Writerly (Slithery?)
June 16, 2013
A snake dashed across the sandy road. A coachwhip, maybe? About three feet long and slender, a gorgeous dark coral. It left a trail of parentheses.
Basic Black
December 8, 2012
Under a bright winter sky, we hiked among the stumps of old volcanoes. As we scrambled up a bare black cinder cone, three ravens. Then nine ravens. Then thirty ravens, graaking and clonking and falling about in the sky.
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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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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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Coyote Scat
August 25, 2011
White Mesa, Ojito: a crest of grass against the blue sky, round piñon trees along a stratified rose-and-white horizon. Light wind, pale skull of a moon.
Juniper berries are ripe. They taste like sweet turpentine. All the coyote scat is full of seeds.
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Star Person
August 18, 2011
We went up the stony wash that is westernmost of the Syncline drainages, beautiful from the cliffs above. Petroglyphs on its water-scrubbed sides: a symmetrical spiral in dark desert varnish, and a pale Star Person almost erased by flashfloods. There was still a skim of water running down the linked pools.
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Vibes y Víbora
August 6, 2011
Foothills of the Nacimientos: a Western Diamondback was stretched in the morning sun. It coiled and cocked only when I shouted for the other hikers. Snakes are deaf, so it must have felt the vibration of my shout.
Posed, rigid, it never moved. John the fiddler said, “It’s a musical clef.”
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Dancing in Two Worlds
May 15, 2011
In the Guadalupe Box area of the Jemez Mountains, on a boulder fallen from the sheer rhyolite cliffs, the five-foot-tall petroglyph of an eagle dancer.
Compared to the most ancient spirals and suns the work looks recent, but “recent” is relative: These mesas were refuges for the Pueblos when, ten years after their successful 1680 revolt, the conquistadores marched north from El Paso to retake New Spain.
Smudged drawing from my pocket notes. Those feet: one human, one an eagle’s.
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Last Juncos
April 24, 2011
There are still a few Dark-eyed juncos in their little executioners’ hoods. When I make the birders’ “pishing” noise they get curious and come to about fifteen feet away, making a sound like agate pebbles tapped together.
Last year’s old apples smell like cider vinegar.
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