Free Having Everything Right by Robert Michael; Kim; Pyle Stafford Page A

every stone crumb and weed-stalk in the little enclosure of wire where I stood up. About a quarter mile away, a single tree was moving. The others were still. I folded my map and put it away. Then the little whirlwind moved down the hill into another tree and left the first tree alone. There was a weight to the afternoon. Then all the trees were still and the wind was a slender spiral of dust coming down toward me.
    Even under the snow I can see the varieties of hope at Camp Polk: the ring of stone, the chain perimeter, the lichen-shredded picket fence, concrete moat, rusted cast-iron rail around a rich man’s plot. In the sweep of open desert ground, the grave plot is a pouch, a box, a small fenced span of certainty. That’s all. That’s enough. It’s nearly dark.
    As I rise up, fervent and happy for every movement I make, snow shakes off my coat into my body’s print on the ground. There is one thing still I must do. One of Camp Polk’s oldest stones has fallen from its pedestal. Carved on the stone are the twin gates of heaven thrust wide. An orange swathe of lichen has covered the spirit’s name. I can see only a submerged swirl of graceful lettering where the stonecutter engraved a name, a year, a lamb, and a verse.
    I bend to lift the stone back into place, but it is frozen to the earth. I try to kick it loose, but my toes go numb. Then I see the initials. Chipped ruggedly at the base of the stone, never intended to be seen once it had been fit forever to the pedestal, are the stonecutter’s secret letters “J.A.W.O.S.” What for immortality? Public proclamations are prey to time. Only the secrets survive.
    Was it at Grizzly? Was it at Hay Creek: the nameless stone sunk almost gone into the earth, with its moss-word “Mother”? Or was that Warm Springs, among the gifts of favorite things, the scattered trinkets love makes us give back to a place where we believe?
    Good night, Ray. Bit windy, wouldn’t you say? One thing about snow, though. It don’t ever last.

A W ALK IN E ARLY M AY

    Solitude is the scientific method of the human spirit. If you decide to fast, a full day and its night will be one arc of experience. If you decide not to take a map or to follow a trail, the path you make through broken country will be a chain of sensations. If you decide to take no warm covering for the night, you will change with the world, from warm and light, to cold.
    South of Eureka lies a coastal country now dangerous with marijuana farmers and their guerrilla ways, with federal agents marauding in infrared helicopters and armored jeeps. But that was years away. I was there before, without a map, without food. I left the car and walked out onto the beach. The air was hot and still. The waves were an old rhythm beside me. I knelt over flat sand, where the tallest wave had sorted aribbon of shell. Some four-footed creature had been along, leaving a trail that turned aside, as mine did, for every cluster of debris, every drift-bundle in the sand. One clear print told me it had been a coon, with two little ones. Inside the print, a gray scorpion the size of a ladybug was turning in a pirouette with its hands together. I was already hungry enough to understand that much.
    In the midday shimmer, two women were talking in the waves. I turned: two seals, their eyes and whiskers level with the slick pelt of the water that rose and fell, rose and fell with a whisper. Not fear or purpose: a gentle curiosity came between us. An invitation to know. When they disappeared, kelp swirled from rocks that punctured the surface. I sat on the hot sand a long time. Then they came up, one little one bobbing behind them. This time they did not look at me. In seal, this was a compliment. The swell rose and they were gone again. Like the rocks, they had shown between waves; like the water, they had flowed away.
    I walked south from the car, because it was easier to walk than decide. After a time, it