A Crooked Trail Home

By Jordon Shinn.
Rough Draft 6-12-2009


THE PHIL-BURBAN DROPS US OFF AT THE ROADSIDE—angular boxes, bulging stuff sacks, overflowing packs and foam mattresses. Jugs of frozen milk. Tomatoes. Axe handles.

The first trip down we take the trail, long winding switchbacks of an easy grade, then veer right, down a hidden path, boots digging into the loose foliage and top soil, slipping on vines and tumbling rocks, packs tackling us downhill, knees straining under the pressure, resisting collapse.

At the bottom we enter the edge of a meadow. Thick, leafy, knee-high plants surround us on the soggy ground. There is water here. Lots. We walk disconnectedly through and reconnect to the trail. There, we drop the Dutch ovens at a signpost for a return trip. Turning a bend the full meadow comes into view—lush, green, expansive—forested ridges bordering either side with a creek running through, and at the top a cabin, distant, safe, secluded—but not forgotten.

“It’s so beautiful,” exclaims Boots Uribe, P.C.

The stables are empty, stooped. The garden is barren, but for dry yellow stalks of plants that once flourished, and died with the turn of seasons. Ice. Snow. Darkness.

An enormous ponderosa the width of five men stands stoic as a marble pillar next to the cabin, its roots bulging through the porch and twisting through the cabin’s dirt floor in arcs and knots—this cabin will never fall. The tree must be one of the few old-growth ponderosas left at Philmont, having survived the logging days, when nearly the entire landscape was stripped barren of its ancient forests and the mountains were tunneled through with mines in search of gold, to which Baldy Mt. bears an eternal scar—nothing growing past it tree line, save loose slabs of slate rock.

But here, at the far southwest boarder of Philmont, the meadow is green and thick, seemingly untouched but for the narrow trail, which winds along its edge to the Crooked Creek cabin.

The Camp Director gives the orders, and we are spraying bleach water, wiping down shelves and lowering frozen meats in the wooden icebox. The cabin smells fowl of haunta. I sweep the floor with a straw broom. Thick gray clouds billow with every sweep, singeing my nose and stinging my squinting eyes. I hold my breath despite the dust mask.

The stove is priority: heat, potable water, food. Rats’ nets and charcoal clog its cast iron belly. Once flushed, we pitch in a few small chopped logs from the woodpile, and soon a kettle of water is boiling. Next we clean the lanterns—wipe the soot from the glass, adjust the wicks and fill them with a blue five-gallon jug of kerosene. Six functional lanterns.

All are lit and placed on nails found in the dark wooden corners of the cabin, hammered there by homesteaders before us.

After a modest dinner of cold-cuts and potato chips, we set a large, abandoned rat’s nest in the fireplace and build around it a tee-pee of sticks, then a “cabin” of logs. One match ignites the nest, which slowly smolders red like a candescent mesh bulb, combusting the whole pile in quick orange flames and thick white smoke, rising through the stone chimney, swirling on the wind and coalescing the moon. A coyote sends his greeting, howls chillingly in the darkened meadow below.

We are home.