“Wilderness, Wildfires, and a Greyhound Bus”
An Excerpt from Like A Redwood Seed — Stronger Than the Flames, by Fia Sylvan
“Time for another adventure boys! Cliff diving today? Who’s in?” Carl usually directed these expeditions, impatient and easily bored, his restlessness benefited the rest of us in this.
“Yeah, let’s go!” The boys again setting aside the stereotypical trappings of their male college existence and stampeding out the apartment door. I didn’t wait for an invite, grabbed my sweatshirt and water and followed hastily. They might not have wanted me along, but they weren’t going to shut the doors in my face either.
“I was reading there’s some sweet pools for diving along the Snake up above Shoshone Falls. Might be a hike in, but we’ll see what we find.” Carl laid out his plan for the day. I wasn’t inclined to jump off any cliffs, even if I had been comfortable in the disrobing required for swimming, but I was always down for solitary exploring while the boys did their thing. That’s how it usually played out anyway.
We parked down near the falls and followed a narrow trail of rock and dirt that wound along one side of the split canyon walls.
This trail must’ve been designed by a rock lizard on crack — it wound up and down, through split boulders and around precipitous ledges with crumbling rock that required some serious rock-climbing scrambling skills.
“I see a big pool up there!” Oliver shouted. He and Carl always ranged ahead, Jake and I, slower, trailing behind. Being easily distracted by interesting plants and animals, my forward progress traced a similarly demented course had anyone tried to follow me.
“Thank god,” Jake muttered, sweating, breathing hard. “Short hike, my fat ass.”
I smothered a giggle, and squinted into the scorching desert sunlight to see this famed pool. I saw a good sized body of water, like Olympic swimming pool sized, with small figures up above it, jumping off a large stone promontory that jutted over the sparkling water.
“Looks like someone already beat you to it.” I observed drily, well aware the more people, the more attention they got, so a big plus for the boys.
“Who’s got the balls?” Carl grinned recklessly at our roommates, eyes skipping over me dismissively. He knew I wouldn’t do it. It made me mad, even though he was correct in his assumption.
“Not you fuckheads. If you did, you won’t still have them when you hit the water from that height,” I quipped, irritable. At myself, and them and their assumptions. The cliff was really high above the water, I guessed maybe fifty feet or more, and the water was dark blue-green and murky from all the previous jumpers, you couldn’t be sure if or where there might be rocks. Seemed pretty dangerous and dumb to me. But to each their own.
“HA! Race you to the top boys!” Carl led the dusty sprint up the trail to the top of the cliff, Oliver and Jake on his heels, to join the crowd lined up to leap into the murky depths of the Snake.
I watched a few people jump, careening into the water with a terrific sized splash, accompanied by screams of encouragement from the spectators. They came up sputtering, gasping, looking somewhat stunned, and occasionally red from whatever slapped the water first, but nobody got injured, so I shrugged and wandered away.
I followed the river past the diving pool, slipping and sliding over the rocky, gravel, mad lizard trail. To either side of me rose towering canyon walls, hawks and swallows who nested in the walls swooped above me, voicing their displeasure when I climbed too close to their nests. The super speedy tiny rock lizards darted in and out from underfoot when I disturbed one of their rocks with my clumsy feet.
I climbed, hand over hand, up the canyon wall, where it had crumbled into a less severe slope — I always wanted to see the view from the top. Several long, bruised, sweaty minutes later, prickly pear hairs in my thumb, and a sore ankle where it rolled on a loose rock, I reached the height of the plateau.
I stood, shakily, letting the strong breeze dry my sweaty face, and looked around. I was atop a narrow canyon wall that split the large Shoshone Falls Canyon in two. To my right the Snake rapids raged, wild water racing to the deafening falls below, and to my left the smaller, quieter branch of the Snake split off and wound around the mountain of stone I stood on; into the diving pool my roommates were enjoying. On the far side of the canyon, beyond the river on either side of me, spread endless, open desert floor, sagebrush, rabbit brush, and juniper in every direction. I sat on the edge of the cliff, resting, breathing, soaking in the beauty of the place, and let the strong, cool winds carry my burdens away.
