Leaving the Valley

Tomas was on duty again. He found Polly at the visitor centre kiosk just after sunrise. He had a fresh Thermos of coffee. He set it on a bench and sat down next to it.

They did not say much for a while. Polly preened her wing feathers. The morning was cool and smelled of the river.

"I imagine you're moving on," Tomas said eventually.

Polly tilted her red head. He nodded slowly.

He told her about the rest of the park, the parts she had not been to. The high country off Tioga Road, with its lakes and bare granite domes. Hetch Hetchy, the other valley to the north, dammed and turned into a reservoir more than a hundred years ago, still beautiful, still mostly empty. The grove of redwoods up in Tuolumne Meadows. He spoke of these places with the calm pride of someone who had spent fourteen years getting to know one stretch of mountains.

"This place doesn't really show you everything," he said. "Even if you live here. You catch pieces. The peregrines, the lilies, the Milky Way on Wednesday but not on Thursday. People come for three days and think they saw it. They saw a postcard." He sipped his coffee. "Better to see one piece all the way through, I think. The peregrines I told you about? Fourteen years and I still don't know what they're going to do tomorrow."

Polly thought about her dives off the El Capitan ledge. She had not landed cleanly once. She had also gotten less bad at it each time. She thought she could keep getting less bad for a lifetime.

A shuttle bus pulled in. The same green bus. The same driver. The driver waved at Tomas as she opened the door. Tomas waved back.

"Off you go," he said. He stood up. He had not finished his coffee.

Polly stretched her blue-teal wings. The shuttle door was still open. She could smell the warming pine of the morning forest and the faint diesel of the bus and the river beyond.

She lifted off from the bench railing, circled once over the visitor centre, and climbed. The valley dropped away. El Capitan stood on the left. Half Dome on the right. The Merced ran the floor.

At the rim, she banked west. Below her, a peregrine was hunting a small flock of swifts along the cliff face. Polly watched it for half a minute. Then she found the wind she wanted and let it carry her out of the park.

Behind her, Tomas was already moving on toward the meadow. He had a clipboard out. There would be corn lilies to mark today, and tomorrow, and next year.