The Luminous Land

 10-18 

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I woke up this morning to dramatic, moody skies, thick with clouds rolling across the mountains in endless waves. A cool breeze tugged at my hair, carrying a scent of dampness that threatened rain. The sounds of the campground were subdued, the usual clangor of pots and pans and early morning cooking and grumpy campers replaced by the subtle shush of the winds, ebbing and swelling with the gusts.

I checked my phone for the local forecast and saw that the day called for rain, and that a large band was moving in. So I set up my grill and scrapped together a quick breakfast, then packed it all up and retired to my tent to start a new book.

Just as I zipped up the flap, it started to rain.

It’s not that often that it rains on my trips (beyond the usual West Texas monsoons, which I always seem to encounter) so it was a bit of a novelty. Fortunately, my tent is a very solid one that stays warm and dry even in terrible weather, so a little drizzle is nothing for it to handle. And the rain was sure to help lower temperatures to more of an appropriately autumn-ish state, and to serve to tamp down the remaining few embers of the wildfire. So I laid there in my sleeping bag, snug as a bug, and descended into the depths of my book, quite content to enjoy a bit of a lazy morning.

At some point, after an hour or so of steady rain, I did begin to wonder if it planned on raining all day.

After 2 hours of increasingly heavy rain, I began to wonder if I would need to worry about my campsite flooding (I didn’t).

And after 3 hours, I was beginning to regret picking a campsite so distant from the bathrooms.

But very fortunately, the rain lifted before I had to do something dire. I crept out of my tent just as all of the other campers were emerging from their RVs and tents and campervans, all of us a little bleary, probably looking like slightly bedraggled owls. By that point I had decided I was tired of my book and laying around, and it was quite chilly, so I packed up my “in town” gear and hopped in Jane to go search for a coffee shop. Rainy days are perfect for coffee shops.

I stopped first by the Goldfield Ghost Town, which purported to have a coffee shop. And so it did – but not the kind where you sit and work on blog posts all day. So I wandered around the sodden grounds along with every other cooped-up family in the area.

I found a couple of souvenirs in one of the gift shops, but beyond that decided that the ghost town had exhausted its entertainment options, so I clambered back into Jane and set off towards town (like, actual town, where actual people live).

I really was looking for a local cozy coffee shop, like the kind where writers and artists hang out, but apparently there were few options in Apache Junction, and most of them were closed. So I ensconced myself in a Starbucks with a hot chocolate and an egg sandwich and spent the afternoon organizing and reviewing photos, writing blog posts, and researching hiking options for the remainder of the trip. A boring day, but sometimes that’s just what you do.

The day remained overcast and rainy, eventually giving way to mist and finally clear blue weather only around 4 PM or so. I headed back to camp, figuring I could just have a walk and be happy with that.

The nice thing about rain is that it does leave the air crystal clear and everything is laser crisp afterwards!

I stopped in at the ranger station at the front of the park to bug the rangers once again about my hiking prospects for the area, now that the rain had probably eradicated the remnants of the wildfire. Then we scooted on to the campsite – but as I went to back into my space, I heard a very interesting tinny rattling sound. The kind of sound that sounds like when I lose a wheel cap and the remaining bracket rattles between the wheel and the brake hub. Hmmmmmm.

I got out and discovered that yes, I had indeed lost a wheel cap, somewhere between the ranger station and my site. No sweat, I figured that I would just walk back until I found it. How hard could it be?

Well, I walked all the way back to the ranger station, keeping my eyes peeled the entire way there and back, and that sucker was nowhere to be seen. It had vanished off the face of the earth. Gone completely. Forever. I left a lost-item note with the rangers at the station but with little hope of recovery. Interestingly, I realized that the cap I had lost is the same one that I lost on my first road trip ever… ten years ago. Call it a gift from Jane, I guess.

It does not escape me that I managed to lose this cap in a place called the Superstition Mountains.

The sun settled towards the horizon and I gave up the search for the cap, instead opting to quickly jack the car up and pull the wheel so I could remove the offending rattling bracket. A man in the site across from me offered to help but I declined his offer as pulling a wheel and putting it back on takes maybe five minutes and only one person’s worth of work. So instead he watched me mess with the wheel, clearly fascinated but having enough tact to not ask me the usual obtuse questions, which I appreciated.

I then remembered that I had forgotten to pick up ice while in town, so I popped back over to the ranger station – for the third time that hour – to grab a bag. They had the grace to pretend like they weren’t getting awful tired of me.

Back at camp, I cooked up the usual Boy Scout dinner as the sky bloomed with the now-familiar fire of a Southwestern sunset.

I looked at this weird saguaro a lot on this trip. So here's a dramatic pic of it.

Jane blended into the twilight, but the narrow sliver of remaining sunlight raked intriguingly across the body lines, creating a unique effect in which the sunset served to both highlight the car, and erase it completely into the landscape.

The light faded to the west as the full moon rose to the east, trading the firey oranges and yellows of the sun for the cool blues and grays of the moon, which were somehow no less bright. The landscape gained an ethereal, ghostly cast as a light mist bloomed into a halo, magnifying the moon’s effect. While some remained shrouded in darkness, other parts were highlighted as if painted in light. And although I have no professional camera for nighttime photography, it was a striking enough sight that I took a stab at photographing it anyways. I’m really glad that I did.

Kelly signing out.