River

Day before yesterday we returned to an aforementioned river. This time the trail was significantly less strenuous, traversing hills of rosemary and lavender, an occasional spruce of thyme. It’s green mountains folded clean as origami, and my shoes are brimming with water, squirming as I make my way around crags and gullies. I’m carrying lunch bags. Couscous and orange soft drinks perched on one shoulder, getting a better view of the countryside than I.

An hour and a half of walking: peacock blue bathing suit slick with sweat, hair down, knees up, one, two, I am called a city girl one too many times, lover of the chock-a-block, unappreciative of clay deposits. Oh, how harsh, how very harsh indeed.

But it soon becomes clear that suffering is not in vain. We strike gold, a veritable paradise. To the right of the trodden path, upstream, a little star that strayed from the confines of universe. Pool, blue, waterfall, butterflies, as close to a shiny Bahamas postcard as you’ve ever seen. It’s so great I pull off anything not water-proof, Superhero-style, and cannonball.

It seems impossible to me that engineers have found ways to blast holes through hundreds of feet of rock face. I don’t mean it in a sad environmentalist way, but in a does not compute way. How can you bulldoze through green slices of water, their cascading brethren so tough they throw me out when I try to climb up, the skinny cliffs overlooking houses and trees hundreds of years old? I can’t make it five minutes along these woods without feeling thorns. This mountain is greater than any of us.