Just in time for the season: a rough hoe, but a hoe. The land itself was rough, a sandy little site in the lee of a pile of boulders.
Hoe, hoe, hoe!
Category Archives: Walking All Day On Stone
Hard Land for a Living
On a ridge above the crumbled, pink-and-black Morrison Formation was a decaying axe-cut juniper stump, signal to watch for the circular stone base of a hogan.
Sure enough:
It was probably nineteenth-century, because the juniper cribbing had decayed or been taken for firewood. Into it had been dumped the rusted remains of a McCormick wind pump dating to, say, the ranching thirties:
Outside the circle, laid carefully on a rock–“curated” by some previous visitor–was a 3″ chert hand axe. The Navajo had metal trade axes, so presumably this one was Archaic. Thousands of years older than both hogan and pump.
United
In a midden scatter tumbling far down a slope, three pieces of utilitarian pot that have lain so long separated, on different soil types, that each has weathered to its own color.
Perfect fit.
The Place, the Tree, the Gift
Juniper
At the Base of the Mesas
A nineteenth-century Hispanic homestead, long abandoned in its broadcast midden of rusty metal and purple glass. Axe-cut and adze-hewn beams, windows and doors trimmed with dimension lumber.
It was the first day cool enough, morning only, to scramble and side-hill in the mesa’s shadow. By noon the pale Cretaceous clay was too hot for pleasure.
When It’s Hot, Go High
11,000 feet. The lowlands won’t see asters for another month.
Sky Ocean
South from the Sandia Crest trail. Summer rain.
Newfangled
A chunk of thick, nineteenth-century beer bottle repurposed–right edge retouched–as if it were a flint flake.
Juniper
Lightning-struck.
Burned to the stones, then scoured flush by weather and time.
BETSY JAMES: Worldbuilding and Wilderness 