Selah

It’s a still morning— all the world is asleep except for a few talkative birds and a slight breeze. I listen for awhile, trying to imagine what kind of praises they are offering up.

The coffee and dishes can wait.

A delicate drizzle begins, faintly blurring the swaying branches that bow down in reverence. I realize what I’ve known all along— Nature is His unmatched art-form.

Lands drained by rivers tripping downhill slow off the mark, quick to tire, unfit for distance country of ranges keeping what must be frozen frozen steady as that old faithful freezer atop the basement fridge rimed abode of years-old peas, a plenitude of overripe fruit or so we thought

Empire of frigid air, whirlpools and white water water hiding with every trick in the desert’s repertoire where snow squalls slam lowly Sutton Pass, late April slowing Highway 4 to twenty miles an hour and who was Sutton anyway lumberman, phrenologist, grave robber your basic nineteenth-century nightmare

Bed of atmospheric rivers, cradle of heat domes and seared towns hungry bison, viral wolf-stalkers, blister rust, crisped trees lodgepole pine, whitebark pine, even slide alder is torched

To name is to praise them more poetry in trees than poems, in jigsaw bark and serotinous cones

Have I gone soft? What’s true is true in the West everything is old, or new

Jeffrey Brady

Late July sun over Tickle Toe Mountain awakens shimmering Lake Bennett, calms all her inhabitants: trout, eagles, squirrels, and our tent, glowing under dwarf pine shadows.

Five days we hiked these 33 miles to trail’s end— the old Chilkoot of first peoples, gold rush dreamers, and now those like us, new visitors to the land. We held hands through forests of devil’s club and alpine lichen, climbed granite boulders on the high pass, lightly danced over stepping stones across glacier-fed streams. Then, with the end in sight, ran wildly down the last sandy hill to the blue lake.

Sleep a little longer in this light, my love: You are the salve to my soreness.

Alight fully, she rolls over, eyes trying to focus, then exhales, “Dad, is that you?” And my 10-year-old knows my smile, my nod, my tears, my regret.

We stick our blistered stocking feet outside the tent next to our dusty boots, lace them up carefully, one more time before packing up and catching our train ride— not long now till she’ll head south to her mom, and me, to my lonely northern home.

Thomas Brush