Traveling Meditations III - Water

Meditations on Water – From 11 -13 August



(Note: The night of 10 August was spent in a hotel in Santa Fe. That part of the trip was very enjoyable and included the St. Francis of Assisi Basilica, the Contemporary Native American Museum of Art, a stroll through the Old Square, and other events. My aims for this series of reflections does not include Santa Fe.)



Coming upon the Painted Desert has its own sort of reality to it. I recalled a story in one of my Lovecraftian story anthologies—the specific one I forget—in which an adventuresome couple goes into the Southwest in hopes of discovering this poorly mapped establishment. The suggestion is that it is a ghost town, but in truth it is a weak point between boundaries between our world and something like the dream world of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and Through the Gate of the Silver Key. Out in the Southwest, one has a definite sense of proximity to some other place or thinness of our own sense of time and space. The air is thin and changes quickly, in the summer monsoons footsteps are rapidly washed away, animals are sparse and elusive (except for the damnable mosquitoes), and distances can seem inaccurately far or near. Not to mention the brilliance of stars and the weight of the sun playing their own peculiar mental tricks.



I can also recall the fantasy novels I read in my adolescence based on the Magic: the Gathering card game, a significant notion of which were bubbles of disparate time. These spatial bubbles took on faster and slower temporal movement, sometimes drastically so, which made transport between them of living matter very difficult. (Imagine stepping through an invisible barrier and suddenly feeling numbness in your leg as the tissue therein used up its oxygen and half again or twice the speed as usual; meanwhile your heart moves at an expected rate and under-supplies oxygen to your muscles causing strain and potentially damage.) The trick between movement from one place to the other was through water, which acted to soften the temporal discontinuities and to dampen their effects so that one might move from one place to the other without damage. (The series also emphasized water as a transporter by crafting an interdimensional, the Weatherlight, as a flying ship, closer to a caravel than a spacecraft.)



In its way, these weird fiction and fantasy stories got something right. Water does play a profound role in facilitating the movement through time in a way that we cannot easily appreciate. Water has both the direct, short-view impact on the surroundings—saturated soil, hydrated plants and animals, replenishing groundwater, spurring growth, etc.—and the startling long-view effects—carved bedrock, soil removal and transportation, changing ecosystems, shifted rivers, filled in lakes, glaciers and their rending of stone, etc.—that are so outlandish it is difficult to appreciate without at least a little abstraction. Not only that, but these events happen simultaneously with each circulation of water.



The signs of water and its reflection left in stone are everywhere in the Painted Desert and especially in the Petrified Forest section therein. Over many thousands of years, water gradually deposited sediments that the stream was inadequate to carry. If a stream is fast moving, it can carry larger sediments; if it is slow moving, and likely lower, the stream can only carry fine sediments and will deposit the larger ones. In this way, one can see the seasonal variations in the ancient streambed in the sediments of the Painted Desert. Not only that, but the later carving of the Painted Desert was the result of water as well, water that cuts through the ancient bed and exposes the undulations of the streams forebear.





Shallow, ephemeral creaks and rivers carve out washes in the desert landscape, areas of calm, smooth sand that mark the easy and well-traversed passage of storms. In the monsoon season—summer months when brief but intense rainstorms, likely thunderstorms, roll it and dump fat drops of rain in the region—these washes will fill up in little time at all. The are the main vein of the innumerable tributaries all over the landscape, tributaries as thin as a finger that continue to reveal mineralized tree trunks and fossil caches all over the landscape.



Even before the present, intemperate impacts of rain, the landscape was dominated by a tropical or subtropical climate and ecosystem. The Petrified Forest is the result of a strong river that carried down whole trees during flooding events upstream, only to drop their driftwood loads when the river flow calmed. These stripped trees would become waterlogged and sink, where they would be covered by sediment and ash, the minerals in which would replace the original lignin of the trees resulting in the spectacular mineralization of the Petrified Forest. It seems that no matter what happens there, water will be a ruling factor in the landscapes manifestation.





I cannot help but ponder the sense of thinness in the air. Has it always been there? Is such a perception the result of desert aridity, a foreign environment, rapidly changing weather? Do I feel far from the usual because I am markedly distant from my normal circumstances of paved lanes and geometric buildings?





In a place so much defined by water, I laugh at the reality of carrying so many liters of it with us. Dustin and I would hike for miles, drinking occasionally in the not unpleasant heat. We are boys of the Midwest where heat is thick and humid and cold is sharp, dry, and painful. (Dustin's time in Louisiana, I think, does not breach this sort of expectation.) Strolling in the sunshine without humidity in the way, we feel ourselves clearly moving, unhindered by the usual weight of our previous circumstances. We are infused with not just our own energy, but the excitement and mystique of this uncommon realm.