BIG SOUTHERN CHAPTER 67

DAVID AND KALI

The buzzing of a motorcycle nears, its noisome sound rising over the wind's constant afternoon howl. I use the spotting scope to see who might be coming, direct my eyes to just below the hang gliders' turnoff and then zigzag them down the switchbacks until I see movement—a small lime-green dirt bike negotiating the sharp corners.

My visitors number few, days sometimes passing between them—reminiscent of my youth, monotony only broken by the mailman every day and the milkman every other. I am of an ambivalent mindset today, not keen on erecting a personality to assuage a motorcyclist but aching for a break from the conversation between me and myself. That circular dialogue just makes a tighter and tighter spiral.

Back and forth, back and forth, the motorcycle negotiates the switchbacks, the pitch change of its noise indicating gear changes. It will be twenty minutes before I can identify the rider, though I can tell he has long black hair and wears no helmet—hardly unusual, if ill-advised. I go inside my quarters and make sure nothing untoward presents itself, though what that might be I have no idea. In the space created by waiting, by anticipation, one needs a task, any task, to break the tension.

I can almost make out the driver when the cycle hits a blind spot. The last five hundred feet of rise, to the east below the lookout, has a leeward bend surrounded by trees—perhaps the most wooded area of the mostly barren Butte. I wait for the big reveal, the motorcycle engine muted for a few seconds. A minor excitement blends with trepidation of an equal measure. When the rider comes within sight I see it's a girl.

She pulls within just a few feet of me, revs the engine twice and shuts it down. Smiling. Her face dusty from not just the three and a half mile ride up the Butte but however many miles she rode to get to the base. She works her lips, a mistake, to move the grit and dust from her mouth, then realizing her error pushes her tongue out to get rid of the intrusive foreign matter. That failing, she wipes her forearm across her face. "Hi," she says, then spits gently, still managing the offensive dust. "You must be the fire lookout." She looks around. "Nice view."

I nod. She is somewhat close to my age. Despite her dusty features and wind mussed hair, she gleams. I am taken, I think, where amusement aims—I pocket the thought for future perusal. Her demeanor, her voice betray a certain rare, desirable energy. "Show me around," she says, putting the kickstand down and dismounting. "Like a proper government employee." She is not shy. She's accustomed, I can see, to owning the moment.

She owns this one. I am ambushed—but not fearful and not inspired to fight, instead spurred to another response, call it inventiveness. Unsure of what self to show her, who to be, I wing it. "Behold!" I say, spreading my arms. I rotate dramatically, a self-mocking ringmaster. "The Snake River Plain." I walk a slow, full circle, go to the south side where the BLM has set up a telescope for visitors to view through. "With the aid of technology, the American Falls Reservoir. Pocatello to the east of it, American Falls to the west, Springfield the little town to the north side, this side, of the lake. You can just barely see the general store if you focus in. It's surrounded by a much smaller body of water. Danilson Lake." She goes to the scope and peers through it.

I have not learned the mountain ranges like a good lookout but still rattle their names off. "Sublett Mountains. Deep Creek. Bannock." As she swings the scope I name the ranges roughly corresponding to her sight. "Portneuf. Blackfoot. As you move from south to east." I move again. "Big Hole. Snake. Henry's Lake. Centennials." Keep moving. "You may have seen the Beaverheads and Lemhis if you came from the east. We're looking north now. Just walk to the other side of the building here. Lost River. White Knob. Pioneer. White Clouds on a perfect day, not today."

She gives a proper pause. "Nice." Her hair, blown by the wind which is now gaining force, flies in her face, covers her mouth. She spits to remove it, pulls it away. "Do you have any water? I'm dry."

"Inside." I lead her into the building, reach for the insulated cooler. Just inside the door, it serves as a water source. While I pour the slow trickle into a hopefully clean cup she wanders in, eyes my bookshelf. "Kierkegaard. Tao Te Ching. Hesse. Nietzsche—is that the way you say it? That's a collection. The Upanishads. I feel like I'm in a Somerset Maugham novel."

Unfamiliar with the allusion, I don't reveal my ignorance. But I know I may be blushing—I was teased for my reading habit in school and have yet to get over it. Here, I believe, is someone who would not belittle and shame me, yet I am abashed. "I guess I'm glad I didn't bring up my record collection," I say.

I hand her the glass. She gulps it down at one go. "Cold! That's a surprise." She wipes her mouth, hands me the cup. "Let me guess," she says. "Dylan. Young. Prine. Cohen. Jackson Browne. Van Morrison. No heavy metal." She looks at me questioningly, then reverses her thoughts. "And God, no disco."

I blush again. "Other than Van Morrison, spot on. You missed a few but I won't test you. Am I so predictable?"

She shrugs. "Simply makes sense," she says. "Why forego the records?"

"Foregone because of no electricity."

"Foregone or forewent?"

"Forgoed," I say.

She laughs from the gut. "Foregoed it is," she says, "I almost snorted. You almost got a snort." She then continues to browse through my books.

The wind picks up outside. I feel duty bound to check the weather so excuse myself. "I'll be back in a second." Outdoors, I look as always first to the southwest, the predominant source of wind and precipitation. There are clouds, dark, at the horizon, not yet rising high in the sky but a potential harbinger.

She follows me out, closes the door behind her, moves up beside me to eye the same horizon. She puts a hand gently at my back, imperceptibly so, likely her ingrained habit rather than aimed specifically for my reception. Yet it electrifies me. "Storm?" she asks.

"Possibly." I direct her to the telescope, tell her where to look and how I scan for fires. As of yet, there is no lightning so any blaze could only be man-caused.

I fear I might smell bad, showers being infrequent and the heat of mid and late June already above normal, so I lean away from her when possible, considering the wind direction as an aid to dissipate my aroma. She smells slightly dusky, salty, and if I can detect that, no doubt she can smell me—though she shows no repulsion.

I offer her a sandwich, apologize that cheese and bread, possibly stale, with a little mayo or butter on it is the limit of today's menu. "Oh, and pickles. If that's your thing."

"Not a cook?" she says facetiously. Then, "I'll take you up on that offer. I'm not picky." She pauses. "But next time, I expect Dutch oven."

In the building I go into food prep mode and watch her through the single window. She scouts the horizon, the vast countryside between it and the Butte, aims the scope at the approaching clouds, the bank swelling and darkening as it nears. Three o'clock to five has been the period that decides the difference between storm and omen, almost every day a similar series of events taking place. The heat of the day determines how quickly the storm clouds form, how big the bank gets, how dark its color becomes, how likely it is to just thunder and send out lightning or bring rain and hail with it.

As I bring the sandwiches out, on paper plates that wrestle with the wind, I hear the first thunder. She turns away from the scope toward me, raises her eyebrows. "I know what that means," she says. I hand her the sandwich.

"I'd offer you a beer," I say, "But I don't drink anymore." I almost regret saying it. I know it seems to some to be an off putting warning: 'don't go here'. But if I don't, I'll be worrying about confronting a future event during which alcohol comes up. I took the job to 'find a new playground' and 'new friends,' as AA would say, a start to the end of old habits. I've only been dry for a month, so my capacity to say 'no' has yet to gain much strength. A no now is easier than excuse-making later.

"There's a story behind that, I bet," she says. "A beer would be nice. So they say. Not necessary though. Particularly since I don't drink either. I threw up on sloe gin in high school and that was enough of my grand experiment."

"Lucky you, you escaped early."

"There are other traps beside alcohol and drugs," she sighs. "Believe me."

"I bet there's a story behind that, too," I say, but inquire no further.

We chew in silence, but my ears are alert to every crack of distant thunder and my eyes catch the first stabs of lightning in the distance. Verga shows at the cloud bank's easterly and westerly ends where light can still reveal it—a smear of rain falling but not hitting the earth.

"I guess I better decide pretty soon," she says. I shoot her a questioning look. "Whether to go or take cover."

"It's already too late," I tell her. "If it hits you'll be swamped unless you have a truck parked at the base. Even then—" I flatten my left hand, palm downward, and make a waving motion "—kind of iffy."

She ponders that, looks at me, appearing to wait for something. I realize—two beats too late, as a friend once said—that she needs an invitation. I tell her she can weather the storm in the building, warn her that it can be pretty frightening at this height in such an open area.

"Do I look like someone who might be scared?" she looks at her motorcycle. "I'm Kali, by the way."

"David."

The wind is whipping now, fifty miles an hour by my guess. The anemometer inside gives the exact reading but I no longer need it, my estimates always within one or two miles per hour. The thunder nears, close lightning won't be far behind, I tell Kali we should go inside where it's safer. "Protocol," I say, excusing my cautiousness.

"Protocol," she skeptically repeats, but she accompanies me.

The anemometer reads 54 MPH. Bits of gravel, dried vegetation, strike the window. The antenna for the radio outside creaks under strain, making an eerie sound to join the air currents indecisively swelling and abating outside. Thunder, not quite constant, nonetheless approaches a rare steadiness, cracking the sky. In the cinder block building we need to shout to understand each other, the wind howling and the thunder shrieking and pounding. The room darkens, the sky heavy and black, then brightens with the lightning that follows the thunder so closely that we know the storm is upon us.

A deafening crack hits the air simultaneously with an intense show of lightning. We both jump. I recognize the sound, a near strike hitting a ridge of rock, blowing it apart. I will scout the sides of the Butte with a telescope tomorrow to see if the hit is evident. Kali, though exhibiting no fear, is alert. "Are we safe?" she asks.

"Not as safe as we can be," I say, and though I don't want to be presumptuous, I tell her the method I've been instructed to use should a storm get this intense. We pull the sheets off my bed, pull the two rubber mattresses apart and crawl between them. They act as grounds to prevent electrocution should lightning strike near us.

Though the anemometer now reads 92 MPH, the highest I've seen but only by a bit, the noise of the storm gets muffled by the four inch mattresses, sound entering only at the open seam between the two. "I've never actually been a sandwich," she says.

Her absurdity breaks my trepidation and I break out laughing, so hard it almost drowns out the sounds of the storm. She responds with her own laugh, and soon we are pulsating, her laughter inspiring mine, mine instigating hers, every time we wish to stop a new round of guffaws starting. I reach my hand to hers and hold it and she grasps mine back, the touch calming us, and as our laughter abates the moment expands, the storm releasing occasional pellets—either hail or rain, I can't see—against the building and the wind, thunder and lightning continuing for what seems like a long time but might only be minutes.

The thunder stops, save an occasional low rumble that diminishes with time, its aim further northeast to the next stop. The wind slows, slows more, until the air slackens into a tired mass, bringing a rare stillness atop the Butte. Reluctant to leave her touch, still my sense of duty calls me to my job of fire lookout. There could very well be a fire started given the number of lightning strikes.

I lift the mattress up, crawl out, hold it while she escapes, and we go outside. I walk to my telescope while she looks around, it being perhaps the first time she's seen the vivid colors of the desert in the light that follows a storm. There is a rainbow spreading from the Bannocks clear to the Subletts, the air smells of petrichor and sage, the first the result of moisture on dust and the second a release of oils that comes but rarely, after a rain or when the temperature's near freezing on a humid morning.

Those smell surround us, though little rain fell, just enough to splotch the ground. It's already dry on high spots in the parking lot, there's no puddles collected save on stone or metal surfaces. Kali grabs her motorcycle, pushed over by the wind, inspects the parts for damage, then sets it back on its stands.

I see no telling smoke, though that doesn't mean there isn't a fire. A smoldering cedar might burn all night before a rising wind excites it enough to show color. Shortly after, it will throw sparks. Landing in the always dry cheatgrass, those sparks turn to fire in seconds and hundreds of acres in minutes. I will be checking every few minutes throughout the night, it will be a long one.

Kali gets on her bike. "Thanks for the show," she says. We exchange a look that seems to me to mean something but I distrust my instincts.

"My pleasure," I say, smiling. "I love a good sandwich."

She stifles a laugh. "I'll be back," she says, starting the cycle. "We'll put something else on that sandwich." She whirls the bike around, kicking up small rocks, and fishtails down the trail toward the bottom of the Butte. I watch her go, listen. Watch, listen. Take the portable telescope and follow her down as far as I can see until I hear her no more. I go to the east, aim the scope on the road I expect she might be taking either into Blackfoot or to Atomic City so I can see her until I can see her no more, not wanting to miss anything.

A lull after a storm rarely lasts long. The wind returns, first lightly, then at its usual twenty mile per hour pace, the desert a constant drone until nightfall.

© 2025 Ralph Thurston