Howl at the Full Moon Tonight

Tonight is a full moon, and hopefully the coldest full moon we will have until November. As a way of celebrating this full moon, I'd like to tell a story of a memorable full moon from my past. A full moon.......on the trail.

*coyote hooooooooowl*

So there we were: camped at a cow tank about five miles from Squaw Creek and another five miles to Lime Creek (Note: I just went through a fist full of dirty trail letters trying to find the name Lime Creek in one of them because I forgot what that Final D was called. The name came to me while I was searching, but now my fingers are blackened a little from true-blue Anasazi grit. It feels good. I tried to smell the letters in case they smelled of the trail, but my lip gloss smells too minty to detect the undertones of sweat, sap, and Arizona dirt). I was with a boys band--there were seven of us all together, I think. Three staff (me, Lane, and Curly) and five boys.

It had been our layover day. We had hiked the entire day before, hooting and hollering as we kicked up the dust and slid-skidded our way down off of a mesa and onto a juniper-laden hill surrounding a cow tank oasis. Cow tanks glitter brighter than gold seen from those mesas in the early afternoon.

I had camped there before, during a 36-hour rainstorm. I had been with a large boy band then, as well, and had still been the only girl. Though we had spent all morning no-tracing our firepit and grass beds, when I walked back onto that nostalgic patch of grassy hilltop, I could still detect the rock borders my boys had built to keep the water out of their sleeping bags and I could see the grassless lines forming small rectangles around the thicker junipers where we had dug trenches to flow the river away from our shelters. That had been a good month before. All of those boys had gone home to their families since then.

I could still see each of them and I remembered who had slept where. I set down my pack at the foot of the tree where one of my favorite youngwalkers had slept and lay down on the ground to look up and see what he had stared at for those 36 hours. Probably pretty much the same thing I had seen--wet juniper boughs and dripping green army tarp.

It wasn't going to rain this week. I only built a shelter to keep off the wind. It was still chill at night, and I wore a wool jacket to the fire circle. The full moon was a harvest moon and it was orange.

We sat around the fire and made trail cheesecakes. This was a good boys' band and we had had a good layover. Two of the boys rose early with me and helped me gather firewood all morning. Most of the junipers had been in fires and our hands turned black from gathering so much ashy burnt wood. We got a small fire cracking, and set about making our breakfasts. Lane and Curly, the other two staff members, slept in until all the other boys woke and started throwing small rocks at their shelters. I'm pretty sure I initiated that.

Then we spent the day having sittings and awarding names and beads; the boys sat underneath the juniper shades with me and we made bracelets all day. It was adorable. We had each made lists of people we were going to make presents for during that layover. I taught three boys how to round braid and flat braid and one of them became quicker than I was so I started to file stone pendants out of pride. Price had given me ironwood to work with, and I divvied up the scraps to a few more boys and lent out my files and we had an industrious day stringing beads and braiding fake sinew necklaces and writing in our journals. No one even took a nap. Best layover day I ever had on the trail.

So that night, when we gathered around the fire circle beneath a full harvest moon, the boys and I felt good. I'm trying to remember the fire circle topic. Every night on the trail, we pass around a talking stick (think the conch shell from Lord of the Flies) and the person holding the talking stick speaks freely from the heart about whatever question or topic someone in the band comes up with. I remember one of the boys picked the topic, and it was something about weakness. I remember feeling humbled. I remember Lane and I exchanging glances over the fire, as if our eyes were telling each other that this was good, this was real. I loved working with Lane. Genuine, genuine, careful man. But fun and squirrely, too. We had spent the day in serious, reverent contemplation to come up with honor names for two of our boys who had changed significantly since they had received their first, and now outdated, Anasazi names.

After everyone had spoken, we were silent. I love the sound of a campfire spitting coals. Everyone in the band had been here for a few weeks. The smoke didn't bother any of us. We each shared what we had made that day and who we were going to gift our best pieces to. One boy had made a bracelet for each of his sisters, another had made a necklace with a wooden bead for his mom, another boy had dutifully, nervously scraped together a stone ring for a girl he hoped would still be there when he went home, bless his heart.

That's when we noticed the moon was bright orange. "We have to howl at it." I suggest that to every band I'm with during a full moon. Whenever I'm with a girl band, and the moon looks kind of full, I just tell them it's a full moon all week because those girls have so much fun finding reasons to hoot at the top of their lungs.

The boys were in. We walked up to the lip of the cow tank so we could see the reflection of a ghostly orange circle filling the water's surface. A double full moon. We felt like savage kings of beasts and started giggling prematurely. Then, on my count, we all howled and hooted and roared at the moon, and then we waited. Sure enough, from two or three different points away off in the distant horizons, we heard Anasazi bands throw back their heads and return our calls, howling and hooting from their own cozy cowtanks or creek elbows. That was when my favorite of the boys turned to me and said, "Emily, did you know I have cat eyes?" and in the light of the full harvest moon, he bugged out his eyes, and I saw that his pupils dropped down to a point, like a teardrop, like cat eyes. And I screamed my guts out in awesome giggly fright. I had never seen coloboma before, didn't know it existed.

And that's how I'll honor the full moon tonight--I'm going to remember those boys and our adventures, the hot house we built at the end of the week, the time we got lost while Curly was leading, the time Cat-Eyes teared up when I gave him his name and told him he was a man, the light of that harvest moon. Hit it, Neil Young.