I’d just finished a day hike down Thunder River Trail and was looking for a place to park my truck and camp. Drift smoke from a few fires farther east along the rim swaddled the lower reaches below Steamboat Mountain. I decided to camp randomly. Whatever the next road was, I’d take it. The next sign was for Sowats Point, nine miles away.

The west trending road was deep with potholes. I gave up after about three miles in, and camped along an overgrown side road that led to a clearing. Before sunset, I walked down the main road toward Sowats Point. Thick forests on either side were overgrown with Gambel oak and sage and studded with ponderosa. The sun neared its gloaming. I felt myself wishing I’d gambled to the end of the road to Sowats Point. What vistas would I have seen?

It’d been a good day. I’d traversed the Thunder River Trail down to the Esplanade, hoping to reach a distant fault where Deer Creek plunged down into the Inner Gorge. I’d wanted to go farther, to hike up to the edge of that fault. Instead, I ended up on a hillock in the middle of the Esplanade, thinking about the cliff I’ have to hike back up along Thunder River Trail, about how much water I didn’t have left. So I stopped before my destination, gazing at the fault from far away.

Now, as I walked down the road toward Sowats Point, contemplating my regret, a space between the serviceberry and the oak brush opened up on the south edge of the road. The sun was lowing near a ridge, behind which it would soon set. The North Rim was trackless forest. Mostly pondies, but also quakies, endless oak, and manzanita. The Rim’s small mountains and long ridges rolled with spruce-fir forests, spilling over cliffs.

A montane meadow opened up south of the road, filled with Apache plume and cliffrose, with mountain mahogany and big sage. The meadow stretched beyond the scrub which held thick to the roadside. It looked inviting. I zigzagged through the short sage and owlcover, moved through the fleabane and yarrow at my ankles. I stepped over the deadfall of pinion. What drew my eyes, even from the road, was a stand of yarrow, the blossoms gone for a couple weeks due to the cold nights.

They were an amber hue, dusted by the sun. They seemed lit from behind. No taller than my knees, most stood shorter than that. They were golden baskets for the light. They held it in a way that nothing else did for those minutes, those moments before sunset. They were a glass that held the white wine light.

Everything stood, still. No breeze. No sound. The oak had grown to small trees. The thinnest stems bowed, unmoving. Just the gentle light, at rest in the cold October sky. The meadow sloped south toward a line of ponderosa.

The center of the scene, of my contemplation, remained the yarrow, immature bunches growing in a large ellipse, in a clearing where conditions seemed favorable. They were young clusters, grouping in bullion stands which prismed the light like dragonfly wings.

The forests, the stillness carried away my thoughts and replaced them with blissful emptiness. But one or two ideas bled through the membrane of nothing. One thought, the first one that stabbed through, was that this soft light, easy on the eyes, was what I’d come to see. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t made it to the end of the road at Sowal Point to camp, or that I hadn’t gotten down to the edge of the Esplanade to see the fault pouring off into the inner canyon earlier today.

This light had beckoned me here from the road three times before I finally walked into the meadow. The easy tranquility, stiff in the cool air, was just an ordinary light. I could have it any time. Yet I had to be open to it.

This light, the standstill peace, was always here. Like a radio station that broadcast 24 hours a day, it was just a matter of whether I tuned into it.

I noticed the bowed stem of a yarrow nod up and down. A sage tremored from an unfelt breeze. I wondered why I could see the wind, but not feel it. Thought intruded on silence. Time crept back in, for to think is to think in time.

Stillness, though, held out, here and there in patches of still light captured by the nets of yarrow like webs catch breeze. I waited until the sun dropped below the tops of the trees along the ridge. I walked back to my campsite and slept for the cold night.

© 2022 by Michael C. Just

Mike’s novel, The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy, is available in softcover or eBook formats through Amazon.

You can purchase the book through this website. Or go straight to amazon at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+dirt+journey+of+a+mystic+cowboy&crid=1S40Q4BXSUWJ6&sprefix=the+dirt%3A+journey+of+a+m%2Caps%2C180&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_23

Mike’s other titles, including The Crippy, The Mind Altar, and Canyon Calls, are available through this website or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002

Four of his short stories have recently been published online:

Lies, Ltd. has been published by The Mystery Tribune @ Lies, Ltd.: Literary Short Fiction by Michael C. Just (mysterytribune.com)

The Obligate Carnivore has been published by the Scarlet Leaf Review @ Category: MICHAEL JUST – SCARLET LEAF REVIEW

I See You, Too has been published by the 96th of October @ I See You, Too – 96th of October

Offload, a short story about a man who can heal any disease, is now live and can be read at The Worlds Within at Offload – The Worlds Within