Not Navajo. Often a stone circle is the foundation of a traditional hogan, but this is in the wrong place–over a lava field, no grazing near–and the “doorway” break faces west, not east.
Puebloan? There are tumbled Ancestral Puebloan structures in the neighborhood, but they’re all square-cornered. Nor can it be a kiva, because it was built right on the sandstone slabs.
The fallen ponderosa that divides it neatly in half is old, but thick lichen says the circle is much, much older.
What was it?
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.
More than fifty elk, cautious but unworried, moved slowly away from us around the base of a narrow mesa. We hoofed it up the slope and across the mesa top in time to watch them leap two fences and head single file up the next ridge.
Not the best focus, but the best behinds.
I forgot my camera. I was indignant until I remembered I’d never owned a camera until a few years ago. All hike records were scratched with a stubby pencil on a 3×5 card.
We went off-trail in the Malpaís. Snow and wind and frost-heaving had smoothed sand over the face of the weathered stone, healing the skin of the desert until we were the first ever to walk there.
Camera or not, it was a good day, though I wish I could have gotten an image of an old friend. Fortunately I already had one; it was taken in a different season, but you get the idea.
East of the Malpaís: worn yellow sandstone patched with gray lichen, overlooking black lava with gray-green sage and lichen.
When I was small, I dreamed about owning a house carved into a rock. Here it was: a hollowed-out, round cave, just the right size for a child. It was cool inside. The oval doorway framed the extraordinary ordinary lava world outside.
Malpaís. The McCartys flow rivals anything in Hawaii. Underfoot the clink and chink, the almost metallic scraping ring of scoria where flat sheets of it have popped off the still-hot surface.
Black, black. Splits and fissures with grasses, mountain mahogany, and a few cacti clinging to their walls. As we scrambled west—wearing leather-palmed gloves, too aware of our bare legs—we climbed a pressure ridge in the lava, a standing black crest so steep we clambered up it on all fours . In its glassy crevices claret cup cacti were just beginning to bloom, the most beautiful red I’ve ever seen.
May is mockingbird month, when they return from their winter grounds. We listened to their changing carols all day.
On the Malpais, the McCarty’s lava flow, only three thousand years old. The surface looks fresh as yesterday, like Kilauea’s: so crevassed and glassy that Jan said, “On the Malpais, you don’t bruise.” We kept a sharp lookout for rattlesnakes—there’s sure to be a black morph.
The perfect, trembling webs of orb spiders stretched across the black fissures as if to draw the shattered rock together.
The first cactus: I hopped the fence onto the Malpais, and with my first step ran into a cholla. Guess I haven’t been hiking for a while.
The second cactus: side-hilling down from the sandstone ledges, I slipped on the scree and my right hand, which I put out instinctively to catch myself, landed smack in a prickly pear. Stabbed full of big spines, furred with gloccids. I had to stand where I was and pull the spines out; got most of them, but a few I’ll bear to my grave like shrapnel.
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On and around the Malpais, the hunter-gatherer-farmer presence of ancestral Puebloans is everywhere underfoot.
In a sandy cul-de-sac among the crinkled lava, all by itself, was a carefully-squared sandstone block that was probably a deadfall for small game: packrats, squirrels, deer mice. Jan propped it on a twig and demonstrated, remarking, at the appropriate instant, “Squeak.”
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WORLD-BUILDING and WILDERNESS: 