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Show Go Love/203 no thoughts of the various shades of tombstone granite. How to get away? Mustang Ridge's Campground's host is watering five-gallon buckets planted with tomatoes and scrawny pepper plants We're afternoon arrivals, here only for one night to camp on the reservoir before the river float. From here we see white boats rock on still water^ trolling up Mackinaw Sun shines between the ribs of the steel bridge. The old man lets us choose between twenty-eight and thirty, full-sun sites, but not so bad. This is the Ashley National Forest, half-million acres of Blue Spruce and Pifion, Quaking Aspen up high. The afternoon's hot and smells of dry pine. We take twenty eight, set camp, Lara chasing fat chipmunks tree to tree. "I'm so fucking glad," Renee says when the camp's set, kicked back in a bent camp chair with her legs stretched out and river sandals undone, "to have this done." She's poured wine, a half-circle of sweat under each breast. "How about you?" Three o'clock, the cicadas thrum. Our dogs pass out in the shade of a pinyon. "Fish?" Renee says, "Yea Sure " I pack quickly and get away without the dogs. On the way out, the hostess, a big red-headed woman with cracked hands tells me not to have fire or use fireworks "And you'll need to watch it with whatever you're smoking." Retirees, they're up from Arizona, the plates on the monster R V. imprinted with saguaro cactus like the ones Mama said grew outside Tucson by Mount Lemon where snow shone miraculously above the desert. I tell the camp host's wife no problem, we'll go easy on fire, and turn out onto the road that falls three miles to the river. I've driven this way in October snowstorms, half-plowed after |