NOVA LUNA
or like me, continually change your surroundings. But in moving from place to place, you risk forgetting the landmarks that can guide you safely back home.
I walk the trail in late afternoon, the fading sun at my back. The shadows are soft and will soon grow heavy and dark. It is late May and the creek rushes loudly, foamy with cold mountain runoff. After 10 years of living in this small, northern Utah town, this canyon is the place I love the best. I love it because I know it. I know where the old mine is and where the aspens begin. I know where avalanches crash down, the most likely spots to spy snakes, and where coyotes feed on deer carcasses dumped by hunters. Walk with me through the seasons, and I'll show you where the arnica grows thick and the side canyon where a cascading waterfall nestles under a great peak. We can follow the sweep of glacier lilies in early spring, sample delicate thimbleberries when the sun is high, and watch the fog roll over the ridgeline in late autumn. Deep underground, fire and pressure breathe life into stone. The shifting earth constantly nudges the younger mountains higher while the creek works hard to cut through the very old rock below. Hundreds of millions of years ago, what is now Utah was located near the equator and covered by a vast, shallow sea. The warm tropical waters nurtured a wide variety of marine invertebrates, algae, and corals. The fossilized evidence hides in these rocks in the form of ooids, trilobites, brachiopods, and crinoids. To think that this path was once a sandy beach! Rocks, tell me a story. Tell me how the warm waters covered you when you were simple grains of sand. What did it feel like when the earth trembled and bucked and suddenly you were tumbling for what seemed like eons before you came to rest? How you sat undisturbed for millions of years. Tell me about the great floods and of the hidden springs and how they smoothed your rough edges and made you crack and fall apart. Rocks, tell me the story of how weathering and time make us who we are and turn us into something better.
All the men in my father's family were steelworkers. They toiled beneath screaming ladles of fire until their skin turned black and they smelled like sweat and shaved bits of iron. They made large castings that weighed more than an elephant and smaller castings of clowns that swallowed coins when you moved a lever on the back. A solar system is like a foundry. Buckets the size of the moon hold the light from 10,000 suns and spit enough dust to fill the Milky Way. The air is alive with a million stars. Stars are born when dust gathers, coalesces, and collapses into dense, hot cores of more dust and gas. The nearest star nursery is 1,500 light years away in a nebula hidden in the constellation Orion. I am familiar with Orion because I drove beneath it every winter night for two years on my way home from work. Just recently, I baked bread at a small artisan Summer- Fall 2009
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