The Girl from the Valley
When I was a young girl herding goats, I’d watch them climb up the cliffs. Always careful to listen to their bells tolling a dull din, echoing down the valley, carried by the winds, I’d whistle them back when the sun passed beneath the pursed lips of the mountain range.
Two ridges kissed in a cleft, covering the horizon, like mountains were drawing a robe tight, refusing to show the bare vista behind. They called the ridges “the lovers”: two craggy sides vaulting upwards, met by a more serene ravine in the middle, where the bed of a waterfall had gone dry and sandy. I wouldn’t bring the goats there. There were no grasses and the sand was loose; they were liable to trip and fall down. Persistent creatures — but they were better at scaling sheer, rocky cliffs.
My father warned me about the kissing ridge. He said that over there was a land different from ours. He even hinted on one occasion that there was a sea. A sea? I could only imagine it. And how did he know, after all? Our valley was lush and green, but never so much water as a sea. Forests full of timber, freshwater streams from springs, vineyards of grapes, and lemon orchards. Fresh tomatoes. My mother made cheese and my brothers would go fishing for crabs and oysters. It was strange for a girl to be a goat herder, but the goats loved me. The boys were too rough at playing with them and they’d get butted around; I’d laugh at them, and the goats would too. They gave me that job.
That meant I could watch the sun fall down the kissing ridge alone every summer. It was like the sun carved that spot itself — gradually arcing, bouncing over the ridge’s line over the course of the seasons, until on the solstice it got to the spot where the waterfall had been, I suppose, generations ago. The little bits of quartz at the top made the pursed rock glimmer, and it would appear for a few moments that the sun opened its mouth wide between the ridge clefts and let its tongue stream out. One summer I smiled back at it so wide that I opened my mouth, teeth bare, and let my own tongue fall, imitating the scene ahead. I breathed in, deep, inhaling that crisp, mountain air, full of quartz and pure, unwatered dust.
Until the din of the goat bells pulled me back out of my reverie. One was staring back at me, looking at me askance with its pill-shaped pupil. Its tongue was out, slack, like a comic mirror of my reverie. I burst out in a laugh.
Once, when I was sixteen, I resolved to scale the sun’s tongue on the solstice. I didn’t tell my fathers or brothers. I only let my mother in on the secret.
“If you go, just take this walking stick — and this canteen of water that used to be mine — and some dried berries. And fresh cheese we made. Don’t stay too long. I want you back by sundown — do you understand? Then your papa won’t know, and I won’t have to tell him.”
“Yes, mama. Thank you, mama.”
So I went with the goats up the mountain side like I normally did, but with new resolve, and an excitement I didn’t fully understand: the kind you get while picking stolen cherries right before the harvesters arrive. I left the goats safe in the mountains’ pocket right before the ridge’s slope, and I kept in earshot of their ringing bells. Like mama said, as long as I was back before sundown I wouldn’t have to worry about father, or my brothers, as long as I came back with all the goats. But I could feel my heartbeat and breath quicken — with excitement, with the growing sweat collecting at my temples — as I scaled that sandy ramp, its soft ground slipping beneath my mountain shoes.
The sun burned in my eyes as its afternoon waned, falling towards its resting place in the crevice, like a glowing gold ball in a chalice. I endeavored to see what was on the other side — and the sound of the distant goat bells was outdone in my head by the whisper of the wind through the ridge.
I passed over the lip, the stem of the chalice-shaped rockform glowing right as the solstice flirted with dusk, and I blinked, putting my flattened hand over my eyes to block out the light. I saw something I never could’ve imagined: a vast desert; quartz-white, with glistening sand as far as I could see, lumped in dunes, like a hundred pale tablecloths arranged for rows and rows. It looked like snow on a bright, crisp day — hard to look at for too long. And beyond that, what father hinted at after all: a sea, inky blue for every bit as the sand was white, stretching outward until it was a perfectly flat line. The sky held that sun in place; the outline of the mountain’s crevice still burned in my vision, if only from memory, like the gold cup the priests held up during mass.
But this was not their cup; instead, the sky was the cup, holding a sacramental sun, God’s eternal coin. Percolated below it, the salty sea; I saw something none of the stories would’ve promised — and there I understood why my father didn’t want to pass through this cleft. As much as I loved the orchards, the vineyards, my family, and my brothers, I got a whiff of that salt air, cleansed by fine-ground quartz, and left a few salty drops of my own sweat there like an offering.
Somewhere I’d never been and could never return back from was out there. And I wanted more than anything to go.
