Lightning Strike at LeFevre Overlook
Tuesday, July 23, 2013 at about 3:00 p.m.
SETH MULLER
36.83, -112.255
A stone wall crumbles here.
A man and a woman were cooked
in a blue flash. On their honeymoon.
They traveled over the
largest ocean to a different
continent and stood at the viewpoint.
Their journey went across this—
Inner America—as they dropped from the
desert plateau and Grand Canyon.
Their bodies stopped.
But their ghosts did not know. They stood at
Bright Angel Point. A thermal lifted them
from the path, as it would
dust. It carried them in swirls
around the chiseled limestone.
It scared them, but the fear turned
into thrill. They pushed under raven wings.
They peered into cliff-wall caves.
They caressed the plateau’s corners
and they became air and then they became memory
and then they became nothing/everything.
Flagstaff-based author SETH MULLER has written books for middle graders (The Keepers of the Windclaw Chronicles Books One through Three and Augustus Fig) and has penned titles for people who, like him, firmly believe the Grand Canyon is rather awesome (Canyon Crossing and Heart in the Bony Middle). He has written two full-length plays, Convergence and Monsters—both produced, and is a two-time winner of the Northern Arizona Playwriting Showcase. During the not-writing, not-researching, and not-revising times, Seth likes reading, hiking, exploring, baking, and coffee-drinking. He teaches in the English Department at Northern Arizona University.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
I had stopped at LeFevre Overlook, between Fredonia and Jacob Lake on the way up the Kaibab Plateau one day in July 2013 and watched a thunderstorm track to the south and east. A week later, I learned a couple on their honeymoon stood where I stood three days later and were struck by lightning and killed. Rather being shocked by the death, it sort of blended with a reverence I was feeling for the realm of the Colorado Plateau in the days after adventuring there and imagining "ghost tourists" feeling the same way. It led to an odd, haunting little poem.