Lucky Us

We plunged zombie armed into the fabric of night, a homogenized, untouchable, lightless velvet that cloaked the pines. We groped through the darkness for a spot to pee with our fingers extended ready to touch god or be obliterated against blackjack trunks. On the way back we took cautious steps until we jammed our digits into steel and slid them along the truck’s curves searching for the door to go back to sleep.

A last look at the sky through the window revealed towering silhouettes, pine shaped off-black cut outs in the stars. So many stars. None of them ours.

Our sun is a black pinhole compared to the biggest and brightest stars, but it’s our star and it was rising soon. And the Grand Canyon is a ditch carved by time and weather, but it’s our ditch, and watching the one rise over the other is a site we feel lucky to see. So we drove out of the forest in twilight to catch the dawn properly from the South Rim of the canyon.

After the South Rim ritual our pilgrimage took us to another ditch. A multi-component site. An overlooked feat of civil engineering quietly sparing the city from snow melt and monsoon floods. For some it’s a wayward home or heroin den, a bordello, prophet’s tablet or canvas. For us, the megalith beneath the street was a shrine to the carve, where we worshipped in turns, offering our sweat for joy until lunch.

Heather’s first full-pipe

(I originally wrote this for The Dojo of Do Well site on June 16th, 2023.)