We found a two-inch Jerusalem cricket—also called “child of the earth” or “earth baby”—trudging stolidly at the arroyo-side.
Friend: Oh god, I think it looks like a little alien. Like an extraterrestrial fetus.
Me: I think it looks like a kid in a stripy T-shirt.
Friend: How benign. You’re perverse, but benign.
*
Best discovery: the source of that organic-metallic, pungent odor we call “snake smell.”
It has an oiliness, and always seems to occur near strata of barely-altered Cretaceous swamp not compressed enough to be coal. Yet I’ve heard many a desert rat say, “That’s rattler smell.” It has always made me aware of my ankles.
But it’s a plant. Thick, small, dark green leaves in pairs on a red stem. I couldn’t find it in Weeds of the West, but it looks like a vetch.
*
I have been looking at cliff swallows’ nests.
And at how the desert pavement is renewed by wind and rain and winter snow, the pebbles and flakes and sherds inlaid in the sand as if brand new, as if no human had ever stepped there.
*
Just walking, walking, picking up rocks and talking about everything. So peaceful and happy that I began to sing under my breath. Jan said, “You sound happy as a rock.” As a leaf floating on water, a relaxed hand laid on the table, palm up.
*
The rains have come, and with them the toads. The pools of the Syncline were full of bright red mud-water, tadpoles and predators. A slim—but no doubt well fed—garter snake with a black head took to the opaque slurry, then poked its head out like a sea serpent.
In a drying pothole were many toadlets so small they looked like insects, not a quarter inch long. They had finished their lightning metamorphosis, but at the bottom of the hole was a gelatinous pudding of polliwogs that hadn’t grown up fast enough. Now and then there was a tiny squirm or shudder from someone in the black mass, a last effort at life.
*
Along a dusty red two-track we came upon a ring of burned stones, a campsite that probably dated to the Thirties. In the rusty upturned bowl of a Model T headlamp, tidily deposited, was a pile of coyote poop.
Perfect aim. No seat to leave up.
*
This wide, dry land, faintly green with spring, and nobody as far as the eye can see. Wind roaring up from Ladrón Peak on the south horizon.
A mourning dove burst whistling from a clump of snakeweed. I thought, Hmm! Sure enough, there was her nest on the stony earth: round, shaped from dry grasses. Two exquisite white eggs in it, the newest things I’ve ever seen.
*
WORLD-BUILDING and WILDERNESS: 