Human Traces
September 30, 2011
In the middle of the desert wilderness we came upon a wooden bed frame and a rusty hibachi, standing all alone in a meadow. Someone had built the bed a plywood bottom.
Snakeweed had grown up green all around. I picked a broken shell earring out of the sand.
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Horned Toad Hatch
September 22, 2011
Our horned toads—the Desert Short-Horned Lizard—give live birth. Or rather, they incubate shell-less eggs in their bodies, and give birth to a litter of six to thirty-one (thirty-one!) infants still in their amnions, little marbles that break open into horned toads ready to run.
On Sandia Crest I came upon what must have been a recent birth, a fat adult with a salmon-colored chin and a handful of babies the size of bumblebees.
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Rolling Thunder
September 10, 2011
Rain-soaked sandstone is unstable. Hiking upcanyon, we found a boulder the size of a Winnebago that had peeled off the mesa and bashed a fifteen-foot-wide swath down the scree slope.
It had taken out the piñones, hit the canyon bottom, run up the opposite side, rolled back down, bounced a couple of times and settled back to dam the creek into a fine little trout pool.
The bashed pine needles were still green, but the pool already had a half dozen six-inch fish in it.
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Agua Viva
September 2, 2011
It poured.
I’d never seen live water on Red Mesa before. High up it was milky, coming off the pale-yellow-to-gray sands and clays; below it was a rich red, thick with mud. We couldn’t get any wetter, so we waded right through the freshets that were neither sun-hot nor rain-cold but somewhere in between.
On the highway home, just east of the Ojito road, an arroyo roared down like ocean waves. Astonishing.
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