Mornings

NOTE: A brief thought, to be expanded upon later, but for now enjoy this excerpt from today's freewriting.

Mornings. The air is heavy with possibility and potential, indeed countless things are possible on any given day. Then, after a few hours the sun rises higher and the list dwindles until only routine is left. In the morning the world is reborn, animals awaken and shake the sleep from their tired limbs, frost melts from the trees and fields, and the cold mists of evening lie heavy in the valleys both obscuring and embracing the river banks and lakeshores

and thus extending the night that much longer. My best days come from watching the sunrise, to greet the day with that first fiery burst of crimson crests the horizon. I remember being able to catch the sunrise every morning for nearly a month, it was down by the sea on Hatteras Island where I lived and worked for a time.

The day would begin dark and blue, deep in the southern pines that surrounded my home. I would run down the road then, looking at the blue mist between the trees, choked with trailing vines and greenbriar.

Making my way out on the elevated abandoned road above the salt marsh, I would watch as herons and egrets strode sleepily about, looking for fish among the rushes. Cresting the low dune line, I would kick off my shoes man make a beeline for the surf, still the color of night burnished silver, with the faintest semicircle of gold attesting to where the sun would soon appear. This gold would grow into blazing red and I would stop my run along the beach and sit back on the hard sand to watch. For a few moments, the sun would be visible below the water, like a great shining behemoth lurking beneath the waves, and then the thinnest sliver of molten gold would break the surface as Apollo’s chariot climbed slowly from the sea, illuminating the sand, the breakers, and the tall shimmering dunegrass with a strange and beautiful light.

Every morning for a month my day began thus, to watch all of the glory of our neighboring star burst shining from the ocean each morning was a unique and special gift. I believe that few of us realize the magic of the sunrise, and only by virtue of its repetition are we desensitized to it.

The Predator

NOTE: a memory from today's freewriting.

Up a gravel road from my trailer in the shadow of the ragged Chisos Mountains in South Texas, lies Mouse Canyon. It is discernible from my front steps in the mornings when I watch the sun illuminate the mountainsides and every dark stone and pale green Sotol seems to glow with an ethereal light. In that rich winter sunlight, a dark cleft can be seen; a wound in the face of Panther Peak, where the dry wash that curls around behind my temporary home is disappears, swallowed by the mountain.

One midwinter afternoon, I set out from my house beneath the blazing South Texas sun and walked the wash toward the mountain. It curled this way and that, cobbled with water smoothed stones and walled in by eroded walls of desert earth. At one bend in the wash stood a stooped cottonwood shimmering with the leaves of the previous summer that still clung to its time-sculpted branches.

I sat to rest in its shade and looked out onto the blasted landscape of jagged rock and thorny plants. Everything here was shaped by the desert around it. The landscape was vigorous in itself defense. Over there was a patch of Shindagger, and at my back stood the globular mass of a Sotol with last year’s flowerhead looming high above and casting a narrow strip of shadow upon its serrated leaves. Cacti come in all shapes and sizes here; from the tall rose-hooked Devil’s Claw to the low and lethal Horse Crippler, the plants of the Chihuahuan Desert are both beautiful and terrifying at once. They invoke a deep respect and admiration in me; one does not travel lightly in this country.

As I round a bend in the wash, the dark walls of the stone cleft loom over my head and I enter the narrow coolness of the canyon. Everywhere is the trace of water’s passage in through this deep defile, dead plants layered with sediment wrap the up-canyon side of each tree trunk and beneath boulders lie the concentric rings of slowly drying pools. Each day having taken a little more of their precious contents leaving only the dessicated bodies of the ephermeral pool-dwellers to rise again with the next rain. Water is so fleeting here, more-so than any other desert that I have found myself a part of. It has not rained here since my arrival.

Yet I smell water. A wet coolness borne on the sweeping downcanyon wind. Does it come from a spring in the heights of the Chisos? Unseen from my vantage point, the only thing I can descry of the world outside the confines of the canyon is the pale sliver of the winter moon riding high in the unbroken azure ribbon between the towering walls.

As suddenly as the canyon began, it came to an end, and a pile of smooth boulders lay piled below the twist of a high pour off that lay at the utmost end of mouse canyon. Beyond its lip I could see the broad expanse of Sotol grasslands leading up the mountain side to the cliffs ringing Panther Peak. Off to my left, another pour off beckoned, darker and narrower, its end unseen and unknown. I clambered up the boulders to its entrance and eased myself gently into its cool embrace.

As my eyes adjusted to the light and the echoes of my clumsy passage died away, I became aware of being surrounded by the strong smell of water; cool, clean, and strong. At my feet lay a deep pool cut from the solid stone of the canyon. It was small, no more than two feet across, and the reflection of the sky in its glassy surface made the canyon walls around glow a deep sapphire. It was everything cool and pure in the midst of a land defined by sharp edges and searing heat.

So taken in by the beauty of this perfect window, that I did not at first realize that I was not alone. It stood there, perfectly still, the smooth vertical expanse of the canyon wall at its back and the pool before it, so close it almost brushed the surface. It was an ancient predator, and it was poised above the sky-mirror ready to strike at the slightest movement within the depths of the water. A living fossil, the water-bug waited for its prey. It was like the landscape surrounding it, beautiful and terrifying, a perfect killing machine of lethal precision and ruthless appetite. It was the largest I had ever seen, the golden oval of its carpace nearly six inches in length. Beneath it were folded six deep yellow legs; thick with cruel barbs and each one ending in a long claw that gripped the slick stone. It would stay there, motionless, waiting for a succulent canyon toad or slow-moving lizard to cross its path, or for an unlucky insect to break the glassy surface of its pool.

I was an intruder in its domain, and remembering myself, I nodded my head in aquiesence and left it to its hunting. Life in the desert, always juxtaposed with death. Like the siren song of a selenium spring, what I had just seen was a clear and beautiful illustration of this ageless dichotomy.

Life.

Death.

The pool.

The predator.

One cannot exist without the other...

-Charlie Kolb, Atlas Mountains, Morocco

God's Dog

NOTE: A few paragraphs from today's freewriting...

I remember one night when I was camped on a cliff high above Canyonlands National Park, a campsite I had been to many times with many different people, I built a small fire of juniper twigs in an elevated and established ring, shielded from the desert wind that always sweeps in at sundown. Peeling the dead outer bark from a nearby wind-wizened tree, I knelt above my firelay and rubbed the bark gently back and forth between my hand showering the bed of twigs with tiny fibers. Twisting the remaining bark in to a nest for the coal, I pulled out my flint striker and began to shower sparks into the nest with my knife.

A momentary red glow signaled to me that one of the sparks had caught and I began to blow on the coal. Gently at first, but constantly, I breathed oxygen into the nest and the fire-ring began to fill with thick smoke. But soon, with a tiny wooshing sound, the bark caught and within minutes the air was filled with the heat and light of a campfire and the aroma of juniper smoke floated on the breeze that carried with it the mournful yipping of a distant coyote, alone on the endless mesa-top.

~

Coyote is a fascinating figure to me, he is saint and sinner, trickster and sage, God and Demon. Much of Native American mythos revolves around him from sea to sea, but to me he best represents the spirit of the Southwest and the red-deserts of the Colorado Plateau. Small and elusive, like a grey whisper on the desert wind, Coyote is nonetheless seen often by men, many of whom view him as a pest or “varmint”. I have seen him many times myself, trotting nonchalantly across an open field, or sitting on his haunches in an oak opening watching me pass; occasionally I will only see his tail as he disappears into the brush along a road or trail. When he is not seen, he is heard, along with a small group of his fellows. In the cold watches of the starry desert night, they hurl their shrill voices skyward, sounding like an army rather than a band.

When he is killed, another steps forward to take his place, indeed in many of the ancient stories coyote is easily killed but staying dead is another matter entirely. Coyote has flourished while their big brother the Wolf, and cousin the Grizzly Bear have been hunted and driven far into the dark, cold forests of the north, into only a sliver of their former range.

No, coyote continues trot along the deer trails on the sage plateau, and to laugh at the moon as it crests the rim of his deep canyon. Indeed “God’s dog”, to borrow from Mary Austin, shows no sign of going anywhere despite all our efforts to the contrary. So when I hear his wild chorus, sung unseen off in the silver sagelands, as the moon rides high in a sea of stars, I smile to myself knowing that my world is still wild and that no one can take that away.

-Charlie Kolb, Atlas Mountains, Morocco