Cold Water

Curiosity

Alight on the thermals over the sandstone cathedrals today, a golden eagle circled for about a half hour. Since I had nothing more pressing on my agenda, I watched him disappear into the clear sky. A light breeze was kicking dust up the face of the slope and into my nose and eyes and everywhere else defenseless. The sun screamed out white today. The humidity was a little high today, for the desert. Probably upwards of thirty percent. It was just enough to make sweating necessary and a left over talus boulder into a very nice cot. Eventually, a nap found me.

I dreamed about eagles and an angel. She smelled like smoke and coffee. She had on black mascara, which I thought was a little odd. She wouldn’t show me her tattoo. I’m guessing it would be barbed wire or cinnamon. I’m not sure what a cinnamon tattoo would look like. Later, I found a cobble sized piece of mossy agate. And some agate that is a striking blue. I wonder what manner of beauty the cretaceous must have sacrificed for this.

I wonder now what a cinnamon blossom would look like. Probably just delicate.

I have a small glass with mostly ice and a little caramel skim clinging and creeping farther into the container as the water dilutes it. The drips are slipping farther down as gravity wins the fight against cohesion and adhesion. Then I help the process along and pour the half melted ice and a little of the sweet smoke into me. The eagle is worth a thought.

On the eagle’s way up into the thermals, I wonder who it carried with it. I wonder what rabbit or marmot found itself towering above its former domain. That makes me think of other birds out in a different desert. Gray ones with a prey easier to kill and not nearly as beautiful. I wish I knew at least a few of those I owe an apology.

The barite concretions of the Mancos Shale formation boil out of the interbedded mudstones and calcite veins and they compress into hard nodes. Then, as the water falls onto the tender slopes of the easily soluble, the nodes are left sitting on the surface, exposed to all the world. Below the drab brown, you can find crystals clear as glass as large as six inches long. If you remove them, you must transfer them immediately into some sort of cooler or other means of protecting them from the above ground heat and sun. If you don’t protect them from the rapid temperature change, they will crack and maybe shatter like ice pulled from the freezer.

One time I dug for hours into the soft clay of some ancient loam from the time of enormity. I found radiating acicular habited barite and gypsum. I carved one into an Easer Island figure one afternoon when I was finding reasons to keep breathing. Someone had wandered off on me. She just sort of got lost and went away. I still think she was wrong, regardless of how things may have worked out. But even then, the irreversibility of all things was apparent. We could never fight the entropy that had moved into the void where some sort of affection and need had lived. We were done and even if we had not or have not moved on, time and space did without us.

Some answers can’t be found in rocks. Possibly.

Ice is a mineral. Not too many people know that. The problem is that, depending on the definition, the ice in this glass may or may not be. It is anthropogenic in origin. Some definitions do not allow for any sort of biogenesis.

Cooking

I make a really rich fugio sort of dish sometimes when I’m looking for ways to increase my lean protein and fiber intake. It’s a fairly simple dish, just browned beef, a few roasted peppers–chile and bell, a quick deglaze with some red wine vinegar. I try to stick to the Caledonian origins of the meal by using oregano and thyme in fairly heavy quantities.

There’s a sort of pall that settles over me sometimes when I cook. I can’t explain it, and I can’t really give it the credit it deserves with simple words and nuanced instruction. When I cook, I think of the evolution of the food over time. I don’t believe in the stricture of recipes. Improvisation and constant refining are more my style. At this point, I can more or less add flourishes here and there with some confidence that it will not be terrible. When I make meals like this, where the measurements are by touch and sound and by the eddying and emergingly complex ripples of vapor off of the pan of hot brown and red and green, I think of someone married to recipes. She had them saved and preserved in the falsity of a digital forever, never to be altered. And she would always use the recipe, without waiver or falter. Her food was never bad.

It is sad.

I generally use dried herbs in any full flavored dish where simmering is involved. They work just as well, and they keep better. It is important to wait until the last fifteen minutes or so to add spices that may grow bitter or overstrong.

With the middling high smell of onions and beef simmering in the tomatoes and peppers and garbanzo, I pulled out a three finger pinch of thyme and let some fall back into the jar until I had the right amount. I milled it together in my hands over the pan, letting it fall, and the rich green leapt up on the rising steam. The oregano got a heaping two finger pinch and was ground between my fingers, rolled away and left to the hand of gravity to be delivered to its already cooking brethren. Any ingredient you plan on using only for flavor must be treated so, it is necessary that you crush it to release all the trapped things you desire from it to color your creation.

The Grand Mesa

The Grand Mesa, generally referred to by locals as simply “The Mesa” is an imposing feature of Western Colorado topography. Basalts and glacial till make up the cap of the Grand Mesa Formation. The formation was formed by basalt flows somewhere to the East, as the dating processes can attest, though the actual origin of the flows is a mystery. The slow and grinding forces of erosion work quickly through the fluvial and lacustrine tertiary and fluvial deposits overlain, but can only incise and cut the silica rich basalts with difficulty. A cap of erosion resistant rock on top of easily friable or soluble rock underneath gives much of the American Southwest its distinctive form. The balancing rocks and cliffs riding on top of thinly cemented mudstones slopes give rise to dramatic mesas. While it is accurate to call a mesa a flat mountain, the same could be said of a plateau. The distinction rests in that a plateau is borne of an uplift event and a mesa is primarily caused by erosive forces. The network of canyons and their brother mesas throught the Southwest is evidence of long gone erosive powers that have long since trickled off.

The melting glaciers of the last few million years took down the entirety of Western Colorado and Eastern Utah at an average rate of six inches per thousand years. Of course, the coursing and plunging rivers responsible for the mazework sandstones exposed again to the sun did not flow in sheets, but in meandering channels. For an average to be taken, there must absolutely be assumed some variation and in sweeping generalizations over geological spans, the wondrous emerging complexity of erosion and collapse is handily outside of human perceptive abilities.

The Grand Mesa is referred to by the shortened and pretentious “The Mesa” for a fairly good reason. It is the tallest flat topped mountain in the world. The Cap scrapes at twelve thousand feet, enough to give rise to lodge pole pines and alpine valleys breathtaking and stunning. The mostly flat surface is an important collection of watersheds, both for the consumption of humans, but also for agriculture throughout the emerging breadbasket states of the Southwest and out into California. The Mesa stores up enormous volumes of snow that melt slowly in the cool summer months.

I once got a 75 Scout stuck in a snowdrift off of Land’s End Road in a July blizzard. I spent the night sleeping in the back in a sleeping bag I kept handy and reading with the assistance of a home made emergency candle. I lived on through the night without dying and without trepidation. In fact, it was a comfortable night, with the Scout insulated against the blowing cold by a nice mound of snow insulation. The cabin was kept bearably warm by the burning flame of the lantern wick soaked in parafin. In the clear azure sky of the next day, I shoveled the Scout out of the drift and dug down to the front hubs so I could lock them into four wheel drive. As with most nights spent in a sleeping bag, the night passed pleasantly with the comfort of company. Along with the typcial extra gear needed in a roadside emergency pack, I also recommend taking a girl with green eyes and loose morals.

Yellow Cat Honky Tonk

The Yellow Cat’s lit up like three dog fire and the dirt drive’s breaking down four bald tires of a maniac driver in an old Country Squire.

It’s got a 400M with the Weiland heads and the Carter 650 mixed down to three threads with the C-6 tranny and the spool rear end. Three inch pipes clear out the back end.

The door’s hanging open because it just can’t close and the reams of sick lemonade hoochie music throws out the sound of marginal women that are wearing no clothes.

You got a busted out window with the long shadows falling from the greasy purple lights and the back room’s crawling with the snake oil charming of a dead-end calling. There’s a blood stain on the floor, but nobody’s talking.

Inside the men are all dragging through the slimy mud bottom of the wormy backwards dance of Lilith’s cousins falling all over themselves for a twenty dollar calling.

There’s a dirty older girl with a flower tattoo and some long fake hair and she’s missing a tooth that was knocked out one night by a out of state trucker. He left out alive, but he was almost cut in two.

Through the back of the building, the lights get dimmer till you hit the back tables with the hole in the center where the down and out wander and the needle enters.

With her hair tied back and her stretch marks showing, there’s a dark skinned goddess oiled up till she’s glowing purple, green and flashing neon and a glass pipe smoking. She can’t remember her name, but she’s good at the stroking.

Now, you can’t pull a knife without somebody knowing that you’re not here for the girls or the blue rock token and the music keeps going but a light gets broken.

I kick down a door all the way in the back, she’s making her money with his sweat on all down her back and pooling up on the floor underneath her coupled rack. He’s got his eyes closed and his head leaning back.

She knows to look scared but she isn’t even surprised, the kid’s screaming in the corner bleeding out his eyes, the knife’s running through his blood between her thighs.

She’s got beautiful eyes, black and already halfway dead, like an old Ford Torino’ll knock the hair off your head and take you down a straight road with no corners ahead. But if you got to make a turn, it’s made out of lead.

Weekend Update

I’m using this weekend to sit down and collate all the stuff written during this last field time.  I have a lot, some of it that makes sense, some of it that doesn’t.   It all needs winnowed and furrowed and chaffed out.

Also, I am very sorry for not commenting on you nice people’s blogs lately.  I’m just too busy most of the time.  I have been reading, as your statcounters can attest, I just haven’t had much to say.

Anyway.  I’m taking the day off.  I head back out in the field Wednesday or Thursday, which is nice.

No Title

The sound of water running is very foreign a thing for me at the moment.  The Delores had the typical river sounds.  A sort of sucking and rolling sound.  The sound of water leaving, passing by on its way ultimately downhill.  The sound of change and dessication, like someone’s voice after you’ve quit caring.  The pinwheels sounds of pressurized water on tap blowing down onto a body sounds a little obscene.  Like some sort of hydrological peep show in the next room.

The ceiling is right where I left it.  Hanging from stout walls that keep out the dust and sun and blowing gnats and other creatures.  The house is quiet, but not the rangey and breezy quietude I am used to.  It’s a contained and sanitized silence, but for the shower running.

And while I laid there, I realized.  It wasn’t the way my bed smelled like ice cream and sweat, or the way the sounds of traffic and pasty fat people passed by outside my window, or even the the torrent of hot water on demand pageantry on the other side of a simple white door.  It most definitely wasn’t the long blond hair left behind on my behemoth of a bed, or the person that shed it, there in the falsified rain storm in the next room.

I just don’t want to be here.

Prickly Pear

Letter

[redacted]

We’ve hit enormous amounts of water, sometimes as much as a twenty foot section of saturation. Easily 2000 gallons have come out of a 500 foot hole. That is a little abnormal, considering that we’re drilling in the places we are. But the Delores is running high and thick, so the spongy Dakota and Burro Canyon sandstones are taking a good load. It was a wet spring and so far a wet summer, not here of course, but over the rest of the state. Water never falls in one place, it is transported by its own weight to more and less interesting places. The skiers in Aspen probably give no thought to their playground feeding the aquifers and dusty farmers of Mexico. They only see powder pack and recreation.

[redacted]

I found Meredith (I don’t think I told you about the new female flirting with me) yesterday nursing a fawn. That explains why she seemed sluggish and wide at the hips this last week. She bedded down in the sage and produced a brand new antelope. I’m not sure how this will effect our relationship, but I couldn’t help saying guiltily and aloud, “Damn it. Another Goddamn single mom.”

I have good luck with them. I can’t imagine what innate fathering ability an antelope would see in me. Then again, it is hard to take the opinion of a wild goat with racing stripes and nubs on its head seriously. I wonder if the tracks I saw running back and forth to the river belonged to her and her new family. I hope, though I know better, that the cougar starves before it finds her and her offspring. I’m a creature of sympathy.

[redacted...] If love is a product of knowledge, then I am afraid no one will ever be able to fully love me without standing on Big Gypsum ridge and being somewhere between heartbroken and enthralled at the vista given. [...redacted]

I’m glad the wedding you worried about went well. I’m sure you were the sort of beauty kind and full of grace that anyone would be fortunate to behold. I wish instead of thirsting and eating the blossoms of the cactus, I could have seen you, but that was not the plan. While you have bodies of the most human value buried everywhere in your anthropomorphic lithology, you have no U₃O₈ hidden as an accessory to vanadinite. Unfortunate for us both. The desert puts me in quite the mood.

Casey

Dry Creek Basin

It’s easy to look like a goober when you’ve been outside for a week.