All posts by Betsy James

On Hiking in New Mexico, On Integrating Word and Image, On the Creative Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Another Mystery

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We were picking our way down a remote and rocky draw in the Morrison when my companion looked back and said, “What’s that?”

We’re used to finding stone structures—stone is the building material out there—but we’d never seen anything like this. The unstable mudstone cliffs aren’t good for cliff dwellings, nor was this the regular, well-set look of an Ancestral Pueblo house or granary. Just stones, randomly stacked to fill a gap.

We scrambled up the tumbled cliff—always dicey, among the unstable fallen capstones—to see if we could understand what it was. Under the immense sandstone boulders, we found a room. 

The windward side had that gappy wall, though a sketchy barrier had been built on the open leeward side. Had the floor been built up with imported sand? Had those sawn posts, now fallen, held up a tarp of some sort? What looked like a bed of green juniper was a pack rat nest; the floor was thick with droppings. Among them were bits of rusty iron: a bolt, a rod, a strap from the leaf spring of a buggy or an early auto. What had once been in that metal frame? In the “forecourt” was a rusty bucket.

My guess would put the site in the thirties, latest. The ceiling was lightly smoked. Who lived here? Not in winter, certainly, nor during the monsoons. A sheepherder? So remote; were they in hiding? A moonshiner? An outlaw?

A lonely place, under looming stone. 

On Hiking in New Mexico, On Integrating Word and Image, On the Creative Life, On Writing, Walking All Day On Stone

There’s a Story Here

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Below the stone ring of a nineteenth-century Navajo hogan: a piece of sun-purpled glass—pre-1914, when a process was discovered that prevented clear glass from purpling in sunlight—between two snake vertebrae.

Perhaps you’d like to write that one?

On Hiking in New Mexico, On Integrating Word and Image, On the Creative Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Dissolving Dinosaur

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Cascading down the side of an arroyo, the mortal (and purple) remains of a Mesozoic beast. The faintly purple tinge of the bone fragments may be due to manganese, says a local paleontologist who refuses to stake his life on that.

And speaking of stakes, we were not the first discovers. Above and below the scatter were short lengths of rebar with aluminum tags–now illegible, leaving the bones once again to their quiet unmaking.

On Hiking in New Mexico, On Integrating Word and Image, On the Creative Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Another World

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Through the sandstone blocks that form the slowly-eroding edge of a mesa, a view of the desert hundreds of feet below.

I am reminded of a Neolithic dolmen, or tomb. But compared to the slow, quiet age of this erosion, the human Neolithic is the flick of a bird’s wing.

On Hiking in New Mexico, On the Creative Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Hard Land for a Living

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On a ridge above the crumbled, pink-and-black Morrison Formation was a decaying axe-cut juniper stump, signal to watch for the circular stone base of a hogan.

Sure enough:

It was probably nineteenth-century, because the juniper cribbing had decayed or been taken for firewood. Into it had been dumped the rusted remains of a McCormick wind pump dating to, say, the ranching thirties:

Outside the circle, laid carefully on a rock–“curated” by some previous visitor–was a 3″ chert hand axe. The Navajo had metal trade axes, so presumably this one was Archaic. Thousands of years older than both hogan and pump.