Colors

Driving in the dark, the near-dawn, to begin hiking the Narrows:

The anonymity of duskiness brings a slow blink, a nod of the head, a study of the car interior. Eyes raise, and the sudden shift of the environment shedding its monotone shocks, unnerves, and then delights.


Strokes of watercolor percolate through the rock--streaks of sunrise and sunset, blue haze wafting off the trees and far peaks, junipers exhaling indigo to slurp up the sandy stone smudges. The rim of the sky embraces the leafy colors seeping upward, against gravity, and the domed sky swishes upward as the cloth is whisked away, first white and yellow, then orange, pink, sloughing away to leave the powdery blue of a dawn sky.

The sky recedes and the sun reveals the stony pigments blasted into the rocks, deep-seated color like kilned ceramics. But, blocked from the sun's radiance, the creviced blue shadows siphon the hues from the stone, wicking them back to air and sky.  

As tones become hardened by the sun's entrance, the scrubby flora emblazons gold, scarlet, and bronze onto the landscape. Orgasmic leaves boast their own brilliance, confident in their breath-taking, almost unnatural richness, until the sun overwhelms and incinerates the now curling, ash-light foliage. 

  It is too much to bear. Sunrise deceives us, portrayed so often as a calm, peaceful, moment of yawning and potential, of waking. As I watch it emerge through my window I am hard-pressed, breathless, stunned. The earth falls prey, surrendering its brushstrokes of innocence to the sun's savagery. We also fall prey to this celestial tyrant, intent on exposing beauty, pursuing it to the climatic moment when it is consumed.