In the morning we carry our bags out of the bedroom and into the front room and sit around the dinner table talking to Jim and Deborah. Things are low-key; they are coming off two weeks of hosting friends and family and we are weary, not from the work we have done or the miles travelled but the effort of saying goodbye to this place again; I have grown attached to the spicy smell of the foothills and the pink gorges and amber streams– and the cabin is the binding of this picture book. Under the weight of departure there's a spring of certainty: that we will return for a longer time. Each time we leave it is like this, each time a little more difficult to leave.
But finally we do and it is time for the long drive to Flaming Gorge. Once again we shoot the alley north through Longmont and Loveland, stopping at a King Sooper's on the way for picnic food and crackling hard candy, for the miles of baking monotony–
Then it's across the prairie and into the foothills of the Medicine Bow Mountains, a topography of decayed pyramids, great hills revealing their weathered brown terraces between bands of red dust and grey/green sage. Off a minor highway we take a turn towards Red Mountain, a backdrop, we think, for a picnic lunch– and a gravel county road shepherds us through the winding uplands. The destination is elusive: after miles of weathered barbed-wire fence and ratcheting locusts we pass a sign posted by a university; this is the point of interest referenced by the brown sign on the highway. There is no placard, no sheltered sign, no pullout, just more sage, receding into a green haze under the horizon.
We pull off at the next likely place and eat our lunch in the car. A white Toyota crackles by and stops while I'm in the food bag; it's a local who wonders why the Oregon plates are pulled off to the side in this godforsaken place. We must be hopelessly lost or broken down or most likely both. When Celeste tells him we're having our lunch here he grins vaguely, says "OK" and drives off.
After another long session of 25-mile-an-hour curves it's back to I-80 and the careless hostility of the truckers, the anxiety-ridden stupidity of the commuters... The land is given over to natural gas operations and open range. Past Rock Springs it's time to turn south, onto another two-lane road in the scrub: U.S. 191. Then it's another winding 20 miles on Flaming Gorge Road to the immense crack in the ground the Bureau of Reclamation dammed and called the Flaming Gorge Reservoir.
The campground is a Ballardian forest of widely-dispersed olive trees, weathered mid-century concrete shelters and camp loops that resemble, in their aerial aspect, greatly-enlarged fruiting bodies or club moss fronds. There are few campers and the sun is low enough that you aren't paralyzed by the heat when you climb out of the truck.
Big cottontails creep out of the sage by the road and watch us as we walk by in our board shorts and sandals. Below a ridge the road curves to the south and back again to reveal colossal stepped cliffs and spires of orange sandstone. The westering sun has painted the tips of the spires behind us a brilliant yellow, but the cliffs ahead are violet, the water black. I look for rattlesnakes in the cooling cobbles by the trail, but see only the volleyball-sized holes left by the rabbits. At the beach parallel sets of tire tracks lead into the shallow water and muck; to our left a gull feasts on a 15-pound fish carcass. We walk to the water's edge and look at the swirling black scum, the shimmering mud. My towel feels stale on my neck. Today it will remain dry. We walk down the beach a ways to confirm our suspicions, that this stinking mire is typical, then walk back to camp.
The spires to the east turn orange, then red as the sun dips below the canyon walls. That night a pack of coyotes howl and yip at each other in a distant wash.
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