All posts by Betsy James

On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Cliff-hanger

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crumbling cliffOn an impossibly narrow peninsula of stone was a hunter’s paradise: it overlooked a game trail that crossed from one watershed to another. A hunter had only to wait.

And hunters had waited. On the peninsula was a thousand-year-old Archaic camp, its earth black with twelve to eighteen inches of ashy midden. Eighty feet above the valley floor, craning our necks, we could see that its crumbling north edge was formed of friable Tertiary sediments. The site itself looked “broken in half” like Dun Aengus, the cliff’s-edge fort from the Irish Iron Age, which the Atlantic has half devoured.

Following the game trail, we circled down to the bottom of the cliff. At its base stood an intact chunk of the site. It had slid from the edge where we had leaned and still stood upright, complete with ashes and flakes. On the cliff face rivulets of ashy mud trailed from the broken edge .

Ignorant, we had stood on that undercut, sleazy, brittle cliff’s edge, eighty feet above the valley floor.

On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Stinky Rattler?

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VerticalSnakeDB143Best discovery: the source of that organic-metallic, pungent odor we call “snake smell.”

It has an oiliness, and always seems to occur near strata of barely-altered Cretaceous swamp not compressed enough to be coal. Yet I’ve heard many a desert rat say, “That’s rattler smell.” It has always made me aware of my ankles.

But it’s a plant. Thick, small, dark green leaves in pairs on a red stem. I couldn’t find it in Weeds of the West, but it looks like a vetch.

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On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, Uncategorized, Walking All Day On Stone

Face Down

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SlotCanyonDB124The day began with mottled clouds that later burned off. No friendly sand to walk in, just acrid mud dust, with now and then a stiff, dried place where a cow had pissed. We hiked down terrifying deep arroyos whose walls, scored by mud-laden runnels, were poised to collapse.

Mudstone concretions: eyeballs and entrails lay in drifts on the yellow-red dirt. We came across two half-buried spheres, both about twelve feet in diameter, like the backs of two huge skulls: Baba Yaga and her daughter.

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On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, Walking All Day On Stone

And We Are As Brief

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Fossil antlerAt the base of a sandy slope lay shattered antlers. I picked them up; they were stone.

Fossil bone lay all over, a jaw with a row of tooth sockets, an ungulate’s durable knucklebone. The antlers belonged to a proto-antelope. The weight of overlying strata had cracked them, but old rain, bearing minerals in solution, had mended the cracks. I found the tiny parallel tracks left by the incisors of that briefest being, a mouse or vole.

These sediments are slightly over two million years old.

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On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Hogan Rings

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Navajo Slab CorralFrom the mesa edge we saw, on a south-facing bench, two Navajo hogan rings and a stone corral, and climbed down to them.

They were old. No historical pottery scatter at all. One of the rings still carried the juniper cribbing of the roof, though it had fallen. In the desert juniper can endure for hundreds of years.

The hogan’s door did not face east as is traditional, because the ring had been built against a sandstone slab; however, the north wall did appear to have been knocked out, customary ritual to release the spirit of a dead person. 

The corral had been formed ingeniously by piling cedar to wall up the ends of a cleft formed when a fallen slab split in two.

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On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Feet

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More millipedes, six inches long and shiny as mahogany fiddles. They look like little trains, like the Coast Starlight trucking along. Many wide holes of what Jan calls “evening ants.” If you poke in a stick and bring an ant up into the sun, instantly it dies. Each hole is surrounded by a spread of tiny discarded juniper twigs.

Clear bear tracks in the damp sand of the water chute.

Best of all, near the end of the long day and worn out: four adults lying on their bellies on the sandstone, watching a millipede poop.

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On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Little, Big

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Late summer, hiking on the syncline: dozens of millipedes, the color of polished violins, in frantic, foot-waving travel. Next spring we’ll find their husks, curled in tight spirals and weathered white as chalk.

On the road out we were passed by an enormous RV. From a distance its size-to-speed ratio was exactly that of a millipede.

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