When I took a hike the other day at Taos Valley Overlook, I came across this little arroyo near the cliffs by the Rio Pueblo and decided to jump down inside!
I love these secret, hidden spots
It sure was nice in there. I keep thinking I’ll find something marvelous where the soil is cut away like that. I dunno, bones, artifacts, or fossils, maybe. Mystical shiny rocks. A chunk of a UFO. A rusty pistol. Diamonds!—or the secret of my life. But not this time, alas. In a similar but wider arroyo in the hills above where we live, I once uncovered what had to be hand-laid stones from an old wall about six feet from the surface. I’ve forgotten the location, but Indian ruins, for sure, and old ones. The pottery fragments around here are easily 1,000 years old. So the dirt is full of treasure, if only colorful stones.
There’s a metaphor here, I know it.
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Isn’t there something exciting yet comforting about walking in those little arroyos? We used to relentlessly hunt for gold in them when we were kids, even though our efforts were never rewarded. (Although perhaps metaphorically, as you suggest.) Thank you for the delightful memory.
On my walks out at the Taos Valley Overlook, I’ve “mapped” half a dozen arroyos I mean to explore further. I just know there must be something there.
Seriously, though: you mentioned the comforting. That’s a real thing, Mother Earth and all.
These down and dirty earthy thoughts and images are very close to my own heart. I reckon it harks back to earliest primordial childhood memories of sprawling on the ground and looking close up at little buried things – worms, nails, pebbles. I still like doing this. Your arroyo sounds like a veritable treasure house. The gardening impulse also captures some of the mystery: “as the soil tarnished with weed / the sturdy seedling with arched body comes / shouldering its way and shedding earth crumbs” (R. Frost). Pure magic from the bowels of the earth.
Why is it then that the single most recurrent dream of many of us (certainly me) is of flying? Or, more exactly, floating and hovering about at a great height, looking down on the earth far away, feeling ebulliently detached from the worry, the fret, the agony of human life, literally being above it all. Is this just an absurd longing for something we humans can never have in reality – transcendance? Or is it pointing us to a worthy objective far away from our earthy origins. Ah, posing these questions brings the priest and the doctor in their long coats hurrying over the fields.