Virga & Bone: Essays From Dry Places by Craig Childs

Author:Craig Childs [Childs, Craig]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nature, Essays, Travel, Essays & Travelogues, Ecosystems & Habitats, Deserts, Ecology
ISBN: 9781948814195
Google: vuSmDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B07VWXM13R
Publisher: Torrey House Press
Published: 2019-10-01T05:00:00+00:00

For the last couple decades, the sculptor and I had been exchanging occasional gifts in the mail, me sending him the gray-skinned ghost of a paper wasp nest, him sending me an odd coil of rusted metal. We’d never met in person. This was our first time. He’d been trying deserts lately, getting out of trees. His last exploration had been Craters of the Moon in southern Idaho, a barren rockscape of bulging, cresting lava several thousand years old. He said he was seeing as much life in rock as he was in trees. I said I knew just the place, two-day-long platforms of sandstone I’d found on the outskirts of Paradox Valley in southwestern Colorado.

I could have taken him to the goblin fields of the San Rafael Swell in Utah. The caprocked towers of the Sierra Ancha in Arizona, sedimentary books stacked skyward. The Chiricahua Mountains with their caves like earlobes and open mouths a hundred feet tall. Anyplace would do, arroyos shaped like snakes leaving archways and pedestaled rocks, a chain of steeples, a devil’s shoulder, pelvis, spine. Just a stroll around Arches National Park would have been almost too much, like putting a flash bomb in his face. I imagine what he would say, coming over a rise onto Delicate Arch, a rock formation that looks more like a giant’s daintiest bones than anything geologic. We would have looked on with fifty or a hundred others, most in silence, all having paid their fee to get in, standing and sitting in a powerful contemplation of what is even possible in this world. He would have said it looked as if gods had lived here when earth was made of clay, the only way such a thing could ever happen. I would say I wouldn’t be surprised if one day geologists broke down and finally admitted they’d known all along that the geometry of Delicate Arch and many of the other arches and balanced rocks in the area was physically impossible. They were formed through no known geologic process, evidence of divine hand, proof at last.

What people might not get is that geology is the hand of God. The wind is God’s breath, and water carries it all away.

Neither the sculptor nor I were religious. If anything, our shared religion was growth, decay, and the contours formed between. Evidence of the divine is beside the point. Have you seen a hummingbird nest hung on a string of flood debris in a desert wash? Or the echoing marks of conchoidal fractures on a rock face a hundred feet tall, where long ago a giant slab broke free? You can see the very center where the rock snapped open, a shell-shaped pluck.

I knew he’d enjoy this zone in western Colorado, boulders perched, slickrock endless. He smiled, fascinated, walking round and round a near-toppled formation, fingering blowholes made by wind and placing both hands on the belly of the rock, pregnant he said, feeling as if for the fetus inside. Bringing him here was my gift; it would all be too much to send in the mail.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.