Notes from the Spring

There is a spring east of the dry lake whose name I will not tell you. It is not secret, exactly — anyone with a topographic map and an afternoon can find it — but the people who care for it have asked, gently, that it not be made findable, and I respect them. So: a spring, east of a dry lake, in a country that has more dry lakes than wet ones.

The first time I came here I expected something dramatic. A pool. A reflection. Instead I found a damp patch the size of a kitchen table, threaded with reeds, and the deep prints of a single mule deer. That was all. I had driven six hours to look at a wet patch of dirt.

It took me three more visits before I understood what I was looking at. The spring is not the water. The spring is the pattern the water makes in the lives around it — the bee that comes for it at midmorning, the bat that comes for the bee at dusk, the coyote that comes for whatever has come for the bat. The water is incidental. The water is the excuse for an entire small civilization to assemble itself, every day, in this otherwise unremarkable square of dirt.

I think about this, now, when I read the news. About what is the spring and what is the assembly. About what is incidental and what is the pattern.