A couple days ago I finally moved on from Carbondale. I’m higher now, on the forested Uncompahgre Plateau in southwest Colorado. On Google Earth it’s the huge dark washboard south of Grand Junction and the interstate, west of Montrose and the Rockies, north of the San Juan range, and east of the Utah border. The Uncompahgre’s long east slope rises from grassland to pinyon-juniper scrub to spruce-fir-ponderosa-aspen forest at its apex. Logging several years ago thinned this forest to a parklike open patchwork with an ocean of gray dead wood underfoot.
As my car and I climbed gradually up the plateau for almost an hour, it seemed we were leaving lowland afflictions behind. Heat, Gambel oak-serviceberry thickets, cows — no more.
The next morning in the still predawn forest, who should wander out from the pines but …. Their groans echoed in the cool air among the trees, deep, croaking, a sound straight from hell. Are they tormentors or tormented? Both. I don’t know. I cross paths with them during surveys and they scare off, stumbling over dead wood and swinging their heavy shins into logs. Their plateau goes on and on in the manner of a vast terrarium.
Today I returned from my survey to find a mark I didn’t remember making in the dust on the rear windshield of my car. It looked as if someone had wiped a line with the back of their fist.
I rounded the corner and the car was covered in scuff marks. Beasts as tall as my chest had come while I was gone and rubbed themselves against all 4 doors, the rear, the hood — and the driver’s window. For what cause, who’s to say. Did they gently nudge with moist nostrils, or heave their shoulders to rock the thing side to side? Were they scratching an itch? After my food? Looking for me? Were they marauders? Artists?
Writers? Leaving a message on the blankest page around.
With the marks, the car is actually cleaner — as if finger-painted in reverse — but also, now, inscrutable.
Who did this? The trampled earth and the lingering smell of dung can only prove so much. But I think I know. The voices of the damned echo through the trees. The only other sound’s the sweep of easy wind and aspenquake.
