Getting away, getting back...

I feel like this lately--like a speck of a bug being followed by shadow poised on the very edge of the world. I try to focus on the color, rather than the precarious ground beneath my feet, but it's so easy to lose sight of the glorious view.

Last Sunday, we got away. Loaded up the Moose (our burly and beloved '85 Landcruiser) and trekked out to a canyon about 45 minutes from town. Chris, my mom, Graysen, me...in the rattling truck, beneath the hot hot sun, on a day of raw feelings. Chris's work schedule, 12+ hour days 6 days per week with a 120 mile round-trip commute, has left him feeling flayed. I struggle to offer my support while stuck in the quagmire that is, on an almost daily basis, parenting four kids. We both have our burdens, and it's so tough to see each other without the cast of our own shadows. Last Sunday saw us getting a late start after much tension, and there were few words between us as we closed in on the mysterious and treacherous canyon that wends its way up from Dixon Apple Farm. In the canyon, a stream, butterflies, wildflowers...a reprieve from the parched desert landscape that otherwise surrounds us, pulling all the moisture from our skin.
A roostertail of dust followed us along the stretch of road by the farm and we rounded the bend, mouth of the canyon in sight, only to come up short in front of a locked metal gate. ROAD CLOSED. The canyon out of reach.
We turned around, defeated, and mused about the reasons the road was now blocked off. Our suspicion: in January one of my mother's co-workers drove her car off a cliff somewhere up here. She wasn't found until March at the base of a cliff in a canyon so remote that rescue workers had to rappel in to retrieve her body. The papers referred to the canyon where she was found as Bland Canyon, a label my mother was uncomfortable with. "There's simply no place in Bland Canyon where she could have plummetted from such a height in her 2 wheel-drive car," she said. The only obvious place is here, on this now blocked road that winds up, up, and around one of the most frightening corners I've driven. The one-track dirt road snakes its way around the corner where there's no guard rail on the lip of a drop-off nobody would survive. It only makes sense.
In lieu of venturing further into the canyon we planned to visit, we took a right turn past the apple farm and went instead into Bland Canyon. As Mom described, the road did not climb high enough to create a suicidal drop-off. Rather, it meandered through the bottom of the canyon, was shaded by evergreens. Recent rains had raised clusters of wildflowers, and at one point I called the halt, grabbed my camera, and was awestruck by the small world I found unfolding on a crop of coneflowers. White butterflies, reddish spiky bees, bright red aphids, a honeybee or two...the air was thick with life, the flowers host and witness to all of it. Beyond that, we found a pull off where we explored for awhile, all three of us adults with cameras in hand. Then, we moved on, and found a road that climbed away to the left. With Moose in 4 low we climbed up an old washed out track, passing a sign that piqued our interest:



A cemetery up this old road? Of course. Bland Canyon gets its name from an old mining town, now a locked-up ghost town. A few years ago, Mom visited Bland and met the last resident, a woman named Helen Blount. I recall seeing Mom's photos from her visit, but having no physical place to connect with personally they didn't resonate for me past the aesthetic (Mom is a great photographer!). When faced with the cemetery, which we found a ways up the road and hidden in some trees, I'm jonesing to go to the actual town.
The cemetery isn't delineated on its border, as far as we could tell. Simple rings of moss rock seemed to mark the older graves, which are scattered beneath trees and around bends. The only marked graves we found were enclosed by a short black fence. Three people rest there. The two older graves were a bit hard to read but I think they said Grace and John Callahan, both deceased pre-1980. The one to the farthest left was Helen Blount herself. When we approached the grave I had not yet made the connections with Mom's long ago trip to Bland, the pictures she took, and this canyon or this cemetery. So I was at first surprised when Mom said: "Oh look, this is where Helen is buried." Surprise passed quickly, however, because I am well aware of the fact that Mom knows pretty much everyone. Forget Kevin Bacon--around here it's the six degrees of Laura Ware.
She filled in the gaps of my understanding about Helen and Bland, and we explored a bit before heading back up the road that took us to the top of the ridge and the most beautiful view. The bouncing of the Moose along the old mining roads rocked Gray to sleep and as the sun set we retraced our steps back to the mouth of the canyon and home, the full moon inset in a deepening blue and pink-streaked sky following us the whole way.