nature-present-shopping

Yesterday afternoon Karen and I set out on a pre-emptive power walk – we figured we’d burn off Thanksgiving dinner before we ate it. And also, we had some nature-present-shopping to do. Alex is leaving us; the Girl’s Dorm will never be the same. We set out in search of a small beige good luck gift for her.

Karen picked up one rock, and I said: That’s conglomerate stone; small stones fused together by sedimentary pressure. How uncomfortable! she said, and tossed it aside. She picked another rock. I said: No, that one’s too plain. But then felt badly, because who died and made me the expert on small beige lucky things? So I said: I mean, it’s all right. She said: We could have had this conversation on a playground twenty years ago… That rock’s stupid. Is not! Is too. I’m telling…

I got so out of breath walking up one hill that I had to ask: Is this hill steep? Yeah, it’s steep. We leaned into a ferocious wind, leaving a string of unsuitable unlucky stones in our wake, stopping every now and then to take photographs of the insane things the sky was doing: low rain erased the Big Horns, high slabs of granite grey let stray god rays through, bruise black-blue blanketed Powder Basin and all the rest was bright sun.

We could see the cold and rain heading our way; we turned down slope toward home. Fifty feet below the ridgeline we spotted a string of long thin parallel lines of stone running out like musical notation – a treble clef – perpendicular to the trail. It took a moment to recognize this as a mostly buried petrified tree, its top most layer barely above ground.

Here’s what we found for Alex: A Small Square of Petrified Wood with One Thin Line of Quartz Crystal Inclusions. A piece of a tree turned to stone and trimmed with rhinestone symbolizes long life and good fortune, we decided. Certain small beige things are lucky; you just know when you see them.

Here’s a photograph Alex took of eerie trees near Piney Creek:

Happy trails Alex. People actually say happy trails in Wyoming.

“All those verbs: to leave, to travel, to depart, to flee. Snow has refused to let Paul drive; it’s her car after all, and aged Rabbit with the ‘t’ cracked off in back. She calls it The Rabbi and steers it over the secondary highways of the Midwest, the Rockies, the far West, pretty much only alert to one thing, the imperative of movement. She keeps her mind on the going and the radio, and plans strategies for the ingestion of coffee. Stopping seems like a very bad idea.” Stacey Richter, “Goodnight” in My Date with Satan, NY: Scribner, 1999, page 186.
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