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Shouting at the Sky
Troubled Teens and the Promise of the Wild
By Gary Ferguson
Late afternoon brings clouds -- cold and gray, like they were spun out of steel; while so far the most they've managed here in the desert is a few drops of rain, from the looks of it they're loosing no end of fresh snow on Thousand Lake Mountain. Just when we're sure the storm is going to get us after all, two big fingers of blue sky crack open in the west to light a band of mist lying along the domes of Capitol Reef, turning them into sun-drenched turrets and ramparts, one minute half hidden and the next rising out of the gray like portals in the mists of Avalon. It's simply incredible, a show of beauty that completely overwhelms us, and before long Megan and Jonathan are running back and forth across the hills around camp, gaining this rise and then that one, trying to see it from every possible angle. In the last of the light a rainbow begins to form barely a half mile away, one end planted at the base of Rabbit Butte and the other just to the east, in the foothills of the Henrys. It comes in stages, a few weak bands at first, swelling to something fat, complete, every color clear, as if it had been finger painted on the sky. Even Susan, who by ow has shuffled back to her bag, once more sad and dejected, comes hurtling out from under her tarp. "Wow! That's the biggest rainbow I've ever seen in my life!" she says, grinning for the first time in two days.
