Below the stone ring of a nineteenth-century Navajo hogan: a piece of sun-purpled glass—pre-1914, when a process was discovered that prevented clear glass from purpling in sunlight—between two snake vertebrae.
Perhaps you’d like to write that one?
Stone in the outwash of the Morrison Formation…
…and, near the stone circle that is all that remains of an early Navajo hogan, a juniper stump, axe-cut a couple of centuries ago and scoured to the ground by wildfire:
…something like 200 million years ago. Morrison Formation. Waiting in delta clay since the Jurassic.
Cascading down the side of an arroyo, the mortal (and purple) remains of a Mesozoic beast. The faintly purple tinge of the bone fragments may be due to manganese, says a local paleontologist who refuses to stake his life on that.
And speaking of stakes, we were not the first discovers. Above and below the scatter were short lengths of rebar with aluminum tags–now illegible, leaving the bones once again to their quiet unmaking.
…without a drop of water in it.
One of them has a tail.
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.
Just in time for the season: a rough hoe, but a hoe. The land itself was rough, a sandy little site in the lee of a pile of boulders.
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.
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.
WORLD-BUILDING and WILDERNESS: 