Grand Mesa is both a striking landmark and a measure of what has been lost. For Hig, its forests, lakes, and streams hold memories of life with Melissa, while its warming waters and increasingly unreliable seasons make the damage to the natural world impossible to treat as distant background.

Landscape and Setting

Seen from the air, Grand Mesa is a broad, flat-topped upland rising above the surrounding country. Its far rim is marked by purple-banded cliffs; its forests include aspen, and its summer understory can be dense with ferns. Dark lakes and beaver ponds interrupt the wooded surface. The scale of the formation is part of its character: Hig describes it as a roughly sixty-mile outcrop lifted against the sky.

The mesa also shapes the terrain below it. On a flight down its south slope, Hig looks over soft aspens and a valley patterned with orchards, vineyards, cottonwoods, and a river. The view opens from the high ground into a greener river bottom, then onward to dry desert scrubland and the mesas of the plateau. The abrupt passage between wooded heights and arid country makes Grand Mesa a threshold as well as a landmark.

Memory and Attachment

Grand Mesa is inseparable from Hig’s memories of Melissa. They made some of their best camping trips there, including a week beside a lake so remote that there was no road for miles. The fishing was abundant enough that trout seemed nearly to leap into their frying pan. Those recollections give the highland a personal history: it is not simply scenery but a place where their shared life once felt spacious and secure.

The mesa also draws Hig back to the practice of fishing after the trout have disappeared. He carries a pack rod his father gave him for his sixteenth birthday, later teaching himself to use it and learning from Uncle Pete. In the mountain woods he seeks stretches that remain green or are beginning to recover, setting down his pack and listening beside the water. Fishing links the present landscape to an earlier world, but it cannot restore that world; even the act of returning makes the changes legible.

Ecological Change

The landscape’s seasonal signs no longer offer dependable reassurance. In mid-April, a warm wind comes down from the mountains when Hig expects cold, and the old markers of the season have become mostly nostalgia. The mountains had snow that winter, but for two consecutive years before it, the peaks were nearly bare. Hig says this prospect frightens him more than attacks or disease.

The streams register the change directly. Hig understands the trout to be gone because the water has grown too warm, and he distinguishes the loss of the fish from the loss of the creek itself: the latter would mean the disappearance of the living place that sustained them. He continues fishing in the mountains for suckers and carp, adapting to different fish and even to carp feeding near the surface. Yet those substitutions do not cancel the loss. Later, after catching several thin carp and releasing them carefully, he recognizes that they, too, are starving. His recurring thought of waking in tears over vanished species extends from trout to carp, placing Grand Mesa within a wider pattern of ecological decline.

Role in the Narrative

Grand Mesa joins intimate memory to environmental evidence. Its lakes recall camping with Melissa; its streams once promised trout; its forests still offer Hig moments of refuge and attention. At the same time, warm water and scant snow reveal that this refuge is changing. The contrast gives the location more than scenic importance: it is a place where Hig’s grief for people and his mourning for the nonhuman world meet without becoming interchangeable. The landscape matters in its own right, and its deterioration changes what home and return can mean.