Tag Archives: petrified wood

On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Woodpiles

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We walked in over multicolored gravels eroded from some long-lost range. Some were petrified wood, glossy and tumble-polished. Among them a second generation of trees had grown; these too had fossilized, then eroded, and now looked simply like wood chips inexplicably turned to stone. Among them the ponderosas of today stood, living wood.

Next to a dissolving petrified log, recent woodcutters had left their beer cans and pile of slash. Old woodpile, new woodpile: the two looked remarkably alike, though the ancient one was yellow and bright as new wood, and the new one was gray.

On Creativity, On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, Uncategorized, Walking All Day On Stone

Rock Happy

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Basket of Rocks 2A frosty desert morning on the gravels of the ancient Rio Puerco. All around us, distantly, the pop and crack of target shooting. We parked in a trashed pullout and hiked away from the road.

Wandering, sometimes talking, sometimes silent, we picked up rocks and dropped them. Showed each other the best ones: quartz and quartzites,  petrified wood, metamorphics full of crinoid stems—all tumble-polished millions of years before humans were human. The sun rose, then sank. The wide bare plains; the weather-bitten volcanic Ladrones palely looming, almost floating. Except for wind and the marksmen, silence.

At dusk, our pockets full of pretty rocks, we trailed back to the pickup and sat on the tailgate as the target shooters drove homeward past us in their four-by-fours.

On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Unforced

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Boots 2014-02-24 cropPenistaja Mesa, tohellandgone west of Cuba. Cabezón dim and blue on the horizon. Tertiary strata, sometimes black with almost-coal. Everywhere petrified wood: enormous whole logs weathering into chips, as though we walked through slash left by a mad stone woodcutter.

Penistaja is probably a corruption of the Navajo binishdaahi’, “I forced him to sit.” So we sat.

On the Creative Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Wood and Stone

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Hiking the Piedra Lumbre area of La Leña. A cold, dry day with a storm moving in.

Lots of petrified wood. Not the brilliant agates we see so often but a frail, glittering mudstone that preserves knotholes and wormholes, almost the worm itself.

Fossil tree trunks dissolve into perfect wood chips: the desert floor is littered as though a stone woodcutter had passed, chopping stone trees for a stone fire.

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Walking All Day On Stone

Ojito in October

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To the Ojito Wilderness with a motley crew of desert-rat friends.

Windy. Took shorts, but it was too cold to wear them. We drove way far out in the Ojito and hiked down to the place where there’s scattered white-yellow-green petrified wood, below hoodoos among the ponderosas.

Archaic firepits. The crew kept getting ahead of me; I was dogging back and forth, trying to keep them in sight, now and then frantic as the others got farther and farther away and I had to run after them.

Found a large dinosaur bone on the ridge by following its fragments up a wash. It was falling apart; we dug some of the sand away from it, then covered it back up without ever having located both ends. Jan taught us the lick-stick test: If it’s bone, rather than another type of rock like agate or petrified wood, it will stick to your tongue when you lick it. (The porous vesicles left by cells and capillaries wick up the moisture of your tongue.)

Windblown grass draws circles in sand, as in snow.

Oak bushes have brown leaves around their bases, bare grey twigs on top.

Back in Bernalillo we went to Silva’s Saloon, which was full of bikers in leathers, a billiards game in progress. We shared two pitchers, ate Kentucky Flocked chicken and came home happy.

I forgot to say that on an Archaic site on the ridgetop was a broken mano, a hand-grinding stone: pretty, crystalline, red and white and yellow, with a slanted natural edge of white quartzite along one side. The edge made a perfect place for the user of the stone, probably a teenager, to hook her fingers. So I hooked my own fingers there, thinking: After five thousand years–fifty centuries–this stone remembers the grip of a hand.

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