KINGSVIEW

THE DREAMY DRAW CONVERSATION

Michael A. King

There is a beautiful park at the north edge of Phoenix called the Dreamy Draw, the name itself rather lovely. I walked over an hour, higher and higher up and into its hills, until I was entirely enclosed in wilderness, even though behind I could still vaguely hear interstate traffic and occasionally through gaps in hills see Phoenix spread out below.

High up at the very center of a set of enclosing hills was a stone outcropping looking down over the mini-valley created by the base of the hills. A few sweetly green trees (green looks particularly sweet in the desert) grew at the center of the outcropping. The effect, looking down from above, was almost like that of a great altar rising up from the desert floor.

I was going to turn back before hiking down to it, then noted a stone bench that created a kind of entry to that spot and somehow invited further contact. So I walked to the bench and there saw these words: "August 15, 1999. When Ed (39), Mollie (8) and Lexi (6) Bull reached that highest point, they looked around and said, ‘Papou, We like it here.’"

Unless I totally misunderstood, Ed, Mollie, and Lexi reached their highest point by, somehow, dying. I think "Bull" is their last name and perhaps Ed was the father of Mollie and Lexi. Bull, set there in Arizona and combined with "Papou," struck me as probably pointing to Native American ancestry.

Moved, I went past the chair to look out from that highest point, on a day when the desert air was cool yet the sun warm. I didn’t want to tear myself away.

For a time I didn’t, but then I saw a hiker coming up the trail far below, and he had his head and arms covered against the sun and a backpack, including water, on his back. I had thought to put on suntan lotion but not my hat and I hadn’t brought water. I began to feel exposed. I needed to get back to shelter and water. I also vaguely felt that as he neared the area, it would feel more comfortable to leave. So I did.

Just as I reached the end of the short path leading down to the bench on the outcropping, the hiker reached me. As he moved to pass me, he said, "All mine?"

"All yours," I replied. "It’s a lovely spot."

"Oh I love it," he said. "Thank you."

Maybe you had to be there, I’m not sure, but can you hear it? It was the perfect conversation. So often the phrases seem just a tad off, the one or the other of us too awkward or tongue-tied to say just the right thing. Not this time. Somehow we had found the perfect words to enact a ritual in which we each acknowledged the specialness of this place and one had the grace to ask for it as the other had the grace to relinquish it.

I don’t want overly to romanticize Native Americans, who had their own flaws. But I couldn’t help but think of the fact that this was once their land, that they had elaborate rituals for relating to each other and to this land, that perhaps some of their own were memorialized by that bench behind me, and that two white men—their culture so often about pushing and shoving and taking the land from the other, no matter what sacredness is trampled in the process—somehow for once knew how to have the perfect conversation.

—Michael A. King, Telford, Pennsylvania, is pastor, Spring Mount (Pa.) Mennonite Church; and editor, DreamSeeker Magazine.