In a midden scatter tumbling far down a slope, three pieces of utilitarian pot that have lain so long separated, on different soil types, that each has weathered to its own color.
Perfect fit.
United
Category Archives: On Hiking in New Mexico
The Place, the Tree, the Gift
Juniper
At the Base of the Mesas
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.
When It’s Hot, Go High
11,000 feet. The lowlands won’t see asters for another month.
Sky Ocean
South from the Sandia Crest trail. Summer rain.
Newfangled
A chunk of thick, nineteenth-century beer bottle repurposed–right edge retouched–as if it were a flint flake.
Juniper
Lightning-struck.
Burned to the stones, then scoured flush by weather and time.
Is This Yours?
The leg it slashed –clinic visit, tetanus booster–was mine.
Vote to control shooters on public lands.
Weapons, Sand, and Time
A tiny–1.7 cm–obsidian point, probably Ancestral Puebloan.
Flint from a flintlock–Navajo, at a guess. The flint itself is probably from the Brandon flint mines in England, knapped there and imported as a finished product.
Remains of a WWII dummy bomb. The brightly-colored sands and clays of the desert were exploited as targets.
WORLD-BUILDING and WILDERNESS: 