...three metates. Archaic, given their location, on earth once much wetter than it is in these times of drought.
Each is pecked to roughen its grinding surface. Use has rubbed the first into a bowl that exposes the thin strata of its sandstone, now spalled by frost and rain. All are broken.
The third in situ in a messy prehistoric living room, now cross-trodden by cows:
We threaded the wind- and rain-scoured mesa rims among scattered flakes and potsherds of millennia. Here and there, a firepit so old that its ashes were only a faint stain in the dun soil.
The next wind and rain will hide it again. But the metate was in plain sight, the only flat surface among boulders. The last pecking to renew its grinding surface had become dark spots, and the worn surface on the left side was a smooth bowl under the hand.
On raindrop-pecked sand, the subtle lunar crescent of an Archaic metate broken and abandoned a few thousand years ago.
To the Syncline, where we watched a pair of ravens build their nest. Among the braided channels of the arroyo was a beautiful Archaic metate—a smoothly pecked, scooped-out bowl in the bedrock, say two thousand years old.
As we scrambled a rocky side canyon I came upon a desert-varnished boulder with the impression of three ferns, tidy as a museum exhibit. Probably Triassic: more than two million years. Later I went back to look for it. I found the ravens’ nest, but the ferns were lost among the trillion stones of the canyonside.
WORLD-BUILDING and WILDERNESS: 