Through the sandstone blocks that form the slowly-eroding edge of a mesa, a view of the desert hundreds of feet below.
I am reminded of a Neolithic dolmen, or tomb. But compared to the slow, quiet age of this erosion, the human Neolithic is the flick of a bird’s wing.
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.
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.
A chunk of thick, nineteenth-century beer bottle repurposed–right edge retouched–as if it were a flint flake.
Lightning-struck.
Burned to the stones, then scoured flush by weather and time.
The leg it slashed –clinic visit, tetanus booster–was mine.
Vote to control shooters on public lands.
The square-cornered foundation and a couple of scattered sherds say Ancestral Pueblo, but both the vertical orientation and the size of the stones are unusual and impressive. Walls and roof–jacal style, the Southwest version of wattle-and-daub–have long since dissolved into the desert clay.
And another house. I have no idea whose, but the excavator left their claw marks above the doorway.
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.
BETSY JAMES: Worldbuilding and Wilderness 