It’s a gorgeous sunny day on our Thursday Evening off, and we’re not about to let it go to waste. And so it is that the ten of us, freshly showered and toting bags full of recently laundered clothing, find ourselves piling once again into Sally and Shelly, and heading down to explore what I now call Jabba Land.
We trudge up the first hill as a group, then spread out, dispersing unintentionally as we explore. Some take the sandy two-track and soon discover a rusty dilapidated car half-swallowed by the sand. Others veer off across the sage and up onto an overlooking ridge. Some scramble up then down again as the mood hits, playing around and snapping a few shots then hiking onward again. Yet by the by, we’re all drawn to the slanted slab of bulbous rock that’s carved across the landscape.
The rock is dotted in the strangest blobs of stone, ridged and marked like giant natural cairns. They remind me of hardened turds, of the lumpy towers my dad would make on the beach with dark wet sand. It looks like a field of petrified Jabba the Huts.
It is like a playground for me. I clamber up one mound and down the next, hoping around like a little kid, taking photos like I were my dad. I wish Stephen were there with me. It is just like all those myriad hikes of ours, those weekend we’d spend hoping along the slippery stones that jut out like stepping stones along the creaks. We were always drawn to the creeks, abandoning the hiking trails again and again to clamber along the creeks instead. Annadel. Helen Putnam. Fairfield Osborn. Crane Creek.
He would love this, my brother. He would love this Jabba Land.
