… so it’s time to repair the desert gaiters. You think maybe?
The seamstress said, “You know it’s going to cost you more to repair them than to buy a new pair?”
I know. But in Escalante last spring a young hiker said, “You can’t get that kind any more!” and offered me fifty dollars for them. When I explained that they had thirty-plus years and about seven hundred hikes in them he said reverently, “You’re the real deal.”
Seriously? After that, how could I bear to get new ones?
In Zuni, that’s the plural of “mud.”
We were in Zuni last week. It’s monsoon season. The mud was so plural we’re still knocking it off our boots.
It’s much too hot to hike in the desert. We’re hiding out, like this mouse.
There is a mouse. I promise.
Find the mouse:
I mean it. There’s a mouse in there.
Hint: Look for the invisible but hopeful thought balloon that reads, “You are mistaken. There is no mouse.”
Another hint: The mouse is about the size of a pecan.
Mouse!
On one five mile hike, about twenty metates. Most were the simple Archaic type, but did even the Ancestral Pueblo use that casual style when hunting and traveling light? The materials were always to hand.
Nine of them:
Also one Ancestral Pueblo type, broken. So often metates are broken. Were they perhaps broken ritually to mark some event?
Lately the temperature has been perfectly reptilian.
On a sandy mesa-side, Hosteen Cheii. Proper behavior is to give him water; if you don’t have water, use spit.
And cooling it in the shade of a juniper, a pretty prairie rattler. Proper behavior is to back off in a hurry.
It stands in the middle of one of the linked plazas of a remote, dusty, fallen Pueblo complex that was abandoned, probably because of drought, sometime about 1200 C.E..
It’s not a grave. Ancestral Puebloans didn’t do graves with headstones.
It looks shrine-ish. The unassuming shrines of the Pueblos are often a careful pile of stones.
…a Giant Sequoia.
In the sand of an arroyo, roadrunner on the left—all those little Xs—coyote on the right.
...three metates. Archaic, given their location, on earth once much wetter than it is in these times of drought.
Each is pecked to roughen its grinding surface. Use has rubbed the first into a bowl that exposes the thin strata of its sandstone, now spalled by frost and rain. All are broken.
The third in situ in a messy prehistoric living room, now cross-trodden by cows:
See July 5 post. What are they?
Like the circle in the earlier post, this one was in the wrong place and with the wrong doorway opening to be a hogan ring. Its lichened stones were next to the collapsed foundations of a Puebloan fieldhouse, ca. 1300s (my best guess; post-Chaco). But it didn’t have the sunken center typical of a kiva depression, and seemed too small for that as well.
Beautiful potsherds.
Remember to turn potsherds face down again to protect the paint.
BETSY JAMES: Worldbuilding and Wilderness 