Rock on a Hilltop

The small town gets smaller behind me as I creep up the hill and push the brake in response to the bright red light. The other cars move across the intersection as solemn and smooth as dancers. The sunlight strikes at the pavement. Morning comes slow and harsh in Andalusia. I am supposed to go straight. I have had every intention for the last two days to go straight to Valencia. That is the planned route. But the hour is hanging between morning and afternoon. I’ve had a late start and my belly is full of fine dark coffee and a rich pain au chocolait from a café just down the street from where my car is poised and purring. Chugging on its own ignition it waits on the light.

My foot is tensed and ready to return to the gas when I look to my right. There is a road with no signs, and no one else has turned to go that way. It winds down into some desert. I got the keys for this car in Malaga. That is further south, before the beginning of the desert. I have hugged the coast and kept these last three days baptized in the sight and chilling softness of the Mediterranean sea. But now I am up past Almeria. I don’t even know the name of the village I’m leaving. I pulled over for breakfast without care. The desert is really beginning in earnest now, I can see it sprawling out to the right. The light flashes green, I flick on my blinker and turn right.  

 The road lounges suddenly, sudden after the erect asphalt snake of the freeway. I wheel around a bend and the freeway is lost, sights, sounds, cars, and all. The road is like a cat lolling on its back on the ground. It lopes through a desert plain that rises up beautiful in its sameness and sudden changes. Canyons form between hills. The ground is ashen beige with a patterned ochre and eerie green. Dark scrubby brushes cling to the earth in a pattern of spacing only they understand. There are few trees and nothing to interrupt the domination of the sloping hills and canyons save the road. Days of stacked solitude have a sudden power in the desert. I hear my voice, speaking into the silence.

“Why did I do it? Why did I stay?”  

Gripping the wheel, pulling it gently the bright white fiat glides along the languid road like a skipper over pond water. The desert is my sea now and I am drifting.  

“Three years. Three lost years and I knew it all the time. I knew he was lying. I knew he was treating me like nothing and I stayed for it, I sat under it and I said ‘I love you please don’t leave’, he threatened to leave, and I wouldn’t let him go! I could feel it that it was wrong and it didn’t matter, I stayed again and again, I pulled him back over and over.”

Three years spent on deception and manipulation, erosion of words like no and mine. The sunbaked expanse lay urgently content under the bright sky and there is nothing to crowd out the question.  

“How do I protect myself from living it again? He seemed like someone else when we met and for a while after. If you don’t know at first and by the time you do know you hang on, what am I supposed to do?”  

The desert went on past the windows.

“I should have let go two years ago. Learn when to let go, that’s what you do.”

Always a disciple of tenacity and now I have to learn how to let go. This is a delicate point. How do you measure it? How can you know when giving up is not failure but wisdom? How do you choose the right moment to open your hands and say, not enough.

“It has to be instincts. It has to be gut feelings. I knew it in my gut and I didn’t listen. The moment you feel that you know that deep, that’s when you do it.” I nod to myself and sigh, letting the weight of the regret roll off me as if I were wet and pushing a towel over my skin. “You have to learn to listen to your instincts.”  

I fall silent, meditating on the feelings that come from the base of the stomach and the back of the mind. The desert rises and falls around me from slopes and hills and little canyons and back to flat again, rising and falling like breathing. Then there is a hill the road is curling over.

I am gliding faster alongside two hills, a long elegant bridge strung between them gleaming proud in the sun. It is bright white, and it has been there a long time. It is probably medieval. Down in the pitch bottom of the valleys or off the side of the hills every so often there are little buildings. Hard to say what they are from the road, sometimes they look like churches or mosques, with smaller ones clustered around, maybe a village. What I can see from the road is the doorways solid black like open mouths, no doors remain. Abandoned, all of them. They are probably medieval too. This stretch of Spain is where the Moors and the Visigoths vied for power for hundreds of years. Frontier lines moved from one kingdom to another over and over, attacks, battles, alliances, fortresses, and their memory is a scar to the landscape.  

Driving further up a road strung like drizzled olive oil and now there’s only other tall hills radiating outward in even sloping peaks. They are smooth and poised as fabric draped over some mysterious bundles. They feel like stepping stones. I can see past them to the edge of the Mediterranean. It looks like if I took a few steps across them I could dip my feet in the water but I know this is an illusion. The water is miles and miles away. I have been driving into the hills of the desert since morning and now it is afternoon. I am restless suddenly. My feet are ready to meet the desert, the gentle smoothness of the hills is as alluring as a soft lapping surf.  

I see a telephone pole supporting telephone wires that stretch effortlessly across the landscape. They too look like I could reach out and touch them. The road flattens before the next switch back, there is a pull off point. I pull over and stop.  

“I’m going to go touch that pole.” My words fall against the sound of the car turning off as I pull the keys from the ignition. Without the rumble of the cars combustion and my own voice, the silence falls in and it is absolute.  

I leave the car without my jacket. I push my keys into my bra and hang my camera around my neck. The car door echoes as it shuts. The silence feels deeper when it returns. I haven’t seen another car since I left the freeway and there are none now. I turn in a circle slowly, looking closely at the hills and the road now that I’m standing and looking without the windshield dividing me from them. The sky is a pallid grey but there is sunlight pushing through like a puree drippin through a sieve. I can smell the air and it smells like dust. Nothing moves, or makes any noise but my own feet.

 I start walking toward the phone pole. Within a few steps the optical illusion ends. There is a steep drop off. I scramble down the rocks carefully, my boots handle them deftly.  Once down the slope the pole looks even further away. I keep walking toward it, over the uneven surface of the rocks and around scant clinging scrubby brush. Every time the pole seems close I go down a slight incline or take a few more steps and it seems to move further away.  

I look over my shoulder and I can’t see my car anymore. I can barely see the road. I keep walking. Then suddenly the pole stops moving. It gets taller. It has a wooden base that I didn’t expect and it is taller still and then I can reach out my hand and I feel the wood beneath my palm. I look up at it and across the hills at the rest of the towers. The hills spread out peaceful and further than before but they look just as easy to step over. The landscape is sanguine and quiet. My mind is still. It is open. It is more without distraction than it has ever been.

My heart jumps.  

Get back to the car now.  

The voice is hard and firm within my own mind but it came from the back. It came from the bottom. It is pure intutition. It can speak here. It can be heard and felt completly. My body fills with adrenaline and I look around the peaceful hills like a hunted animal but there is nothing. Nothing and no one and no sound but the wind. A gentle breeze is whipping up the scrub brush and they make their soft sounds as their branches brush each other. I turn to go back and I can’t see the road. There is only the expanse of the desert. My heart is pounding and I go to war on myself.  

What is it? Is it an animal hunting me?  

I remember my German professor years before telling the class about Boris the bear. A bear was spotted in Germany and it was such a tremendous sensation the German papers kept track of him and named him Boris. Until a hunter shot him and then there were presumably no bears in Germany again. At least so few bears that there may as well be no bears.  

This is Spain. How is this different? People have lived here so long they’ve probably hunted all predators to nothing from untold generations of sheep raising. I’m being ridiculous. I can’t stop my eyes from roving the landscape. I’d see it coming. This is all flat.  

Don’t coyotes and big cats blend into their environment? I’m hiking faster through the rocks now. The feeling and the voice has not stopped, I am so deeply compelled I cannot stand it and I’m moving even as my logical mind tells me to breathe.  

A person maybe? Is that what it is? Is there some psychopath out here, waiting for their next victim? Another brush of my eyes across the desolate green and brown rocks, the blue and green scrub bushes and more rocks. Any psychopath hunting here would be an idiot, there are no people out here.

But I bend down and carefully pick up a large rock that fills my hand. I carry it firmly. Adrenaline continues to surge. I am hiking as though I were escaping a stalking cat. The feeling builds on itself as I realize my own weakness. My feet stumble over the rocks. My lungs burn and I struggle to breathe. A pack of lucky strikes a day has caught up to me now, my body feels like it is made of faint threads of heated string and rubber but I am pushing myself as fast as I can and it is not fast enough and my heart is pounding in my chest, the feeling is bitter in my dry mouth. I make it to the steep incline. My stomach turns on itself and I’m sweating but I can’t move faster. I keep moving and seem to stay in the same place. I still can’t see the car or the road.   

Breathe, breathe, I tell myself. This is probably nothing. You’ll feel silly when you get in the car, this is a panic attack over nothing. But the deeper voice inside me says  

MOVE.  

My feet are slipping on the rocks as my hands reach up to climb the drop off, I know this is just before the car but I can’t watch behind me or around me now. There is nothing but the short wall of rocks around and above me and to climb it. I’m still gripping my rock in one hand. I'm climbing with my legs and empty hand, leaning with the forearm of my hand full of defensive rock for purchase as I climb. I look down at my camera to keep it from tapping against the rocks as it swings around my neck and then I see it. A small droplet of rain on top of the camera. Then another. Everything is still for a moment, adrenaline falls back as I stare at the droplets.

I stuff the camera against my chest into my thin sweater and keep climbing. One final slip of my foot and I am over the ledge and I can see my car, waiting for me still far but closer and there is the road behind it. I’m running, my legs are burning and so are my lungs and the rock is heavy in my hand but I’m running. I skid in the thin gravel alongside the car as I pull the keys out and unlock it. I jump in and lock the doors behind me and stare out the windows, heart pounding, waiting. There’s nothing. Nothing. Complete silence. No animals, no people, nothing.  

Then there is a tremendous boom. The sky falls open and there is rain. The roof of the car is pounding with rain, like a stampede of horses the rain falls against the roof of the car. The windshield is filled with little rivers and I can’t see the rocks I just climbed, or the telephone pole I touched anymore it is all water. I look down at my camera around my neck and my jacket in the passenger seat, at my own legs. Completely dry, safe, and warm. I hear hail.