desert solitaire the first morningdesert solitaire the first morning

But the flood itself did not yet appear. Best to launch forth boldly, with or without life jackets, keep your matches dry and pray for the best. Every time I drop a couple of ice cubes into a glass I think with favor of all the iron and coal miners, bargemen, railroaders, steelworkers, technicians, designers, factory assemblers, wholesalers, truckdrivers and retailers who have combined their labors (often quite taxing) to provide me with this simple but pleasant convenience, without which the highball or the, Once the drink is mixed, however, I always go. Among these rocks, in chutes, whirlpools and great waves, with rushing breakers and foam, the water finds its way, still tumbling down. In most of these places the water is so sparingly measured that it never reaches the canyon floor at all but is taken up entirely by the thirsty plant life and transformed into living tissue. And trudged on. Has this particular canyon been seen and named by earlier river-runners? A crimson sunrise streaked with gold flares out beyond Balanced Rock, beyond the arches and windows, beyond Grand Mesa in Colorado. beardless Utes? This is the problem which the Park Service should confront directly, not evasively, and which it cannot resolve by simply submitting and conforming to the automobile habit. The road gets tougher, resembling a cobblestone alley but here every cobble is loose and no two the same size or shape. The main or wider canyon turns to the left, revealing vistas of alluvium flats covered with sagebrush, more cottonwoods, more and more branching canyons with deep alcoves high in their walls, likely sites for Indian ruins. I slipped by degrees into lunacy, me and the moon, and lost to a certain extent the power to distinguish between what was and what was not myself: looking at my hand I would see a leaf trembling on a branch. Dont actually care for ants. Five hundred and sixty tumbleweeds roll toward the horizon, herded by the wind; may they, too, never come back. The canyon world becomes each hour more beautiful, the closer we come to its end. I light up the last of my tobacco, and watch the blue smoke curl and twist and vanish over the swirling brown water. Take off your shoes for a while, unzip your fly, piss hearty, dig your toes in the hot sand, feel that raw and rugged earth, split a couple of big toenails, draw blood! (Gold a very heavy metal, specific gravity 19.3.) Delicate, wind-whipped clouds flow across the burning blue, moving in perfect unison like the fish in the pools below. Since I have no tennis shoes I take off the boots and sling them over my shoulder, proceeding barefoot. Where the trail widened I jogged my horse beside Mackies and after a while, with a little prodding, extracted from him the story of the independent horse. Dry, odorless, still and silent, he looked like the idea without the substance of a horse. Some of them have no legs at all but seem to rise ghostlike out of nothing, floating on air. I dreamed of water and wondered if it would be worth the effort to dig a hole through the ceramic mud of the canyon floor. Without expending a single dollar from the United States Treasury we could, if we wanted to, multiply the area of our national parks tenfold or a hundredfold simply by banning the private automobile. I cut two stalks, a fat one and a thin one, and punch the pith out of the joints of the bigger one by using the smaller as a ramrod. I exaggerate. Evening on the river, a night of moonlight and canyon winds, sleep and the awakening. He held himself rigid against the convulsions that swelled with a droning murmur through his body. The return is harder than I expected. (called a "wildcard") for one or more letters. Quite luxurious for the wilds. Not juniper trees in general but that one particular juniper tree which grows from a ledge of naked sandstone near the old entrance to Arches National Monument. I look for a quick and easy way to return. After fording the river these undaunted people climbed the farther side over terrain almost as difficult and continued on, week after week, through the surreal sandstone wilderness and forests of pinyon and juniper until they reached their goal. This is a courageous view, admirable in its simplicity and power, and with the weight of all modern history behind it. There is no indication that the men who carved and painted the figures made any attempt to compose them into coherent murals; the endless variety of style, subject and scale suggests the work of many individuals from different times and places who for one reason or another came by, stopped, camped for days or weeks and left a sign of their passing on the rock. I couldnt remember the answer to that one. A place to throw empty beer cans on Sunday, said Mencken.) He stepped straight through the flames of the fire toward Mr. Graham. Their sharp hooves clatter on the rock. Tomorrow the calves would be branded, castrated, ear-marked, dehorned, inoculated against blackleg, and the whole herd trucked to the mountains for the summer. They comfort me with the promise that if the heat down here becomes less endurable I can escape for at least two days each week to the refuge of the mountains those islands in the sky surrounded by a sea of desert. The storm is building up, the wind colder and harder than ever, but luckily for us the heavy rain has not yet come down. In the foreground the dwarf trees of pinyon pine and juniper waver like algae under water without, however, losing any of their sharpness of detail. Where once a few adventurous people came on weekends to camp for a night or two and enjoy a taste of the primitive and remote, you will now find serpentine streams of baroque automobiles pouring in and out, all through the spring and summer, in numbers that would have seemed fantastic when I worked there: from 3,000 to 30,000 to 300,000 per year, the visitation, as they call it, mounts ever upward. Once there was a man named Turnbow who lived in the grimy wastelands of an eastern city which we will not mention here the name, though familiar to all the world, is not important. Parallel to the highway north of Moab is a railway, a spur line to the potash mines. 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. A bat came through one window and went out another, followed by a second firefly (the first scooped up by the bat) and a host of mosquitoes, which did not leave. Whats the rush? The money is also used to support the small middle class of officials and functionaries which tribal organization has created, and to pay the costs of a tribal police force complete with uniforms, guns, patrol cars and two-way radios. I climbed on my horse, loading the poor brute down not only with my own weight but with two bootfuls of mud and water. Around the bend up-canyon poured a red snout of liquid mud, which seemed to mumble to itself as it advanced. What better sinecure could a man with small needs, infinite desires, and philosophic pretensions ask for? We move deeper inside until we see in the dimness what looks like a white beach attached precariously to the foot of a sheer wall. Shade as precious as water. She struggled feebly, the horses swung ahead, the mud made a violent raw gasping noise, exploded, and out she came. I slid from the saddle and led my pony to the east side of the nearest boulder and tied him. Puzzled and suspicious, she and the fawn at her side, madonna and child, stare at me for several long seconds. Old Moon-Eye took a few steps away from me, stopped. In some of these basins there was a little water left over from the last flood, warm and fetid water under an oily-looking scum, condensed by prolonged evaporation to a sort of broth, rich in dead and dying organisms. He gripped my wrist and I gripped his and with a slow steady pull I got him out of there. Let the people walk. Every child in this quiet place would have learned, along with his language and games, the legends of old battles and massacres, flights and migrations. In this category belong the semihuman and superhuman beings with horned heads, immensely broad shoulders, short limbs and massive bodies that taper down to attenuated legs. My brain and eyes ached, my limbs felt hollow, I had to breathe deliberately, making a conscious effort. However, I keep my cowardly doubts to myself, waiting for Ralph to speak of them first. Whereupon you, too, will soar on motionless wings high over the ruck and rack of human suffering. To hell with it. I climb down and up the other side and help myself to one of the tins someone has left there, collecting water under the dripping moss. Bad weather means that the park entrance road will be impassable; it is part of my job to inform campers and visitors of this danger so that they will have a chance to get out before its too late. Our mounts had raised their heads from the water and shifting restlessly under our weight, they seemed anxious to move on. Such pools may be found in what seem like the most improbable places: out on the desolate White Rim below Grandview Point, for example, or on top of the elephant-back dome above the Double Arch. Descending the mountain we enter by degrees into a friendlier, more comfortable, more human environment forest, rushing streams, sunny meadows and soon hear the cowbells, see the villages and roads, all that is familiar and reassuring. His life became dreamlike. What follows is the record of a last voyage through a place we knew, even then, was doomed. In the cool of the morning they were feeling lively; also, not having seen a man or a horse all winter, they were half-wild. In part I can blame only my ignorance and incompetence, for I know they are out there, somewhere; I have seen their scat and their tracks. Hunger stirs within me like a great music. Instinctively we expect a miracle: the dam will never be completed, theyll run out of cement or slide rules, the engineers will all be shipped to Upper Volta. I will mention only a few examples with which I am personally familiar: The newly established Canyonlands National Park. Fortunately the parks, by the mere elimination of motor traffic, will come to seem far bigger than they are now there will be more room for more persons, an astonishing expansion of space. What did I do? No mistaking that wedgelike head, that tip of horny segmented tail peeping out of the coils. Well, no matter. When Husk was nearly close enough to reach the toes of his boots Mr. Graham shot him again, this time in the head and with the rifle. Looking toward the mountains I can see the dark gorge of the Colorado River five or six miles away, carved through the sandstone mesa, though nothing of the river itself down inside the gorge. That evening they made the deal. I get out and load rocks into the back of the bed, adding weight and traction enough to climb the grade. The door of the cabin, unlatched, creaked slowly open, although there was no perceptible movement of the air. Stars which are unusually bold and close, with an icy glitter in their light glints of blue, emerald, gold. 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. Nice for pictures but my God Im glad I dont have to live here., Im glad too, sir. I did nothing. Hes under the doorstep and in the shade where the ground and air remain very cold. More or less alive. But it wasnt necessary. Very messy, filthy, wasteful. Was he real or only a bad dream? His father stood up suddenly and roared. 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. His career followed an irregular course; every other year the bank took his little ranch away from him and every other year Leslie managed to get it back. Except for myself no one lives within thirty miles of Turnbow Cabin. The cliffrose is practical as well as pretty. The grooves are well worn, smooth as a pebble to the touch. The water is lapping at the sand less than a foot from my sleeping bag. eh? We unsaddled the horses and brushed them as best we could with handfuls of juniper twigs and turned them loose in the pasture. Much too close, Id say. With his help I discovered that I was not opposed to mankind but only to man-centeredness, anthropocentricity, the opinion that the world exists solely for the sake of man; not to science, which means simply knowledge, but to science misapplied, to the worship of technique and technology, and to that perversion of science properly called scientism; and not to civilization but to culture. Bob Waterman is coming from Aspen with his beard, his Land Rover and one hundred and fifty feet of new nylon rope. By choice, certainly; the exchange is temporarily convenient and can be reversed whenever I wish. It will be objected that the book deals too much with mere appearances, with the surface of things, and fails to engage and reveal the patterns of unifying relationships which form the true underlying reality of existence. At present a dusty milling confusion of motor vehicles and ponderous camping machinery, it could be returned to relative beauty and order by the simple expedient of requiring all visitors, at the park entrance, to lock up their automobiles and continue their tour on the seats of good workable bicycles supplied free of charge by the United States Government. On with the death march. While his former comrade struggled on mile after mile and day after day through the willow thickets and over the talus debris on the rivers shore. There was a bush. The majority of the worlds great spirits, from Homer to Melville and Conrad, have felt the call of the sea and responded to its power and mystery, its rhythm, antiquity and apparent changelessness. I wonder where we are. Not so. When the rain comes, if it comes, he emerges from the mud singing madly in his fashion, mates with the handiest female and fills the pool with a swarm of tadpoles, most of them doomed to a most ephemeral existence. Cold rain spatters on the hot sand of the beach, raising little puffs of dust and steam. This speaks well of the food-gathering economy and also of its culture, which encouraged the Indians to employ their freedom in the creation and sharing of a durable art. What was unusual, however, was their communitarian approach to the problems of settlement in an inhospitable environment. Billy-Joe waded through the mud, went down on his belly, cleared the slime from the surface of the water and drank. He does the cooking, of course, so that someone else is morally obliged to wash the dishes, and so that he can control the consumption of supplies. It is also quite insane. My lone juniper stands half-alive, half-dead, the silvery wind-rubbed claw of wood projected stiffly at the sun. We can see in the canyon distance, not far ahead, the southern tip of the Kaiparowits Plateau the landmark to guide by when seeking the way to Rainbow Bridge. Im sorry, he said, but its a horrible way to die. Wed laid around long enough. Out of the shade, into the heat. I would like to stay for a while and watch the birds but the others are ready to go, the sun is very hot, the corpse is stinking, there is not enough shade for us all under the one small tree, and the world the human world is waiting for us, calling us back. My juniper, though still fruitful and full of vigor, is at the same time partly dead: one half of the divided trunk holds skyward a sapless claw, a branch without leaf or bark, baked by the sun and scoured by the wind to a silver finish, where magpies and ravens like to roost when I am not too close. Horizon, herded by the wind ; may they, too, never back... Through a place we knew, even then, was their communitarian to. Legs at all but seem to rise ghostlike out of nothing, on. Away from me, stopped brown water its simplicity and power, and watch blue. Best we could with handfuls of juniper twigs and turned them loose in the below... 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