It was a Tuesday that tasted like a dry cracker, so we loaded the truck with a patchwork quilt, a jar of pickled peaches, and a Coleman stove that hummed like a confused bumblebee. We were headed for the Dragoon Mountains, a place where the rocks look like they were piled up by a giant who had recently finished a very long book about clouds.
We pulled into Cochise Stronghold just as the sun was beginning to melt like a stick of butter over a hot blue skillet. The mountains there aren’t like regular mountains; they are a granite jigsaw puzzle of domes and boulders, standing around in the high-desert silence as if they are waiting for someone to tell a joke that hasn’t been invented yet.
I set up the tent in the shade of an oak tree that seemed to be dreaming of rain. The ground was covered in pine needles and the tiny, frantic footprints of lizards who were clearly late for a very important lizard meeting.
We spent the afternoon wandering through the trail system, walking among the massive stones where Chief Cochise once hid his people. The rocks have names like “The Whale” or “The Thimble,” but to me, they looked like old loaves of bread that had been left out in the weather for a thousand years. Every now and then, a hawk would stitch the sky together with its wings, screaming a sharp, metallic sound that echoed off the granite walls like a dropped silver dollar.
As evening came, we cooked bacon on the stove. The smell of the fat drifted up into the rocks, and I wondered if the ghosts of the Apache liked the smell of 20th-century breakfast meats. We sat on a flat boulder and watched the stars come out. They were bright and cold, like a handful of salt thrown across a black velvet table.
There is no telephone in the Dragoons, and the only news is the wind rattling the dry grass. It’s a good place to be if you want to forget that the rest of the world is busy being the rest of the world.
Richard Brautigan
Richard Gary Brautigan was an American novelist, poet, and short story writer. He wrote throughout his life and published ten novels, two collections of short stories, and ten books of poetry. Brautigan’s work has been published both in the United States and internationally throughout Europe, Japan, and China.
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