Watrous Ridge

Atop the western ridge over Watrous Gulch again, I had a simple, quiet day of it. The ascent was without trail, & my steps gingerly carried me over budded black-eye susans & columbine, scrub & sage. Nurse logs from decades ago, or rather their imprint upon the soil, could be seen here & there like shadows, phantoms of having-been. A fine mulch attended their angles of repose, soft underfoot, fecund. & perched atop the ridge, Willa in the distance chasing after a chipmunk in a patch of thick & twisted pine, I looked over the gulch below, the stream & its densely foliaged banks, the bark & plank laid over as a bridge, the winding trail small & peculiar from afar, a pencil-line drawn over an acquiescent landscape. Two hawks were gliding about a copse where late a camp was made, scavenging or investigating. I could plainly see them from above, some two hundred feet below me, their gliding so controlled that it seemed to announce a plane like an invisible surface of water hovering above the pine-nettles below. It was dizzying in the most placid of ways to look upon them from above; I was removed from the scene somehow, interloping upon a natural sphere that had not known the touch of a human path. It was no revelation, nor did it give me cause to commence one of my usual lectures to nothingness, but it remains in my memory now, hours later, extraordinary in precisely the way that the ordinary can seem. Such fulgence in these small, fugitive moments, such radiant profundity.