Sonora
for my daughter
Tired wheels hum beneath us, turning against the pavement of an empty highway. She huddles under a blanket by the window, an arm’s length away, watching the barely visible landscape gather and recede through endless miles of night. In these coldest hours I drive, heater on low to stay awake, watching for the stars to fade. Light emanates from beyond distant monoliths, touches the gathered wisps that shift and reflect a multi-hued ocean of radiance, promising the still-hidden face of the rising sun.
A road sign flashes under the scrolling headlights. “Scenic Turnoff Ahead.” Slow-count to seven before I engage the signal, tock-tocking into the parking area where hardpacked soil rests under sandy gravel, surrounded by dim hillocks and boulders and strange, ghostly earth. Wait. Turn off the engine, lights. Listen to the engine slowly tick in the cool air.
She is looking at me out of the corner of her eye, my sad and angry child, a question posed with one raised eyebrow as she stares through the windshield. The white hospital bracelet slips down her wrist when she tugs out an earbud, challenging me to speak. I offer no explanation. I slide the keys, pop the handle, creak the door, and step out. Dragging my sweatshirt behind me, I pull it on over my head and stretch in the cold, absorbing this place that falls somewhere between here and there, this eerie, ethereal otherwhere, trapped between darkness and daylight.
Walking away from the once-blue old Nova, blasted almost metallic by sun and desert wind, I abandon her on the bench seat within.
Let her make up her own mind.
I wonder which fear will win.
A worn path slips in and out of view, offers a gentle climb up the tall slope. Behind me, the musical kerchunk of the passenger door as it opens and closes. Her feet crunch across the gravel to the footpath, where she soon thumps softly along. A quick look over my shoulder. No earbuds.
Back and forth up the slow rise to the viewing area at the crest. We stop. She is small and slim beside me within the cascading, alien chorus of dawn creatures. We step closer, and the restless sound of living desert recedes from our human presence, until only wind remains, sluicing through channels and rivers of dust and stone, sliding, rattling over the loose, shifting surface before us.
The sky catches fire.
Across the wide valley, the great, glowing ball creeps over and eats the horizon with a liquid burn that spreads like acid until the dam of night bursts and the visible world is flooded in painful brilliance. The sun shrinks as it lifts away from the seam between sky and earth, and the intense glow slowly subsides into a stream of increasing brightness, bathing everything forward in golden light and silvery shadow. Sunstruck tears speckle our cheeks while heat blankets the cold earth, and the warm wind blows drifting mists of fine, white dust into the air, false clouds that will never rain.
Below us, the skeletal desert is awash with scattered rock and loose pebble and powdery sand. A stand of ocotillo blooms: a clump of long, whip-length canes, curving over and capped by red petals fluttering in the dust-speckled wind, easily mistaken for vivid butterflies. Wearing their fleshy crowns, the silhouettes of majestic Saguaro stretch upward, light-limned and reaching forth like the many-fingered hands of old gods, nearly forgotten.
Her head flicks to the side as a tiny bird, an owl no bigger than her palm, swoops and disappears near the top of one of those fleshy green digits. A nest lies hidden inside the giant fingertip. Clustered below like uninviting footstools, a few fat barrel cacti radiate yellow-white spines toward the sky. Spiderwebs glitter between the sharp needles. The jumbled pads of prickly pear cactus climb each other, hovering against gravity, a whimsical collage of spotted, dusty mittens. One offers flowers; a late, peach-colored bloom unfurling patiently among the cylindrical, red-green fruits.
Farther off, the earth slides gently down. Seemingly incongruous, a lacy, thorn-riddled mesquite raises hazy branches from a sheltered low point amongst a gargantuan pile of cracked, prehistoric stones. I watch her eyes follow the vivid flash of birds that swerve and flit swiftly through the airy branches as they raucously exchange their morning gossip.
A natural fence of teddy bear cholla, painful, fuzzy-looking, interweaves into a partial barrier for round-headed ground squirrels with their seed-shaped black eyes as they scamper and climb the broken rocks. The small sandy-red streaks stop and emit sonic chirps like miniature prairie dog barks, then zoom away again too quickly to follow. I lose and find them as they spin and stop and turn. A disagreement takes place over a long, withered seed pod, pulling briefly back and forth until one tumbles away. My daughter laughs. The world goes silent at this involuntary trespass, and her shoulders tense; she glances at me with the fragile remains of a smile.
A stillness settles about her. Days gone, she would have rushed in, clamoring to reach those little animals, to catch them and hold them in her hands. Threads of wisdom govern now. She gestures to a flat and crumbling slab nearby, where a rattlesnake with a misshapen belly settles to bask in the glory of the soon blazing sun. There is little room here for disregard, impatience, or misunderstanding.
She stretches, pushing her reluctant arms up into the sunlight, desert dust glittering, and closes her eyes. Breathes deeply as her back unkinks, up on to her toes and down. As her feet shift, there is a semi-metallic scrape. She crouches down and examines something underfoot; a plug of clear glass like a time-stilled pool of water, concentric rings expanding to a radius bigger than her head, surface gritty with sand. A lightning strike.
The heat is dry, arid like the land. My skin prickles in response. We could stay longer. I want to. But a different life beckons, pulling us back to the road. I look toward the car. We have somewhere to be, someplace to get to.
I wish I knew the right words. I wish we had more time, so I could find them.
She yawns, shakes her head. Turns away, walks the edge of the overlook the long way around. Approaches a rocky shelf topped by a lone, windswept juniper. The tree is warped by the constant onslaught of wind, twisted and turned by the air that sweeps over it. The sturdy, convoluted flesh is flayed red, cream, silvery gray. She steals a tiny branchlet as we pass by.
Hours later, surrounded by the green, grassy fields on the road to Flagstaff, she turns to me.
“We could go back there sometime,” she says. “We could go back there sometime and stay for a while.” Twirling the stolen piece of green in her fingers, she is relaxed in her seat, headphones and texts and messages temporarily forgotten.
“I would like that,” I tell her.
