A Black Snake and The Rising Hills

"What's the most beautiful place that you've ever visited?"

It's a somewhat cliche question without much ribbon. It's also a question that I frequently pose to my patients in therapy groups.

Toward what does your mind float when presented with such a question? Amongst which pile of sand does it come to lie?

There's no wrong answer to the question. That's partially why I ask it. It's also a simple mechanism to get socially vulnerable individuals to open up and share a cherished memory or perspective.

On occasion, when the cadence of the conversation calls for it, I'll share my answer in turn. And since you're reading this, I suppose that it might just be my turn once again.

North of Phoenix, and yet still within it's technical boundaries, rests an island of pleasant suburbia known as Tramonto. The road behind my house, Cloud Road, was included in the legal boundary that separated the city from the country. We would often try our best to hit whiffle golf balls over the fence and across the road for the simple purpose of saying that we had hit the ball "out of the city".

Before we moved into the home, my family had lived in a modest house near Union Hills closer to the heart of Phoenix. Of course, when my parents bought that home, their first, Union Hills might as well of been the edge of civilization. "Everything north was just desert," my dad would tell me years later. But when Phoenix inevitably crept north and began to swallow even Union Hills, my parents wanted to relocate us as north as they could while still remaining within a reasonable commuting distance to their jobs in north Scottsdale. So they took us to Tramonto, which is, as it turns out, Italian for sunset.

It was a new build. I remember how we would drive up on the weekends to visit the plot as the house was being built. Being ten years old at the time, the half hour drive to visit the construction site felt more like an odyssey across the galaxy than a simple shot up the Seventeen (Yes. I will forever say "The" before an interstate's name. Deal with it).

When we'd arrive at the plot, I remember being struck as to how it was truly surrounded by nothing but desert in all directions, save for a winding black asphalt rode that snaked through the desert. We were the first home to be built in the entire development. The only thing to keep the road company was the bones of our to be home and the wooden stakes driven into the earth keeping taught lines of red string that outlined the various other plots of land to be sold around us; red floating strings outlining the homes of our neighbors to be one day.

Mostly I remember just walking through the house mid-construction and peering up through slats of wooden beams and trying to imagine walls existing where they weren't at the time. It felt abstract and strange to think, especially from the vantage of a child with no construct of what the actual construction of a home entailed. I remember my mom warning us of nails on the floor and my father detailing what each future room would someday hold. I remember looking East and seeing a pair of hills rising out of the desert rather abruptly. The sunset kissed their peaks and they had an air of etherealness to their designs. They felt distant and magnificent. Something in their elevated dirt called to me and always had.

Fast forward a few years. In the montage of time that brings us to my sixteenth year or so, homes around ours began to pop up one at a time, and within a few of those homes children of similar ages moved in, each surely experiencing coming of age stories of their own. (Sonder is an important and humbling thing, isn't it?). I made some friends here and there and came to make (almost) lifelong friends with one in particular. We rode our BMX bikes through the snaking streets of the development like it was the end of the world and we were each Mad Max himself. It was a time before any higher concepts came to take us in any direction but onward, and nothing mattered but the rubber on the road and the wind that brushed us.

Inevitably, we would take our bikes to the foothills to the East and ascend their rocky faces. We gave the hills names, but I can't recall now what they were.

Halfway up the western of the two hills protruded a tall rock face that jutted out of the otherwise slow ascent like a tremendous skin tag of rock. We would hike to the spot late in the day, and as we sat upon it's open palm, we'd watch the western sky collapse into slow blackness while the crickets and cicadas weaved a white noise worthy of a bow.

When the path down the mountain was sufficiently dark and treacherous, we would at last descend, find our bikes, and ride home. My friend lived only a block away from me, so we would ride together, as if we were fighter jets maintaining a tight formation as we rode through the streets, all the way until the final fork that separated his house's road from mine.

And then one day, we rode to and ascended the hills for the last time and didn't know it. We got our licenses and began to drive everywhere we went. I joined the military. He moved away. We don't talk anymore and that's a story I wont tell here.

But looking back now, when I give it sufficient pause and patience in recollection, I still get misty eyed when I think of those hills just to the east of the elusive north that my parents had sought so hard to give to us kids.

I'm glad that they did.