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Order this writing in the collection book Layers of Creation available for only 1795 |
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This appears in a pre-2010 issue of Down in the Dirt magazine.
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Camping In Colorado
Jean Berrett
I was sitting alone by a dead campfire when suddenly the mountain shook. Just before, I’d been watching a small gray spider crawl over pebbles and jagged stones. It crawled very fast, then stopped when the mountain shook, then crawled very fast again. I remembered curtains blowing in an easy wind as sun fell through an open window and made my babydoll’s blond hair shine and her blue glass eyes light up. Daddy will be home soon. Mother has put something on to cook. It smells good. I am hungry. Maybe I should go outside and look for Robbie. Maybe he will let me be Little Injun with him as cowboy Red Ryder. My hair is dark, almost black, cut short and straight like an Indian’s. How special I feel because he will play with me, only a sister, only a girl. Again the mountain shakes. They are dynamiting the rock so that another road can be laid all the way up to Independence Pass. Aside from me and the tiny gray spider I wonder how many things alive must take somehow into account the shaking of this mountain. Now the spider is crawling up a stoolsize rock where I sit and drink coffee each morning. The rock is amazingly red, splotched and speckled all over with green and yellow lichen. The side of the mountain above this site looks like huge rocks stacked haphazardly and about to topple over. Everywhere up there at every angle, dead trees lie about. What killed them I wonder? From down here they look like small tossed sticks. I fall asleep on an armybrown blanket spread over the grass and dream again of my father’s death, how his beaten body fell out of the boat where his brother was sleeping drunk. And how we brought no charges because surely his brother did not kill him, for surely he too was drunk and even so had no intention and besides, even if it were so, who were we to multiply horror upon horror? I have flown in other dreams, riding the stark and intimate wind, maneuvering gusts over and under my wings. When I woke I’d remember how small we are who crawl and wonder and weep down here beneath the flight of everything.
