fire dancers and pot smokers and me

There is a night security guard looking at me right now... I am sitting in my usual parking space in the dark lot... my face lit up in an eerie green glow from my computer screen. All summer I have come to the hotel parking lot to steal their wireless internet "waves" and they've never caught me. Don't you dare catch me now. I've almost made it.

Ok, he's gone. More important things to do. Brr... my toes are freezing. I can't believe seasons have come and gone and it's actually fall here in Zion. I remember driving in the first week of June and seeing snow still up on the caps of the surrounding mountains. I remember seeing all that snow melt in July and watching the Virgin river swell and pull the surrounding banks into it's current. I remember when it was too dangerous to hike the slot canyons when the flash floods were high and when the Narrows water was too fast. I remember the sad look on that German man's face when I told him it was closed and he said he'd been planning to hike the Narrows all his life and this was finally the trip. I remember that weird week in July when it hailed every day. I miss those nights when the rocks baked in the sun all day and kept all of us in the canyon warm during the night and I could walk around in shorts and tshirt and take a night nap on the bench outside the lodge. I remember the night when I awoke from my thoughts to find two skunks hanging out underneath my bench and other nights when grey fox would sneak up to sniff my toes. And now it's fall. The leaves in the higher elevations have already turned to yellows and reds. It's already snowed an hour away from us and the snowbirds have come down from the mountains to visit Zion "to get away from the cold." And I sit here tonight with my toes freezing. The cold has finally reached us too.

The other night I had my first and only bonfire for the summer. How sad is that. One of the park service guys is going back home to Ohio for school and he had a going away party. There was a weather advisory for strong winds for that night and all of southern Utah was asked to not have fires, yet that is exactly what we did. I looked around the circle and in the glow of the fire I could recognize almost every face. Springdale is small. The same person that serves you coffee one place is your waiter at the next restaurant. They were serving drinks out of the back of a pickup truck and some people had reached the idiot mode pretty early on because they had already come from the bar. I stood there throwing the stick for the dog. Lucky me, he always came back to play again. He was faithful. I needed a friend. Every once in awhile I glance back to see what people were doing. Some were twirling fire. One guy was riding a unicycle around blowing fire, except he increasingly fell on his face as he drank more and more to get more fuel for his firey breath. Other people were standing around smoking pot. I listened as their conversations turned more philosophical and watched as their mouths hung open more in a state of amazement at words such as "the" and "it." My side of the fire was alittle less interesting. We stood around talking and I threw the stick for the dog. I was surrounded by people, yet I realized I was completely alone.

I'm ready. I love Zion. I love the beauty of it all but I'm so ready to be home. I'm tired of being lonely. I live in community, yet the odd thing about community like this is that you can sit there in a room full of people and watch a movie, yet only be masking the fact that you're still alone. Physically, you're social... intellectually, you're dying inside. I had a weird dream last night about being back home and walking the streets alone. Everything was so grey and though I've been told some of us dream in color and others not, I've never been so aware of the grey of my dreams before. I met up with a carnival. It looked like fun, but I walked on because there was no one to enjoy it with. And the odd reminder from the other night, as I weaved in and out of the shops in my dreamy town, a dog followed me, asking me to throw the stick.