By H. S. Brockmeyer, Annapolis, MD. A Mozart author, taking a break from Wolfgang
I make no apologies for feeling abject terror. There are the best and worst of times (forgive me, Charles Dickens.)
My best friend, David, a writer like myself, and I, had a splendid day hiking the Grand Canyon. We were here with a group, but had separated from the others so that we could have our own personal experience.
The summer day was a dead heat; tan and brown grasshoppers leapt like professional ballet dancers in an unchoreographed pas de deux. I swiped my face for the hundredth time with a sports-stick sunscreen; I wasn’t going into my senior years with wrinkles from a day at the canyon.
The dirt path of the outer rim was foot-worn and parched. The sky stretched out above for a gazillion miles, a milky blue streaked with creamy white cloud striations. We drank obsessively from plastic water bottles, more thirsty after every sip. The saving grace was that, after our hike, we’d meet our group at the bus, and we’d all go to dinner, with lots of cold beer. I could almost taste the cold, spicy bite of that first sip.
As we rounded a corner of dried bushes, branches reaching out like dead skeletons, the most exquisite animal slowly sauntered down from the hill above us and blocked our path.
I stopped as my heart nearly exploded.
David, a tall, muscular man, who had never evinced a lick of fear, even when finding a huge pale yellow centipede on the roll of toilet paper in my guest bathroom, also froze in his tracks.
The animal was a large, solid bighorn sheep. It had the most amazing horns, of a light brown color that curved magnificently backward. The head was large, with gray, stubborn eyes, and a blunt white nose that looked as if it were made for battering. Possibly humans, I thought momentarily.
It eyed us with the interest of a ram who is annoyed by humans in its natural domain. As if it were bored; but a spark of excitement twitched in its eyes. Like a shark that has smelled blood miles away.
David and I looked at each other warily. The ram stayed put on the path; a narrow path that was death by falling on one side, and a hilly bluff with desiccated bushes and happy, apathetic grasshoppers on the other.
I have a high, loud scream that I inherited from my histrionic mother; and let it out as loudly as possible.
The ram did not flinch.
Next, I sang a few lines from a Mozart aria, from his opera, The Marriage of Figaro: “Voi che sapete”. I had voice lessons for years and my coloratura tones echoed in the valley, the best singer’s concert hall I had ever experienced.
The ram gazed at me as if I were an anomaly.
Next, I tried the aria with the high F, a real screamer, from Mozart’s opera, The Magic Flute: “Die Hölle Racht kocht in meinem Herzen…” [Revenge from Hell boils in my heart]. And boy, did it, now. Move, damn ram – move!
But Mr. Ram had all the time in the world.
David had had enough. He took off one tennis shoe and threw it at Big Horns.
The ram rose up on two feet and butted the rubber-heeled cloth shoe down into the valley.
We listened to hear it drop. Nothing. Gulping audibly, we were perplexed.
“Try the other shoe,” I whispered.
David obeyed, now standing in his bare, wide feet with supernatural-sized bunions. He tossed it, hard. The shoe grazed one of the big horns.
The ram just stared at us.
I became indignant; we felt trapped. When we tried to go forward, the ram backed up, as if he was going to buck us. The horns were massive.
“Shoot,” I said, admitting defeat, and sank down onto the dried brown path, all played out.
David yelled a few more times, in his bass voice, but the ram refused to budge.
By now we were sucking down water bubbles in the gnarled plastic bottles. I thought of the people back home; my mother and my two cats, Taco Belle and his brother, Brownie. I began to visualize scenes of my life, while fantasizing about a 20-ounce ice cold diet coke.
A hawk or buzzard began to circle overhead. It was black and persistent, like a hungry shark. David and I began to talk about the fun and crazy times we had spent together, all the while eyeing Big Horns. The ram stood stock-still on the path like a one-dimensional cut-out in real life.
Now the sky began to darken into the most beautiful sunset I had ever seen. Twilight is what you might call it; magic is more fitting. The milky blue sky began to turn into a vivid turquoise-Prussian blue, with magnificent lipstick-red clouds alchemizing the huge expanse. The very neon vividness of the phenomenal heavens was a masterpiece from divine artistry. We could only gaze skyward, knowing that our bus driver would be fraught with worry about our absences.
Still, the ram guarded the forward path. I would have cried, were it not for the rapture of the sky.
Suddenly, a runner came from nowhere, on the path behind the ram. He wore no shirt, only running shorts; his upper tanned torso a work by Michaelangelo. His dirty white runner’s shoes were almost glowing in the weird blue twilight.
He noticed us on the other side of the ram, trapped and desperate. He threw an empty soft drink can at the ram.
Big Horns moved, ever so delicately, then bounded away into the distance, the dried dirt on the path rising at each hoof thud as if bullets were hitting it.
The runner ran by us without a word.
We walked quickly back to the bus, the driver standing outside, peering at his watch in the dusk. The lipstick-red clouds had turned now to a vivid pink, a stark and beautiful heaven woven with Prussian blue.
“Wondered where you guys were,” the bus driver said, as we boarded the bus.
$10 was donated to the Waterlife Discovery Center in Sagle, Idaho, in thanks to the author for her submission.
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