desert solitaire the first morningdesert solitaire the first morning

The sandstone walls rise higher than ever before, a thousand, two thousand feet above the water, rounding off on top as half-domes and capitals, golden and glowing in the sunlight, a deep radiant red in the shade. Are saints human? Meanwhile the tribal population continues to grow in geometric progression: 2 4 8 16 32 64, etc., onward and upward, as the majority of The People settle more deeply into the second-class way of life, American style, to which they are fairly accustomed, with all of its advantages and disadvantages: the visiting caseworker from the welfare department, the relief check, the derelict automobiles upside down on the front yard, the tarpaper shack next to the hogan and ramada, the repossessed TV set, the confused adolescents, and the wine bottles in the kitchen midden. The Bedouin know what I mean. To conserve bodily moisture and energy the rodents remain in their burrows during the day. He sang and whistled continually, winked and grinned when he caught my eye and charged after straying cattle like a maniac, spurring his thin-skinned palomino through the brush, up over rocks, down mudbanks and between trees with what looked to me like complete indifference to life and limb, the vulnerability of the flesh. When I come to a very steep pitch the rear wheels spin, the motor stalls. To solve the first part of the problem we may soon have to make birth control compulsory; to solve the second part we will have to borrow from Navajo tradition and begin a more equitable sharing of national income. Merle the super, the boss, is a slender, graceful man of about fifty years, with a fine, grave, expressive face toughened though not hardened by a life spent mostly out-of-doors. Animals have no sense of sportsmanship. I would have plenty of time to write not only my epitaph but my own elegy. As the weather improves so does the terrain. He meets the park superintendent and chief ranger. Far beyond these hundreds of square miles of desiccated tableland rise the sheer walls of further great mesas comparable in size and elevation to the one we stand on; and beyond the mesas are the mountains the Abajos and Elk Ridge forty miles south, the La Sals and Tukuhnikivats forty miles east, the Henrys fifty miles southwest. His father stood up suddenly and roared. However for the sake of their privacy I have invented fictitious names for some of the people I once knew in the Moab area and in a couple of cases relocated them in space and time. But I can tell you where it was. Well, damn the lot of them, I think, rolling down the broad asphalt trail to Moab at a safe and sane eighty-five, not forgetting to keep one eye skinned for a sign of Fred Burkett the local highway patrolman, whose favorite hiding place north of town was behind a Chamber of Commerce billboard welcoming tourists to Moab, Uranium Capital of the World, was until I leveled the billboard to the ground one night with a bucksaw which I had borrowed for the job from the United States National Park Service, Department of the Interior (Help Keep America Beautiful) good thing Fred wasnt there at the time; his new Plymouth Interceptor wouldve got badly wrinkled assuming he was asleep as usual. I came to a lip on the canyon floor which overhung by twelve feet the largest so far of these stagnant pools. True, I agree, and yet and yet Rilke said that things dont truly exist until the poet gives them names. Where they would not think of doing otherwise. (One leap and he was in the saddle; five beers and he was on the floor.) Near the first group of arches, looming over a bend in the road, is a balanced rock about fifty feet high, mounted on a pedestal of equal height; it looks like a head from Easter Island, a stone god or a petrified ogre. Resource management is the current term. The flowers were fragrant, tender, inviting; he ate them. The pool is deep, over my head. The waves smooth off as the river broadens through a wider channel, resuming its serene and steady flow. A small wooden sign guides him off the highway and onto a rough dirt track. As predicted, the snowfall has disappeared by this time and all watercourses in the park are dry except for the one spring-fed perennial stream known as Salt Creek, a glassy flow inches deep that trickles over shoals of quicksand and between mud flats covered with white crusts of alkali. If they can. It does not. They are the Negroes of the Southwest red black men. Watching the sky I see shooting stars, blue-green and vivid, course across the narrow band of sky between the canyon walls. Although differences of opinion have been known to occur, open violence is rare, for these men treat one another with courtesy and respect. They feed in the twilight between evening and night and again in that similar twilight, unknown to most Americans, between dawn and sunrise, at which times aerial insects are most abundant. The original text plus a side-by-side modern translation of. Nobody lives in this area but it is utilized nevertheless; the rancher we saw probably has his home in Hanksville or the little town of Green River. And its a wide river this time of the year. I range around the trailer, pick up some dead sticks from under the junipers and build a little squaw fire, for company. Personal property would have been buried with the dead, to be later dug up by pillagers and animals or exposed by erosion. Therefore the frogs, the toads, keep on singing even though we know, if they dont, that the sound of their uproar must surely be luring all the snakes and ringtail cats and kit foxes and coyotes and great horned owls toward the scene of their happiness. A few pale stars shone through the moonlight. Flowers curl up. Moon-Eye broke away and ran off into the canyons with a good saddle on his back. I havent seen one for a week. I had no netting, of course, and the air was much too humid and hot for sleeping inside a bag. There is in fact no illusion of the sort called mirage, only the faint deception of motion where nothing is actually moving but the overheated air. I have seen the place called Trinity, in New Mexico, where our wise men exploded the first atomic bomb and the heat of the blast fused sand into a greenish glass already the grass has returned, and the cactus and the mesquite. The flow may reappear farther down the canyon, surfacing briefly for a second time, a third time, diminishing in force until it vanishes completely and for good. I wait and watch, guarding the desert, the arches, the sand and barren rock, the isolated junipers and scattered clumps of sage surrounding me in stillness and simplicity under the starlight. It would be like murder; and where would I set my coffee? He stumbled backward, turned, ran. Hes a gelding and hes got Roy Scobies brand on his hide., I stared up the side canyon to where the tracks went out of sight around the first bend. In any case the game was not meant for the solitary but for two alone lad and lass, man and maid. To the northeast we can see a little of The Maze, a vermiculate area of pink and white rock beyond and below the ledge we are now on, and on this side of it a number of standing monoliths Candlestick Spire, Lizard Rock and others unnamed. In style the inscriptions and paintings range from the crude and simple to the elegant, sophisticated and subtle. This meant first of all bulldozing a road into the claim; then if they had any money left or could borrow more they had to hire or lease a drilling rig. Forward. Will come to all of us, as it must (they say) to all men. On a Monday evening before my two days off I load bedroll, rucksack, climbing boots and grub box into the pickup and drive away, turning my back on the entrance station and housetrailer and ramada, the lone juniper and all the hoodoo rocks. One breath of juniper smoke, like the perfume of sagebrush after rain, evokes in magical catalysis, like certain music, the space and light and clarity and piercing strangeness of the American West. As is the case with many cliff dwellings, the erosion of eight centuries has removed whole blocks of rock which formerly must have supported ladders and handholds, making the ghost village now inaccessible. Here are the buttercups, alpine or subalpine, with their hairy sepals, divided leaves, shiny yellow petals: hold one close to your nose, the old wives say, and if your nose reflects the yellow you are a butter-lover. More quicksand. In coat and hat and scarf and gloves and long underwear, freezing, I linger on my terrace near the ramada, which is now being unroofed branch by branch in the winds, the red flag whipped to shreds, the windbells jangling like a Chinese fire alarm. The red bandana, the bells? Yielding, the agony passed out of him and beyond and all became quiet again, marvelously still. This I attribute not to the administrators of the Park Service like administrators everywhere they are distinguished chiefly by their ineffable mediocrity but to the actual working rangers and naturalists in the field, the majority of whom are capable, honest, dedicated men. You wont like that, old horse. By taking off my shoes and digging my toes in the sand I made contact with that larger world an exhilarating feeling which leads to equanimity. The lawyer said that he had been authorized by an interested party to negotiate with Mrs. Husk the purchase of her share in these properties. I follow the little stream, keeping close to its course up through the clear green shade of the aspens. Men come and go, cities rise and fall, whole civilizations appear and disappear the earth remains, slightly modified. For the rest of the afternoon, keeping to the shady side, we drift down the splendid river, deeper and deeper and deeper into the fantastic. He looked down at the sand between his legs. Streambeds are usually dry. He describes the area as a sea of desert (5) and the most beautiful place on Earth (1). Like a solitary diamond Venus glows on the soft flare in the west, following the sun. Id sooner exchange ideas with the birds on earth than learn to carry on intergalactic communications with some obscure race of humanoids on a satellite planet from the world of Betelgeuse. No matter, its of slight importance. At a point where rocks come very near the surface, the water forms a chute above, strikes, and is shot up 10 or 15 feet, and piles back in gentle curves, as in a fountain; and on the river tumbles and roars. Abbey provides detailed inventories and observations of the life of desert plants, and their unique adaptations to their harsh surroundings, including the cliffrose, juniper, pinyon pine, and sand sage. A human shout reaches our ears from the west shore. It is like a labyrinth indeed a labyrinth with the roof removed. Afterwards we sit by the fire until the fire gives out, listening, smoking, analyzing socioeconomic problems: Look here, Newcomb, I say, do you think its fitting that you and I should be here in the wilds, risking our lives amidst untold hardships, while our wives and loved ones lounge at their ease back in Albuquerque, enjoying the multifold comforts, benefits and luxuries of modern contemporary twentieth century American urban civilization?. Talk about inter-subjectivity we are both taking on the coloration of river and canyon, our skin as mahogany as the water on the shady side, our clothing coated with silt, our bare feet caked with mud and tough as lizard skin, our whiskers bleached as the sand even our eyeballs, what little you can see of them between the lids, have taken on a coral-pink, the color of the dunes. First of all I was not going to die immediately, unless another flash flood came down the gorge; there was the pond of stagnant water on hand to save me from thirst and a man can live, they say, for thirty days or more without food. In the bark of the nearest aspen, deeply inscribed, are the initials C.E.M., without a date. It was even hotter inside the trailer than outside but I opened the refrigerator and left it open and took out a pitcher filled with ice cubes and water. But here as elsewhere in the canyonlands they left a record of their passage. Youve been out here in the wilderness long enough, old man. I could have opened his skull with a bottle of his own Lowenbrau, and was powerfully tempted. A shameless, The two gopher snakes are nearly identical in length and coloring; I cannot be certain that either is actually my former household pet. Below the garden the cliff curves deeply inward, forming an overhang that would shelter a house; at this point the water is released from the draw of surface tension and falls free through the air in a misty, wavy spray down to the canyon floor where I stand, as in a fine shower, filling my canteen and soaking myself and drinking all at the same time. I round the next bend in the canyon and all at once, quite unexpectedly, there it is, the bridge of stone. Maybe. Northeast of Moab in a region of gargoyles and hobgoblins, a landscape left over from the late Jurassic, is a peculiar little waterhole named Onion Spring. The birds are muted, inactive. He discusses his intense love and adoration for the land. Before it passed over the farther wall he fell asleep. Gaze not too long into the abyss, lest the abyss gaze into thee., I watch also for a gathering of vultures in the air, which would be a helpful clue. 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