valley near the river
May. 17th, 2004 09:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
burnunitA small group of young boys walked carefully through the dusty valley, following the dry creekbed upstream. They picked their way over pale stones and the moved with a quiet rustle through tall brown switchgrass and wild buckwheat, heads bobbing in time to the nod and sway of the weeds in the breeze. The farther they moved upstream, the greener it grew and hints of sunlight caromed from beneath the stones; the creek was starting to show signs of life.
Rounding a corner they were treated to the sight of a wide, deep bowl, hedged round its top with sharp cliffs. Incongruously (they had been walking through wildlands for hours) four sagging wires hung in the air above the valley, strung mightily from great tarred beams driven into the rim of the bowl in some forgotten act of engineering. They felt a shock of recognition: the electric tethers of civilization had been run out ahead of them and they were not exploring so much as retracing something's footsteps. Following this creek served as a pale impersonation of the great wonders they could find if they could get up those cliffs, stare into the west and slip from pole to pole, a short line of tiny figures tightwalking the shadows of the powerlines upstream to the glittering cities and full houses of the living and the dead.
But standing there in the bottom of the silent valley, the wire contrails above their heads were as impossible as birds in flight, and after a flicker of squinted eyes upward the boys ignored them and looked north. The far end of the valley was a steep wall, a thrust of packed dirt that looked as much like the face of a dam as anything. In the middle of the face the black opening of a pipe jutted out, disgorging a thin stream of water to beacon in the sun. Were they bigger and stronger climbers (and if they'd rated the activity more worthwhile than tracing power lines- they did not) the boys could have scaled the wall and seen the pocked remnants of an east-west road, overgrown and littered with a few pieces of rusting junk. The road terminated just a few tenths of a mile beyond the westward slope of their valley and they sensed they would have been disappointed eventually. Which left them to turn back, retrace and head east down one of the other branches of the great canyon system; or shuffle forward, clamber into the steel culvert and see where it took them.
Rounding a corner they were treated to the sight of a wide, deep bowl, hedged round its top with sharp cliffs. Incongruously (they had been walking through wildlands for hours) four sagging wires hung in the air above the valley, strung mightily from great tarred beams driven into the rim of the bowl in some forgotten act of engineering. They felt a shock of recognition: the electric tethers of civilization had been run out ahead of them and they were not exploring so much as retracing something's footsteps. Following this creek served as a pale impersonation of the great wonders they could find if they could get up those cliffs, stare into the west and slip from pole to pole, a short line of tiny figures tightwalking the shadows of the powerlines upstream to the glittering cities and full houses of the living and the dead.
But standing there in the bottom of the silent valley, the wire contrails above their heads were as impossible as birds in flight, and after a flicker of squinted eyes upward the boys ignored them and looked north. The far end of the valley was a steep wall, a thrust of packed dirt that looked as much like the face of a dam as anything. In the middle of the face the black opening of a pipe jutted out, disgorging a thin stream of water to beacon in the sun. Were they bigger and stronger climbers (and if they'd rated the activity more worthwhile than tracing power lines- they did not) the boys could have scaled the wall and seen the pocked remnants of an east-west road, overgrown and littered with a few pieces of rusting junk. The road terminated just a few tenths of a mile beyond the westward slope of their valley and they sensed they would have been disappointed eventually. Which left them to turn back, retrace and head east down one of the other branches of the great canyon system; or shuffle forward, clamber into the steel culvert and see where it took them.