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 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.

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

At the Base of the Mesas

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A nineteenth-century Hispanic homestead, long abandoned in its broadcast midden of rusty metal and purple glass. Axe-cut and adze-hewn beams, windows and doors trimmed with dimension lumber.

It was the first day cool enough, morning only, to scramble and side-hill in the mesa’s shadow. By noon the pale Cretaceous clay was too hot for pleasure.