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Show THE ZEPH YR/DECEMBER 2003-JANUARY 2004 sort of intensity, the same sort of intimacy and unfailing admiration lovers believe only they know, and he kept all of it to himself: the long, streaking sunsets beyond Blue Mountain, the yellow stands of aspen where he had hunted and killed elk, and the fields above the river, some plowed and others vacant, rolling over and down and into hills or other fields or draws and basins and then ending, sharply, at the deep gorge of the river, and it was memory and not time that had made those places his, not in the sense of ownership but in the absolute sense of belonging, of being able to return to a mutable landscape where a life and beauty had been made private and permanent in his mind DOLORES A River Narrative By Damon Falke so the river diminishes in the summer, after the spring melt and run-off, when the river climbs to four times its average depth, surging with four times the force, enough to swipe away the careless bridges the summer people had built in the previous year, but then it is July, then August, and the river recedes and gradually warms, and’children swim and drift along on silver and black inner-tubes on marbled ‘currents, sometimes mossy green or amber or a purple slate color that matches the shade of distant the river begins up in the conifers, the high-country, not much wider than the long step of an average man and flows nearly three hundred miles west to north, giving 61,000 acres of dry terrain a chance to stay semifertile and semi-green before dumping inexhaustible tons of salt, mud and iron into the Colorado and there must be a thousand, even a hundredthousand places on a single strip of beach that change and endure morning to evening, season to season, seven year drought or hundred year flood; still, there is a consistency to change and the river bares all of it, taking on the appearance of each new season, each stretch turning at separate times, divided as it is by elevation and geography, and in the middle section, below Bradfield, the river, opaque and warm, descends with unremarkable placidity, causing the sharp rise of a narrow canyon beneath the canyon rim, protected above and below by the sheerness of landscape, Anasazi once molded their homes and kivas out of mud, stone and cedar, and from their dwellings, some four hundred feet above any recognizable stretch of level land, a native could have sat and watched the river under the yellow light of dusk, following its coppery course, us.nterrupted, as far as the first great bend in the canyon, and he wouid have seen above the canyon, opposite, a vast plateau of undulating land, an ocean-like expanse of buffalo grass and occasional cedars that join north with south before extending west and east across the horizon, land accentuated by geological episodes (faults, anticlines, synclines) and little else, land that would eventually give way to the horse and wagon and later to the Model T and plow, yet the native would have seen all this country still pristine—not virgin, not even the land his grandfather would have seen, and perhaps he would have known this, perceived the mutability of the earth, contemplated it without distraction and with a clear sense of nearness and perpetuity, less abstract discernments of distance and time, when day and night merged under a maroon sky and changing seasons were made of days from other seasons and a year was a coalescence of seasons, but in time the native disappeared and what had been shelter and storage became ruin, and in these places brush grew thick, covering the ruins, leaving them in view of only the birds— ravens, eagles, waterfowl and the many swallows ..and the town would forget all this, except there is always some family member, or at least one or a handful in town, who remember how it used to be, how the Indians would ride up from the reservation to hunt in the fall, with their dogs, Winchesters and one or two raspy Fords that carried old men who could no longer makes the trip on horseback... now eight hundred years gone and much of the land west of the ruins, west of the river, has been turned and cultivated into acres of wheat, pinto beans, alfalfa, and whole sections of land have been squared off and stitched together with barbed wire; places now, both grown and wild, carry names: Doe Canyon, Eastman’s Draw, Donavan Flats, Hermit’s Wash; and there are dusty towns, none very large, spaced out between farms and unplowed fields of sage and pinion and theirs, the towns’, is a spoken history, of how such and such came from back east or from down south to settle and farm, whose family still lays claim to the land and origins of the town, and the town would forget all this, except there is always some family member, or at least one or a handful in town, who remember how it used to be, how the Indians would ride up from the reservation to hunt in the fall, with their dogs, Winchesters and one or two raspy Fords that carried the old men who could no longer make the trip on horseback, of the railroad or covered wagon that had brought momma or daddy to the country and how in that first year there were only fifty sacks of beans; and once a year, the ones or one who remembers is brought before the town or families to give their accounts of blazing, nearly unbearable summers and winters when snow would fall for days, sometimes four feet or better, and with an impervious stare some fifty years removed from youth, the one will recall, though not aloud, the wholeness of a life composed of moments and episodes, seeing again in the twilight of old man memory the boy, the young man, the mature man that had been (and also was and is) himself, and it is the self he wonders most about, questioning its sustainability and hoping that there is some underlying thing, some fundamental cause or principal that existed in the nature of the self that made a man more than simply Man but an individual, who, regardless of the life lived, whether corrupted or deepened, forgotten or distinguished, would remain separate from others, solitary and utterly unknowable, that perhaps in the final, grand summation of his living, he could claim that indeed his life had been his own and he would see most clearly the person he was and had been in the apparition of the land he had known, land so lucid and accessible in his memory that he envisioned it as a lover recalls his beloved, with the same mountains, and the children start up at Stapleton Bridge, with soft drinks and sandwiches and terrific bags of chips, and one or two will carry fishing poles and stringers, and they float the eight miles to town clustered together like a school of fish, flashing back and forth across the current, but often they stop on gravel bars to throw rocks or cast a line and there is always inventing among them, always creating the illusion that they are alone, pioneers, floating through some other country or time, uncertain of where they are going but still seeking that other place, and near town they come back from those places, the flux of imaginary time and travel gone out of them, replaced by camp parks and gas stations, the apple juice factory, the VFW, and for a few, their own backyards, and after town bridge the trip is over, they pack it in, each with an inner-tube slung awkwardly over a sun-burnt shoulder, the next day already in mind, already planned, already sunny and blue and hopeful; and here, not a quarter mile below town bridge, the river pauses; contained by a dam, it fills and spreads across a great bowl-shaped valley of now submerged cedar and pinion, neglected fences, and ruined buildings of what had been a cattle settlement, a reservoir whose north and east shore reach the sewer plant, whose west and southern shores brace against the farm country, and below the reservoir, out of the dam, the river flows cold into the country, not quite the river that had been or even the country that had been, not the twelve mile section above the bridge, bordered as it is on one side by a narrow gravel road that follows those twelve miles upstream as far as the dam, a powdery yellow-white drive in the summer, leading PAGE4 |