The Rivers of Mars
Michael McClintock
South Pasadena, California, US
Starting out about an hour before sunrise, I cross the salt flats to the far
side of the Wakeenepah depression in the cool of the morning. I share the
silence with an occasional, distant coyote out looking for snakes or lizards
still groggy from the night, or a kangaroo rat returning home after a night of
foraging among the bushes and woody shrubs in clumps along the dry washes. The
area appears to be reliably watered with snowmelt each spring from the bare rock
mountains some thirty miles away, which now appear so gaunt and dry, without a
tree, and broken into a thousand jagged, tumbled megaliths by a million years of
freezing and kilning, glacier and flood.
In the late morning I come across a broad
gravel plain marked by a single line of tire tracks; these I follow about a half
mile back to a vacated campsite among large, house-size boulders -- excellent
shelter and even some dry, cozy, rupestral chambers in the hollows and spaces,
walled on two and three sides, suitable for a stay of many days.
The long day ended in a red sky. The dunes and
the flats and all that empty quarter were washed with a glowing red -- an
otherworldly hue. Of course it was pure fancy, but for a fact the place reminded
me of photos I had seen depicting what some believed to be ancient basins and
channels that once held the rivers of Mars.
a short night --
they have come early,
the fleas in my bed
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Read "April " by Barbara Shepherd
