Scenes Floating in Memory
2007; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 115; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/sew.2007.0075
ISSN1934-421X
Autores Tópico(s)Borges, Kipling, and Jewish Identity
ResumoScenes Floating in Memory Peter Makuck Out of Aravaipa From White Water Draw by the border, after watching birds and still seeing the bright throb of our first vermilion flycatcher through freezing rain, we headed north again. A distant checkpoint on two-lane blacktop grew in the windshield. Hand on his sidearm, a guard with shades leaned in to ask our names and where we were from. A German shepherd with another guard on a long leash sniffed and circled our car for the nothing we had to declare but the glory of shrikes, eagles, and the high honking of a thousand cranes still floating in memory. Rough roads climbed into Aravaipa Canyon. We rattled over cattle guards past ashen scrub and clusters of prickly pear toward The Chimneys that some old friends had told us to see before a sign finally told us to stop—flash floods. Road impassable, even for an off-road Jeep. Lines of blue-black clouds piled up like curses kept to ourselves. Quiet helped us imagine what we rumbled over these desert dirt roads for and now wouldn't see—those rock formations sculpted by an outsized alien tripping on acid. So we turned about and headed for Bonito, [End Page 337] an unfindable place up switchbacks out of Aravaipa into the mountains around a curve to a sudden vista—endless snow peaks and long shadows taking the sage flats below. We got out, stepped onto a ridge in time to spot a javelina disappearing into scrub, silence now deep as the canyon at our shoetips. At first not a trace of the human in all this distance, then far below, like images from a lost language, a mass of white, bonking and bleating, reshaping itself before a herder on horseback and a border collie moving toward a corral in the quickening dark. Toledo, Spain What has stayed in mind isn't so much the blue Islamic designs or reflecting pools in the Alcazar or the Santa Cruz with so many paintings of stylized Annunciations, Nativities, and Assumptions but this guy pulling suitcases, three large wheeled bags, one attached to another, a train really, clack clacking in front of the café until they get stuck on the curb. Face glazed with sweat, he loudly clears his throat as if to speak but aims instead an angry look [End Page 338] at his young tight-skirted lover lagging at a store window, a look that says the least you could do is help this miserable bag-train over the curb, which she does, watching me watch her bend beautifully, then blesses me with a wink and a smile. Peter Makuck , Who is Now Retired from East Carolina University, Presented the Aiken Taylor Lecture on Brendan Galvin in November.
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