Foothills of the Nacimientos: a Western Diamondback was stretched in the morning sun. It coiled and cocked only when I shouted for the other hikers. Snakes are deaf, so it must have felt the vibration of my shout.
Posed, rigid, it never moved. John the fiddler said, “It’s a musical clef.”
*
Slow, huge thunderheads.
Rain had washed everything, as though it had doused the desert with a gigantic fire hose. The daisies’ faces were plastered to the ground.
A pretty mano of pink granite. Where it lay was wilder than when it was made by an Archaic hunter-gatherer, probably a woman: only the rare hiker goes there now. The mano had been looking at the sky for two thousand years, at least. I admired it, then left it to its next eons of quiet and space and rain.
*
In the Jemez Mountains we hiked among the Tent Rocks: eerie, beautiful. Pink-white ashy pumice forms teepees, minarets, cupolas, gables, totem poles, shrines—their bases scalloped like coconut-cream popsicles, their tops jagged as blades. Don’t slide off; by the time you got to the bottom you’d be, not just dead, but completely skinned by volcanic glass. As we crept along the steep sides of the hills each of us touched the slope with one hand.
The ash is full of obsidian, Apache Tears.
*
In the Guadalupe Box area of the Jemez Mountains, on a boulder fallen from the sheer rhyolite cliffs, the five-foot-tall petroglyph of an eagle dancer.
Compared to the most ancient spirals and suns the work looks recent, but “recent” is relative: These mesas were refuges for the Pueblos when, ten years after their successful 1680 revolt, the conquistadores marched north from El Paso to retake New Spain.
Smudged drawing from my pocket notes. Those feet: one human, one an eagle’s.
*
Peralta Canyon, Jemez: pictographs in red ochre. Finger marks, in groups along ridges of rock next to the creek; one faint handprint; stars, turtles, and this pretty sun face.
Unlike those of the classic Zia symbol, all its rays are of equal length. The slanted ones may be feathers. It had been painted with a finger, and seemed to be subtly smiling.
*
There are still a few Dark-eyed juncos in their little executioners’ hoods. When I make the birders’ “pishing” noise they get curious and come to about fifteen feet away, making a sound like agate pebbles tapped together.
Last year’s old apples smell like cider vinegar.
*
In the cobble hills above the Rio Puerco. Rain, snow, thunder. I was afraid of lightning, but Jan sheltered calmly under a juniper that bore the black scars of a previous strike. The wind smelled of wet stone.
In the sand lay an iron axehead, its handle long ago lost to weather. From the eighteen-eighties, maybe. The edge had a graceful worn curve, and the splayed butt showed it had been used as a wedge to split firewood.
*
In the Cretaceous mud we found a shattered dinosaur thigh by following fragments of petrified bone scattered down an arroyo.
But—I think I’ve explained this before—if you find a tiny piece, how can you tell whether it’s a dissolving dinosaur?
Lick it. If it’s bone, rather than some other stone like agate or silicified wood, the porous vesicles left by once-living cells and capillaries will wick up the moisture of your tongue, and it will stick.
The hullabaloo over e-readers has brought back a luscious memory of cycling (or attempting to cycle; it was wetter than the bottom of the sea) in Wales, sleeping in hostels and B&Bs. I had a paperback copy of T. H. White’s The Once and Future King. Before I turned out the light each night, I tore off the pages I had just read and dropped them in the waste bin.
And pedaled on, lighter.
*
*
Did you know rationality is solar?
That’s why you wake up at 3 a.m. and worry about the rent, who your kid is dating, and that weird spot on your nose. All the rationality on the planet is in China, and the Chinese are using it.
Just remind yourself of this and go back to sleep. Come morning, you’ll be rational again and the Chinese will be lying awake worrying about the rent, their kids, and their noses.
*
WORLD-BUILDING and WILDERNESS: 