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 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.
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.
Two weeks ago we walked on dust. But a few days of snow and rain have swollen the bentonite clay in the Morrison Formation into a soft, brickled carpet. Sun and wind will soon turn it to dust again, except where cryptobiotic organisms can anchor it.
In another stratum of the Morrison, the winter wet had brought down a layer of outwash like melted creamsicle: flat as a dance floor, delicate and thin as old wallpaper.
BETSY JAMES: Worldbuilding and Wilderness 