TIM BASCOM
Desperado
As the sun sets, shadows pool across the basin then up the bottom slope of the far canyon wall, shrouding an eroded ridge, along with its straggly pinyons. A black curtain creeps up the glowing rockface, until just the tip of a separate tower blazes golden against the cloudless blue, capped with a sheet of limestone.
Up there where, earlier in the afternoon, three climbers dangled like spiders under the lip of stone then hooted as they made the summit, the day has not quite ended. But down here, night has arrived. In the growing darkness, chill settles. The sandy gullies and the rocky outcrops are still giving off waves of heat so that when you sit down against a boulder, you can feel it toasting your back. Yet the cool air of the descending night causes such a contrast that you shiver, your chest and neck chilled under the still-sweaty T-shirt.
All the birds seem to have settled into resting places, except a lone mourning dove, which coos plaintively then goes quiet. The climbers are long gone, hiking back to their cars four miles to the east. Your spouse is asleep in the tent, having succumbed after deciding to lie down a moment. And now you feel like you are waiting in the pause between movements, expecting a solo instrument—perhaps an oboe—to ease into the next section.
Dinner seems too much work. The fire can wait. You sit against the warm stone and watch the curtain of shadow rise over the distant tower, turning it into a black silhouette. You feel sad in a sweet meditative way, aware of all the beauty but also the light fading from this scene. This is one less day in the life you will live. One day put away. No rewinding now, except in your mind.
Is that someone whistling in the dark? Or just wind in the pines? Your mind drifts, making an associative leap: “. . . and freedom, oh freedom, well that's just some people talkin’.”
Such aloneness is rare. In these times, one is always a stone’s throw from another human marker—house, truck, wires, crop rows, lettered signs. But out here, without those markers, you are reminded that, in truth, you are actually always alone, even when surrounded by fellow humans.
Suddenly, you are startled by your spouse calling from the tent: “You still alive out there?”
You are. You are still alive out there. So you call back through that thin layer of nylon that separates you: “I thought you’d never ask.”
Tim Bascom is author of a novel, two collections of essays, and two prize-winning memoirs about years spent in East Africa as a youth. His essays have won prizes at The Missouri Review and Florida Review, being selected for the anthologies Best Creative Nonfiction and Best American Travel Writing.