22.

…Ink stopped at a place called Parasawampitts, one of the Vista Points along the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, so they could camp for the night. She asked him what it meant, Parasawampitts.

He shrugged. “How the hell should I know?”

Patsy felt dragged along with each yellow dash on the road since they left Shiprock. She was sober now, but still precarious.

“Ink, I think I wanna be alone for a while,” she said, almost as if now were the time of her confinement to end. And he seemed to know, nodded just once.

She walked away, with no water, no compass. She hiked along the trail, the Rainbow Rim Trail, until the rim became a montane forest as it meandered in from the canyon. The winds gale force, they seemed to moan a lamentation, seemed to want her to let go. That is what she hadn’t done back in Shiprock, let go of what she’d confessed to Ink’s sister. The tempests were telling her to let go.

She thought of each one of her transgressions: There was bad daughter. All that running away. Causing Momma grief. Pawning Momma’s cranberry glass collection for a teenth of glass. Rolling johns for Dean to culcock. One by one, as the gale force slammed her thinning hair, she let them go.

She walked miles, more than she ever remembered walking, as the side chasm wandered back out to the Canyon, always holding to the Rainbow Rim. It was a trail that wandered in and out along the North Rim, canopying her in towering ponderosa as she leaned out over the rim for one leg of the trek, blanketing her in oak and aspen as it cut into the mainland the next. 90 The Rainbow Rim

But there was one transgression that just wouldn’t go, wouldn’t let go, lodged so deep and hard inside her craw. It was the boy. Of course, which other one could it be? If there was one she didn’t want to face. If there was one person in the world she never wanted to have to see, it was the one she’d left behind. And yet, beneath the fear of facing him was her hushed hope, her greatest yearning: to see him, to be with him once again. That was when she knew what she must do. Maybe not now. Maybe the time wasn’t ripe.

Winds roared like jets, never stopped blowing. Forty miles west by southwest, mountains called the Uinkarets rested on the straight horizon line of the North Rim, miles and miles away. The wind strafed everything, twittered every branch and limb, driving the flies and bees alee. Talus slopes of island mesas were carpeted lime with oak brush and cliffrose in bloom. She knew the names of some of the monoliths, but most she didn’t. She peered down, and the inner chasm wound its serpentine channel. The broad tables of the Esplanade north and the Tonto Platform south poured cliffs that formed the final rim of the inner gorge.

From the Esplanade and the Tonto, plains spread in all directions. Every surface jade, yet all topology red as well. Cloud shadows stained scarps and buttes near black with a fleeting finish.

She rested in a bivouac of dirt under the shade of a piñon, her berth necklaced by fragments of Kaibab limestone. Concave cones in the loose dirt, far out on the headland of Locust Point, formed perfect circles. She didn’t know what could’ve made them. She looked it up when she left. They marked the traps of ant lions.

She couldn’t summon up another soul all that afternoon, ant lion or human. At first, she found it unnerving, her mind chattering, wanting to go back to camp and talk to Ink. But something inside, the impression of a voice, told her to stay put. She nestled in on a dimple, a dry kettle in the limestone, crossing her elbows on the outsides of her knees. Only herself and the ferocity of gusts that shaped a dead juniper trunk into a boney filigree which blended to the limestone broken at the base of the bole. Wood petrified to stone.

She became aware that what really was, what really lived, never died. It was unborn. Birthless. Deathless. And this unborn wind in its desolation broke hard across the cliffs, filled its own breaking heart with dervishes of dark soil that spit in her eyes, wailed through the endless stands of ponderosa across the side canyon, a cataract of wind 50 miles wide. The sage and piñon, the Gambel oak and Mormon tea, the fiery claret cup in bloom beside the paintbrush and dandelion, surrounded her at the tip of the promontory. In recline here at this dry cape — sometimes inspired, at other times bored or thinking of the three plus mile slog back to camp, as the squall paid her no heed. Only that one thought kept returning, refraining like the gnats that’d come back to her ears between blasts of wind.

Is love as intense and uncompromising as the wind?

I let go! I let go! she cried, but the gusts wouldn’t cease, letting her know what she must do.

Then, in a softer mien, I let go. Yet the squalls kept on. Surrender must be utter, she concluded, or it’s just another compromise. And she knew that compromise just got you back into bed.

Dust from the mistrals, which blew across the world, filtered the sun a half-blood hue, and she could look at it head on as it descended to the tops of the northern Uinkarets, a Vulcan line that stretched dozens of miles from the North Rim. The knives of the mountains pricked the sun’s yoke and it bled, releasing its cytol into the atmosphere, a divine oblation to itself. How fast the full circle of the sun became a yellow sliver as its pallet shifted like the skin of an octopus, wafting just above the summit. Then the rich gloaming seared as the sun dropped its blood, engorging the earth. Each day goes the way of night, she thought. And each day dies its own death. Crags and spires slackened into the flax light, their supple shapes unified with sky and shadow. The world all one thing.

The soft peaks dissolved into sky at their summits, sky into light, light into penumbra. Every precipice in the canyon the gentle bend of a Goliath’s knee. Ridgelines stacked in selfsame platforms that merged with the fog of dust. A vague and dreamy gulf dissipated in its final orison into the ocean from which it calved.

All is dust and all is darkness, she understood. She walked back to camp in darkness, unafraid of what she had to do. The scour of the wind drove its whip all night, finding its way into the corners of her dreams.

© 2025 by Michael C. Just