A Walk in the Park by Kevin Fedarko

Author:Kevin Fedarko
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2024-05-28T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

That evening, a few minutes after sunset, we moved onto a fin of sandstone that was cantilevered twenty or thirty feet off the lip of the Esplanade, and set our camp there, suspended over the chasm. Far below, amid the shadows pooling on the canyon’s bottom, the thin wire of the river gleamed briefly, like a filament in a light bulb just as it’s flicked off.

More than half a million acres of rock were out there, and aside from the five of us, not a single human was visible in any of it.

As we gathered in a circle to fix our dinner, the last of the light melted away, the first of the stars stippled the sky with icy pinpoints of light, and the flame of our stove seemed to illuminate our aloneness: a tiny cluster of men and women, gathered around a single blue bar of burning butane, surrounded by a sea of stone. It marvels me, as I recall now how it felt that night, to say that we weren’t shocked into silence, but simply did what people have done since the dawn of time. We told stories.

It started when Amy remembered how, years earlier while working in the central part of the canyon, she had stumbled across the body of a dead hawk lying on the ground, its beak covered in blood, and how baffled she was by the scene—until several feet away she discovered the mangled body of a rattlesnake that had evidently been snatched into the air by the hawk, but had somehow managed to sink its fangs into the breast of its captor in midflight, killing them both.

From there, talk turned to the roasting pits that we’d passed, along with the question of just how long it took to cook the heart of an agave, and whether any of us had ever eaten one, and if so, what it tasted like.

“I think they take about three days to bake,” said Rich, “and they’re packed with all sorts of sugars, so they’re supposed to be incredibly tasty.”

“Some of them taste like potatoes,” added Amy, who had sampled several during a river trip for members of the Hualapai tribe. “But there are sweeter varieties that are almost like molasses or pineapple.”

Things continued in this vein until just before bed, when Rich pulled out his satellite tracker and shared a weather report that had arrived from his brother-in-law, Dale Diulus, in Phoenix. A massive storm was pushing down from Alaska, and unlike the autumn squalls that had drenched Rich and his crew back in October and November, this was a full-on winter juggernaut freighted with sleet and snow—the kind of frontal system that could drive the temperature far below freezing, like a hammer sinking a nail into a board.

The storm was still a long way off, Dale reported, lumbering out over the Pacific. All sorts of things might happen over the next several days to weaken or deflect it. But if it held to its

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.