All posts by Betsy James

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

3,000 Miles and 300 Million Years

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A decade ago, hiking the crest of the Manzano Mountains, I picked up an odd fossil (left):

I ran it around to all the paleontologists I knew. A worm tunnel? A beetle track? Trunk of a very small elephant? (Right.)

But not the right paleontologists, apparently, for no one could say. Heavy and red with iron, the mystery piece has roamed around my desk for years, petted and puzzled over.

Then, in the museum at Joggins Cliffs in Nova Scotia, I found Artisia (right). It’s a cast of the pith of Cordaites, a treelike plant that grew huge in what is now the Bay of Fundy–and, it seems, in what would become the Manzanos Crest Trail. I checked: Carboniferous-Permian boundary. Both places.

300 million years later, I can crow, “That’s it!”

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

Bedrock Metate

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Bedrock metates are the oldest. They belonged to the Archaics, the first peoples in the Southwest, who became the Puebloans and still live and work here.

With a rounded mano as pestle, this one was used for the grinding of wild grasses. Corn had not yet spread up from its first cultivation in Mexico.

Season after season, a band of hunter-gatherers returned to this stone. As they arrived at their familiar camp, surely they felt, “There it is. Here we are.”

Time has filled this one with windblown sand.

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

Don’t know about you, but I’m pleased

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Pleasing Fungus beetles. Yes, that’s their actual name. They live on the fungus that grows on dead trees, in this case downed by fire. I don’t know whether this group–originally there were three–were mating or tussling.

As my zoologist mother said, “You be grateful to fungus and bacteria. If it weren’t for them you’d be up to your neck in dead dinosaurs.”

On Creativity, On Integrating Word and Image, On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, On Writing, Walking All Day On Stone

Just Out:

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It feels like what it is, a field journal. I’m delighted with it:

https://casaurracapress.com/bookstore/p/breathing-stone

You can order it from your favorite indie bookstore; from Bookshop, the indie alternative to the big A:

https://bookshop.org/p/books/breathing-stone-living-small-in-a-southwest-village-betsy-james/20027660?ean=9781956375152

or from the publisher, single copies okay:

https://casaurracapress.com/bookstore

Many miles of quiet walkabout. Illustrated.

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

UFO Superbloom

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April 16:

May 4:

The desert was in superbloom. Our UFO is a scarlet beehive or hedgehog cactus, Echinocereus coccineus, exploiting a crack in a huge hematitic concretion. There were many concretions on the hillside, each with its resident beehive. The yellow carpet is probably Fendler’s bladder pod: Physaria fendleri.