… so it’s time to repair the desert gaiters. You think maybe?
The seamstress said, “You know it’s going to cost you more to repair them than to buy a new pair?”
I know. But in Escalante last spring a young hiker said, “You can’t get that kind any more!” and offered me fifty dollars for them. When I explained that they had thirty-plus years and about seven hundred hikes in them he said reverently, “You’re the real deal.”
Seriously? After that, how could I bear to get new ones?
In Zuni, that’s the plural of “mud.”
We were in Zuni last week. It’s monsoon season. The mud was so plural we’re still knocking it off our boots.
It’s much too hot to hike in the desert. We’re hiding out, like this mouse.
There is a mouse. I promise.
Find the mouse:
I mean it. There’s a mouse in there.
Hint: Look for the invisible but hopeful thought balloon that reads, “You are mistaken. There is no mouse.”
Another hint: The mouse is about the size of a pecan.
Mouse!
From Infinite and Dangerous and Bright, by Betsy James … with 150 illustrations by the author.
Infinite and Dangerous and Bright is available from:
or Amazon.
On one five mile hike, about twenty metates. Most were the simple Archaic type, but did even the Ancestral Pueblo use that casual style when hunting and traveling light? The materials were always to hand.
Nine of them:
Also one Ancestral Pueblo type, broken. So often metates are broken. Were they perhaps broken ritually to mark some event?
It stands in the middle of one of the linked plazas of a remote, dusty, fallen Pueblo complex that was abandoned, probably because of drought, sometime about 1200 C.E..
It’s not a grave. Ancestral Puebloans didn’t do graves with headstones.
It looks shrine-ish. The unassuming shrines of the Pueblos are often a careful pile of stones.
I’m not great at identifying projectile points, but my best guess is that this is an Armijo point (Late Archaic, about 2,000 B.C.) and an atlatl point rather than an arrowhead. It was about an inch long, and, interestingly, had had a “field repair.” The original delicate serration had broken along one edge, spoiling its symmetry, and someone–the original owner? a later finder?– had resharpened the broken side with plain bifacial knapping. Like a slightly tippy Christmas tree, it looks wonky but serviceable.
I’m not great at identifying flowers, either. But the desert was blooming.
The square-cornered foundation and a couple of scattered sherds say Ancestral Pueblo, but both the vertical orientation and the size of the stones are unusual and impressive. Walls and roof–jacal style, the Southwest version of wattle-and-daub–have long since dissolved into the desert clay.
And another house. I have no idea whose, but the excavator left their claw marks above the doorway.
Mouse? Packrat?
I vote for a jumping rodent. See how the footprints are clustered? Maybe a kangaroo rat? The soil is clay. It was sloppy mud a couple of weeks ago, now hard as ceramic. This dance should last until the next good rain.
We threaded the wind- and rain-scoured mesa rims among scattered flakes and potsherds of millennia. Here and there, a firepit so old that its ashes were only a faint stain in the dun soil.
The next wind and rain will hide it again. But the metate was in plain sight, the only flat surface among boulders. The last pecking to renew its grinding surface had become dark spots, and the worn surface on the left side was a smooth bowl under the hand.
BETSY JAMES: Worldbuilding and Wilderness 