Sitting Bull Falls — Shadows of Clouds across the Desert
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Summer: 1966. The powdery sand blew off the rock face I was clinging to and into my eyes. I blinked and squinted into the sun, craning my neck up to look up the steeply canted rock. Through dusty glasses I looked between my outstretched arms at the stretch of the rock face above and suddenly felt utterly alone. I could not see anyone above me, only hot white rock. My fingers were jammed into a crack and my knuckles were bloodless from the grip.
I was 11 years old, hanging on steep slick rock and very scared. I was free climbing, and the grip of my canvas tennis shoes was unsure. I had crawled out from an overhanging rocky outcropping onto the steep face and was trying to make my way up.
My dad had worked his way up this steep section with a rope coiled over his shoulder. He was now braced on a perch above me and out of my sight. He had called me out to climb up to where he could reach me with the rope. I’d made it out onto the rock, laid my body against the burning surface, and was fighting the rising fear that was stopping my breathing and causing me to shake inside.
I laid my cheek against the pale rock, then peered over my shoulder to look down. I saw the tops of cottonwood trees where occasionally water will run. There were picnic tables down there along the trail to the falls. I was sure if I were to slip now I wouldn’t stop until I landed down there.
The rope came dangling down to me from above. I caught it with my left hand and wound it around my wrist and then, trusting implicitly in my father’s hold, I grabbed on with my right. My father pulled me up across the face of the rock quickly and surely. As I scrambled up to him, he grabbed me by the back of my tee shirt and pulled me onto the perch with him. He looked at my face and grinned. I grinned too, and then looked shyly down at my feet hoping to conceal my nervousness.
My heart was still pounding. He clapped me on the back and went on ahead, finding the easy way to the top of the mountain.
Once there we walked out to the cliff face that overlooks the road into the falls area. I saw the shadows of clouds moving darkly along the brightly contoured landscape of the desert floor below us. They glided from the west to the east, as far as the eye could see, across this northern most part of Guadalupe Mountains to the Pecos River Valley.
I was atop a mountain between the white clouds above and their shadows on the ground below. The hot wind that moved the clouds blew dryly in my face. I felt the movement of the wind and the changing light and stood still in a special place between the clouds and their shadows. I’d never felt higher and cleaner in my life.
Winter 1977. We had spent a few days skiing in Red River and now, legally married, (and not at all sure what the implications of that commitment would bring), we were preparing to return to Iran where we had met. But we had a few days left of our vacation in the U.S., and I told her about Sitting Bull Falls. So we drove south out of the snowy mountains to the desert and arrived on a clear day when the sun was warm but the wind blew in cold dry gusts.
We walked the trail up to the top of the falls. It was quiet except for the winter wind rustling the dry brush, and we were alone and young. We didn’t talk much. We sat apart from each other on the rocks and turned the collars of our new ski jackets against the wind, lost in our doubts. There was frost in the shadows under the brush, and a light crystalline ice formed on the edges of the clear pools of spring water. The wind carried our sighs and our misgivings away to the indifferent desert.
So you speak of what you know. I told her that I remember there is a spring that bubbles right up out of the rocks about a half a mile or so away and you could follow the stream back to the spring, and the water is clean and cold. She walked away from the top of the falls to sit on a rock and the wind blew in her hair and she smiled at me. I took her picture there with the cliff face of the first real mountain I’d climbed when I was a boy in the background. I told her about how the shadows of the clouds move across the desert.
Summer 1998. We walked the trail to the top of the falls on a hot day in late July. My daughters were excited and cheerfully carrying their day packs up the rocky trail. I told them we’d find the spring and that the water would be clean and cold. So we hiked up to the top of the falls and followed the well worn path along the stream. There was the familiar brush, salt cedars and cacti.
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Bumblebees crawled on bright blue blossoms, and a roadrunner ran into the shade at our approach. The trail rose beside the actual spring, and only by the thickness of the green bushes covering the depression among the rocks do you know exactly where the water comes from.
Even though it was a short hike, the girls’ faces were flushed from the intense desert heat. I crawled down some rocks just off the trail and scared a cottontail rabbit away into the bushes. The springs rose among the rocks in deep cool shade. The water lay utterly transparent and still in small green niches, cold and smoothly trickling from pool to pool down to its small stream, bringing life to the desert.
There are caves under these mountains, and the water rises from those dark mysterious limestone depths. I was first to remove my boots and step into the cold water, slipping a bit on the mossy bottom, gasping from the sudden cold and muddying the clarity of the small pool. We splashed each other and we all soaked our feet and drenched our shirts and hats.
We dunked ourselves again in the pools at the top of the falls and then sat quietly apart in the sun drying our skin and clothes in the arid breeze. Then we walked out from the top and the girls sat with their mother on a rock. It was the same rock my wife had sat on over twenty years before. I took their picture with the cliffs of the first mountain I’d climbed in the background.
On the walk back to the parking lot and the picnic tables among the cottonwoods, I told them when we come again we will bring a rope and climb a mountain. I told them that from the top you can see the shadows of the clouds moving across the desert floor.
My father’s now gone, and will never again challenge me to face my fears and reach to me with a rope and a grin. My wife has stayed with me, braving the cold winds of our doubts and our changes, and has remained my partner across the years, the separations and the distances we’ve drifted. My daughters grow as inexorably as the springs that rise from some mysterious source, bringing life to the desert.
We are all bound together by blood and our commitments, but also by our joys and our fears, our hopes and our doubts. We are bound by memories of remarkable places where we have felt rock in our hands, wind on our faces, sun on our backs, and where water rises and falls. We are bound like clouds to their shadows blowing from the west to the east.
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