Friday afternoon hike through Heil Valley. The rough trail lay like a spine holding together two broad wings of meadow, whose upward slope to the right and downward slope to the left suggested a great bird banking. In support of this metaphor, which might seem rather overwrought for describing what was, after all, only a gentle trail through a tranquil valley, I offer a list of what we found along that trail:
-the femur of what was probably a cow, bleached clean
-a length of backbone joined to the sacrum of what was probably a deer
-two bluejay feathers
-an intact swallowtail butterfly
The butterfly and feathers we kept; the bones we left where we found them, the sacrum hanging from the branch of a tree. We also saw two black squirrels and two deer, or possibly one black squirrel and one deer, two times each. The deer had big round mouse ears and a twitching tail. The squirrel might have been pregnant. There were a number of hornets circling the little round holes they had punched in earth. We saw many wildflowers, too, Aspen Daisies and Scotch Thistle and what I think was Hairy False Golden Aster, its ghostly white heads seeming to float above the grass, nodding at the inevitability of its decline from bright flower to feathery boll. And along the side of the trail were mounds of dead branches and leaves, gathered and waiting to be burned.
It was impossible along that course to avoid considering the mechanical reality of the biological. Just as it was impossible, later that night at a screening of the Wizard of Oz, to avoid revisiting all these thoughts of skeletons and wings and the thin veins that carry water from the foot of a flower to its face. I think I noticed for the first time during that show how deeply bizarre is the idea of a man stuffed only with straw and sewn so poorly he could be disassembled by an angry monkey or a strong breeze.
And there is another reason I was put in mind of a bird when describing the hike: I am still so in awe of the mountains that just walking among them lifts my stomach slightly -- not my real stomach, but the emotional stomach that hovers between my breastbone and my belly button, registering apprehension, foreboding, guilt, inadequacy, and, sometimes, elation.
What I'm saying is that walking through that valley felt a little like flying.
