RIP JIM BRIDWELL

Sunlight glistened along the lizard's back like water. Each time I reached for it, it darted, quick as a minnow, higher up the rock, swimming over bulges and through the cool shadows of small cracks. I was six or seven. I'd always liked watching small animals, but the lizard absolutely mesmerized me. Now, it wriggled out of reach. I touched the rock, wishing my hands and feet could stick to the granite flakes like the tiny creature's did, and then, without thinking, I began to climb after it, farther and farther up the cliff. From time to time the lizard stopped, as if to lure me on.

My foot slipped a little on a loose patch, and I looked down. In the dirt lot beneath me, everything had gotten smaller. There was no one around. I began to shake. The lizard was gone. A shadow seemed to pass over the bright day. Slowly I relaxed my tight grip on the handhold above me and moved my trembling fingers to the one below it. Then the other hand, then a foot, reversing the moves. The same terrain that I'd passed over, hypnotized by the lizard's easy movements, had grown steeper, the holds harder to find.

When my feet struck the ground, I stumbled backward, the horizontal world unfamiliar. My anxiety subsided, and I imagined the lizard, high on the cliff, looking down at me, its slim body quick as a wink.

For years the memory of that beauty and that fear fermented in me until I realized it wasn't about the lizard. I wanted to capture something that was even more elusive: I wanted to find the limits of my imagination itself.