The Meadow 63 This isn’t an Elegy. Caldor isn’t Dead Taylor Graham Our forest-away-from-home, torched last summer. It’s December. I’m driving foothills up mid-Sierra —coming back. Muscle-memory knows all the curves. Here’s the turnoff onto logging road. In that canyon the blaze started—the fire’s giant footprint shown on TV news while flames kept changing direction, sweeping through. A moonscape with still-standing pine-crowns lost in cloud. I let Loki out of the car. What’s dead ash and char to a dog? Freest hike ever—no people, no cars, no fences. A chunk of quartz left over from Gold Rush— what does it care for fire? A log charred shiny-black as dragon scales. A manmade artefact: like a book splayed open metallic; each unreadable leaf rings silver. What is the script, the secret message? Loki marks scat of a forest creature come back to its home in ash. A swath of winter grass pushes through soil dozed for the firefight. Now, December sun breaks through cloud, and in midst of burn, a stringer of manzanita, deer-brush, ponderosa, oak, and incense cedar—untouched.
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