In the sandpits of a big Archaic site we came upon a golden bull snake, thick-bodied, almost six feet long. We approached it cautiously. It did not move except to flick its black tongue, smelling us.
When we had looked at it long enough, we spoke and moved more normally. It wove toward us, aggressing; then gracefully, unhurriedly, it turned along its body and slipped back into the brush. For all its length and girth it left scarcely any mark in the sand.
I get cranky about trash in the wilderness. At the foot of the low mesa I picked up what I thought was a fragment of gray plastic hose.
It was the broken mouthpiece of a Puebloan tobacco pipe, conically drilled from either end and polished quite round. (That’s a field drawing, with my not-very-big forefinger for scale. Say an inch and some.) Probably argillite, which is “indurated claystone”: claystone that was heated and hardened underground by, for example, a volcanic dike.
I thought of 14th Century men huddled in the lee of the mesa, having a—probably ceremonial—smoke.
We followed the water-scoured sandstone channels until they petered out, then crossed to the next gully west. This ended in a series of tinajas and a plunge pool. We crawled up to a rock shelter above—charcoal and sherds and rat poop—and clambered down to a second, even lovelier set of pools. There we put our backs against the stone and listened to the ponderosa sigh. Most beautiful tree, the ponderosa. Most beautiful voice, the peaceful tree.
In the midst of this communion with nature G. discovered that a thermos of coffee—cream and sugar—had come open in his pack.
A frosty desert morning on the gravels of the ancient Rio Puerco. All around us, distantly, the pop and crack of target shooting. We parked in a trashed pullout and hiked away from the road.
Wandering, sometimes talking, sometimes silent, we picked up rocks and dropped them. Showed each other the best ones: quartz and quartzites, petrified wood, metamorphics full of crinoid stems—all tumble-polished millions of years before humans were human. The sun rose, then sank. The wide bare plains; the weather-bitten volcanic Ladrones palely looming, almost floating. Except for wind and the marksmen, silence.
At dusk, our pockets full of pretty rocks, we trailed back to the pickup and sat on the tailgate as the target shooters drove homeward past us in their four-by-fours.
We followed the ridge for a while, then dropped into the dry gorge. Seasonal flash floods had carved an amphitheater, huge, cool, and dim. The east rim, where the low sun struck, was brilliant yellow against the cobalt sky.
The floods had rolled big stones around and around until they drilled deep holes into the bedrock. One shaft was nine feet deep. How many millennia of intermittent rains does it take to scour a pit like that?
On a low ridge there had been a cluster of Puebloan fieldhouses, their adobe melted now, nothing left but a pile of stones, potshards, broken metates. Higher on the slope was an Archaic site: no pottery, the black sand of firepits, many chert flakes.
Clearly, the house-builder Puebloans liked a nice flat bench, while the Archaic preferred the sloping, sandy corries that face the sun. A few thousand years later, both sites still feel homey, scattered with trash like a friendly living room.
In their time those sites must have looked even homier: busted baskets, gnawed bones, brush shelters left to the wind, husks and cobs and turds.
We see what lasts.
Into a stiff wind and spits of rain we climbed high on a Triassic ridge. Among the gray mudstone was a spill of red ochre. One chunk was handy as a pencil: I tried it on a rock, thinking about how our Paleolithic ancestors used ochre to paint bodies for dance, delight and death.
Afterward I turned the rock over to hide that a human had left a mark in that remote place. The next good rain will wash it away.
Many Archaic firepits. Circles of black soil on yellow sand, red heaps of burned rock. The mesa ridges were wind-scoured, not a grain of loose sand, streaks and gullies gouged by the wind.
A bear’s footprints, round sole, four fat round toes. We followed them; the bear had broken branches from a juniper to eat the ripe berries. Suddenly Jan said, “There!”
It took a moment to spot it, about five hundred yards away: black, big, ambling and then running away from us, its loose skin every which way, shining in the autumn sun.
In the wilderness, so many unexpected traces of humans.
In a roadless canyon we came upon the disintegrating remains of a camp Jan had stumbled on, just abandoned, in the 70s. It must have been a hippie camp, he said, because there were tipi poles and a dew-swollen copy of The Hobbit.
Poles and book were still there. The book was unidentifiable now, gray with sun.
In the Jemez Mountains under a Maynard Dixon sky, lazing like lizards. As we sat on the edge of the high mesa a half dozen swallows buzzed our ears like bullets, like a mechanical breath.
A raven flew by. In mid-flight it folded its wings, turned upside down and said, “Clonk!” Unfolded, came right side up and flew calmly on.
WORLD-BUILDING and WILDERNESS: 