I bit a dried ball of piñon pitch. It tasted like cloves.
The wide horseshoes of mesa canyons, naked slopes of the Morrison formation, eroded, sleeked by rain and full of the sandy tongues left by its torrents: a water-made landscape without a drop of water in it.
The Morrison slopes were fissured, pristine—sandy corries where only animals had walked. Footprints of coyote, mice, ravens, deer.
*
Among the lifts and holts of sandstone in the beaten, overgrazed terrain west of Albuquerque, overrun for centuries by sheep, cattle, Spaniards, Navajos, soldiers, ranchers and uranium prospectors, in the plumb middle of nowhere, we came upon an enormous galvanized bolt sticking out of the ground.
Pat said it held the universe together. With a little work, feeling like King Arthur, I pulled it out.
*
The most wonderful thing to happen in the hike happened right at the beginning of it.
There’d been rain the night before, and the clouds had half withdrawn over the mesas. Arroyos were dry. But as we crossed the first, and just as we crossed, a slow, creamy tongue of water came snaking down it.
It arrived from some far-distant cloudburst, miles away and maybe hours ago. Traveling, say, five inches per second. It was cream-colored and laden with lumps of tan foam, remnants of some fury upstream, now abated.
Best was its sound. As it moved over the dry sand it made a purr, a hiss, filling tiny underground gaps—perhaps animal or insect burrows—from which the air escaped in tiny gurgling fountains. The flow came slowly, slowly over the rippled sand.
When, five or six hours later, we hiked back, it was still running slightly, but the sand was saturated and completely silent.
*
Back in the red-rock hills, the scattered ruins of a mine, thick with mechanical garbage. As though no one who worked there had ever done anything but let broken refuse fall straight from his hand.
Pack rats had annexed a battered, faded-blue Dodge van and filled it, floor to ceiling, with cholla cactus. Another rat duo—they’re usually mother-daughter pairs—lived in a fairly new range: it lay on its back, the burner holes serving as windows. I opened the oven door (the roof) and looked down into the chambers. The rats weren’t home, but the clippings were still green. Nice digs.
*
The Syncline: The sandstone ponds had had a flashflood through them. In the lower pools the willows were torn and full of wreckage, but the higher ones were beautiful. We went in naked on the sandy, gravely mud.
Polliwogs and froglets nibbled us. We slid down the algae-coated water chutes of the linked pools; the stream’s steady drip from pool to pool became overflow as our bodies displaced water.
So quiet! Wind in the cottonwoods, sun on the washed stone, warm breeze on bare skin. Absolute peace.
My pencil fell out of my pack; I took these notes on a three-by-five card by scratching with a rock.
At the top of the acequia was a tunnel in the side of the mountain, originally a mine. I couldn’t see into it—it was dark and the day was bright. But away back in there I could make out a reddish door; the sound of water came from behind it. Across the square black tunnel mouth orb spiders had built three perfect webs, one after another.
*
In the middle of the desert wilderness we came upon a wooden bed frame and a rusty hibachi, standing all alone in a meadow. Someone had built the bed a plywood bottom.
Snakeweed had grown up green all around. I picked a broken shell earring out of the sand.
*
Our horned toads—the Desert Short-Horned Lizard—give live birth. Or rather, they incubate shell-less eggs in their bodies, and give birth to a litter of six to thirty-one (thirty-one!) infants still in their amnions, little marbles that break open into horned toads ready to run.
On Sandia Crest I came upon what must have been a recent birth, a fat adult with a salmon-colored chin and a handful of babies the size of bumblebees.
*
Rain-soaked sandstone is unstable. Hiking upcanyon, we found a boulder the size of a Winnebago that had peeled off the mesa and bashed a fifteen-foot-wide swath down the scree slope.
It had taken out the piñones, hit the canyon bottom, run up the opposite side, rolled back down, bounced a couple of times and settled back to dam the creek into a fine little trout pool.
The bashed pine needles were still green, but the pool already had a half dozen six-inch fish in it.
*
It poured.
I’d never seen live water on Red Mesa before. High up it was milky, coming off the pale-yellow-to-gray sands and clays; below it was a rich red, thick with mud. We couldn’t get any wetter, so we waded right through the freshets that were neither sun-hot nor rain-cold but somewhere in between.
On the highway home, just east of the Ojito road, an arroyo roared down like ocean waves. Astonishing.
*
WORLD-BUILDING and WILDERNESS: 