ADVENTURE HIGH
Go beyond the
dead-end trusting
you’ll come out the
other side. Believing there’s
a drop-dead vista and
you’ll survive it.
Mid-June, just some
snow lingering in the high
country. Just that
bank of white slowly
melting into creek on
a jeep road half a mile
from the cow-camp meadow.
Just that one
frozen drift. Ease on
the gas, the truck
stops. Rock the
wheels deeper into screaming
ice. Stuck. It could
snow again tonight.
Shovel out in the
morning. Kibble for your dog,
a can of stew for
you, heated over a tiny
fire that mocks the
stars. Too many stars to
count. Loose change
in the sky’s dark pocket.
Your old dog sleeps
guard outside
your tent; at dawn,
hang-dog. Kibble strewn
across granite,
stew-can crunched. From the near
far distance, coyotes
singing their mock-song.
ON THAT ROAD
AGAIN
Let’s take the drive
for old-times’ sake,
up Mormon Emigrant
Trail where, whizzing up
the long long ridge
at 50 mph on a just-filled
tank of gas, where
pioneers made a wagon path
that zeroed in on
Tragedy
Spring; a month to cross
the Sierra, block-&-
tackling their wagons down Devil’s
Ladder. We’ll take a
lunch, not to be waylaid
by way-stations and
the urge to just sit
down and bide. So much history – our own
and bits and pieces
of other people’s lives –
to relive. Signs to places we’ve turned off
the highway, or
dreamed of turning.
Fleming Meadow,
ghosted space that shivers me
in June. Three or was
it four girls
murdered? Pilliken
and Meiss. Baltic Peak
without its lookout,
its lonely human
perspective; the
disassembled tower lying now
in a county park,
waiting for resurrection.
Farther up the
mountain, just short
of Cosumnes
headwater/before the cattle-
guard, we’ll take
that little forest road
that stopped us once
– a winter-toppled fir
blocking the track, and
we
without a chainsaw.
The whole hillside alive
with butterflies
mating. Clouds
of wings, each couple
balanced on the tips
of nameless pink flowers.
of nameless pink flowers.
After years of getting up at odd hours of the night to go search for lost people, Taylor Graham still trains her dogs for search-and-rescue in the California Sierra, and serves as El Dorado County Santa Clara University
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