In the Jemez Mountains we hiked among the Tent Rocks: eerie, beautiful. Pink-white ashy pumice forms teepees, minarets, cupolas, gables, totem poles, shrines—their bases scalloped like coconut-cream popsicles, their tops jagged as blades. Don’t slide off; by the time you got to the bottom you’d be, not just dead, but completely skinned by volcanic glass. As we crept along the steep sides of the hills each of us touched the slope with one hand.
The ash is full of obsidian, Apache Tears.
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In the Guadalupe Box area of the Jemez Mountains, on a boulder fallen from the sheer rhyolite cliffs, the five-foot-tall petroglyph of an eagle dancer.
Compared to the most ancient spirals and suns the work looks recent, but “recent” is relative: These mesas were refuges for the Pueblos when, ten years after their successful 1680 revolt, the conquistadores marched north from El Paso to retake New Spain.
Smudged drawing from my pocket notes. Those feet: one human, one an eagle’s.
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Peralta Canyon, Jemez: pictographs in red ochre. Finger marks, in groups along ridges of rock next to the creek; one faint handprint; stars, turtles, and this pretty sun face.
Unlike those of the classic Zia symbol, all its rays are of equal length. The slanted ones may be feathers. It had been painted with a finger, and seemed to be subtly smiling.
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In the cobble hills above the Rio Puerco. Rain, snow, thunder. I was afraid of lightning, but Jan sheltered calmly under a juniper that bore the black scars of a previous strike. The wind smelled of wet stone.
In the sand lay an iron axehead, its handle long ago lost to weather. From the eighteen-eighties, maybe. The edge had a graceful worn curve, and the splayed butt showed it had been used as a wedge to split firewood.
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In the trackless mudstone of Piedra Lumbre, five or six hogan rings: stone foundations with east-facing doors, still holding what was left of the cribbed juniper rafters of traditional Navajo houses. Judging by the decay of the juniper, well over a hundred years old. Beyond them, two circles of ash filled with fragments of trash, probably fires that burned the deceased’s possessions. The squashed casing of a cheap nickel pocket watch.
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Writer-illustrator Betsy James, in conversation with older readers.
I watched a charcoal garter snake with two brown stripes navigate the puddles of a rain-soaked road. Sometimes it crawled, sometimes it swam, fluid either way. I understood why Puebloan water deities—Kolowisi, Avanyu—are serpents.
It lay still while I stroked it with a grass stem, then slipped away.
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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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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.
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Did you know rationality is solar?
That’s why you wake up at 3 a.m. and worry about the rent, who your kid is dating, and that weird spot on your nose. All the rationality on the planet is in China, and the Chinese are using it.
Just remind yourself of this and go back to sleep. Come morning, you’ll be rational again and the Chinese will be lying awake worrying about the rent, their kids, and their noses.
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WORLD-BUILDING and WILDERNESS: 