5-1 The road rises in the center so that I have to drive real slow to keep from bottoming out because if that happens I’m sunk and will have to pull out the block and tackle and find a tree or pound a stake or wait for Ranger Tom on the side of the road. For now, the road is good and as long as my wheels are going forward, I’m doing fine. It’s a bit of a trick to gauge how far I’ve come, even in a few hours. Ten miles, twenty, with me stopping every 5 minutes to take a photo. Not that it matters,’ just keep going and don’t get off the road,’ like he says, all the way to the end, and if the sun doesn’t set, there might be enough light to walk out to the rocks. Another hairpin like this one and I’m thinking of how he was betrayed by his lover, La Molinera, who was interviewed ten years after the fact – long after he had his head cut off – that she was the one who told Harry Love where to find him, and not Ana Benitez, and that is was she who dressed up like a man and rode with the gang stealing horses and whooping it up across half of California. But I’m not sure if I believe that part of the story, Whether she ever made it out here or just heard the stories and was boasting, one thing seems certain, Joaquin Rocks is where he kept his hundred stolen horses watered at the spring that mouthed just down the slope, and both the rocks and the spring still have his name, and he must have built a make-shift corral out of manzanita before driving them through Horse Thief Canyon, then up the Tejon, and then onto Sonora along the mountain path where he could make a sizable profit and no one in Mexico would recognize the brand, even if there was one. I’m keeping my eyes peeled for artifacts and nomenclature and geometric figures that live in the rocks like they’re breathing the very air I am, and I wonder if that’s possible that a rock has a name and places they have lived for a million years, at the top of the mountain, and now rest – wearing my age in the patina and shallow indentures caressing my face – like I’m an old man basking in the sun at the foot of the creek looking up at the sky with the water flowing by overhead.But I’m not a rock… am I? I can feel it, and it isn’t because I’m tired, and the night before is starting to take its toll, which was never the case when I was a youngman, and only now do I realize how I left all of that behind the instant it happened and was never meant to look back in rumination, so as long as my wheels are in forward motion, I’m doing fine. And so is Joaquin wherever he is, somewhere along the trail, sometime ago – La Vereda del Monte – The Mountain Path.