Los Arroyos in Stereo

A springtime hike through the hills of the Sierra Nevada, Andalucía, Spain. I follow my guide, Neftali, scrabbling up switchbacks, sweat from the raw sun cooling in the alpine breeze swishing my neck.

 

The hike has been filled with talk. Neftali pointing out species, warning of sliding scree. He tells me the legends of the kings whose names are immortalized in the soaring peaks above—Alcazaba, Mulhacen. We trade words in Spanish and English. At one point, he spots a pinecone with a peculiar spiral pattern. He picks it up and shows it to me. “How do you say?” he asks. “Ardilla.” I’m puzzled. He waves his arm out behind him, miming a bushy tail.

 

“Squirrel?” I say.

“Squorl?”

“Squir-rel.”

“Arg-dee-ya.” 

 

It is agreed.

 

We walk on and come to a junction. Two streams gush in parallel rills down the rocky slopes. The tallest of Spanish mountains loom dark and snow-veined against the burning Mediterranean sky. We’ve walked for hours; my feet sing. The tufted stones heaped between the two coursing brooks invite us to sit and have our lunch of sandwiches and fruit.

 

We drop our packs and lean on stones and the talk stops. Neftali unpacks lunch quietly. I lean back and listen, and the water comes on, estereofonico.

 

Running water is my comfort sound. The thumping flow of the bath filling up when I am a child. The whisper of the lake I woke to every  morning as a student living in a tower in a strange city. The dripping slosh of a waterwheel rolling over and over beside an old wooden bridge in the south of China. The waves of the Atlantic cresting into the eastern tip of Europe, sun setting over them like the skin of blood-swollen drum.

 

All these are present in the rushing noise of the streams sluicing down the mountain on either side of me. There is spritz and hum, splash and susurrus, ring and roar. All the might and delicacy of the sound of water flowing a course it has run for centuries. Sloshing streams, springtime streams, hissing cascades. Streams on all sides, enveloping me, fixing the moment and the place—a pile of mossy rocks halfway along a trail pointing skyward—in a pinpoint of aural ecstasy and goosebumpy bloodrush and misty droplets pattering my skin in the burning sun. The running of water unfettered through space and time. The meeting of frequencies on the way down the mountainside. Oblivion distilled in the two numbing soundstreams colliding in the acoustic echo chamber of my head. 

 

I open my eyes and look over at Neftali. He has put his pack aside—the lunch laid out for when we are ready—and leaned back, like me, to listen to the water. We catch each others’ eye, but say nothing. The water in stereo is a speech of its own. For this sound, we have no words in any language but bliss.