This afternoon my wife and I walked up the mesa again along the old road where no one’s supposed to go.
It’s just a couple of ruts in the dirt. There hasn’t been any vehicular traffic up there for a long time, the occasional all-terrain vehicle excepted. At each end of the road, someone has gone to great lengths to dig deep trenches and pile up brush for barricades. That’s sort of a custom around here instead of fences and gates, and you almost never see a sign. But the trenches and the brush piles don’t stop off-road machines, and they’re basically the only things you’d see up there anyway. Never mind, the mock war games go on in a spacious, slow-motion “out there” where I hardly ever see either party. As for pedestrians, I encounter another person on that road about once in every 200 walks. Hell, I’ve probaby seen more guys on horseback. It’s pretty quiet, in other words, and you have space to take things in.
Today my wife remarked that the road was getting softer, adding that she thought it might have to do with the lengthening dry spell. I hadn’t noticed the softness — not the first word that comes to mind for anything in this place — but she was right: it was softer, in between the rocks and on the straighter stretches, and maybe the dryness was relevant. Could be the temperature, too. We’ve had a string of hard freezes here, strong enough to freeze the moisture in the upper layer of the hard clay soil and pulverize the fragments on the surface. That dries the dirt out even more, and pretty soon there’s nothing to bind the bits together. That’s how we get the brown talcum powder underfoot, and yes, it does feel softer, until the wind blows everything away.
The padding helps with something else I’ve imagined on these walks, that the Earth is so alive, I’m walking on muscle and flesh. Just having that feeling smooths out my walking. (Who wants to go clomp-clomp all over his mother?) In the extended moment of attention, the ground lifts to meet my steps a tiny bit and shoots me along like a moving sidewalk.
Hah!
By spring, I’ll be swimming up the canyon.
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Our mother the earth is an old bitch gone in the teeth. We’re walking on bones more than on flesh. I don’t mind scuffing up the old harridan. I object to her bloodthirsty savagery. The best I look for from her is a truce, given that we humans, like it or not, are part of her monstrous game and can’t really escape her. Might as well accept the limitations she imposes – death, brutality, indifference. Can’t escape them anyway. “Death is the mother of beauty”, as the poet said. Doesn’t mean we have to love the nasty creature. She hasn’t been lovable since the days of Wordsworth, who managed to convince himself that she was the spiritual force behind the beautiful scenery of the Lake Country. No, Bill, it was just scenery. Just ducks quacking and water rippling and trees towering. Didn’t mean a thing except the thing it was – a nice outing in the countryside for a gentleman of leisure. Much better than being pent up in the smoky city, I grant that much. You liked to draw moral truths from the pleasure of the scene, but weren’t you really just on an extended holiday? Not that there’s anything wrong with that! Maybe we should all do it.
Pardon my whimsy, John. I like to tease you. I liked your metaphor of walking on a dusty cushion, which might be a moving sidewalk, which might evolve to a waterway. Maybe it will lead us to heaven in the end. You’re just naturally more spiritual than me, I reckon, who generally relishes being stuck in the mud and calling it by that name. But I like your words when you’re in full flight. We your readers get our word’s worth out of you.