II.
You rise in the dark in your rent house and turn off the air conditioner because you cannot abide the tyranny of noise in the morning. Greek yoghurt for breakfast to help you digestion, Ice in the water jug, a pickle in the lunch bucket, a naproxen for the chronic pain, and out to the truck to get to the field.
Later, sometime between false and real dawn, you lean against the bed of your work truck, enjoying the cool of the metal, looking up at Orion in the sky. An audiobook talks quietly from the phone in your pocket while you put together your telemetry equipment. As Orion fades away, you can begin to see the prairie surrounding you. Picking up a signal on the receiver, you start walking across the range. The signal is weak, so you hike up the canyon, homing in on the animal on which you put a radio collar months ago. As you walk, you see the plants, unconsciously naming them as you go. Helianthus, Ziziphus, curtipendula, Prosopis. Sunflower, lotebush, sideoats, mesquite. Where they are and how they are arranged tell you a story about the history of the place. You often think about how little you have changed while not realizing how many more names you have for your world, how much more the landscape tells you than it did before. You reach where the canyon rises up to become the caprock, and the light on your equipment tells you the GPS data on your study animal has downloaded to your tablet. Another set of data points from which you’ll tell the world how prairie wildlife uses the landscape.
Since you are so close, you pick a deer trail and climb the escarpment, leaving the rolling plains for the llano estacado. By the time you reach the top, your sweat is salt and the wind hot and coarse across it. Catching your breath at the top, you look out across the dryland cotton that comes to the edge of the caprock. There’s Amaranthus along the edge and towards the field’s center. Amaranths. Pigweed. Carless weed. Wildlife food in a sea of fiber and ecological desert. Native and noxious. You wonder how many miles you walked chopping cotton back then compared to how many miles you hike doing wildlife biology now?
Some of those memories are blurry and faded, but you remember the sweat and the waiting and the want. How many rows walked, how miles of ditches dug, how many long nights working a job you hated to get from then to now? You’re unsure, but the math says it took you fifteen years longer to get to college than your classmates. You turn your back and mind to the cotton and past to use the high ground to scan through the other frequencies of your radio collars.
Eventually the first part of the day is over, and you load up in your work truck to head back to the office to analyze your data. The hours spent driving between study sites doesn’t bother you. You live in your head a lot of time, so for hours at a time you compose stories in your head, think about all the jobs you’ve had and the ones you still want, what life was like before college left you stranded in the gulf between your first social circle and what is supposed to be your current one. More and more you think about a tiny shack someplace quiet with no pressing need to be anywhere in the morning but on the porch watching the sun rise. You’re still waiting. For another house in the country, for a job with fewer hours, more time in a tent, less time being in charge. You’ve learned your patterns enough to know you feel more feral at certain times of the year. You no longer quit jobs for the sake of the going. So, you’ll shrug off the urge to go do something different. Back at the office you’ll pour yourself a glass of unsweetened tea, sit down and write what you’ve spent the past years learning. You’ll not stop waiting.
Not today at least.
instante mense 