Cairns At The River

Today I walked with Deborah down the steep hill behind my camp house all the way to the river, across the swaying floating bridge, and north off of camp property to a small sandy beach. There next to the water, piled atop the rocky granite boulders that jut forth from the dusty earth everywhere at camp, were countless cairns. Piles of rocks, one after another--small and large stones, short and tall piles, wobbly and stable testaments to those who had come to build them, to dip their toes or their whole selves in the flow of the Tuolumne, and had left these markers of trails and paths and lives as their legacy before departing.

I photographed every one I could find, wide angle and tightly zoomed in, with lush backgrounds of branches leaves trees water and with just the rock on which they were perched to show them off. They reminded me of the surprise cairns Sarah and I were delighted to find hidden away beneath the base of the bridge at Esalen, just below the side that leads from the round meditation room to the art barn, the ones by which we had a stranger take our picture--one of a set of pictures from Pesach, Santa Barbara, and Big Sur that I never saw after they were developed.

While Deborah played in the river and told me stories I slipped and slid back and forth on the "slick as snot on linoleum" rocks, trying to maintain my three points of contact at all time which is hard with a handful of stones. Finding just the right ones I constructed my own cairn balanced on the jagged edge of one half of a pair of boulders, once all the same rock but now split in two with an empty inch of air down the middle, sheared apart by the movement of the earth centuries ago.

As we hiked back up the hill, the one that no matter how many times I climb it always takes my breath away in its steepness, I thought about this new cairn and the others from my past that have shown me my way and brought me to this place...shehechiyanu, v kimanu, v higiyanu, l'hazman hazeh. Why is it so much easier to see where cairns have brought you than where they are taking you? That is part of what defines them I suppose.