In the Cretaceous mud we found a shattered dinosaur thigh by following fragments of petrified bone scattered down an arroyo.
But—I think I’ve explained this before—if you find a tiny piece, how can you tell whether it’s a dissolving dinosaur?
Lick it. If it’s bone, rather than some other stone like agate or silicified wood, the porous vesicles left by once-living cells and capillaries will wick up the moisture of your tongue, and it will stick.
Writer-illustrator Betsy James, in conversation with older readers
In the sand of the Ojito Wilderness, a cracked Archaic mano, a grindstone. Crystalline quartzite, red and white and yellow, with a slanted edge that provided a perfect grip. I hooked my fingers there, seeing another woman’s hand: small like mine, probably young, with broken nails.
After twenty centuries, the stone remembers that other hand.
*
From a faded pamphlet on Navajo folklore I learned that a horned toad can make an arrowhead by choosing a stone and running around it. This is why you’ll sometimes find an arrowhead where there was none before.
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Red Mesa. Up the roughest canyon to the plunge-pool cave, the scoured sandstone channels. We put our backs against the stone and listened to the Ponderosa sigh. In the midst of this communion I found a thermos of hot chocolate had come open in my pack.
Along the arroyo I picked up a clump of breast feathers, each pointed with a tiny dark heart.
*
Standing in the middle of a dry field, the last blue-purple light in the sky, I thought: The world is round. The horizon is a circle, with the sky bowl over it like my grandmother’s domed paperweight of clear glass.
Wherever you stand is precisely the center of the world.
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*
No time to read, you say?
A good book has time inside it.
It’s a gate to time out of time, a different world on a different schedule, a respite from the crazy speed of our lives.
Be still. Be welcome. Open the gate.
*
Hiking the Piedra Lumbre area of La Leña. A cold, dry day with a storm moving in.
Lots of petrified wood. Not the brilliant agates we see so often but a frail, glittering mudstone that preserves knotholes and wormholes, almost the worm itself.
Fossil tree trunks dissolve into perfect wood chips: the desert floor is littered as though a stone woodcutter had passed, chopping stone trees for a stone fire.
*
The hullabaloo over e-readers has brought back a luscious memory of cycling (or attempting to cycle; it was wetter than the bottom of the sea) in Wales, sleeping in hostels and B&Bs. I had a paperback copy of T. H. White’s The Once and Future King. Before I turned out the light each night, I tore off the pages I had just read and dropped them in the waste bin.
And pedaled on, lighter.
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At Zuni Pueblo, a storymaking workshop for 3rd, 4th, 5th graders. Writers can’t be restrained from doodling while they think, so we covered the new library tabletops with yellow butcher paper. When we cleaned up on Friday—the kids long gone—among the smudgy misspellings and graffiti was this drawing, unsigned.
Her quiet face.
*
Hiking the red Triassic, we stopped to admire a wide, round, hissing spring that had been bubbling up CO2, methane, and hydrogen sulfide for a hundred thousand years.
In the Pleistocene this area must have boiled like Yellowstone, for all around were the empty vats of dry springs, thirty to sixty feet deep. If you fell in you could never get out—nor, so far off trail, would you be found. The living spring, presumably as deep, was capped with a peaty mat formed by the accumulated sedge roots of millenia, thick enough—we hoped—to support our weight.
We walked across. It trembled subtly under our feet, like an acqueous drum.
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BETSY JAMES: Worldbuilding and Wilderness 