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.
*
In Zuni, if I have it right (and often I don’t), you go through several incarnations after this human one. The first are as food-giving game animals like deer or antelope. But the last—right before you go to heaven to dance for eternity—is as sho:mi:do’kya, the little black stinkbug that raises its tail on our desert’s red earth.
I once had a stinkbug crawl into my old Intellifax 1270 and die there. This caused a paper jam and permanent scratches on the drum, but I felt kind of touched that somebody went to heaven from my fax machine.
*
Even when I don’t want to write, if I begin, the flow begins: very steady, like blood, or a river.
Year after year I hiked down Frijoles Canyon to the Rio Grande. The river is always there. In different seasons it is different colors—tan in March, emerald in October—and has different water levels, and the sky above changes color and temperature.
But the river itself is always there.
*
*
We all have too many books. But I have books and rocks.
I have best rocks; second best rocks; third best rocks; and driveway rocks, which I don’t care if somebody steals. When I move, the best, second best, and third best go with me.
Last time I moved, my brother tried to lift a box before he noticed it had been labeled (neatly) ROCKS AND LEG WEIGHTS.
So why, he asked, nursing his lower back, couldn’t you have packed ROCKS with PILLOWS? ROCKS with UNDERWEAR?
Hey. I could have packed them with The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.
*
My family was anxious about labels. (“What’s your major?”)
To my ancestors—who according to the Zunis are dancing for eternity, though it’s hard to envision those inveterate Presbyterians dancing at all—I say: What I am is me. I am the one who writes, paints, works, sings…and dances.
How to do it all—time allocation—is another question. Honest, guys, I don’t know how. I dither and fiddle and get cranky. I put in a good work day, but sometimes that means lying in the grass staring at clouds, or walking around an Asian store trying to guess what the hell some dried object is.
I try to distinguish my family’s slightly hysterical work-ethic voice from the deep, driving voice of what actually wants to get done. Sometimes one is louder, sometimes the other. But as I accept my own mortality I have less patience for the hysterical voice. More and more I cleave to the voice of time, nature, peace: the voice of earth, where we are one of the gang: very unimportant, very much a part of the world.
BETSY JAMES: Worldbuilding and Wilderness 