The Certainty of Spinning

 

I took my chances on a perilous path, along which my steps zigzagged, resembling a spiral lightning bolt.
—Robert Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty”

The morning we leave for the Spiral Jetty is the first day of sunshine in more than a week. When my husband, Michael, and I pile into our pickup truck, along with our lunches, binoculars, camera, and journals, I can’t believe the clarity of the light—that the nearby mountains can possibly be this green, the sky this blue, the air as thin as rice paper. It is as though I have been asleep for years, only to be reborn into a world that is unacquainted with the color gray or edges that are anything but crisp. And perhaps I have. The past winter was the hardest since arriving in northern Utah’s Cache Valley eight years ago, bringing day upon day of snowfall, so much that we no longer had any place to put the shoveled snow and simply gave up. Snow continued into May, swamping the tiny mountain fawn lilies that dared to bare their heads. In addition, we have two young boys, ages four and two. I have rarely slept through the night in four years, having grown used to one or the other hauling me from the sea bottom of sleep to adjust the blankets, scare away the monsters, assure them that I am there. Clarity was given up long ago.

I blink in the sun.

Yellow sunflowers called mule’s ears gather in small towns along the flanks of the Bear River Range, raucous bursts against a brilliant green. They remind me of the first time we took Aidan, our older son, hiking. He was six weeks old, and the sunflowers were in full bloom, banging their heavy heads against our legs as we walked the trail. I held Aidan against my body in a front pack and worried I would stumble, fall to the ground, that I would somehow swing him into a tree, lose him in the river, let him slip from the carrier. Turns out I should have been worrying about hail, the kind that arrives unannounced in the late spring and pelts your body with rough, jagged balls. When the storm hit, both shelter and car were far away. Michael bushwhacked a path straight up the side of the mountain, into a small forest, and I followed, wondering what kind of mother I was to bring a newborn into the wild, cursing my stupidity.

Within minutes, though, I was nursing Aidan under a towering pine near a fire Michael had built out of nothing while the hail grew in piles like stones. Our tiny family huddled in a refuge ringed by sunflowers; the warmth of the fire matched the warmth of my son’s skin. Every spring when the mule’s ears bloom, their bodies bending toward the sun, I think of that first hike, the hailstorm, the shelter, and the emerging knowledge that we were responsible for a being who could not even lift his head.


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