 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
I’m sitting on a bench.
This isn’t some melodramatic fictionalized account where the author, sitting cozy in his room tries to lend realism to his story by employing first person voice, or even an actual recollection where the primary source uses present tense deus ex machina to bring the reader into his experiences.
I am sitting on a bench. I should be working.
This summer is my nineteenth, and, trapped in a maelstrom of indecisiveness and desperation, I decided to get as far away from my tiny, flat hometown of Acampo, California as possible by moving to the tiny, amazingly topographic town of Mammoth Lakes, California. I came on less than 72 hours notice for a job mapping the trails around the city , for maintenance and accuracy.
Which is what I should be doing now.
This bench is one of the things I’m mapping.
This is the last trail I have to do on this particular project, and its surveying was delayed by a construction project that’s going on along it. I had to wait until after the crewmen went home for the day to sneak in and pin it down on a map, even as it’s changing.
In addition, my equipment, a hand-held GPS that talks to the stars rather than one of the bulky, tripod-mounted scopes my forbearers used, is suffering from Schrödinger's
malady, an affliction in which I don’t know if it will be working or not working from one second to the next, and I’m trying desperately not to collapse the wave-form. For the past several days—the weekend—the proverbial cat has been emphatically dead, and only today, Monday, did the wave-form mysteriously jump to the opposite alternative.
That’s why I’m out here tonight, after union rules dictate there are no construction workers out on this trail.
The forecast said thunder storms, and I believed it. Yet nothing more than a few drops of rain have fallen as I plotted the cross-country ski signs, benches, and bollards along the trail. The sun is setting under the clouds, making the mountain ranges glow against the black of the storm clouds. A slight breeze numbs my fingers as I type on my used, battered, rugged little notebook, making them stiff and prolonging the time I should be working, but am not.
I knew this bench was special before I reached it. There are rocks arranged around it, and the view is unparalleled. In the foreground are brush covered steppes, giving way to a swelling ridge of conifers and, behind them, the blood-red hulks of the Sherwins stabbing up from the landscape. To the right, the scar-faced hulk of Mammoth Mountain, the bulging pluton of Mammoth Rock, and the jutting precipice of Mammoth ridge, like the spine of the world.
Around the bench, rocks are arranged in a semicircle, like a shrine to some local god.
The bench itself is nothing special; brown rubberized criss-crosses of a metal skeleton, held together by welded pipe and bolts.
The plaque, though, is what really caught my attention, what persuaded me to dig my computer out of my backpack and sit for a while, contemplating the landscape, the texture of the cold air piercing my thin t-shirt, in the hopes that I might never forget, and that others who weren’t here might have some semblance of memory.
There is a name: Christopher Cairo Newton.
I don’t know it. I don’t know who he was, whether he was a fire-fighter, a businessman, or just a tourist.
There’s a quote.
“Take the fresh mountain air deep within your lungs and marvel at one of the most beautiful places in all of California, if not the world!”
I don’t know who said it. Maybe it was Christopher Cairo Newton. Maybe it was someone famous. Maybe it was just the person who paid for the plaque, and the bench.
But that’s not what made me stop. That’s not what’s causing actual tears to slide down my face like the rain that was promised but hasn’t yet come.
There are two dates.
The first is unremarkable: 9/23/62. 53 years, 10 months and 13 days ago.
The second:
9/11/01
