Cold

The days crawl by like weeks and when I stand on the point and and breathe heavy steam into a cup of wonderfully awful camp coffee, I think of you.

The Colorado Plateau is a formal term for a large, diamond shaped mass of precambrian metamorphic basement rock underlying the Four Corners states. It acts independently of the rest of the old Laurentian and later North American chunks of buoyant crust. It uplifts and rotates and buoys around on the mantle independent of the greater continental crust of North America, which more or less dies out in Nevada. I have heard someone tell a story of the Plateau being the final resting place of the Yavapai, a string of islands similar to Indonesia that was never quite swallowed by the Laurentian shield. It’s a good story.

The closest analog would be the swallowing up of the Marianas plate under Asia, all those islands to eventually be sandwiched between Australia and whatever Asia will be calling itself then. If people are around, they’ll be much changed and I doubt old words will mean what they do now.

I read a book once on geologists going to other planets to find the First Sun People. I never can remember the name of the author, and I can never convince anyone to read them. The premise of the book revolves around an alternate universe where the Americas (Inca, if I remember correctly) had risen to prominence and the Pacific Rim had run the show through human history, not the pasty pretense of Western Europe. It was its own kind of pretense and genocide.

The sun went down and the fish got cleaned while I stoked up the fire. Tonight, good, cold water trout would have a rare opportunity to live on as human. Inside human, at least. These were hard earned trout. Pulled out of the cold, mostly frozen water. They required sacrifice and maddening precision. Men catch these fish, not homogenized, coddled, waddling balls of pork rinds and cheap beer casting for the dumbest fish on earth in the warmest climate around. These fish took some goddamn skill. I caught very few. I am terrible at fishing. Eventually, I just kneeled down and started grabbing them.

Predation looks a lot easier on the Discovery Channel.

The Plateau is rotating today. Driven by forces very much in dispute, it rotates around, compressing and uplifting and popping up the northern borders of its mass, rifting apart in the south, where the Rio Grande flows by unearthed eons of information hidden in sediments collapsing inward.

My brother came up to the fire with a bucket full of freshly disemboweled fish and he sat it next to me. I looked down and saw the sheen of ice. It had formed in the screaming dense wind trading the cold and ice for the warm and lower.  It had also formed in the time it took him to walk five hundred yards.

We’ve done dumber things than camp in December.  Like me missing you, and him missing her.

Luckily, cold and whiskey and talking to a brother kills most memories.

We may have been raised wrong.