SandScript 2020

A Wedding
Lee Fike
It begins like this—tall Cottonwoods, Sycamores, and Arizona Ashes, murmuring in
a light autumn breeze. Their voices originate in their roots buried beneath the river,
the power of that water rising up into the canopy to whisper its tale through the shimmering
leaves. I listen to the story as if in a dream, told in the language of the canyon, its native
language of rock and wood. Their tale will soon be over for the year, as the leaves fall, some to
the creek-side ground, beginning their journey from the tree crests to their roots, while other
leaves land in the water, floating away to fertilize downstream lands. The leaves will molder in
the lonely earth, the shaded, sandy, riverine soil, and will finally become the earth itself, as will
we all, following nature’s cycle of creation, growth, maturity, senescence, death, and rebirth,
into a new form. The trees give back more than they have taken from the earth; they add
their chlorophyll-derived energy, new carbon chains, new nutrients for the next generation.
Their moist, wooden roots break the bedrock, millimeter by millimeter, making new resources
available, adding to the never ceasing flux and flow of the biome, the inexorable force of life
that the earth longs for, aches for. Life wanted to happen here; it wants it still, here on this
planet, bathing in the warm light of this sun. It began with a desire as dire as sex, an urgent
urge that could not be denied.
And what about us, the human animals, the builders and destroyers, the talkers and
occasional listeners? Somehow, we, too, will nourish our next generation. We will feed them
with… what? Truth and love? Or will it be lies and ruined dreams? A nutritious heritage of hope
and success, or the poisons of hatred, regrets, and a legacy of failure? Will they be able to build
on what we have left them, or will we leave them to rediscover life for themselves?
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FICTION