In the muddy pool of an elk footprint, frost at work.
Ice
Category Archives: On the Writing Life
The Unnoticed
About seven thousand years ago, a culture that the invaders of five hundred years ago called the Bajada were making tools out of basalt.
Basalt. Were they crazy? Gluttons for punishment? Basalt is hard, grainy, homely, and close to impossible to knap. But by god it’s tough. It takes a lot to break it. Maybe that was the attraction?
We have to assume that the so-called Bajada–we have no idea what they called themselves, though they were all over the Southwest–were tough. And that hunters found a reason for their choice of that difficult material.
Where you find those basalt flakes you may also find the metate where gatherers ground wild grain:
Their camp is eroding into the arroyo. But if you’re alert you can spot what’s left of the place where folks sat around knapping basalt, sharing chapatis made of wild grains, and telling stories about the next seven thousand years.
Elking
We set out from an altitude of about 9000′. Hiked down 800 vertical feet to the valley, where we picked up an elk trail fragrant with droppings. The grass was laid in the direction of travel, roughly northeast. We followed; the trail led us along the edge of the meadow, then abruptly back up the 800 vertical feet, through the ashy pine wood to the rim.
Never caught up to the elk. Probably they didn’t have to stop so often and sit down.
Not New Mexico…
…but in the Triassic or thereabouts, when shallow seas and river deltas inundated where now we walk in the desert, it might have been. These are the red waves of the Bay of Fundy.
And this is how the waters of time soften and embellish the work of our hands:
Beautiful Hineys
More than fifty elk, cautious but unworried, moved slowly away from us around the base of a narrow mesa. We hoofed it up the slope and across the mesa top in time to watch them leap two fences and head single file up the next ridge.
Not the best focus, but the best behinds.
Just Out:
It feels like what it is, a field journal. I’m delighted with it:
https://casaurracapress.com/bookstore/p/breathing-stone
You can order it from your favorite indie bookstore; from Bookshop, the indie alternative to the big A:
or from the publisher, single copies okay:
https://casaurracapress.com/bookstore
Many miles of quiet walkabout. Illustrated.
UFO Superbloom
April 16:
May 4:
The desert was in superbloom. Our UFO is a scarlet beehive or hedgehog cactus, Echinocereus coccineus, exploiting a crack in a huge hematitic concretion. There were many concretions on the hillside, each with its resident beehive. The yellow carpet is probably Fendler’s bladder pod: Physaria fendleri.
Two Strikes
Two ponderosasr in a sandy bowl, both lightning-struck. One, a gray ghost; the other, twisted like a pretzel but still living, shelters a juniper in its embrace.
Things You Find in the Desert
Sheer mesa, Cretaceous mudlands, lightning-blasted ponderosas. But what struck me were the sherds of a busted sixties coffee mug and an open safety pin.
Old Moon
On raindrop-pecked sand, the subtle lunar crescent of an Archaic metate broken and abandoned a few thousand years ago.
BETSY JAMES: Worldbuilding and Wilderness 