Gray's Canyon

Cottonwoods clatter.  A steady wind has risen with the evening.  The multitude of fresh leaves on plump, flexing petioles slide and shuffle against one another.  They make the noise of a crowd. 

Sometime before my arrival there was a crowd in my campsite on the Green River.  There is a large fire mound of old, gray coals and circling it is a broad ring of beer bottles.  My predecessors, as they sat around the fire, must have tossed bottle after bottle over their shoulders.  Many bottles per shoulder, I guess, and possibly several shoulders.  The many bottles shout loudly an awful egotism, although bottle litter is a squalid sign of one's power and persistent presence.   The bottle mouths had gathered sand before I arrived.  I gather the bottles into a pile, and as I gather I find more and more among the bushes.

There is a crowd in the campground down the river about a quarter of a mile. River runners were lined-up for dinner when I drove past.  Rafts were parked in the campground sites.  I have used that campground in the past but now tend to drive past.  My site up the river, despite the bottle litter, offers only the crowd of cottonwood leaves, a thicket of skunkbush, sand sage, and greasewood.  It offers this:  "kwip, kwip, kwip, kwip."  The periodic song of a lonely bird, calling from a cottonwood for a mate.