Forever Moments: Don't Let Them Pass You By

By Lyman Hafen

To See a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.

–William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence,” 1787

After growing up with the red sand of southern Utah caked between their toes, our two oldest sons found themselves in the rich, dark soil of Indiana. They were both young fathers at the time, and they had both ended up doing postgraduate studies in the Hoosier State, one at Indiana University in Bloomington, the other at Purdue in West Lafayette. Their time in the Midwest overlapped a couple of years, and Debbie and I visited them several times, landing in Indianapolis and driving an hour to the north or an hour to the south, depending on which house we went to first.

It gave us a chance to get to know a part of the country we’d only flown over. And every time we went, we’d venture further south to, say, the pastoral landscapes of Brown County or Louisville, Kentucky, where we watched the horses run at Churchill Downs or north to Chicago, where we rode the elevator to the top of the Sears Tower. It was quite the country. Green, mostly flat, and utterly fascinating to a red rock cowboy who had no idea there were places on this planet where corn and wheat and just about anything else grew on nothing but rain.

An overriding memory of those visits was the walks I took with my granddaughter Bianka, who was four and five years old during those years. Her mother, my daughter-in-law Katalin, is Hungarian and the only one in our family born outside the United States. Bianka was the first in our line to grow up off the Colorado Plateau, far from the dust and the canyons and the sun-struck arid country where her American progenitors had lived for generations.

On one of those walks through one of those perfectly idyllic all-American neighborhoods of Bloomington, Indiana, Bianka and I saw a cardinal fly into a bush. It perched on a branch not ten feet from us. It streaked into our view, a bright slash of red light, and landed on the branch where it seemed to freeze in time. Both of us stood completely spellbound by the red, unearthly red, unbearably beautiful red, of the bird that had blessed us by its appearance. We didn’t move. We couldn’t speak. We could only stand like statues in the powerful essence of the redness that engulfed us.

The only thing I could compare to it was those moments as a boy at our ranch in Clover Valley, Nevada, when a redwing blackbird swooped onto a fencepost along the meadow and perched for a moment—just long enough for that radiant dot of red on its wing to sear itself into my senses. Something about the piercing red splash on that black lacquered wing was transcendent. It seemed as if it were lit from within by a celestial beam.

Bianka, who was growing up among cardinals, was just as entranced by the deep and astounding power of that color as I was. I don’t know how long we stood there. Maybe a few seconds. Maybe a minute. Maybe an eternity. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was we were there. We had been blessed to be there in that moment, in that forever moment in which there came a state of grace, a moment in which our hearts swelled and an image was burnt into our souls and a feeling was embedded deep within us that we would never quite be able to define but that we would never forget.

We spent the rest of the morning looking for the cardinal or any of its brothers or sisters who might be in the neighborhood. We didn’t find them. And though I have looked for that same red in all the places I’ve been in all the years since, I have never seen it again.

About the Author

Lyman is the author of a dozen books intent on connecting landscape and story in the American Southwest. He is executive director of the Zion National Park Forever Project, and is past president of the national Public Lands Alliance. He’s been writing and publishing for more than 35 years, with several hundred magazine articles in publications ranging from Western Horseman to Northern Lights, and was the founding editor of St. George Magazine in 1983. He’s been recognized on several occasions with literary awards from the Utah Arts Council, and won the Wrangler Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. He lives in Santa Clara, Utah, with his wife Debbie, and together they have 6 children and 18 grandchildren.