IN A HOT SPRING
Today, James Ron offers a spare, quietly hopeful short story that inspired my companion poem. Plus, a note about this collaboration.
The story, “In a Hot Spring” was written by James Ron, a writer whose characters carry real interior lives and whose settings, whether a Sierra Nevada hot spring or somewhere farther afield, feel inhabited rather than described, and inspired my poem. He has a gift for grounding you in a place and a history without making you feel like you’re being taught anything. Subscribe to his Substack by clicking the button near the end of this page.
CHARLES LEANED BACK against the rock face; just chillin in a hot spring, up to his chin in clear hot water, buck-naked, legs stretched out.
He released a breath of air, looking up through pristine air at the big pines close at hand and the hardy, gnarly specimens at tree line. The smell of pine and high-country flowering meadow hung in the air. The ridge line of granite peaks and cloudless powder blue skies spread out above.
He felt he had come to terms with the happenings of the past two years. The nighttime tossing and turning and questions with no answers faded away.
He and his wife of three years had divorced and five months later, he lost his job.
He got over the job loss easier than he got over his wife.
At thirty-three, he was on his way up the ladder in an investment firm. He was in sales. He wasn’t crazy about his job; but he was making good money and the company was growing.
He could plan for a family and their future.
His job was time-consuming. It cost him his wife.
Something had changed. They drifted apart. She divorced him. He was crushed. He dove into his work. It helped him deal with it.
He scored on a couple of deals that brought him a substantial commission.
A larger firm bought the company; new management changed things around, and he liked the job even less. He took a generous severance package.
He didn’t know what he would do. But whatever it was, it didn’t need to be in a hurry. With a close eye on things, he could live comfortably for a long time.
With a cool breeze on his face from the snowmelt stream that runs alongside and into the hot spring, he felt free from the past.
The past was gone but not forgotten.
He got things done at his own pace.
At first, he traveled. Time to do it while he could, he thought. He went to Hawaii; beautiful, he could live there. And Alaska, beautiful, would in no way live there by choice. He was always cold.
He started camping again, something his family did when he was younger. A forgotten joy remembered.
Now he was camped in a meadow next to Berry Hill Lake at about 6000’ on a spur trail just off the Pacific Crest Trail. Near Markleeville, south of Lake Tahoe.
Up on the ridgeline coming in, half a mile back, the Sierra Mountains stretch out north and south, down to the long central valley on one side, and to the high plains arid desert on the other.
Entering his second night, he had seen no one. Not surprising. This was a little-known hot spring in an area of many.
He thought about doing extended trips on the PCT. Hikers do the whole thing, Mexico to Canada. It can take months.
He’d kept in touch with his friends and previous contacts.
A couple of his business friends wanted him to join them. They sold partnerships and stock shares for a company called Thorium NRG. It made Thorium-based modular nuclear power stations sized to run small businesses up to industrial complexes. Expandable as needed.
Opinions of and regulations for the use of these reactors were changing. The future needs more energy. AI, by itself, demands huge amounts of energy. These modules would do the trick. Thorium is cheaper and less toxic.
It was just a matter of time. Get in, he thought.
He joined up and was to start on Monday. He’d work out of his place in South Lake Tahoe. They were in San Francisco and L.A.
He knew he wanted to find “her” and to have a family, but that day was in the future. Something pleasant to think about, always in the back of his mind.
For now, he’d go with the opportunity at hand.
He followed a jet and its contrail across the sky as it tracked eastward. It disappeared beyond the ridge right where the trail begins its descent down the mountain slope to the lake.
Someone wearing a lime green jacket was coming down the trail.
A female wearing a backpack.
A hundred yards out, she stopped and gave a wave. He waved back and watched as she wove her way down the talus and boulders.
She walked along the shoreline and selected a place to camp.
She set things up with ease.
She was shapely.
Pulling a towel out of her pack, she angled over to the creek and made her way up the short distance to the spring.
Only then did he think about being naked, and it was too late anyway.
He was only a little self-conscious.
She was pretty.
He could only smile as she came up to the spring. She eyed him, looked around, and saw his clothes laid out on the rock shelf.
She smiled.
“I hope I haven’t intruded on you,” she said.
“No, no. I’m surprised that’s all. Not many people know about this spot.
“You know you aren’t on the PCT now, right? There’s no through trail here.”
“Oh, I know,” she said. “We used to come here as kids.”
Looking into the spring, she said, “Someone stacked the river rock into a nice tub. Real nice.”
“Um, that would be me. I’ve been working on it.”
“I’m Maria. You don’t mind if I get in, do you?”
She began stripping down.
Somewhat surprised and stumbling over his words he answered her, “Hi, Maria, - I’m Charles, - - Nice to see you, I mean meet you. - Uh, no, sure, of course. Come on in. The water’s fine.”
The back of his mind spoke up. - “Charles. Meet your future.”
Heat rises the way relief does— slow, then all at once. You can lose two years to the same ceiling. You can lose a woman to the particular silence that grows between people who stopped saying the hard thing. Out here, granite doesn’t care. Pine doesn’t care. Sky, least of all. That’s the whole point. He built something with his hands for no reason, which is the only good reason. Then the mountain sent someone down. It does that sometimes— waits until you’ve quit asking and tosses you an answer in a lime green jacket.
Author’s Note
The story came first—Charles, a hot spring, a lime green jacket appearing on the trail at exactly the right moment. It’s a quiet piece, more interested in the interior weather of a man sorting himself out than in plot, and it earns its ending without forcing it.
The poem wasn’t meant to retell any of that. I wanted to write something complementary, which turned out to mean feeling rather than mirroring—the emotional current running beneath the story’s surface, pulled up and held to the light on its own terms. Solitude as chosen, not merely suffered. The strange logic of building something for no reason. The way clarity tends to arrive only after you’ve stopped chasing it.
Two forms, one set of truths. The story shows you, Charles. My poem tries to show you what it feels like to be him.
Upcoming…
A prose poem about an ordinary morning:
Morning Breaks, 09 May 2026
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