Cities of Gold by Douglas Preston

Author:Douglas Preston [Preston, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781614190127
Published: 2014-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

Walter on his horse Pedernal. Photo Douglas Preston.

We continued along the dirt road, climbing steeply, winding back and forth, up one mountainside after another. As we climbed our feelings began to soar.

We paused at a point of granite thrusting out of the trees, and found ourselves looking south over mountains that appeared to have no end, layer after layer, dissolving into a gray-blue indistinctness, merging with the sky. It was a well-muscled landscape, an orogenic flex in the earth’s crust. The Mogollon Rim country is the backbone of Arizona, controlling most of Arizona’s weather, accepting most of its rainfall, and determining much of its settlement patterns from prehistoric times to the present. It is an immense geological formation with a half-billion-year history; compared to the Rim, the Grand Canyon is a mere notch in the ground.

We ate lunch at the overlook, watching dark clouds roll in across the great sea of mountains. It began to rain. The rain turned the mountains blue, and then gray, and then they faded away in the mists.

“It’s hard to believe we rode through that country,” Walter said, unhooking his canteen from the saddlehorn. “Remember those people back in Santa Fe who said we were gonna die up here in Rim country?”

“Yeah. There are always people telling you that something can’t be done.”

Walter took a swig from his canteen and raised it to the clouds. “Fuck you!” he cried out. His voice tumbled off into gray space, with no answering echo. The rain misted down, covering everything like a cold blanket.

Our horses’ hooves became balled with mud. The rain penetrated our riding gloves, ran into our boots, collected in our saddles, and crept between our legs. It became intolerable; we stopped to camp at two o’clock.

We camped underneath the oldest, deadest alligator juniper in Arizona. There was no fresh water or grass anywhere and the slope was pitched a good 20 degrees from the horizontal, but we had reached a state where we no longer cared. The horses drank from a mudhole and I crawled into my bedroll at three and was asleep by six.

My night was filled with restless dreams. Twice I woke up thinking I heard the sound of thundering hooves; each time I shook Walter awake, hollering that the horses were loose and running away. But each time the horses were standing, hunkered down and miserable, in the rain.

Then I dreamed I was back in Wellesley, the town where I grew up. I found myself wandering about the backyard of the house of my best friend, Chip. Everything was different. Most of Chip’s modest, brick house had been torn down and a vulgar mansion erected in its place. I knocked on the door and a woman answered, demanding to know, in a crisp Brahmin accent, exactly what it was I wanted. She didn’t know Chip or his family. I tried to explain that he had once lived there, but she shook her head. She had never heard of my street or my family.

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