the crack

I felt like staying close to home this weekend, not wanting to ride too far south or north, instead just heading directly east up my dependable emigration canyon.

this happens to me often: when it comes time to make a route decision, I consider and reject any route that takes me too far south. for some reason, fifteen miles up emigration feels so much closer to home than fifteen miles toward little cottonwood. it's not: I understand that. but my comfort zone seems to extend much further east than it does south.

so yesterday I rode emigration, then toward east canyon until the dense wall of snow prevented further travel (that would now be 1.3 miles past the gate), then down to mountain dell golf course and the edge of I-80, turning around and coming back up the hill, up little mountain, down emigration, and home. I promised myself a longer ride today.

and then today dawned, and I didn't feel like a longer ride.
so I basically repeated yesterday's ride, just without the big hill down to and back up from mountain dell.
I held the goal of trying to decipher scenic differences between the two days. I had hoped that the road to east canyon would have been clear a little further, what with the mild temperature of yesterday afternoon and this morning, but that changed very little. where I saw the most difference was little dell reservoir.
yesterday it looked significantly frozen, with only the north and west edges showing water where the ice had pulled back. but today I saw more water, and most excitingly, the large crack across the center of reservoir, south to north.
unfortunately, I can't swear that the crack wasn't there yesterday.
perhaps I just didn't notice.
but today it was glaring, gorgeous, powerful, and I thought about being there to witness its development; what a gift that would be.

the reservoir is reclaiming its more active life, the water slowly changing from its sluggish and thickened state to a form of itself we're more familiar with, the kind we love to dangle our hands in and dip our toes in and splash about it. soon the ice will pull back further and further, and the wind will reach between its shelves and tickle the reservoir, calling it back to playfulness.

I think I'd just like to camp by the side of the reservoir, watching the ice melt, pulling back its boundaries, freeing the water beneath to once again feel the warmth of the sun. I'd bring a few books, plenty blankets, and a good store of food, of course. a journal, a good pen, sunglasses, and one of my favorite coffee mugs.
I'd sit on my camp chair, perusing the imperceptibly changing scene until suddenly I would realize it was no longer the same, that a transition had been made before my very (seemingly oblivious) eyes.
I'd stay there as long as it took, until the glacier was broken apart into pieces that floated across the surface, bumping into each other and cracking again, slivers dropping away and into the gently moving body of water. wind rippling the surface, sun casting glittery sparkles over the entire space, the reservoir becoming itself once again, the same and yet intensely different.

perhaps I'd bring my bike, to go for the occasional spin, knowing that each time I returned I would come back to the same spot which had irreparably metamorphosed into something different, never to return to exactly what it had been.