Snow is not an expectation but a small, rare gift out in the desert. Nothing but sheer altitude lets raindrops crystallize up here, lets evergreens spread their spiny fingers and reach with impressive persistence towards the January sun. Pine, spruce, fir gather up hillsides, cover the ground with a carpet of sweet-scented decay. Rain pounded these peaks all week, and my feet slide on the mud.
All sorts of creatures have left a smattering of tracks in the thin snow. Squirrels with their small, frantic scurrying; rabbits with their feet all piled together every foot or so; dogs disturbing the debris; humans with their round, thick shoes intruding.
I run my fingers along the russet bark of an old pine. I can’t imagine what it would be to stand here years and years and watch the world turn its generations over while roots sprawl and leaves sigh small beads of water and oxygen back into the sky — there lies a graveness, a profound calm that my spastic animal heart will never know. If I stand still enough in the cold, I can feel it thud against my bones.
In order to survive, my body must never rest. Even asleep, the tiny motors of my chemical existence turn and turn, odd dreams sometimes resulting. I wake up for water, for warmth, for a run to the restroom. Even now, resting on a fallen trunk, I fidget. I explore the smoothness of this particular bark, the bite of this air, the smell of the soil that harbors so many pulsing lives. For the mole, the world of scent is much more colorful and vast than that of sight. For the spider hanging sideways from a tree, gravity hardly matters. The things by which I measure my body against the earth, my place in the great carbon carnival, are meaningless to so many others.
I don’t feel lonely, here. There is consolation in being inconsequential. On the way back, we pass dry canyons and hills. I doze in the backseat and picture myself atop each barren peak. I imagine how peaceful it would be, when my days are done, to climb and climb and lay lizard-like against a boulder, and fade in solitude beneath the sun while my molecules are gently picked up and brought home.