The nearest town is Halfway, Oregon, population 500. Visitors are few. These are the times I go stir crazy. Normally I can hike up and down the mountain to check up on the mule deer, the resident redtailed hawk, a badger which has been busy excavating a burrow right in the middle of the trail. But days of prison-like isolation can make me question my sanity.
Words fall like predators on the page.
I think about all these things, too distracted to read or maybe write. I'd live this way if it weren't for my husband, my teaching job. Then the afternoon wind begins to pick up. I watch as it blows the smoke to the east, then go out on the catwalk to take a reading. I think about how it would feel to become air, a thermal over the mountains.