On Leaving and Coming Home

The heat.

The moment we crossed the Cascades, it descended and held, an ever-present misery running backward from the Coast, a living ghost where the foothills broke the champaign, blistering Utah in red welts of flame, smudging the edges of every road in rural New Mexico; it followed us out of Texas, and even in the shadow of Boulder, the air burned, roasting the high passes through Idaho’s smoking slopes where the unseen threat of wildfire stayed on the nose.

But then I can speak of driving into the sunset glow which limned the backs of the Cascades off that endless Eastern Washington plain. Of Tahoma rising like a jagged god and setting beneath the earth. Of the Stuart Range like the spired back of a buried dragon illumined by dusk’s retreating strokes.

And to know, deep in what lives beneath the bones, that beyond those mountains lay the ocean and our home.