Wild, Barefoot & Free

Day six of a sprint across the country, southwest Colorado. My boyfriend and I avoided road trip digestive woes by eating only vegetarian but hadn't avoided the inevitable matted hair and heady body scent from prolonged sitting in a car. We were driving to move him to San Diego- thus we were potentially driving towards a breakup. I felt queasy for most of the trip.
On this sunny Thursday morning, we decided to take a massive shortcut devised from the trusty USA atlas on which I would have taken a courtroom oath. So what if the roads of the shortcut weren't black or red lines like those designating highways or streets? This meandering magenta line would cut two hours of desert driving. Aim towards the mesas and drive, sister.
The shortcut led us along fields with abandoned equipment and giant open air barns for drying grass. A group of ponies stood in the road at one point and politely trotted to the side when we gingerly approached. Not long after, the pavement gave way to crumbled asphalt and dirt. Dust rose behind our compact car as we soldiered on, both quietly unsure this was ‘the way’. If we accidentally were on a farm driveway, we wouldn't know until we’d wasted time and precious gas.
Like the first oversize mushroom in Alice in Wonderland, the National Monument sign cropped up on the side of the road. Yucca House National Monument. I sputtered in disbelief. We pulled off our magenta shortcut to investigate. The park consisted of a large pueblo and ruin of a kiva, or community religious center.
Both overlooked the brush plain, a space of unimaginable grace and expanse. The wind whipped from a distance and rustled the abundant sage bush. That day the sage was flowering and the air was full of sacred spice. It wasn't hard to project the National Monument’s description of Pueblo life onto the empty buildings. I felt a twinge of sadness that a place of such productive gathering now laid forgotten. Though the Park Service maintained the space, it was mostly archaeologically un-evacuated and obviously visitor-less. Before we left, I gave thanks to the sage brush for sharing its gift.
We drove away, back into the fields of bright grass. “Wait!” my boyfriend yelped and we pulled over for a final small miracle. Three does bounded across the land and paused at the highest point. Their shiny heaving bodies stood stark against the impossibly blue sky. “What blessings,” I breathed, corniness be damned.