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Crossroad at the Foot of a Mountain

By Michael Wolcott

"Coming to Flagstaff for the first time felt strangely like a homecoming. Strangers smiled as if they knew us - maybe because we were so obviously in love. In the crosswalks, drivers made eye contact. That would have set off a fight-or-flight response in Manhattan. Here it just felt friendly."

For the fourth time that hour, a freight train rumbled through downtown Flagstaff. Lilacs bloomed on the corner next to the hostel. Kathleen and I stood in front of a coffee shop, holding hands. It was 1987 and we were on a Grand Canyon vacation. Manhattan felt as distant as Pluto.
The train swept past, echoing songs by Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie. The sound of freight trains - like the smell of lilacs and the piercing silver light - seemed to be rearranging my cells.
I read aloud from an index card scotch-taped to the plate-glass window: FOR RENT: Small cabin near town. Wood stove, electricity, and outhouse. No running water. $100/month.
"What do you think?" I said. "Can we afford it?"
She laughed. "You're serious, aren't you?"
I didn't really know. But at that moment, anything seemed possible. That morning I had set foot in the desert Southwest for the first time in my 32 years. I was high on all of it: the crazy, crumbling mountains; the giant blue sky; the prickly, misshapen plants that seemed to have been invented by wizards.
We had just meandered up from the Phoenix airport on back roads, parking the rent-a-car to splash around in the Agua Fria. Hummingbirds chirped in the spiny branches of a paloverde. After swimming we unfolded a blanket, stretched out together, and found that our skin was already dry. Kathleen noticed some pale orange wildflowers. Like everything else here, they were both unfamiliar and beautiful. She pulled out her sketch pad and splashed the page with color.
We drove on. The newness was quenching a lifelong thirst in me that I had not even known existed. But to Kathleen, who had also grown up in the East, this bony land was disturbing. "It's so big that it's scary," she said. But she was happy to see me so excited.
When we approached Flagstaff from the southeast, the naked summits of the San Francisco Peaks had sprung from the horizon like silver islands in an ocean of dark green. It was Shangri-la.
Coming to Flagstaff for the first time felt strangely like a homecoming. Strangers smiled as if they knew us - maybe because we were so obviously in love. In the crosswalks, drivers made eye contact. That would have set off a fight-or-flight response in Manhattan. Here it just felt friendly.

"You really could live in this place, couldn't you?" Kathleen said, before we stepped into the coffee shop.
"Not without you," I grinned. "But maybe I'll write down that phone number just in case we do come back."
We both knew that wasn't going to happen. Kathleen was an actress with city dreams. I had moved to New York for a job, but that experiment had run its course in less than two years. If not for Kathleen I would have already left.
That night we camped north of town in the shadow of the San Francisco Peaks. The ponderosa forest smelled like vanilla beans. While gathering firewood, Kathleen took a fall on a heap of sharp volcanic boulders. She was not used to climbing on rocks, or to camping, or to the long shadows cast by mountains. But she was trying.
We found an impressive weeping bruise under her loose cotton pants. She looked up with sad, frightened eyes, and then smiled through tears: "What now, mountain man?" We joked about the dangerous wilderness while I found a bandage.
Backpacking in Grand Canyon was also scary, but she tried - and got heat exhaustion. When we headed back to Flagstaff three days later, crossing the Navajo Reservation at night, I chose not to point out the starlit silhouette of the Peaks.
Once back in Manhattan, I found myself imagining a life in the long, graceful shadow of the mountain. That vision would not leave me alone. It felt like an affair. When Flagstaff finally won me over, Kathleen stayed behind in New York. I grieved that ending for a very long time, but have never spent a minute being homesick for the East.
Now, two decades later, little remains from that Grand Canyon trip but a simple crayon drawing that hangs over my desk. Kathleen and I lost track of each other long ago. The flowers that grew by the Agua Fria, I know now, were globemallow.

MICHAEL WOLCOTT is at home in Flagstaff, Ariz.