Category Archives: On Integrating Word and Image

On Hiking in New Mexico, On Integrating Word and Image, On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, Walking All Day On Stone

The Unnoticed

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About seven thousand years ago, a culture that the invaders of five hundred years ago called the Bajada were making tools out of basalt.

Basalt. Were they crazy? Gluttons for punishment? Basalt is hard, grainy, homely, and close to impossible to knap. But by god it’s tough. It takes a lot to break it. Maybe that was the attraction?

We have to assume that the so-called Bajada–we have no idea what they called themselves, though they were all over the Southwest–were tough. And that hunters found a reason for their choice of that difficult material.

Where you find those basalt flakes you may also find the metate where gatherers ground wild grain:

Their camp is eroding into the arroyo. But if you’re alert you can spot what’s left of the place where folks sat around knapping basalt, sharing chapatis made of wild grains, and telling stories about the next seven thousand years.

On Hiking in New Mexico, On Integrating Word and Image, On the Creative Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Drop It and Dance

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On the slope below a line of rubble that might–or, in that stony country, might not–have been a tiny ruin, was a cascade of the coarse grayware of the Late Archaic.

At first glance it seemed like a “pot drop”: the in situ remains of one vessel. But if you look closely you can see that the corrugation was done by a couple of different hands.

Not far away there was a little dance floor:

On Creativity, On Hiking in New Mexico, On Integrating Word and Image, On the Creative Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Annular Eclipse

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From a sandstone mesa we watched the moon slide over the sun. Later, in a vast site full of ashy firepits and burned stone, an Archaic mano echoed those lunar shapes.

Below: exposed surface, buried surface, and its thousands-of-years-old bed.

On Creativity, On Hiking in New Mexico, On Integrating Word and Image, On the Creative Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Many Manos

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All day we spotted Archaic manos, grinding stones, whole or broken–this in terrain we’d hiked for decades. What was it about today?

First mano. Front elevation, rear elevation, then back into its nest for the next few thousand years:

More manos: Some were carefully shaped. Some were an expedient cobble, one or both sides slicked by use on a handy flat rock as metate.

Unlike more recent, Puebloan manos, which were flat and wide for grinding corn, Archaic manos–thousands of years old–were a characteristic oval. Mostly they were used to grind wild seeds: Indian rice grass, for example. Or whatever edibles the desert had to offer. A friend in Zuni said of his wild-resourceful grandmother, “Grandma eats everything.”

On Hiking in New Mexico, On Integrating Word and Image, On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Elking

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We set out from an altitude of about 9000′. Hiked down 800 vertical feet to the valley, where we picked up an elk trail fragrant with droppings. The grass was laid in the direction of travel, roughly northeast. We followed; the trail led us along the edge of the meadow, then abruptly back up the 800 vertical feet, through the ashy pine wood to the rim.

Never caught up to the elk. Probably they didn’t have to stop so often and sit down.

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

Rain

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After long heat, rain and chill at last. The little tinajas in the sandstone have sips of water now for birds, foxes, coyotes.

The sinuous watercourses are full of red mud. This collared lizard—male? female?—out and about before cold weather, was actually an outrageous neon chartreuse. With a muddy face.

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

Corvid. Yes, you read that right.

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A local group, “Art as Antibodies” asked for pieces about how we’re coping with the Covid lockdown. I sent a  painting of the wide and windy desert, which is how—and where—I cope. Not covidy enough, they said. So I sent a corvid.

Slot canyons are spooky, mysterious, intimate. Ravens nest along the rim. When you emerge from the dark strictures of a slot canyon you feel reborn.