Pilgrimage, by Tom Dinard

When did orange fires start burning atop mountains at the end of a day? When did green lichen attach itself to granite? When did packs of sheep and stray dogs decide to move together on the side of the road? And when did words begin to spill from my pen?

Was it really twenty-nine years ago that I frantically looked for a sneaker in a crate of baseball cards as my mother hustled to get me in the car and take me to the airport? Was it really twenty-nine years ago that I arrived at the Gulch alone, eleven years old, from Long Island, stranded in the wilds of New Mexico?

Today the air turns cooler as I approach the gate. Storms are coming in from the east, near Grants. The caretaker across the way makes me sign a book and then gives me the two hours of light remaining to find whatever it is I’m looking for. He says most of the buildings are locked.

I walk under the old wood sign leading in, hear the crunch of the crimson earth under my shoes, and smell the cottonwoods mixing with the breeze like I did so many years ago.

I’m eleven again as I find the log mess hall, built in 1916, and the adobe oven in which the bread was baked. A hummingbird shoots out from a hole in one of the boards now covering the mess hall windows. He chirps a welcome. Or maybe a warning. A chain-link fence now surrounds the coldest swimming pool in North America, where counselors threw me in, naked and trembling.

I learned strength here. The first few days, I lagged behind the group. I couldn’t roll up a sleeping bag without watching it unraveling shortly after our hikes began. I couldn’t last very long with the backpack loaded on my shoulders, and I was forced to go without Starbursts and McDonald’s and Yankee games, the most taxing adjustment of all.

Two weeks out here cured me. We turned black skillets silver again. We cooked over an open fire. We ate canned oranges out of stainless steel bowls. We crapped in an outhouse, sprinkling lime to keep the black widows away.

Pine Canyon, in the nether regions of the Gulch’s six hundred acres, was the site of my first major trek — six miles. I can still see Jeff Levine slicing off the tip of his finger while trying to peel an orange with a Swiss Army knife as bees the size of crows swarmed the oozing nectar and blood. Twenty-nine years ago the bees weren’t the only things around here that seemed much bigger.

Now I trudge through the Canyon and the frames of scenery change before me from a needle floor with juniper and pine towering and blacking out what little daylight remains to a fresh carpet of green stretching to the tree-lined auburn mesas.

I exit Pine Canyon and pass through the rendezvous ground, a log bench-surrounded plain where camp groups returning from the road met for one night of skits and songs. Twenty-nine years ago I performed “New York, New York” as Sinatra and wowed the trekkers. They packed up the next morning and left for their shining destinations.

The only thing left for me to do now is find my camp, the Little Outfit camp, about a half mile from the base if my memory is true. Back then, it seemed like an hour’s hike to the mess hall. Tonight it takes ten minutes.

I see the familiar wood bunks, tiny and not suited for anything other than falling asleep and waking up. I’m close.

I start running, looking for the familiar pattern of bunks, possibly the dirt trail I walked hundreds of times. The trail was cut by a big tree somewhere in the middle, leading through an open fence to a field of purple flowers and an adobe-roofed hogan, the Navajo dwelling for prayer and song. I can picture it as clearly as my home, but I can’t find it.

I ponder petrified wood and weather charts for Indiana in one of the open learning bunks before I realize there isn’t much light left. Then I remember the arts and crafts house and how it was a sort of landmark we always passed. I run to the north a little and see it. I’m on my way.

Now I’m caught in a dirt groove pulling my legs to something I already know. Every pebble I pass and every sandstone bluff seen in the distance was there twenty-nine million years ago and twenty-nine years ago.

I see the hogan roof that we slapped mud and hay on for an entire day the last time I was here. I know my place.

I find my bunk next to the area where we threw small metal washers, trying to get them in a square hole cut into the center of a wooden board almost thirty feet away. The washer board is gone, and so is the mailbag called the “Cow” that hung from a stately piñon and held our drinking water.

I run away from the cooking area to the passage through cholla cactus beds and once again greet the sprawling field where we played Capture the Flag. Today the desolation of a barren meadow under a dark sky thousands of miles from home lifts me up.

On the way back to base camp, I stop by our campfire site, still visible with logs laid around a charred black center. I can almost hear the strains of the old nightly lullaby:

Desert silvery blue beneath the pale moonlight,
Coyotes yappin’ lazy on the hill.
Sleepy winks o’light along the far skyline,
Time for millin’ cattle to be still.

So, now, the lightnin’s far away,
The coyote’s nothin’ skeery, just singin’ to his dearie,
Yo, ho, tomorrow’s a holiday,
So settle down your cattle ‘til the mornin’.

Nothin’ out there on the plains that you folks need,
Nothin’ out there seems to catch your eye,
But still you gotta watch ‘em or they’ll all stampede,
Plungin’ down some ‘royo bank to die.

So, now, the lightnin’s far away,
The coyote’s nothin’ skeery, just singin’ to his dearie,
Yo, ho, tomorrow’s a holiday,
So settle down your cattle ‘til the mornin’.

I remember singing that song the first few weeks of camp, minutes before I’d have to retire to a sleeping bag atop a foam pad on a wood frame bunk over a concrete floor. I’d wish that tomorrow was a holiday and I would close my eyes, hoping I’d wake up and be in my bed at home.

These days, I sometimes close my eyes while in front of my laptop and wish I was right here, yawning under the stars and singing “Desert Silvery Blue.”

I retrace my steps back to the car with precision. There are no problems for me to negotiate now. I don’t need to be afraid of strange animals or plants — the horned lizards are still hibernating and I’m sure the rattlers are somewhere underground, too.

The car is in view as I prepare to go north now, on my way to Southern Colorado tomorrow and who knows where after that.

A cottontail rabbit stops in my path near the old wooden sign that says Cottonwood Gulch. He darts away as soon as I notice him. He scurries through the brush toward the L.O. camp, east, in the direction of the gathering storms.

Nothing at this place has changed except me.