Burn

Blackened earth on the side of the highway in northern New Mexico. I get out of the car and breathe deep - sage and pinion and the sun on wood chips. Blanca Peak rises like rock candy to the north dominating the San Luis Valley. It is here when I knew I was home. It is here where I dropped to my knees and put my nose to the dry, prickly ground and brought the dust of the high desert into my body. It is here, looking to the dry, broken west - all the way out to the San Juans 100 miles away - where I came into my body for the briefest moment; where I inhabited myself for the first time since birth. It was 1995 - June. The wind blew from the west and clouds massed over the endless crest of the Sangre de Cristos. It was here when I knew I was alive. Life smelled like burning ground and distant cottonwood trees in an ancient streambed. And it tasted like antelope and buffalo long gone into that ground. The sky to the west was unrelenting in its blue - the crystallized New Mexico blue. How does the sky know what state it's in? Go With God - "Vaya Con Dios", the sign read. It was here when I knew I was a writer. And I knew also that I wasn't a writer. It was here where my eyes burned from tears and I almost turned around and went back to sleep in Boulder. It was hard to stand in that forever valley. It contained everything. I had vertigo. There was nothing to hold on to - no hooks in the sky, no trees to climb - only sage: sturdy, sweet sage fanning to the horizon beyond the burned hump of mountain in Sunshine Valley.