Donna Gwinnell Lambo-Weidner

“I’d rather be here, with you, than anywhere else in the world.”
When the man in the mountain spoke, it wasn’t with words. A wave of warm air rippled across his furrowed forehead, crept over his craggy face, and burst from the mouth of a cave carved above his clean-shaven chin. The breath of wind beckoned. “Come,” it coaxed. “Let us walk together in another’s footsteps.”

The distance from the edge of the mesa to the bottom of the rock face might just as well have been the height of the Empire State Building. I thought we’d be maneuvering the 200 foot drop along some wide, gradually sloping, hand-railed staircase, not snaking down a perpendicular footpath where I’d have to stab my fingers into hand cracks to stay balanced and, in particularly narrow spaces, pry my dusty size six sneakers from smooth grooves worn into the pitted volcanic tuff by legions of industrious feet for nearly six hundred years.

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