Belief Is What You Can Get Away With

Poetry

after Natalie Diaz

I hiked the mystic trail for the first time in flip-flops. Flip-flops! Flip-flops I hadn’t worn more than twice. The beartooths ripped my feet apart, no care for the rubber promise of protection, but to everyone’s surprise, I made it all six and a half miles. We went down to the beach of mystic lake. The clean glacial-cold water healed over the rips in my feet, or at least I believed that enough to convince myself to come back to this dammed lake and her forest again, again, and again. 

I camped for the first time in a campground down the valley from mystic lake. It will be fun! my cousins kept repeating, but they’d been camping before. I checked every nook and cranny of the site for murderers, big or small. All night I tossed and turned in my hammock (a choice for a first trip, I know), so sure a bear was standing just next to me planning how to have her next meal. All night I contemplated the meaning of death while a bird sang softly for her favorite audience: the creek. What nice music for my death! 

Yet morning came. I was surprised too. I thought of dragging myself to the car and home, but the picnic table was calling to me. I sat on its edge, as the sun crept its way higher into the sky, showering the blanket of trees with soft golden light. Their gilded greens slowed the beat of my heart, and the thoughts in my mind halted on their march. The force of the earth’s painting I saw with my own eyes knocked me back onto the dirt. These quiet early blues of the morning became my home for years to come. 

When I told that story on a soft cerulean evening under the loving shade of lodgepoles, someone said, Belief is what you can get away with. I don’t really know what he meant. I did see a bear years later, barely twenty steps ahead of me, just below the palisades that skiers landmark in the winter. I looked into her eyes. And I knew she wasn’t going to hurt me. We were two women alone in the woods. She simply huffed, and sauntered down into the berry-filled underbrush. I hiked on.