This post originally ran in September of 2014 and I’ve not been back to this wild desert party since. I’ve just returned from Burning Man, a Mad Max bacchanalia in the desert of western Nevada. I went to see what my civilization was up to, what fiery pinnacle we’ve invented. I also wanted to see […]
Archeology
In North America, the oldest images put onto rock date back to almost 13,000 BC, deep in the Ice Age. Those types are rare. Most of what you see — phantom-body figures, snakes, lightning bolts, shields, hunting scenes — come from the last handful of millennia, animistic hunter-gatherers and corn-bearing agrarians, the rise of Native […]
My in-laws are visiting from the East Coast and we’ve had some days to explore. The local bar in our five-hundred-person town is a must-see, its sleek wood and mirrors more than a century old, and the old mountain-mining town of Telluride is forty-five minutes away for window shopping and looking for famous people. The […]
The other day I was going through someone’s collapsed house on the tip of a mesa in western Colorado. It looked like a small homestead where no one had been in a handful of decades. The front wall with its peaked roof and door still latched shut lay flat where it had fallen. I poked […]
My mother is an artist, and when she was a kid in New Mexico she’d draw horses in a Southwestern style, jaunty spring in their step and delicately curved, a bit like the art of Navajo, Acoma, or Zuni, all of which could have influenced her. The other day, I came across a couple of […]
My wife weighs in on the mysterious reflective object that appeared and a week later disappeared in the southern Utah desert. She says if this tower is technically neither an obelisk nor a monolith, why not call it a monolisk, or an obelith? Monoöbelisk. Two days after its discovery by a helicopter pilot hauling wildlife […]
I went up to a rock art panel in southeast Utah the other day, one known as the Desecration Panel. The sandstone wall is long and repeatedly marked by petroglyphs of animals and human-like characters about 1,500 years old, what is called Basketmaker tradition. Several are terribly defaced, the damage relatively recent. One figure, which […]
I broke a pot the other day, not just any pot but a ceramic Acoma vessel I inherited after my father died decades ago. I snatched something from the shelf, barely tapping the little seed jar, its mouth big enough for a finger, maybe two. It barely rocked one way and then the other, energy […]
