Engineer and the wall

Turning away from the dried riverbed, the engineer looks up both sides of the canyon. Neither seems too pleasant in the bright brisk midday. On one side a steep cliff juts up. A brown crumbly wall, like a bulwark of earth arresting any curious thing. On the other spreads a long collection of rolling hills, yellow in the fall, extending beyond the infinity of his horizontal scope. Cliff or hills. He considers.

He takes the cliff

This ascent is nothing less than treacherous. The engineer begins to grip and stab at the hanging rocks, pulling his body weight up against inches of gravity while his fingers prick in the late afternoon chill.

Climbing is harder than he thought. Behind him the ominous hills seem to roil on forever..

a lazy perfectionist, he tries not to look

Several more feet up, the engineer has cleared a good third of the wall. But the vertical barricade seems to be growing, and below him hangs a long drop. Is his position becoming more dangerous than he'd anticipated? The engineer starts to wonder if this choice was an impossible one.. this tedious, meticulous, life-threatening spiderlike position against a canyon wall, limbs locked. His future dances above him in what seems to be a growing length of vertical eternity. He's made an impossible choice. Those hills don't sound so bad now..

but he's too far up to turn back yet, and the rocks of the wall are literally falling away beneath his feet.

Up and up and up, one foot here, one hand there. His muscles taught prepared, his balance barely shifting in miniature spurts... a green twig sticks out from where he sets his left thumb.. he looks at it. A green sprig. Some life that decided this was the place to stay Forever. This innocuous, temporary, precarious ledge was the spot this green little wallweed would grow. Was it a choice? or a matter of survival.

The engineer stops for a moment. Some creatures don't set out to accomplish anything but living. And so they're happy given any bits of survival at all. "Give me a wall and I'll stay at it..I'm just a plant.." what life is this? How can a creature not climb to see what's beyond the next ridge? It seems there is so much life to be found and seen.. "but what are you looking for dead Engineer? where were you trying to reach? I too am reaching upwards and out, just from a stable home.. is there something up there you'd rather call a home than here?"

Shaking the thoughts from his head, the engineer looks at his anxious thumbs and glances up the wall again.. the wall that seems to be growing. He looks back at the hills..

*rumble*

Rumble? What rumble. The earth isn't shaking. Is it? Rumble? Where was this rumble earlier, when I was standing in the wash's sandy basin? I would have been fine with a rumble then.

*rrruummmbbllee*

OKAY
Specks of rock and dirt dance on their ledges, start to fall. The engineer holds fast to his grip. This isn't happening.

*RRUMMBBLLEE*

The wall begins to cool. The earth moves. The sun lowers in the afternoon sky, long shadows follow...

He frantically looks down and up the canyon. Far away, something grey sits, a darkness filling the late daylight.. a huge thunderstorm. But its so far away no thunder could survive the soundwaves.. besides, that distant storm is too far upriver and it seems to be dissipating. I'm ok, just a leftover bit of thunder..

*RRRRRRRUUUUUUMMMBBLLLEE*

apparently it's not thunder.

upstream the culprit appears. Along the dry riverbed, hailing forth from another land rushes a pouring, gushing, grey-brown monstrous, curling, streaming, dust-ridden, gut-wrenching, rusty, corpse-stinking, foamy mouth of a heaving, canyon-slapping, flash flood.

mamasita..

Tearing through the trees and boulders beneath him, the flood gouges through the wash, sweeping up everything. The engineer stares thirty feet down in complete disdain. Just his luck.. luck? The furious flood roars on.

a tiny fractured raft floats by, edges broken, trinkets dangling, familiar amongst the passing debris..

One huge wave pounds against the wall splashing up like an ocean's arm, exploding towards him. In a swoop he dodges the upflung gush, pulling his hand away and letting the water pass. It drags along the wall then pulls back to the flood below.

Whew! the engineer puts his hand back against the wall to climb again and notices something missing..

the little green wallweed had been replaced with nothing, but mud

I must to keep climbing or I'll face the same doom as that little plant. My goals have shifted. This canyon edge must be summited. I have to believe in something impossible, something too difficult to accomplish, or I will die too. just like everything else..

so the engineer continues on