Broken Wings and Cow Tank

Sorry it's been a while....I wish I could write several posts to record all my trail diaries here, but I won't make you few faithful friends wade through all the blather of it. In short: my first week back survival camping with at-risk youth was painful and terrible. I almost went back to my parents' basement, snake-ridden regardless. I pulled my groin, I fell into dehydration, I couldn't eat more than chicken broth at night, I felt fatigue for the first real time. I let someone else carry my pack up a mountain. My pride, my energy, my heart and my eyes were dim and flat. They made me leader and trainer, but I felt like I'd been put into the program as a patient, which maybe isn't necessarily a bad outlook on any week.

I returned home that week wondering whether I should be in Arizona at all. That week, Elder Holland spoke at my stake conference, my first Sunday in my new ward. It was the first time in over 15 years that an apostle spoke in a Mesa stake conference they said. It was his typical hellfire and damnation approach, and it left everyone in laughter and tears and hearts that swelled both heavy and light which is a horrible explanation but all I've got for you today.

He spoke of night journeys, of the lack of light and happiness, of sleepless worry and angst....I thought of many of you and wished you could have heard E. Holland shout at us with something like Moroni's anger for us not to dare to think God doesn't love us. Not to dare leave the church during those long nights, not to dare think God is unaware, angry, dismissing, or unfeeling. He said God loves broken things, that it takes broken clouds to get rain, broken earth to get grain, broken grain to get bread. He told us to stay calm if we felt God breaking our heart, to not dare bail when God is only halfway through. He promised us that God keeps the altar close, that after our heart has been broken and placed upon that altar, that He has promised to quickly return us a more powerful, better heart in return for what we trusted Him with. He told us again and again that God loves his broken things the most.

I don't have too much to say, I'll come back later this week and fill in this space with funny stories about the boy band I walked with a rotation ago, or the silly girls I ran around with this last week, but for now I'll just give one brief moment I had at a cow tank in Tonto National Forest last Sunday, while most of the rest of you were watching conference and the snow drift past your windows.

It was warm, I was sunning myself in the muddy banks around the cow tank after filling my canteens and dropping them with two drops Clorox bleach each. We didn't hike that day, but I sawed off a limb with a bent blade to coal-blow a juniper bowl that has already begun to crack. I don't care, I'm finishing it anyway, out of sheer stubbornness. I had just left a sitting with another staff member where we discussed all the world's great questions of soul and spirit.

For those of you unacquainted with cow tanks, they are man-made puddles of thick water meant for cattle and attractive to all other forest beasties, including javelina, cougar, rattlesnake, and the occasional band of at-risk youth. The worst cowtank water I ever had left green flecks on my teeth and tasted like expensive Asian tea, or so I told my band of girls last summer. We shivered as it went down and made sarcastic guesses as to how much money we could make off it to the posh elite crowds their own parents sometimes belong to. Sometimes cowtanks are dry as a bone, I've slept in dry cowtanks before, waterless and cold on the shit-filled hay bed bottoms. The cowtank I was currently at looked somewhat better than this one:



I noticed a butterfly floating along the surface of the middle of the murky water doing the dead man's float, and I wanted it. It was an Arizona Sister Butterfly, Adelpha bredowii eulalia; we'd seen them all week flying through the oaks and sucking moisture from between the rocks around the creekbeds and water pockets. I wanted to put her in my journal and keep her wings to remember the week by. So I stood, dusted myself off and grabbed a long broken limb from out of a nearby dying tree. As I pulled the thin parchment creature across the water to my side of the shore, I was sickeningly shocked to see the butterfly was still alive and stepped back to watch her stand up and begin to sun her tattered, broken wings in the 3:00 sun.

I sat beside her, which made her nervous, but she couldn't go anywhere so she stayed next to me, her wings at a perfect angle to the sun's light and heat. As her wings dried, she began to flutter them and slowly flap them forward and back, forward and back. I was enthralled, entranced.

I called my girls from my camp with two hoots, and they obediently came from between the trees, ragged, smoky, dirty, smelly, with twigs in their hair. I loved their sweet, ornery faces and almost laughed out loud at the sight of their scared faces, wondering if I found unburied poo or some other disgrace that would constitute a family pow-wow and lecture. Instead, I showed them the butterfly I felt I had saved from an untimely drowning and let them call her Mona. I let Mona walk along my hand, the three girls' heads bobbing all around my wrist, watching the butterfly's long tongue extend and feel all around the hair on my knuckles until, satisfied or confused, she rolled her tongue back up in an impressive spiral and let it disappear magically into her tiny face.

We took turns holding Mona and talked about how horrible it would be to spend all morning face down in a cow tank and how miraculous she could fly again by letting the sun dry all the cow dung and dirty water from her fragile wings. We talked about what it meant to have heavy wings and what kind of light in our lives can act as that healing warmth.

Unfortunately for my great metaphor, as soon as Mona had the strength, she flew from one girl's arm right back into the damned cow tank. As we grabbed another long branch to pull her back out, we laughing talked about how sometimes we need several new beginnings and how it isn't necessarily the end if we fly straight back into the cow tank.

I guess I don't have much more to say right now....I have to get ready to go into the office, I need to stop by the bank. My budget's tighter than it's been in years, but my heart feels stronger in contrast. My body has readjusted to the trail and I am no longer the slowest hiker. But I'm likewise becoming more and more aware of the cowtanks I'm dead-man-floating in, though I deny it and justify it most of the time. Well, I'm in no state to say anything real profound here and now, ......I figured I'd better post something though so you faithful friends don't just stop reading me altogether. Thanks for all the recent nudging comments, sorry I've been so absent. You should all come to Arizona. Snow is overrated.