This Digital Potlatch offering is a special GRACK! episode from November, 2003 entitled “Piñon Lift.” It takes place during the first year of my wife’s solo life in Iowa and begins with her discovering the truth of her mother’s Alzheimer’s disease. Not exactly a happy topic, but it got me thinking. I also took a hike, my standard prescription for all that ails me, and found a remarkable steer skull in a tree…
How it got there (perhaps!) is referenced in the title. How do any of us get here, and do we really ever leave? For that you’ll need to click through to the end, and to get you started, have a raven call:
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Piñon Lift
“I need help,” the old lady said.
My mother-in-law was in more trouble than she knew. The call to my wife, living nearby in Dubuque, meant she couldn’t dress herself, even though her clothes were all laid out the night before. Responding quickly, the love of my life found a sandwich she’d prepared for last night’s meal uneaten in the refrigerator, a toothbrush in the bathroom with toothpaste on the wrong side of the brush.
Hearing this in New Mexico, I remembered the photos from long ago: Iowa in the ’40s, a vibrant smiling woman with windblown curly hair, the fearless phys-ed major and her beaming baby girl. How had it come to this, I wondered, thinking also of clean air and water, pure food, a debt-free life, and simple pleasures like cold soda on a summer afternoon. The water, especially. The woman, the water, the river of time.
Once in Maryland I’d paddled my kayak up the brown-green creek behind our house as far as I could go. The banks drew close together, the overhanging branches hung down low, and at last the hull crunched into bottom gravel. As I swung my paddle round to push off and go back, I glanced over the side and beheld a miracle: the water was clear! I’d traveled far enough upstream to pass beyond the unseen outlet for the effluent that fed the algae growth that clouded the water all the way out to the river and into the bay. I sat there transfixed for several moments, rocking slightly in the shallow stream, taking in the power.
The gleaming pebbles on the sandy bottom were close enough to reach. I was five years old again, standing in another stream and picking crayfish off the bottom. A holy, secret moment shimmered way beyond my kayak and the quiet afternoon. I didn’t know whether to cry or shout for joy.
This afternoon, after hearing the news from Dubuque, I took a hike along my usual route up toward the hills above my rented adobe. For a couple of miles between here and the hot springs, the slowly rising rocky landscape of piñon and juniper is riven through with deep arroyos where I like to go exploring. Today I walked as far up as I could along the road and then decided to return by heading out cross-country, using dead reckoning to work my way back home. I soon encountered several large arroyos I had never seen before and scrambled down to walk along the bottom.
Ever since I’d found an ancient campfire site 12 feet down the side of a cut-away embankment, the arroyos held a special promise. I’d left the charcoal and the blackened stones where I had found them, but I knew just what it was and that was enough. This day I was lucky too, as just around a bend I came across what had to be a section of of a masonry wall protruding from the bottom of a bank of clay. The stones were tightly packed together, flat edges against flat, like no act of Nature could accomplish. Again I knew what I was looking at and didn’t even take a picture for fear of leading someone else to dig for relics.
As I stood there marveling, I heard the brushy crunch of gravel sliding down above me. There was bear scat in the area, and while I had no fear of meeting one on open ground, the thought of bears, stray cows, or human lurkers falling on me in a hole was enough to send me scrambling prudently up the other side. I never saw a thing, but as the light was fading, it felt better to walk down along higher ground.
A little farther on I came upon a startling sight. Scattered among the trees were what could best be described as pieces of the exploded skeleton of a steer. I’ve encountered such scenes before, but this was different. These whitened bones showed no sign that anyone but me had ever found them. Scavengers had dragged the carcass here and there, as evidenced by the trail of ribs and vertebrae, resulting in a plainly natural arrangement. In my mind’s eye, I could see coyotes pulling at the hide or tugging on a leg. How long ago the animal had died or been brought down was hard to say. Unlike in the humid East, where skeletons turn green and moulder into dirt beneath the clover and the honeysuckle, in this climate bones can lay around for years.
I took some pictures this time, checked my watch to see how much daylight I had left, stood up to leave, and then I saw it: an apparently intact steer’s skull, complete with horns! Except that it was upside down, six feet off the ground and resting in a tree …
The piñon in question, like many in the area, was dead, a victim of the bark beetle plague resulting from what some see as a drought. (The lack of moisture means the trees have insufficient resin to repel the larvae and quickly die.) But the position of the skull was odd from either animal or human perspective. It was cradled just so, like no scavenger would have left it, yet upside down, like no person would have done. Besides, the skulls are prized by souvenir-hunters and always the first to go. That someone would have placed it there and not come back was hard to figure, and in any case I could tell the it wasn’t fresh.
Naturally I took it home. My landlord, a longtime resident and avid explorer in his younger days, immediately grasped the significance of my finding it in a tree, exclaiming, “Why, it must be really old. A piñon takes seven or eight years, at least, to grow up to that height!” When the carcass was torn apart, then, the head had fallen upside-down into the ground-hugging branches of a young piñon. Over the preceding decade of ample snow and rain, the tree had pulsed with sap and lifted the skull with it as it grew. There may be other explanations, true, but this one gives me comfort and completes the tale.
(A strong young mother with wind in her hair strides quickly through an Anasazi village as night falls in Dubuque. A steer bellows on the mesa, and coyotes tear my bones.)
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Your hikes always seem much more thrilling than mine.
Either that, or I just get scared more easily (“EEK, a bear!”). But I did find a freaking skull…
Exactly. And bones. I once found a rock and a bush.
The way to have real adventure is to pick a spot high on a distant ridge and then figure how to get to it going cross-country. I like to do that: use my eyes to find my own switchbacks, etc. The problem is that things look so much more scary on the way down… it’s a real test of one’s awareness and ability to stay centered. Just enough physical danger to keep me awake and make me feel I “did” something…
Otherwise, it’s sit down, call 911 on the cell phone, and curl up in a ball with your thumb in your mouth.
Guess I will try that next…or stick the thumb in my mouth.