Javelin

I remember how light it felt in my hand, how easy it was to believe I could make it fly. I stepped, twisted, and threw—just as he’d shown me. It lifted beautifully, higher than I expected. And then the wind caught it.

The gust came from nowhere—a canyon wind, sudden and startling. I watched the javelin veer midair, its tip turning, riding the draft like something alive. In that instant, my awe turned to dread. It wasn’t coming down where I’d aimed. It was headed straight for them.

The scene slowed to a crawl. My grandfather and brother stood frozen in the sunlight, two small figures at the far end of the field. I remember shouting—though whether it was a warning or just my own panic, I can’t say. The javelin wobbled and whistled down, a line of light and air and inevitability. At the last second, Herb spun. He moved with that same economy he had when throwing—a twist of hips, a sidestep born of instinct. But not fast enough. The javelin struck him high in the thigh.

The sound, faint from where I stood, was not what I expected—not a crack or a thud, but a soft, terrible sound, like mud releasing your boot after stepping deep into it. He dropped to one knee. My brother yelled and I ran towards them drenched with dread.

Black Hollow

“Luck is a very thin wire between survival and disaster, and not many people can keep their balance on it.”~  Hunter S. Thompson

… But 2021 was not an ordinary year. The Cameron Peak Fire, the largest wildfire in Colorado history, had swept through these mountains the summer before. It burned 208,000 acres, including the very slopes above Black Hollow. The trees were gone, the soil scorched into hydrophobic crust. Where once rain would have been absorbed, now it ran free, gathering in gullies, feeding the creek with a speed and volume it was never meant to hold.

On July 20, radar showed rain parked on Crown Point: one and a half to two inches an hour. What would have been another afternoon shower turned into something else entirely. The system sat and poured, hour after hour, feeding the headwaters of Black Hollow Creek.

The creek began to change. Three feet wide on a normal day, it swelled to twenty feet. Logs and branches jammed higher up in the watershed, creating temporary dams. One broke, then another, then another—dozens in succession. Each break released a surge, picking up more debris, creating new jams that in turn gave way. The creek wasn’t a creek anymore. It was morphing into a cascading machine of destruction.

Down in his trailer, Dan had no idea what was brewing upstream. He was preoccupied with something mundane: a leak in the water line. He had turned the system on earlier that day and noticed the pressure wasn’t right. Two other homes shared that line. He walked down to talk to his neighbor, Dick Brown, but Dick didn’t answer the door. Dan called him instead. Dick picked up, his voice steady, nothing unusual in it.

Dan poured himself a drink, settled onto his deck, called a friend. The rain began to fall, steady and hard, but that was nothing new. The power blinked, came back, blinked again. Then he heard what sounded like a shotgun blast. The power cut out completely. He stepped out to the patio and saw a foot and a half of mud already flowing across it. The power pole beside his cabin was swinging six feet in either direction, tethered by wires like a drunk giant on stilts. Still, he told himself, it’s the usual July monsoon rain, just a little angrier this day.

Then he saw Dick Brown’s house floating down the river…

Tongues in Trees

The man revealed himself the way weather does—slowly, by degrees. First the humming, then the staff knocking lightly against stones, then the shape of him moving through the shadow like a wisp of smoke deciding to have a body.

He had sandals made from something that looked like bark backed with fur. His socks didn’t match, and to a child that was the most important thing: one gray, one white—each pulled to the knee beneath worn knicker pants that ballooned a touch at the thighs. She’d watched the hem of his cloak—lichen-green and rock-gray—swing out and in, a pendulum marking a tempo he didn’t hurry. At the crook of his elbow the cloak bared a forearm browned and nicked, a map of small scars and long work. A soddy canvas satchel hung over one shoulder, resting against his hip and swaying slightly as he glided down the path. The scarf at his throat shouldn’t have made sense—too many colors in fabric worn so thin—yet it tied him to the place the way wildflowers tie a meadow to summer.

He leaned on a staff with a knot of wood for a crown. The knot made a clean spiral—the sort you don’t know you’re following until your eyes are deep in its curve. Years later she would encounter spirals in books—nautilus shells, galaxies, the way ferns unfurl—and think of that staff, of how the curve seemed not carved so much as discovered. Children trust that sort of thing more easily than adults. She had trusted it at once.

He was taller than she expected up close. Not imposing; the word didn’t fit. Tall the way lodgepoles are tall—upright by long habit, not effort. When his eyes met hers they did a peculiar thing: they warmed without softening. Mischief, yes, but none of the predatory gleam she’d learned to watch for in later years—just the brightness people have when they’re about to share a secret and aren’t worried you’ll mishandle it.

“Ah,” he’d said, and the syllable eased into the air, smooth as water over stone. “The mountain greets her own today.”