On the Lack of Cell Service in Deer Creek Canyon

“Ishi was the last of a band of Indians who fled from the hills east of Sacramento in 1865 after nearly being exterminated by “an armed band of whites.” Four of the survivors were found in 1908, but all but Ishi had died prior to him leaving the wilderness three years later.”
- Ryan Olson, Chico Enterprise-Record, March 24, 2016, on the 100th anniversary of Ishi’s Death

There is a place
connections of towers do not reach.
Down the mountains
into the canyon, the road cuts

and the road crumbles,
narrow — heart beating on turns in trees
where blindness is blind
yet sometimes sees ghosts of rock rise

through passing trunks
like figures walking in a flip book.
So it must have seemed
when the four of them were found,

spirits with skin,
their battles fought and lost, their lives
shrinking with the earth,
their stories sacrificed to refuge.

And the last was starved
into a world running the race
to catch itself.