The Hot Spring After Dark

“If you step left of the path, the crust gives way.”

The voice comes from behind the flashlight, one of three that have picked their way from the truck. The beams hesitate at the edge of the last stretch of ground before the water — a pale mineral flat that in daylight shows the footprints of everyone who came before, the crusted rims of old overflow channels. Now the beams skim it, looking for where the previous party stepped. Somebody finds a footprint, frozen into the mud from a colder night, and the line moves again, single file.

The last gate

The road gave up on graded gravel two hours ago. What follows is a set of railroad-tie sections over a creek, then a long washboard through sagebrush, then a gate. The gate is not locked. It is a pipe frame with a chain looped once around the post, and the driver stops the truck, leaves the engine running, and swings the gate wide. The headlights spill over the ground, showing the faint twin ruts continuing on the other side.

Somebody stays in the cab with the door open, keeping the dome light on so the gate can be seen in the mirror. The driver gets back in, eases through, then gets out again to close it. This is the etiquette of these roads — never leave a gate open, never trust that the next person will close it.”

Past the gate, the ruts climb. The truck drops into its lowest gear, and the engine note changes to the single long note of a winching climb. The road becomes rock, then sand, then rock again. The headlights sweep across juniper that has grown close on one side, so the branches scrape the door. The air in the cab smells of cold dust and the heater on full.

Then the ruts end, not in a place but in a decision. A flat clearing, a turnaround of hard-packed earth, a few downed trees used as benches. The headlights rest on a trail sign with no writing left on it, only a metal post. The engine idles. The driver cuts the lights.

It takes a moment for the dark to settle. What returns first is the sky, which has been there all along but only now claims the windshield. The Milky Way runs overhead, split by a faint notch of a ridge. The air is cold enough that the metal of the door handle sticks to a dry fingertip. Someone says, “I can smell it from here.” They can — a sharp mineral smell, like iron and old penny, carried on the same cold that makes the ears ache.

The pool

The walk is a hundred and fifty yards, but it feels longer because the flashlight beams can’t reach the far end. The path is gravel and cinder, sometimes seeping with warm water that has leaked from the spring and made a dark patch on the earth. The trick is to follow the widest beam, the one carried by the person in front. When that person stops, everyone stops.

The spring is a depression in the rock, rimmed with smooth stone worn by a decade of hands and bare feet finding purchase. Steam rises from the surface in a column that the flashlights turn white, so the beam disappears a few feet above the water. The surface itself is black, a black that holds no reflection of the sky — just the dense, cloudy black of mineral water in the dark. The air is several degrees warmer at ground level because of the steam. You can feel it on the cheeks, the way you feel a furnace door open in a cold cellar.

Somebody kneels and puts a hand in. The water is hot, not scalding — the kind of hot that makes you draw your hand out after a second, then put it back in, wrist first. The pool is small. Four people could sit in it with their shoulders out of the water. The bottom is smooth, and at the deep end there is a ledge where the hot water comes up from below, moving in slow pulses that you feel against the back of the knees once you’re in.

The undressing happens quickly, in the dark. Clothes are folded on the dry rocks, or left in a pile on a bench of wood that has been there long enough to bleach gray. The cold air bites at bare skin, and the walk from the pile to the water is done with arms crossed, feet finding the path by memory. The first person in lets out a long breath that is half the heat, half the relief. The second follows. The third sits on the edge with feet in the water, waiting.

The sky

Once the body is submerged, the cold stops mattering. The water is deep enough that the shoulders float. The steam rises from the surface and drifts up between the sheltering rock walls, and above that the sky has come closer because the eyes have adjusted. The stars are not the stars of any town. They are the stars of a place with no house lights for thirty miles, and there are enough of them that the constellations seem to have extra members, stars between the stars that you have to unlearn to see the familiar shapes.

The talk, when it happens, is quiet. Someone points to a satellite moving through the Dipper. Someone else talks about the time they came here in snow. Mostly the talk is about the temperature — the difference between the water and the air. The air on the exposed shoulders is so cold the skin tightens, but the body below the neck is in a warm bath. It is not a comfortable feeling at first. It becomes one.

Out beyond the spring, the dark is absolute. The flashlights have been switched off, because the sky is the only thing worth looking at. The water makes a small sound against the rocks, like a basin being filled. The steam hisses against the cold stone on the far side, where the overflow trickles down and vanished into cracks in the earth. No one says what time it is. The cold is the clock. When the water no longer feels hot, it's time to go.

The walk back

Getting out is done quickly, in the wrong order. The feet find the cold rock first, and the body shakes off the heat in a gasp. The clothes go on over wet skin, and no one bothers with socks because they will only get wet inside boots. The flashlights switch on again, and the first steps back down the path are taken in a hurry, then slower, as the wet hair begins to stiffen.

The hair freezes by the time the trail reaches the clearing. Not a soak-through, not a helmet of ice, but a stiffening at the ends, the strands taking on a brittle quality that you can feel, not just see. The wet shoulders of a jacket harden at the seams. The temperature has dropped the few degrees that darkness brings, and the wind, which had been holding its breath, has started to move down from the ridge.

By the truck, the headlights are turned on before the doors are opened. The engine turns over, the heater on full, and the windows steam up from the wet clothes so that no one can see the stars anymore — only the vague shapes of sagebrush and the dark line of the road, the one the morning will show again from the other side: the gate, the ruts, the long way out. Someone says, “My hair’s freezing.” The laugh is dry, the way it is at the end of a thing done right. The gear shift goes into reverse. The truck turns around in the clearing, and the headlights point down the road they came up, picking out the two ruts that will be there long after the cold has passed through.