There are other trails, but it has become a Sunday ritual to return to the Sawmill Gulch. I’m now familiar with the bends of the trail, and I can sense how far we are along. I recognize the specific dip in temperature before a rounded left turn. After that particular turn there is a window of clearing through ponderosa pines, and an edge, tumbling down into a ruffled white and black river. This is the point on the trail where Dave and I pause. We stand beside the edge, and I watch the water coil around rocks, sweeping down from a snow capped mountain. Dave told me here once, “My brother and I used to practice tumbling down hills like this.”
On this particular walk, we jogged for some stints and slowed down to look at the wild flowers. I like to take my time to catch my breath on this trail. I am always trying to smell something from the earth that would bring me back to it. Like the smell of Rhododendrons bring me back to walking barefoot over the neighborhood concrete in my hometown, Olympia. But there is an expanse of space in the Rattlesnake forest, and I pull the air into my body impatiently, and I smell the blank scent. I do not smell anything but clean air. The air pulled in through my nose makes my brain burn like it is flooded.
On this trip, we turn back at the 3 mile mark, after pausing at the edge of clearing. We walk back the way we came towards the direction of home and food. We both place bets on what time it might be once we get to the car, and if we have time to run errands.
The walk back to the parking lot takes longer, we are a little looser, I could not smell the trees or the dirt but breathing deeply with intention has reminded me to move a little slower. We see, again, the clusters of Arrowleaf Balsamroot, Glacier Lilies, and Purple Shooting Stars. The Shooting Stars are more difficult for me to spot. Their purple petals are pinched behind a sharp-looking black tip instead of spread open like a sunflower. Their shape reminds me of a girl with her hair blown back from a brisk wind in her face.
The wildflowers calm me in the particular way I yearn for when I take deep breaths. The flowers are still. Their stems nudge out of the dirt and bud inherited pigments and leaves. In my vision, they simply appear all at once.
Even as Dave and I arrive back home, the trail and the flowers exist, harvesting sun for months, until they wilt. As I pull on socks and tennis shoes, and as I wash my face and apply makeup for an evening of work in a kitchen, the yellow Glacier Lilly petals are being cloaked by a black evening. I think of that, and I am calmed by how unmovable the wild flowers appear to be, while I move in jolts around the kitchen at the back of a humming bar. The bikes and unleashed dogs and strollers with swaddled babies have all gone home from Sawmill Gulch trail, while the wildflowers in their fixed poses are holding their position of constant, like the stars.
