Sierra Nevada
It’s a thousand-mile round trip. Launching over the Cascades through Willamette Pass, running south with the pines that border the high desert, skirting Klamath Lake down to the California border, down south further, weaving through the Modoc, we buy gas and ice cream sandwiches in Susanville. I ask the clerk where we can run the dogs, and he directs me to a city park where community softball teams are gathering for a game. My dog won’t jump back into the car when we load to drive.
Mercy balks, unsure of her footing, distrustful of the plastic bumper on the Outback, though she can clear five feet over a fallen log. We back the left rear tire into a pothole on the gravel road to lower the gate and wrangle her back inside with an improvised choke chain. Emmy, the German Shorthair and smartest dog I’ve ever known, rides in the back seat like a boss with Dad.
We wait for the flagger to flip the sign, paving the road smooth and black on the highway into Reno, licking ice cream from our fingers, a billboard on 395 advertising a Counting Crows concert at the casino. We blow through Carson City up the pass on 50 to Lake Tahoe, weaving out of Nevada, back into California, south from the lake up further into the granite mountains at dark.
There are black bears and mountain lions here, aspens, sequoia, pine,and juniper. I think on these natives before settling to sleep on the back porch, in the open air with the dog, trespassers that we are in this place. Each day I spot a sabled coyote up the steep ridgeline, dancing over golden boulders and windfallen logs, watching.
Kim K. McCrea 
I’m envious, both of the writing and these places that I’m never likely to see. But I just caught a glimpse. Nice work, Kim.
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You are kind, Ray, thank you. I’m always delighted to find a word from you.
I feel Alabama reading your posts, though I’ve never been there: all the sun and humidity and honor; there is humor and grace, the man and the landscape.
Though I’m of the west, on this day of all days, we are simply neighbors.
My great-great-great grandfather left the Union army in disgust of war and homesteaded in western Idaho before it was a state. No kings for us.
I hope you continue painting with your words, more, bigger. You have a gift. I feel, somehow, it’s us, the troubled poets, whispering across a continent, that will keep us stumbling forward.
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