Rock, Poem, Photo

Portrait: Peeling

Silly party trick, I know. But I liked the frame-within-a-frame the door provided, the way the paint peeling to reveal metal changes the austerity of it all.

Spring and All

Don't see any good in just hanging around
take a tip from the birds and just change the scene
find some long river and follow it down
where our old sins have washed up in New Orleans

Mr Greg Brown, Spring and All

Knowing

There have been a lot of photos lately, and a lot of rocks—fewer poems. I've been looking around for a poem to post, and today, this came across my desk.

 

I Am Offering This Poem

I am offering this poem to you,

since I have nothing else to give.

Keep it like a warm coat,

when winter comes to cover you,
or like a pair of thick socks
the cold cannot bite through,



I love you,



I have nothing else to give you,
so it is a pot full of yellow corn

to warm your belly in the winter,
it is a scarf for your head, to wear

over your hair, to tie up around your face,

I love you,



Keep it, treasure it as you would

if you were lost, needing direction,
in the wilderness life becomes when mature;
and in the corner of your drawer,

tucked away like a cabin or a hogan

in dense trees, come knocking,

and I will answer, give you directions,
and let you warm yourself by this fire,
rest by this fire, and make you feel safe,

I love you,

It's all I have to give,

and it's all anyone needs to live,

and to go on living inside,

when the world outside

no longer cares if you live or die;

remember,



I love you.

—Jimmy Santiago Baca

The Trail

Northern Arizona and Southern Utah wasn't exactly what I had expected—or remembered. 

Phoenix was as wide and bright as it ever was when I'd flown in and changed planes—circling down among the black-brown serrated mountain blades set at angles around the city. But driving north to Sedona, I hadn't expected the landscape to get so soft—to give way to rolling hills, pale yellow spring grass. I hadn't expected to see volcanics. I hadn't expected to guess the landscape was volcanic before confirming it on the map. I'd expected the Mojave—I got more of a feeling of Owens River Valley.

In Sedona, a local guide told us that Native Americans from every direction used to gather here, this lush plateau bounded by deserts and mountains, with cottonwoods, rivers, and Ponderosa pine. You could see why.

Sedona was a satisfying, endless red, with contrasting, cuppy orange flowers blooming everywhere and fraying, pointed yucca. We ventured to all four vortexes, or at least sought trails and buttes near them to hike and climb. Did I feel any change in the energy? No. I didn't feel anything I hadn't felt before. That said, tears came to my eyes when I knelt to take a photo of the orange flowers. It was a rush, all of a sudden—there was so much, so many natural things to absorb, and I had so much time to do it, to just wander into it. On top of the vortex sites, we also hiked out to Devil's Bridge and, before leaving, the followed the stream way up the West Fork Trail.

The Grand Canyon is still there. That I remembered, and I remembered the feeling of standing at the edge and knowing that I'd absorb little from rim-gazing. We took a helicopter flight out over the edge, and I enjoyed being shaken up by that rattling machine even if my seat and the daylight weren't optimal for photographs.

The loneliness is still out there, too. The drive from the Grand Canyon to Kanab is long, across long valleys alongside endless vermillion cliffs, and I started to feel the type of loneliness that happens in those enormous spaces, where you know for sure you won't meet anyone you know. It makes small exchanges—paying a park fee, ordering a meal—more personal.

But Kanab became an unexpected home base. The first night, after the last long stretch out to Coral Pink Sand Dunes National Park on a sandy dirt road, we were surprised and warmed by hot showers. The BLM rangers, the next morning at the lottery to get hiking permits to the Wave, amused the crowd with stories. Having lost, we pitched tent at the White House campsite, rested out the afternoon, and took a late afternoon hike on Wire Pass Trail. The hike turned magic when, in the golden hour of the afternoon, a narrow slot canyon emptied us out into a wide confluence, all high walls, petroglyphs, and thick layers of silt-turned-stone. It was dry as a bone and you could still feel the power of a hundred thousand flash floods. The moon, almost full, rose to the east, above the hundred-foot high canyon walls, and after dinner we climbed on the bone white petrified sand dunes and watched the landscape in the moonlight.

The next day, we won the lottery for Wave permits.

It was a funny thing, to be in the middle of the desert, to be surrounded by a hundred hiker-tourists from a handful of countries, and to win. We were in a place where we knew no-one, and still had a stroke of luck. It was unexpected and disembodied. It was, in its own way, a finding.

We'd planned ahead, and had a date with Antelope Canyon, in Page, to pass the day before our Wave hike, so off we went, past Lake Powell, to the Navajo-run tours. Each tour guide led a pack of twelve into the canyon, and hurriedly described the best photographs to be taken—shot here, the sandstone looked like a desert sunset; shot here, it looked like a heart; here, a coyote. The canyon itself was majestic, sculpted more subtly than Wire Pass, even though we were all shoulder to shoulder, or ducking others' camera shots. I wondered what it was like at night, all the tours gone, the quiet, starlight in the tiny sliver of sky. The guide told us they had to drive cows out in the morning, and clean up after them before the tourists came.

We camped at the trailhead to Wire Pass and The Wave that night. The air was warm but the wind took a few deep, forceful breaths. I woke a few times in the middle of the night to feel the wind rise and push against my side of the tent, as if exhaling in its sleep.

In the morning, after eggs and beans and coffee, we walked the three miles across the border to Coyote Buttes, to the Wave. With the BLM map, and all the cairns knocked down, and a ranger always in sight, it felt like sixth-grade orienteering. Long but fun, free and spacious. Here there was no trail, and the petrified sand dunes were frozen in smaller mounds with more cylindrical tops. A bit like cupcakes.

The beauty of the Wave is hard to describe. I lingered at the entrance. Took lots of photos of the first evidence of the layered, tilting, red and yellow sands. Didn't hurry to the turn that takes you out into the bowl where the layers tilt ninety degrees and back again. I took a walk down a slender side canyon. I knew it would be momentous and I wanted to savor it.

It was momentous.

I hadn't thought we'd spend so much time there, but the bowl of the Wave was silent and strange and elegant and cozy, a well-designed pocket amid a range of crazy dunes. We hiked up and around it and took every possible photo we could think of in the mid-morning light. We took photos of other permit-bearers and they took photos of us.

Leaving was a little hard.

On the way back I picked up a handful of the tiny (iron?) pellets that pepper the sandstone in spots and had weathered out in a pool of sand. A hard blast of wind—it had been still up to that point—hit me from behind and sent my hat rolling down the rock. I took a photo of the pellets and put them back. I didn't have to give it too much meaning to not want to piss off that force, whatever it was. It was quieter, after that.

We made it all the way to Monument Valley that day, stopping only in Mexican Hat for a bit of lunch served by a teenaged Native American boy with an extraordinary, chiseled face and a complementary fauxhawk haircut. The landscape of Monument Valley was immense, and we were grateful to collapse in the hotel. We wandered out to the valley floor for just a few minutes—we drove a few miles out to a corral where horseback tours started—but came in for an early dinner and sunset from the porch.

The next morning, it was just as overwhelming as the night before. We watched the sunrise, watched an older pony trot out into the valley, presumably following the younger horses to the corral. I started thinking in my head that they had retired this old horse, and that he was lonely, and wanting to go back to work. It was a sadness and wide emptiness that matched the place, the big sky, the understanding that we are meaningful but temporary amid all this giant stone.

Our wandering ended in Durango, but the stone seemed to end in the Valley of the Gods, the afternoon we left Monument Valley. We drove a dirt road in a counter-clockwise direction, into the valley from the south and out again to the northwest. The stones there were not entirely unlike topiaries: a hen atop a nest in one, a rooster farther off. I was most struck by the buttes that looked like clusters of people, standing, watching the horizon. They looked to me like pioneers looking back the way they'd came.

We parked the car by the side of the road and grubbed about in dry creek beds with blue bedrock. I took photos of a few samples of stone, but—the landscape here doesn't hide. The samples are what you see. So I mostly watched the hillsides and the ground, admired the layers apparent in cliffs. Here, everywhere, is the mineral cleavage and wear and character that I so admire in all the stone samples I see.

I felt lucky and wise to visit in the spring. One of the common bushes was dropping blue berries. Ravens were playful. Water was plentiful in the creeks. At night the air was cool. I imagine that the fierce heat of summer compounds the feeling of big sky. Maybe that was why the orange cuppy flowers had me, back at the beginning of the trip. We were at the beginning of the cycle, and it was good to remember that sweep of the cycle, in subtle ways, amid the indifferent rock. The season turning, rising, life taking root again.

Roadtrip Pastoral III