Allow yourself to imagine the following. It is early morning in the low, inland hills, and the landscape is all beige and green. The desert boulders, the uncovered, lightened-by-the-sun dirt beneath you, the gnarled arms of the scrub oak choking and alive out of the ground, big patches of tall, swaying grass made thirsty in the heat. But there are cypress trees, too, rich and dark and green, and the sharp, pointy fingers of yucca plants, and the low laying black sage shrubs that creep into the hiking path with their hint-of-purple flowers. It's a little cold so you draw your hands into your sleeves and bunch your hands up against you. In the air are some familiar smells that seem out of place - dark, sweet earth, yesterday's fire, the fumes from someone else's generator. You smell something like a gas station near the beach and something like the rosemary bush growing wild in your dad's backyard. It's very quiet. You hear your own breathing and some birds in the morning and the barely audible wind-ripple of the flora, who seem to be waking up just like you. You spent the night camping, so you awoke with the sun, much earlier than you would otherwise, with that particular and almost delicious stiffness in your back that comes from sleeping out. You zipped yourself out in the morning while in a low crouch, gently moving the pull in a graceful arc up from the ground as to not wake the others. You pulled on your shoes and went to find somewhere to pee, which took longer than expected because the vegetation is so sparse near you - not much privacy. But you are awake now and standing in your long underwear and your favorite hoodie in your pulled on shoes and no socks trying to figure out where exactly the sun will pop up on the horizon. Everyone else seems to still be asleep, you can almost make out their breathing against the walls of the semicircle of tents. Blue tarps that crinkle underfoot. Shoe prints in the dust/dirt. Yesterday no one put up their rain flies - it's so dry here - and when you were first lying down to sleep last night you thought you might never get to. Tent too small, paired with a fellow summer camper you barely know, and the pulsating brightness of the stars overhead. The light through the mesh at the peak was bright enough to keep you awake, but as you stared out into space and saw - truly for one of the handful of times you'll ever experience it in your life - how the points of light trembled, they tremolo'd. You couldn't stop staring. And in fact you stared long enough to see these unfixed twinkles rotate in the sky overhead. Was nothing out there tied down? Could it really be that nothing out there was immovable? Could you truly not set your watch to it? The thoughts felt heavy on your chest. But the ground beneath you pushed back against you laying on it and somehow eventually you drifted off. You dreamed of a tall bridge over a river, or rather you dreamed of a bridge that rose from the landscape, tearing itself from the highways it was connected to. You saw the bridge - white granite, gleaming in the low afternoon sun - stand up and shake itself off as if an old dog called to dinner. You saw it loping toward the sunset shedding cars with each step. The dream is still with you now, but it's just a glimmer, and all you can recall in this moment is that you dreamed of water flowing. You try to bring it back to life but the permanence around you draws your attention away from the walking bridge. This sky feels eternal, the sandstone you're standing on feels unending, your life and maybe this camping trip feel like they will continue on forever, constantly unfolding before you. You're tired and far away from where you live but, as the sun just starts to crest, you are more awake than you can recall ever having been. You feel a warm wind and you are aware of it, you feel every single molecule of air rushing past you, though you are yourself infinite you feel the infinitesimal erosion of your features that this wind brings. It is carving you, ever so slightly, and were you stand in this place for 10,000 years you would finally be unrecognizable. You would be blank. You remember all of a sudden that there is a river nearby, the whole reason you and the others have come here. You're not sure what tubing is and you don't plan to find out. But you love swimming, the freedom and the surrender it gives you. Yesterday, on the way over, you complained to the chaperones. You said, but where will we shower, hoping that by pointing it out they'd somehow realize their mistake and turn the whole caravan around. But they laughed good-naturedly at you instead, saying well first of all you don't have to shower when you're camping. When you thought of how long a week was you must have looked horrified. So they said if you really want you can take a bath in the river, and then one of them said yeah I brought a bar of soap, irish spring, get it? And handed you the box. So you come down off your eternal rock and gently rifle through the tent and get the bar out and borrow a towel from your tentmate. You arrived late the night before, sundown already started and a big rush to get the tents up cook dinner etc, no chance yet to go see the river you drove all this way to come camp next to. Not sure where it is, but over the magnetic silence of the others sleeping you hear a faint babbling coming from over toward the sun, which is now more than halfway up over the horizon. So you walk toward it, soap and towel in hand, stepping over the dry little plants in the path. Allow yourself to imagine this. Imagine the smoothness of the bar of soap in your hand, allow yourself to trace the words IRISH SPRING embossed in the mint chocolate chip green. Picture the blue and white stripes of the towel. Hear the sound of your clothes hitting the rock as they drop balled from your hand. Count the goosebumps that rise from your skin, map exactly where your tan line starts, where your board shorts hit your knees. Listen to the river growing louder with each step, tv static growing and hissing and beneath it, the throb of stones smoothing below the surface. Allow yourself this. Be there. Hold your breath as in you step.
When you return from the river you will see someone, another awake. A friend of yours, you'd like to think. She will be writing something in a book. You will ask her what she's doing and she will say, cryptically, that she begins each day with a psalm.
