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.
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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.
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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.
The day began with mottled clouds that later burned off. No friendly sand to walk in, just acrid mud dust, with now and then a stiff, dried place where a cow had pissed. We hiked down terrifying deep arroyos whose walls, scored by mud-laden runnels, were poised to collapse.
Mudstone concretions: eyeballs and entrails lay in drifts on the yellow-red dirt. We came across two half-buried spheres, both about twelve feet in diameter, like the backs of two huge skulls: Baba Yaga and her daughter.
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On and around the Malpais, the hunter-gatherer-farmer presence of ancestral Puebloans is everywhere underfoot.
In a sandy cul-de-sac among the crinkled lava, all by itself, was a carefully-squared sandstone block that was probably a deadfall for small game: packrats, squirrels, deer mice. Jan propped it on a twig and demonstrated, remarking, at the appropriate instant, “Squeak.”
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Bushwhacking in the dense piñon-juniper and oak brush that covered the mesa, on a windy day that obscured all sound. I was newly aware of how one tracks companions by constant, quick glances through the twiggage, near-subliminal glimpses every four to eight seconds: a scrap of color, a blink of movement out of place against the moving background. It’s an almost-unconscious art, and takes practice. First we lost Rob, then Gary, then John.
They all straggled in later at the car, remarking on how, in countryside like this, a group can get separated in less than a minute. Their shouts had been inaudible in the wind.
Hiking the canyon of the Rio Santa Fe, over our heads the stone-cribbed hairpin turns that carried Spanish wagons, Civil War soldiers and Model Ts up this section of the Camino Real. The eroding pale strata of the canyon walls were capped by tumbled, slightly columnar basalt.
At the cliffs’ feet the rio’s busy water looped and twinkled. It smelled chemical; it was runoff from Santa Fe’s sewage treatment plant, equal parts groundwater from Buckman Wells and bottled water from Fiji that had been filtered through wealthy Santa Feans. Winding down that river was, no doubt, a lot of cocaine.
In the sedge at the brink I nearly stepped on a bull snake. We left, abruptly, in opposite directions.
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Besides its many miles, the best part of the hike was a lonely homestead perched on a rise in the sandstone. For the backcountry, where until the late 1860s Navajo raids made life unhealthy, this settlement was very early. Not even the shape of the house was left, just a heap of stones, but the trash—! Purple glass and thick white china reduced to confetti, buttons, shreds of wire, squashed Prince Albert tobacco cans and unrecognizable bits of rusty metal were scattered over acres.
It was support for my theory that early settlers, uneasy in the wilderness, liked to look at their civilized garbage.
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White Mesa, Ojito: a crest of grass against the blue sky, round piñon trees along a stratified rose-and-white horizon. Light wind, pale skull of a moon.
Juniper berries are ripe. They taste like sweet turpentine. All the coyote scat is full of seeds.
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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.
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WORLD-BUILDING and WILDERNESS: 