We hear fighter jets rip through the clear Nevada sky
and our tinted, thick-paned tour bus windows.
I’ve never been bombed so I don’t flinch.

Cows chewing cud in sagebrush could care less.
No one tells them about butchers.
Marmots reckon we all might be better off
without tons of Navy munitions buried beneath us.
A red-faced man strains against his big belt buckle,
spits and insists those marmots are yellow-bellied.
Regardless, when mountains get anxious, I do, too.

Just past the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone reservation,
our tour guide points out the Fallon Naval Air Station.
She doesn’t need to. The fighter jets show us where it is.
“Rumor has it,” she mentions, “little ol’ Fallon
was the 3rd target on Osama bin Laden’s list.”

Lunch at a BLM campground. There are picnic tables
and a fallout shelter. Bear locks on the dumpsters
are broken and rusted. No one believes bears
have ever been here. The bus driver stumbles out.
Checks the wrinkles on a basalt boulder’s sunburnt face,
looks up, warns us: “We’re way behind schedule,
but there’s plenty of time.” By the smell of him,
his hands have been thoroughly sanitized.

I stretch my legs on a petroglyph trail to a cave
where thousands of archaic artifacts were found.
A sign on the trail tells us to “Appreciate the past.”
It’s hard to hear over screeching F-35s, the Navy’s newest
attack aircraft. In the cave, an archaeologist explains
what coprolite is. Rich in digested roots and seeds. He
speculates about desert people and a second harvest. Then,
someone says it’s 24 years after September 11th.

But the only towers out here are mountains.
And the mountains are anxious.