The Lookout

The perfect tree. It’s a ponderosa pine, an old-growth yellowbelly, one hundred fifty feet tall, one hundred fifty years in the making, with thick, jigsaw-puzzle bark that glows as if illuminated from within and smells faintly of vanilla. Where the green arboreal maze of Arizona’s Kaibab Plateau gives way to the red stony absence of the Grand Canyon—precisely there, at the improbable interface, the incredible edge, the incomparable North Rim—it stands straight and strong, bordering oblivion. I examine it in my imagination, looking down at roots draped over the sheer cliff and up at snug rooms of sky shaped by curving branches. Between two of the branches, a nylon hammock sways in the evening breeze, and a little dude, his legs extended, bare toes tickled by the abyss, grins the idiot-grin of the gobsmacked.

I don’t believe in perfection—the enemy of the good, as the aphorism has it—but I do believe, paradoxically, in the perfect tree: hidden among innumerable neighbors, waiting