First Mud

"I forgot about the awesome thing you can do in a Jeep," Robin said.

"What's that?"

"You can stand up in it!"

We bounced and bumped along a muddy forest service road just outside the Grand Canyon National Park gates. She held on for dear life, and I scanned the horizon for as many mud puddles as I could splash my way through. I needed dirt on my Jeep, or it wasn't a Jeep.

I had just bought it, just come home that same day. First car in years. It was old-ish, eleven years old, with 100,000 miles on it and it didn't come with a top - soft top, hard top, any top. I didn't care.

Each mile along the dirt road, it seemed, unveiled a new forest. First, tall, black, burnt pines on bare, flat ground; it looked like a fairy or faun should come tripping through the trees at any moment, or a dragon. Then, the road carved through steep hills topped with ponderosa pines, little yellow wildflowers and brittlebush. There were softly sloping shoulders that ended abruptly in sheer cliffs leading to broken shelves; and close forests with no underbrush at all.

My favorite was the meadows. After all the heavy rains, they were lush and so green, dotted with mountain lupine and Indian paintbrush and some fiery orange thing I couldn't name. Trees at their edges standing tightly ranked like soldiers, perhaps a small lake or shallow puddle with grasses growing through it.

The sweetest thing was that we didn't see another soul for over an hour. Just driving, we stopped to pick flowers or to top a hill for a new view. I dropped her off on the side of the dirt track and reversed, so she could get a photo of the wicked dust trail I was kicking up. My homemade bouquet grew to include purples, oranges, reds and whites, yellows. No blues, today.

When we saw the green slate roof of the Grand Hotel around the next bend, some magic was lost. When the sky opened up and soaked us twenty miles from home, the rest was.

 But this was only the beginning.