Among the Aspens

I fell from a rooftop in my dream, but I woke up today in Utah where a blue-sky day stretched out in front of us. We are staying at the house of our friend Steve, who sees the Kolobs from his living room window, and there are many possibilities for exploration, but a short Sunday hike seemed most fitting for a pair of travelers who had driven to Burbank yesterday, flown to Vegas, and then driven here in a rental car with a late stop for dinner in Mesquite. 

We headed towards Cedar Breaks, where we paused and said oh, and then we dropped down towards Panguitch, and along the way there was a meadow, and in the meadow, a little forest of aspen and fir trees. We parked in a turnout at the side of the road and meandered through the meadow, each of us choosing a separate course but all eventually ending up in the forest, for it was absolutely necessary that we walk among the trees.

I wanted at first to photograph a single aspen leaf in mid-air as it danced in its descent, a single leaf against the sky, but it seemed impossible. "A fool's errand," said Steve, and he was probably right.

Then a breeze passed through the treetops, shimmying them like tambourines and scattering the leaves into the blue where they fluttered and flickered like translucent gold coins, and instead of trying to capture this elusive spectacle in a photograph, I yielded, wisely, to the wonder of it.

We were at some altitude and the air was thin enough that my head was light and my breathing felt like shallow sips. We found a tree upon whose bark someone had carved his initials in 1928. Steve caught a glimpse of a small shy deer. And as if it were not enough to have been showered by heart-shaped yellow leaves, there was the smell of the woods and the alpine air, the smell of earth, and bark, of evergreen and aspen, a fusion of fragrance that I had long forgotten but it felt like welcome home.

I don’t know how long we wandered around among the trees, but we were in good spirits when we got back to the car. We had satellite radio and discovered a station playing Grateful Dead, all the time, every day. (How is this even possible?) We listened to Box of Rain as we drove past red sandstone spires, then a medley called Help on the Way/Slip Knot/Franklin’s Tower that I had never heard and it went on and on and was really rather wonderful.

We passed hills of black volcanic rocks, and two men on horseback with a 3-legged dog herding sheep in a dusty field, and intermittent clusters of flame-colored trees, and at some point we decided we were hungry and we bought a chicken in Cedar City, rotisserie-cooked, and three ears of sweet corn, and went back to Steve’s where the moon rose over the Kolobs and there’s even television and it feels a lot like vacation.