Along the Union Pass Road

Walk with me away from the highways and the fences, away from the towns and the trucks, away from even this simple dirt road.  Leave behind your shoes and socks.  Take off your hat.  Let’s walk out here where forget-me-nots hide in the shadow of rabbit brush.  Let the skin of your feet flatten stalks of grass.  Reach down as you walk; strip a handful of leaves off the sagebrush and rub your palms together to release that wild aroma.  A meadowlark leaps from the ground beside you.  Walk up a small hill between dry creek beds.  Let’s sit down next to this lichen-covered fin of granite.  Here, the bones of the world press against the surface of the land, an ant is carrying a wisp of grass away, a honeybee is buried in the deep blue mouth of a penstemon.

Look around.  We are sitting still in the middle of a wide-open bowl of sagebrush and ponds, ringed in the distance by dark pines.  Just over that rise to the west is Mosquito Lake.  There, to the southeast, separated from us by the wide Green River Valley, are the bulky snow-covered shoulders of the Wind River Mountains. This must be the center of the world.  We are so high here.  All rivers flow away from this point.  We are inside the sky, and the rest of the earth is lost to us, forgotten.  Time is marked by the chirping of ground squirrels, by the light deepening on the flanks of the ancient Winds. What is this place we have entered?  What creatures make their living here?  What stories are stitched together in this land?

There, listen, can you hear that?  That faint tapping like the wings of a grasshopper?  A soft flutter like a heartbeat underground? Hold your ear down close to the ground.  Can you hear it?  Not the falling trill of the sparrow.  Not the whisper of the evening breeze through the grass.  Underneath those sounds listen for an uneven patter, like raindrops on packed mud.  Pointed hooves are hitting the hard summer ground, coming closer.  Now surely you hear it.  That staccato of hooves on dry earth, light and fast, as quiet as the wind on the sagebrush.

There, see them now, coming over that rise, running toward us.  Pronghorn.  Their necks are outstretched, their eyes are dark and bright. Their legs brush through the wildflowers, the lupine and balsamroot.  Larkspur and scarlet gilia tremble as the pronghorn race toward us.  Quick and smooth as birds, the pronghorn are running, weaving through the sagebrush.  The fawns dart to the front of the group, their legs whirring, a spiral blur.  Now they are racing past, close enough to see the stiff hair of the skin over their shoulders, the bones pressing against the surface.  Hold your breath.  Look at them run. Their mouths are open.  Each stride is long, carrying them high and far over the crackling July grass.  Their hooves barely touch the ground.

And now they are past, streaking away across the plateau.  The late sunlight, orange as it slants through the smoke of summer’s wildfires, casts the pronghorn in bronze light, their white rumps flashing.  At once they all bank to the east and disappear.  No sign of them remains.  Perhaps we saw only an illusion.  Something has happened to us.  Our hearts are quickened.  A thousand years have passed and time is frozen in place.

Shadows of dusk crawl up the mountainsides while the peaks glow firey red. As darkness settles, the sparrows quiet their song and the tune is picked up by a band of coyotes behind us.  The first bright stars blink into the darkness.  There, did you see that?  A quick streak of light, a meteor perhaps.  Just a thin flash above the horizon.  A shooting star.  Or was it a pronghorn catching the last of the sunlight as it raced across the wide bowl of sky?