – to pick up her new puppy! All in all, quite a week! 

 

Now as 2022 draws to a close I look around this little cabin at my modest belongings and feel comfortably at home, lucky to be here, safe and warm, lucky to have little Sunny Juliet, to have good neighbors and blue skies, enough to eat, more than enough to read (no such thing as “too many books” in my lexicon!), and family and friends who keep in touch across the miles. It would be easy -- and sometimes, I admit, the temptation is more than I can resist -- for me to look at 2022 as a catalog of loss, but I guess if I have a single resolution for 2023, it is to continue to count my blessings daily and to recount them whenever I start feeling blue. But here's the tricky thing. Although people say, “Count your blessings,” they generally say it when a person is feeling more blue than blessed -- because why would you need reminding otherwise? – and yet it’s when I’m already feeling blessed and contented that I am more likely to enumerate positive reasons for good feelings. Does that sound familiar to anyone else? It’s those blue hours and moods that are difficult, although heaven knows -- and I am certainly aware -- that in this life I have been a very lucky woman.

 

Last Books (Almost!) Read in the Year 2022

 

129. Steinbeck, John. A Log From the Sea of Cortez (nonfiction)

The pattern of a book, or a day, or a trip, becomes a characteristic design. The factors in a trip by boat, the many-formed personality phases all shuffled together, changing a little to fit into the box and yet bringing their own lumps and corners, make the trip. And from all these factors your expedition has a character of its own, so that one may say of it, “That was a good, kind trip.” Or, “That was a mean one.” The character of the whole becomes defined and definite. 

 

Steinbeck’s chartered boat expedition with Ed Ricketts and crew to collect marine specimens in the Sea of Cortez between Baja California and the Mexican mainland in 1941 is as full of portraits of nature and philosophical topics as it is observations of the land and people encountered. Did you know that Steinbeck studied marine biology in college? Any fan of Cannery Row will find this book fascinating!

 

 

130. Lee, Laurie. As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (nonfiction) 

Ever since childhood I’d imagined myself walking down a white dusty road through groves of orange trees to a city called Seville. The fantasy may have been induced by the Cotswold damp, or by something my mother had told me, but it was one of several such clichés which had brought me to Spain….

 

Laurie Lee’s writing is magical. He walks from his home village to London, travels by boat to Spain, walks across Spain – like a mad dog Englishman, without a hat, courting sunstroke! But who else has ever written like this? 

I was awakened next morning by the high clear voice of a young boy singing in the street below. The sound lifted me gradually with a swaying motion as though I was being cradled on silken cords. It was cool crisp singing, full-throated and pure, and surely the most painless way to be awakened – and as I lay listening, with the sun filtering over me, I thought this was how it should always be. To be charmed from sleep by a voice like this, eased softly back into life, rather than by the customary brutalities of shouts, knocking, and alarm-bells like blows on the head. The borders of consciousness are anxious enough, raw and desperate places; we shouldn’t be dragged across them like struggling thieves as if sleep was a felony.

 

131. Merwin, W.S. The Mays of Ventadorn (nonfiction)

…I was twenty-six, with no money at all and a house in the depths of the country in France. In all the years that followed, the house, the remains of the farm, the village, became a constant, insistent part of my life, invaluable, cherished, demanding, inescapable. 

 

(from late in Chapter 2)

 

…One attractive element in the farming life that had evolved by then in the Quercy was an unobtrusive independence of spirit, a quality rooted in the practice of polyculture – the growing of more or less everything. It was an immemorial system encouraged by the variations of the crumpled landscape with its small irregular fields fitted into the stony contours, but deplored by theorists as inefficient…. Most families possessed a few hectares of upland woods, a few hectares of open pasture in different places, a few hectares of arable land, which they farmed on a careful four-year system of rotation, a sizable number of ritually tended walnut trees, at least one vineyard, and at least one vegetable garden…. They grew much of what they ate, and all that they fed to their animals. They sold walnuts, plums, milk, wool, calves, lambs, cheese, and they raised tobacco some years as a cash crop. They thought that was the way it had always been….

 

(from early in Chapter 3)

 

You can see how for me, this was another book with subject matter and language to work magic on my soul.

  

All three of the books I’ve quoted from above are books I could quote from endlessly, so I have restrained myself and leave you only with these scanty passages to illustrate, I hope, the wonders provided in these priceless works by John Steinbeck, Laurie Lee, and W.S. Merwin.

 

132. Smith, Betty. Maggie-Now (fiction). I have read Maggie-Now almost as many times as I have read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the author’s most famous novel, and I love them equally. Highly recommended, both!

 

133. Robertson, Thomas A. A Southwestern Utopia (nonfiction). An excessive accumulation of facts that nevertheless failed to cohere into any kind of convincing atmosphere. Disappointing but no doubt important reading for researchers into experimental utopian communities. 

December disappointment: holiday lights and decorations in Willcox taken down way too soon!

 

Unexpected thrill this last week of the year: Western bluebirds at my feeders here in Dos Cabezas!

Life -- it is a mixed bag, my friends!

 

Happy new year

and 

happy reading in 2023!!!

Mourning Is a Mountain Road

Don't say you weren't warned.

 

When Peter Pan, the little lost boy who wanted never to grow up, found himself on Marooner’s Rock with the tide rising all about him, he looked at the bright side and said stoically, “To die will be an awfully big adventure.” That was in part the view of the author of Meetings at the Edge, a book highlighted in my most recent post. Today I am thinking of adventures in a broader sense, those sought and unsought, adventures geographical and spiritual, with death only part of the picture.

 

I did not plan to go on a hair-raising expedition on Wednesday. I just had to get out of the house and go somewhere – anywhere – to recover from my most debilitating meltdown since losing the love of my life. Everything – and I mean everything! – seemed overwhelming and unbearable! But I had just bought new tires, mounted only that morning, and I had three-quarters of a tank of gas, so driving down the highway a few miles to Chiricahua National Monument didn’t seem an outlandish idea. Maybe, I thought, on my way down the road, I wouldn’t even go that far. Maybe I’d take the road to Fort Bowie but not even as far as the parking lot, maybe just pulling off at some scenic spot along the way. There was a car behind me as the turnoff got close, though, so instead of slowing down I kept going. 

This way to Pinery Canyon --

Then, should I take the road to the Monument or stay on the main road? I chose the Monument road, but at the T intersection, where turning left takes one into the Monument on a paved road and turning right on gravel and sand leads to Pinery Canyon, I turned right. Again, it was the impulse of the moment. The Artist and I had explored partway up Pinery Canyon once but had always “saved” the expedition over the mountains for another time and so had never together faced the terrors of Onion Saddle at the top of the range. Well, I had no plan to face those terrors on Wednesday, either. But the farther I went into the Coronado National Forest, the more committed I became. Accidentally, as it were. Because turning back seems ridiculous at a certain point, don’t you find? 

Camping spot along the dry creek bed

Once in a while I would see a campsite (a couple of small tents, a few clothes hung on a line strung between two trees, a fire circle made of rocks), and very occasionally (less than half a dozen times in what was finally 30 miles or so) another vehicle approached and the driver raised a hand laconically as we passed each other, but most of the time there was only me, the puppy, and maybe a deer off in the trees. I found myself driving well below the 20 mph speed limit. Once I pulled over to walk the puppy and saw that indeed the rocky creek bed was dry as a bone. We went on….

 

An unplanned adventure doesn’t have to fall from the sky like a tornado, all of a sudden. It can creep upon one gradually, and that was my experience of Pinery Canyon. At one primitive intersection I pulled off when three other cars appeared, two behind me and one ahead, relieved that no one was going my way!

 

…The road narrowed, and the canyon, now on my left, deepened. Loose rocks in the road presented occasional hazards. Basically, as one ascends the mountain, one is traveling a one-lane road with the potential for two-way traffic. 

 

A sign appeared: Portal, on the other side of the mountains, was still 20 miles off, twenty miles of narrow, winding, climbing mountain road! Going on from this point was a big commitment, as there might not be further opportunities to go back, whatever the road ahead presented. Still not completely sure I wanted to go all the way, I proceeded cautiously. Upon reaching a sign that announced Portal still 19 miles distant, I reflected on the length of a mountain mile. Nothing like a mile on flatlands! But I had hours of light, nowhere I had to be, so I might as well keep going.

 

You know that feeling at the top of a Ferris wheel when you pause for a nanosecond and then begin the downward plunge? A glance into the terrifying abyss off the side of my road turned my legs to jelly in just that way. Glancing over was irresistible, but I could not look for more than the briefest glance, even if I stopped stock-still. It was too frightening. My photo does not convey the terror of the vertiginous drop!

Edge feels all too close

At one point the road seemed to be leveling off and even descending, and I wondered, looking off to nearby peaks, if I had passed the highest point. Could it be? Hey! Easy-peasy! My relief was short-lived, as the road began to climb once more, twisting like a snake, making blind hairpin turns – and still it went on and on, as if it would never reach the saddle, much less arrive at Portal on the other side of the range. 

Sometimes I could see below me a portion of road just traveled. Other times the coming road appeared above, across a chasm, and I prayed there would be no other vehicles coming toward me around the turns.

Road to come

Road traveled 

 

At last! The highest hairpin! Onion Saddle! There was the Sulphur Springs Valley spread out below me, my Arizona home valley, a distant panorama – and around the turn the San Simon Valley appeared far below, with its long views into New Mexico. I had crossed Onion Saddle! “If we can do this, we can do anything!” I said aloud to Sunny, tears in my eyes.

Another hairpin

Sulphur Springs Valley

San Simon Valley

Miraculously finding a pull-off spot a couple of minutes later, I paused to catch my breath, get out of the car, and photograph some lupines in bloom. Another car went by, also going toward Portal, and I was glad to be off the road just then and not pressed to go faster by someone behind me. 

Water in the road? Wonderful surprise on the way down! I hadn't counted on seeing and hearing running water.

And a blooming tree! That too looked like some kind of miracle, surrounded by oaks, junipers and pines.

When another decision point appeared, I chose the nine miles to Portal, knowing that the last stretch would be paved and easy. And anyway, Paradise could hardly paradise for me without the Artist, could it?

There were the stunning rock faces that I remembered from a visit to Portal and the Southwest Research Station when the Artist and I had approached it with a visiting friend via I-10, down 80 through New Mexico, and by way of the Portal Road, a long, roundabout way (though they are all “roundabout,” in one way or the other) but much less hair-raising than going over the mountains. My road would be basically downhill from here on. Downhill in low gear, of course, careful not to slide on loose rock. 

The most extraordinary sight, however, appeared when I was a scant few miles from Portal, and it was one I did not capture with my camera. Imagine, if you will, seeing a turquoise swimming pool, like something out of a David Hockney painting, and a woman lazily stroking her way from one end to the other -- in a setting such as this!

 

Well, I shed many, many tears while crossing the mountains, thinking of how the Artist and I had talked of making this daring trip sometime and how he would have loved the long panoramic views and how precious it would have been to share the heart-stopping fears, as well as the soul-expanding thrills of the mountain road, with all its ups and downs and edges and startling sights. How can my own experiences ever again be fully real without him? 

And I thought as I wound my way up and down the mountains that grief is a mountain road: There is the abyss of utter loss, the chasms of loneliness, the heart-stopping fears of all that lies ahead. Will I be able to do this alone? For how long? There are also glimpses of beauty, both in memories and overflowing gratitude. But the road seems endless! And just when you think it’s leveling off, it becomes once again a narrow, rocky climb, and sometimes you need to stop and have a meltdown -- but then you must go forward again, because there is no turning back.

 

I don’t know if the mountain road of mourning has a destination, some spiritual version of Portal, with a welcoming café, cool beverages, and happy families on vacation. It would be lovely to think a reunion awaited at the end of the trail. Or maybe (and I think more likely) the spiritual road just keeps going as long as one lives but comes gradually down off the mountain and takes a gentler route, with only occasional blinding storms. Really, I don’t know. I guess I’ll find out. 

All I can say for certain is that I don’t envisage making the physical drive over the Chiricahua mountain range again, and it’s a foregone certitude that I will never again lose the love of my life. But my afternoon of despair did give way to a minor triumph of sorts. I crossed Onion Saddle and lived to tell the tale.

 

Taking paved roads home through New Mexico at sunset