For weeks, we’ve been talking about making a trip down the Gorge for photography purposes.
There’s never enough time.
The juxtaposition of those two sentences right now — and the manifold lessons embedded therein? You could spend an entire day just teasing out the most shallow, superficial acknowledgment of it.
Of course, the lessons are nothing new, but in this, our busiest and most difficult season, it doesn’t hurt to let them percolate in the back of our minds as we go about our overloaded days now, pushing boulders ever uphill as the ground beneath our feet opens and turns to dust.
There is life in the cracks.
Faith is hard now, but it’s true nonetheless. It’s part of what makes, has always made, this high-desert habitat one of such prosperity and abundance. Those are two words that seemingly do not belong in proximity to the word “desert,” but that speaks only to our miseducation at the hands of colonial culture. “Prosperity” looks very different depending upon context and circumstance, “abundance,” too, and as always, one of the outside world’s greatest failures has been reducing them, like all else, to flattened Eurocolonial images that fit into the convenient shorthand of stereotypes.
But our world exists fully in three dimensions and more, and it is impossible to contain its breadth and depth in the wafer-thin substance of such misconception, and misperception too. Today’s image, shown above, is a perfect example of them all. It’s one Wings captured on film about fifteen, maybe sixteen years ago, if memory serves. It was shot in the Gorge, from the opposite side of both river and highway, using a zoom lens — taken, as it happens, probably just about this time of year, when winter is still present but steadily ceding ever more space to spring.
It’s a scene that’s apt on multiple levels now. First, the boulders: They line both sides of the highway that runs through the Gorge and along this stretch of the Río Grandé. On the side that edges the highway, there are spots where the state highway department has installed netting over the slopes to curb rockslides; in other areas, the occasional boulder will find its way onto the road regardless. Opposite the highway and across the water are spots like those further upriver, where the ridgeline is less banded red cliffs than it is the mix of sandstone and volcanic outcroppings shown here, at once bulbous and sharp-edged, unnavigable, immovable, yet loose enough in places to be ready to fall and shatter into dust.
It’s an unforgiving landscape, one where the occasional bighorn might be found, but best surrendered to the eagles who use it only as a temporary perch. And yet . . . .
And yet, what is unsafe for human traversal is often exactly what other spirits need to survive. It’s a phenomenon not uncommon to the desert, or to other (to humans) harsh climates: The barest rocks will make a space for the green that moves into fill the vacuum, sage and mesquite and piñon rooting themselves solidly beneath the slabs, then rising, squat and strong, to fill the gaps.
Life in the cracks, indeed.
It’s a reminder now, in these difficult days, not to spend too long staring at the feral movements of the winds, nor the stark cold sky or dusty earth. Instead, our task becomes finding the new green that rises to fill the gaps, to fix our faith on it as we wait for the fierce rainless storms of the season to pass.
And, perhaps, we’ll take a day soon to go down the Gorge anyway. We may yet find an eagle or two.
~ Aji
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