Slickrock

Spent the day up on the rim of Slickrock, getting the lay of the land, orienting myself to the local stratigraphy, and finding good highline visible landmarks for azimuths.  As nice as GPS can be, I can find myself faster with an old fashioned Brunton and an aerial map.  The Entrada contact, the acknowledged bottom of the paying rock throughout The Paradox Basin runs along the old lines of subsidence.  Permian times left the gift of Gypsum and salts here, and when the compression of time and water got to be too great, they burst out, rending the ground into the trending slivers visible now.  Paradox, the valley named because it is not a valley at all, has a river crossing it, but not cutting it.  The original pioneers, low on pretense, but high on ease of description, named these chewed up rocks and canyons.  Disappointment Valley has no water.  Dry Creek Basin has a creekbed where all the water is underground.  Paradox is crosscut by a river the short way, with no water running through its length.

Gone

Not necessarily from the blog, but from civilization, yes.

I’m heading out for a pretty intensive field period for the next few weeks, possibly as much as a month. I’ll be in Moab with wifi here and there, but mostly gone. Quick and dirty survey:

If you could buy a hardcover book of about 160 pages or so full of my field musings (such as Disappointment Valley or Gypsum Basin) and a few more down to Earth essays, some pictures, and then maybe some correspondence to friends for $18, would you do it?

I am not concerned with getting rich, and some people will just get a free copy for the hell of it. I just want something with my name on it to give to people.

Foil

“Again.  You need to say things in your head before you say them out loud.  I’m going to start writing down the unacceptable things you say everyday.”

“I thought giving you my blessing for cooter munching would be charming and liberating.”

Serious Sunday (returns)

She said she loved it here. She lied.

She doesn’t love the location, or me, or the sky. She loves feeling at peace, and that is a tenuous prospect. Soon, she’ll go back to liking the fast pace and the unfriendly or artificial people she is used to. And the polish that we lack in this part of the world. No one wants peace until the war has killed enough of the people you love.

I know I am boring. I know my life is boring. I know I lack any sort of thrilling mystery.

I also lack what she wants from me.

Later and alone, staring through a cracked windshield out over the valley, with its lights and gridded pathways fighting the swollen river, I wondered about losing myself.

I still can’t define the incredible rift and impassable divide between losing yourself in someone and losing yourself to someone.

Disappointment Valley

The clouds got heavy, but they never left behind any evidence of their falling selves. They are particularly selfish on days like today. The trending down Dakota and Burro Canyon sandstones hide themselves away in collapsed salt dome, buried under a long stretch of minor creek deposits and more minor human endeavor. Along the north rim, where the salt and gypsum worked their kneading fingers through the evidence of great rivers afoot, cedars cling to the rocks.

The smell of cedar makes me think of a woman, true and kind and with a voice that can render bacon grease, and I wonder what would happen to us both out here, drunk and positively immoral.

The cedar, lightning blasted and twisted into astounding works of art — full of movement, negative space, and biomorphic form — reside easily on the scrapes of rock and desert sand. They are hardy, and generally very old. When they cling into the bed rock (as they must do), their heavy, dry roots fracture and crack, and eventually amputate the lith they make their home. They offer shelter from the sun, but nothing else. If a person finds themselves lost, they may make a minor living gathering the pinion nuts from under them, but that is all. They make an excellent firewood. The first bite of a saw into the gray desiccated limb sends the high and heavy rich smell of creosote into the air and you feel you have murdered the most living thing in the world.

One time I had to pull an old Mustang out of a cedar stand. It was curled around some ancient Juniper that was knotted over and blasted apart by lightning, but still very much alive. The Mustang smelled like beer and sweat and one man running from the jail time he would never really escape. He had a pregnant girlfriend with him, covered in the fine dust of the Cretaceous. He was told the mines in Nevada pay well and don’t ask questions. Then he heard the same about the oil fields of California. Then he heard the same about the fisheries of Mexico.

The cedar can be centuries old and maimed by lightning and fire and drought and old Mustangs, but they live on clinging to the ridges and fringes.

Down in the valley, home to enormous herds of suicidal deer along Highway 141 in the winter, electric and fanciful green reaches up to the sky. The tender green shimmers and sparkles as the leaves turn in the wind and glint the sun. It’s a showy, fake beauty, but a beauty none the less. These are the cottonwoods, handsome and out of place in the fields of sage high above the fallow fields of mortals. They advertise themselves with thick seedfalls and white bark. They mean to tell you they are sucking out of a deep well. They grow in creeks and along banks where their shallow roots don’t have to reach far to suck the land dry. With their artificial looking skin and artificial looking foliage (at least in the high desert) they scream that they sit on something precious. They are living atop water. You may have to dig into the root ball a foot or two, but water will be there. They are an amazing tree in situ. If they ever found their way to a real deciduous forest, they would be mocked and ugly. When the maples or oaks turn fire red, the cottonwood would turn an anemic yellow. When the oak was still a child, the cottonwood would fall over, showing cracks and wrinkles.

But here in the high desert, they look like heaven come down.

They remind me of a few people I know.

“Do you think,” she asked me from thousands of miles away, sending hickory smoke down my spine, “that women always want an edge somehow? Like, they only like you if they have a place where they can beat you at something?”

Over the phone I can hear her move and roll in bed. Her words are rich and heady.

I thought back to long times past and another voice. The talk of one country visited (and not that impressive a country) that was seen through the windows of a car. The talk of books I would normally roll my eyes at. The talk of semi-urban life. Had they known me better than they did that one night, they would never have thought any of it was an edge. I have lived in bigger cities, been to all but two continents riding on buses and, sometimes, burying bodies. But they did not know me. They knew I could two-step, they could see my country stock in my shoulders and arms, and she could hear my origins in my slow and archaic talk. She would never have guessed any of it without me telling her.

In the end, I told her a lot. Screaming down on Rocket Falls, motor wrapped just shy of redline. We left a cleft hoof trail of sparks behind us when I dug too much into the corner and the foot peg met the pavement. She was terrified and thrilled and gripping onto me like I was the last truth she would ever know. Here on 141, we buried the speedometer crossing the three sister valleys. We cut into the toe edges of Gypsum Ridge, of Wray Mesa, and of the last climb up Slickrock. We would make Moab by dawn and fly low through the Castle and back into her world of the three car garage and the alimony and second mortgage for laminate floors. I scared all the hell she had left out of her.

The cottonwoods can only reproduce when there is a flood. The seeds will not open without the total immersion of themselves and the terrain surrounding. The resource they sit on, precious the world over, but hellaciously sparse here, has to suddenly rise and be obscene and ridiculous before they will ever produce anything but glittering yellow and green and substandard fire wood that will not burn without months of preparation. But from far off on the Slick Rock hill, looking down on Disappointment Valley, they are pretty. Pretty has a value, sometimes.

It helps if I’m drunk and feeling positively immoral.

June 3rd

I rolled up on the dusty crossroads way out in the Dry Basin in an old Scout.  It wasn’t mine, it looked to be about a 1965 red Scout 80 with the full cab on it.  I was driving through the heat and the dust along the unpaved road.  I wasn’t driving myself.

In the back of the Scout and sucking the white heat of the afternoon was a woman wearing an anaerobic blood colored cape with a series of garments, all dead skin black.  I can’t describe her.  Everytime I looked in the mirror, the sight of her stabbed me in the stomach and shut off my ability to breathe.  She was beautiful, but a beast of some sort.  I don’t know why I was driving her there, or where we were going.  She never said which way to go.

That was the only two hours of sleep I got last night.

Maybe It’s the Dog Drinking from the Toilet

Or maybe it’s the need to keep moving on.  Or maybe it’s just summer. Or maybe it’s the quiet.

But I haven’t slept in weeks.  It may be making me slightly crazy.

The Gypsum Basin Proper

The sky stretched down from on high to catch the sloping hills of the Burro Canyon formation to the south and north and laid itself in the Basin Gap, turning the far hills blue and hazy. In the high altitudes, the atmosphere is a visible thing. You can see it settle down into the glades and canyons and basins as a heavy blue mist. You can see the clinging gardens of the high plateaus change fauna down the thousand feet of topographic relief. The sagebrush, bluish silver and tinged with blowing red dirt, follows the rolls of the hills and gulleys until the cedar families, juniper and pinyon, take over where the soil is thin and rocky, or where the air is cool. The blue curtain of breathable air shrouds between them and rests light on the ground, out in the fields of heaven.

Once you clear the city skylines and the brown haze and artificial neon green of watered lawn, the natural paths of silver and blue and sage, an indescribable shade of maudlin dawn, run away and on into the ends of the collapsed salt domes and high into the blue and white La Sals, the Blues where my parents wed, and the Henrys. Far to the south, the Lone Cone stands above its ancient battle ground of cinder and I love again. Not a person, as they are fickle and mostly useless, and not just the region, as regions are lost to developing changes cast upon them. I love seeing the blue air settle in the valleys and knowing I am above it. I love the cedar and I love the sage. I love the minimalist spectacle of a red rock desert and high altitude mesa. It isn’t just Colorado, it is the forces, the salt collapse, the tectonic drama, the last thrusting power of the ancient Yavapai craton, pirouetting (as the current legend goes) along the axis of Laurentia. I love the change, slow and brutal.

I love that histories are buried like the memories of former forever loves to be resurrected by forces greater than the weight sinking them into lithosphere of your waking thought.

Met a girl from Dove Creek the other day. She gave me a beer and a long look out of eyes an indescribable shade of maudlin dawn.

And I drank the beer and evangelized the beauty of our home.