The spareness of the desert: a small hill was home to seven clumps of terra cotta-pink grass. Beyond it, dark piñones echoed their humped shape. All carefully spaced; plants form a community, yet they’re individuals who live with each other at a social distance.
I drew the fossil of a spiral snail shell embedded in a gray limestone boulder.
*
*
Season of dry grasses.
The road turned to dirt, then to a two-track that petered out and became a trail. Two young buck deer moved away from us quietly, up the far side of the draw. Two-year-old males: Jan calls them “forkéd horns.”
On a pumice outcropping lay, face down, a Surfer Ken doll in board shorts that had once been blue and yellow. I turned him face up, to catch some rays and even out his tan.
*
Rambling in a rubbly, lunar, black-and-tan landscape where nothing grows but saltbush. Water-scoured sediments, here and there a hunk of dinosaur bone, and hundreds of stones so polished they might have been tipped from a rock tumbler. John, the geologist, says they’re gastroliths: dinosaur gizzard stones.
“Swallowed by dinosaurs as they traveled their migration routes,” he said. “Maybe hundreds of miles long. None is bigger than a grapefruit; if they were the result of normal deposition they’d be more varied in size, with no upper limit. And they’re all exotics, not from any source near here.”
“Then where are they from?”
He said, “The mountain range they came from has long since worn away.”
*
The first cactus: I hopped the fence onto the Malpais, and with my first step ran into a cholla. Guess I haven’t been hiking for a while.
The second cactus: side-hilling down from the sandstone ledges, I slipped on the scree and my right hand, which I put out instinctively to catch myself, landed smack in a prickly pear. Stabbed full of big spines, furred with gloccids. I had to stand where I was and pull the spines out; got most of them, but a few I’ll bear to my grave like shrapnel.
*
A friend from Oklahoma said, at the end of a daylong hike, “I have wore myself slick.”
I had too. I thought how grateful I am to inherit useful expressions like that, often from old ranchers like Jan’s infamous Uncle Clyde. “Raining like a cow pissing on a flat rock.” “Hotter than a June bride in a feather bed.”
My favorite Uncle Clydeism, though, is “Steeper than a cow’s face.” Right. On hikes like that I have wore myself slick.
*
We wandered the mesa through piñon and juniper, following whatever branch of the old logging roads looked interesting, no idea where we really were. Dan gave us the French word flaner, “to wander around pleasantly with no particular goal.”
*
On the red dirt was what looked like a tatón, the fluffy white seed-puff of the river cottonwood…but it was strolling. I had to lie on my belly to see it was a spider. A spider! I have no clue.
A mud-dauber’s nest with holes in a row, like a harmonica.
*
I spotted a rock that shouldn’t have been there: in a field of crumbled pink granite, a smooth gray stone. I pried it up. It was the butt of a buried stone axe, roughly whacked from a river cobble.
Once these mountains were full of grizzlies. Given its nasty point, was the axe a bear bonker? Should we hope not, for all concerned?
*
Where we hiked Jan had found many mountain lion tracks. I learned that lions focus on small animals: I’m 4’11”. Small animals with high voices, actually. I dropped my usual backcountry shout by a good octave.
In Zuni the lion’s name is hokdidasha. Hokdidasha is—I think, but what do I know?—the beast priest of the north. The fetish shown is unsigned.
A snake dashed across the sandy road. A coachwhip, maybe? About three feet long and slender, a gorgeous dark coral. It left a trail of parentheses.
WORLD-BUILDING and WILDERNESS: 