Morning, beautiful
I stare at it, my heartbeat thumping in my ears.
Nathan used to text me every morning. I’d be in the middle of class or locking up my bike outside Fisher Hall and my phone would buzz. Excitement would quickly follow because it meant he was thinking about me, caring about me. Nevermind the message itself was his way of exerting control.You forgot to make the bed again. Did you wear your new shoes in this rain? Don’t bore everyone tonight by talking about spotted toads. Why didn’t you text me back right away? You know how that worries me.
It didn’t start out that way. He was caring in the beginning, which now makes me think it was all a game to him. Win me over, feed me just enough attention to get me hooked, then slowly withdraw, offering up just enough occasional kindness to keep me attached, using my deepest insecurities against me. Meanwhile making me feel like I was losing my mind.DidI forget to switch the laundry?AmI boring to our friends? To the point that I felt incapable of making my own decisions, and unsure of myself. Should I wear my hair up or down? Do I order the chicken or the veggie burger? Maybe my family really doesn’t want me home for Thanksgiving?
Am I stupid?
Margaret Healy’s comment on the plane flashes in my mind.Oh, you. Always so focused.
I exhale slowly and gaze past the gravel pullout where I’m parked to the shallow creek rushing past its barren banks. Nathan got me so turned around I didn’t realize that I’d long stopped listening to my heart, my intuition.
What is my heart telling me now?
Closing my eyes, I think back to Saturday night. To CJ’s hungry kisses and his wicked tongue. To the shower we took together and the devotion in his touch, the way his dirty promises sent me careening over the edge. The way we laughed together. The way he listened.
Am I doing the right thing in asking us to slow down? All day yesterday I tried to work up the nerve to talk to Dad about it, but he was busy, then Jesse and Morgan and Skye came for dinner, and by the time they left it was late and after being out till almost one in the morning the night before, I was beat.
A truck rumbles up the road. It shouldn’t startle me—this is a public access road and only a few miles from Elk Flats. But it’s a reminder that I can’t stand here all day, so I finish looping the hip water straps over my belt, check for the tenth time that my knife is in my pocket, then sling on my pack and snap the tailgate shut.
As I turn away, the approaching truck comes into view. The pale man behind the wheel scowls, like he’s offended by my presence. I hurry down the bank to avoid talking to him, and he cruises past, slowing to get around my vehicle.
Little Elk Creek is maybe eight feet across and shallow, flanked by a mix of aspen and cottonwood with the occasional spruce and hemlock. The snow has mostly melted out, exposing tufts of new grass and baby sage poking through the cobbles and loamy ground ravaged by the fall floods. My goal for the day is to measure existing pool depths of the two-mile run we’ll be restoring and catalogue existing species. I’ll also note any manmade structures that don’t belong, like old livestock fencing or discarded mining equipment.
Before I get out my field notebook and pencil, I snap a picture from the middle of the stream that takes in the patches of blue between the trees and the clear water running over the granite cobbles, then send it to CJ.
ME:
Morning
I’m sniffingthe underside of a rotting deadfall when a beam of sunlight catches on an object hanging from a low-hanging pine bough upriver.
It’s in an area I haven’t covered yet, so I leave my gear and splash up the center of the creek, my felt-bottomed boots sliding over the slick cobbles and my arms extended for balance.
I wade out of the water and stand below what, from a distance, looked like a woven dreamcatcher, but up close, the resemblance vanishes.
The hint of warmth from the midday sun does too, sending a chill down my spine.
During my short tenure with the Boy Scouts in fourth grade, for Mother’s Day gifts we made these woven things using two sticks and colorful yarn. The yarn was scratchy and because I was the unwanted girl in the group, I got last pick of the colors. I ended up with gray, red, and a neon pink. Mom hated it but that might just be my warped memories talking because by then, she had one foot out the door.
I snap a picture of the thing as it shifts in the soft breeze coming down the little valley. The sticks have been whittled smooth to a uniform diameter, but the ends have been left rough. The vertical one is longer, like a cross, and whatever’s been used—fabric, yarn?—to make the geometrical eye pattern around the sticks is faded by the elements.
With the comforting rush of water filling my ears, I take a slow scan of the area, but nothing about this spot feels special.
I double check my GPS, but I haven’t stumbled onto private property.
It couldn’t have been the prospectors who left forty years ago after turning the creek basin inside out in their futile search for silver, but I can’t imagine a cattle rancher leaving this here either. And it’s not some hiker. Maybe a school group visits here to talk about stream ecology? Though if so, why wouldn’t there be more of them? And I can’t see kids carving sticks with this much precision. A hunter doesn’t fit either. They don’t sit around weaving and whittling.
So who left this here? And why?
On Tuesday,I’m spending the morning on the permitting system when an interdepartmental email arrives from “parkscassidyj” regarding the Lost River elk herd. Even though I know it’s just a work-related email, not a love letter, seeing his name in my inbox makes my heart bounce a little higher in my chest.
The report wouldn’t qualify as poetry, but I still eat up his observations and descriptions. He mentions the winter feeding program but he warns against activating it for several of the same reasons I wrote about in my paper. In fact, he’s using a phrase from that same paper.
Almost like he’s read it. Has he?
I don’t even think Dad’s read that one. Mostly because he read parts of it while I was writing and we’ve argued about it for as long as I can remember.