Broken Specter, with pics

      The next day I take a short side-trail to see Charlie’s Bunion, a rocky outcropping of jagged stone that juts from the side of a cliff. I drop my pack and crawl carefully out onto the tip, moving slowly. On either side is a steep drop to rocky clefts far below, and the stone beneath me is slick from rain. At the tip I stand on shaky legs and look around.

Below me is a swooping gorge made of mountainsides and mist and sky. Tree-covered ridges leap away into the distance in a staggering, head-spinning view. I stand staring into this miasma of height and light and nothingness, feeling like an explorer at the edge of a half-formed world.

      The sun behind me casts its beams down onto the valley below. In a patch of space half-filled with fog I can see a small ball of rainbow taking form. In the middle of the ball is my own triangular shadow, my own form somehow caught within the luminous rings of the ball. My own shape painted huge upon the clouds. I raise my arms up above my head and the shadow within the ball breaks and flails in mirror motions. It looks like the shadow of a giant bird unfurling its wings. I wave and the shadow waves back. It is a crazy thing to wave at one’s own giant shadow across the width of a huge valley.

      I know it only from the mountaineering books I’ve read. It is a Brocken Specter, an atmospheric phenomenon involving mist and shadows and strange halos of light. It is seen in high mountainous places when the conditions are just right. I am astounded and delighted.

      I stand on the rock staring down, the wind whipping past me. The ball of light glows like a fallen sun-dog, like a radiant rainbow pearl in the fog. In its white-hot center is my own shape. I laugh, feeling a surge of wild elation.

      This is the kind of strange and mesmerizing moment I had hoped to find on this trip. To find my own form mirrored in the cosmic interplay of molecules. I stand, held inside a rainbow, and feel christened by the cosmos. I feel, for one brief and spell-binding moment, like the universe is dancing with me.