Two packed cars are weaving up through the dusty-hot mid-morning high-summer mountain air. Cars filled with city-suburb people with interesting hats or scarves or haircuts and quirky sunglasses and patterned socks and decorative boots. Carrying Eskys and wine bottles and phones and snacks and cigarettes.
And eventually, the cars just stop on the side of the road. All the people and their dogs head down some stairs off the roadside and climb down the bank off the stairs and gather on a plateau of rocks. Water flows down from somewhere – over the rocks, over the plateau, over the toes of the dogs and the people, off a cliff, down a kind-of canyon in the mountain's side – to somewhere.
It's a very simple thing. We're here to swim in the icy water. To sit on the edge of the mountain. To lie in the sun and drink wine and mutter soft conversations. To be quiet, alone, outside, and bordered by something other than collapsing fences on three sides and the back of a house on the other.