It has been too long since I last posted. Thank you for your patience during a time of great personal change. I cherish your readership and have also paused paid subscriptions until I can resume a more regular schedule of posting.

But for now, a woman has been killed by ICE in the city of Minneapolis. Renee Nicole Good shared my same hometown; she was a poet and a mother, an innocent human being. The actions and injustices and public responses to her killing have reminded me that George Floyd was also killed by police in Minneapolis, just 5.5 years ago. Given, these intersections around specific places, I’ve decided to share the following bit of writing that is an excerpt from my in-progress manuscript because it depicts a similar confluence of confusion, grief, time, and place. My book, Into the Folding Swell, is a work of creative fiction set in May 2021, following the administration of COVID vaccines. During that time, I spent a month traveling the canyon countries of southeastern Utah in pursuit of a wisdom that only the land can give. The book is an act of reckoning — with climate change, with global injustice, and with the death that awaits us all. I am actively seeking a publisher for the book, but in the meantime, I want to share this vulnerable and heartfelt essay.

If you too are feeling confused and despairing about the current state of affairs, know that you are not alone. Hold steady.

Trigger warning: this essay contains descriptions of violence.

I locate the bridge I’m looking for: one of only three bridges that cross the Colorado River; this one just east of Moab near the Colorado border. It’s called the Dewey Bridge and it is actually two bridges. The first one was built in 1916 as a wooden suspension bridge. Made for wagons, horses, and small automobiles, this bridge connected all of the land on one side of the Colorado River to all of the land on the other side. In 1988 the original Dewey Bridge was replaced by a newer, wider, unmoving one. Despite its obsolescence, the old suspension bridge — long and narrow with bright white railings — remained as a historic relic until it burned down in 2008. I drive across the new bridge and get out of my van to explore what remains of the old.

At the riverside campground, I find toilet paper clotted to the back sides of tamarisk bushes. There is an RV and a few people in tents. A lone man in khakis stands motionless with a fishing pole. Each river bank boldly anchors a tall spindly tower; thick cables swoop over the muddy river between them. The wooden flooring of the bridge has entirely burned away and what remains are the vertical metal suspender parts that dangle from the cable in regular intervals. Swaying and equidistant, these steel rods carry square plates, big bolts, or nothing at all. In the wind, the burned-up bridge is surprisingly magnificent, hauntingly beautiful, even musical. I sit down on the red earth to listen.

As it turns out, the bridge was burned down by a seven year-old boy who was playing with matches. The fire was an accident that got out of control. An article I read said that the boy’s family felt remorse. It also said that, at first, the boy lied about starting the fire and then cried terribly. From what I can tell, the boy was forgiven and his family was not made to pay for repairs. That boy is now 20; I can’t find his name anywhere. I wonder how often he thinks about the Dewey Bridge. I wonder how the experience changed him.

I once lied once about a fire I started. My family had strict rules about “lights out” so to continue reading after bedtime, I would throw a blanket over my bedside lamp. One night, while hungrily devouring a novel, my delicate pink bedspread suddenly produced a black ring of small flames. Shocked, I doused the hot fire with my water glass. To my parents, I lied. I said the electric socket had suddenly sprayed sparks out of the wall. Eventually, I cried and told the truth but it took a long time to muster the courage to say what had actually happened.

A few years after the Dewey Bridge burned down, another boy, a thirteen year-old, was camped in this exact same place. He was sleeping outside in a sleeping bag when a young black bear snuck up and bit his face and ear. The boy yelled, of course, and the bear ran off. The boy was taken to the hospital and made a full recovery but the bear - who was only two years-old - was eventually tracked and euthanized.

When a bear attacks a human, there are no second chances, no forgiveness, no mercy. That year of the Dewey Bridge encounter, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services division, which responds to conflicts between people and bears, killed more than 350 black bears. I imagine a ranger, someone in uniform, doing the killing. I don’t know how bears are euthanized but I imagine there is some kind of tranquilizer gun involved. There would also have to be a crane or a bulldozer, a machine capable of moving a very heavy animal. But where does the bulldozer or crane take the bear’s body? You can’t throw a bear in a dump. You can’t return the dead bear to its mother. 350 is a lot of dead bears.

I feel sad for the dead bear. Nobody really knows why it bit the boy, though some say drought could be to blame. But you can’t euthanize the climate and you can’t make an example out of it and so the bear died. I feel sad for the bridge too; nobody could believe it burned so quickly. Now it just rusts and wheezes in the wind like a skeleton jostled loose.

I suppose I feel sorry for the boys too — prone to such terrible, out-of-control accidents — each somehow linked to the loss of something big and majestic. When you’re young, accidents can really define you. They can make you a hero or a victim or sometimes even a criminal. I guess your scars are shaped by whether you committed the accident or the accident was done to you and whether you got a second chance.

Earlier today, on my way to Dewey Bridge, the radio reminded me it has been exactly one year since George Floyd was murdered by police. George Floyd was a black man in Minneapolis who sounded like a decent person. He was accused of using a counterfeit $20 bill at a convenience store, a silly crime really, and even though his money was probably real, the police came and killed him. A policeman named Derek Chauven killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck until George suffocated. The final 9 minutes and 29 seconds of his life were captured on video tape, where we see the man face down on the sidewalk, gasping for breath, begging for help. He was not given a second chance, he was shown no mercy, he died unfairly.

I can’t believe it’s been a year already. People all over the world are marching in the streets today, as they’ve been doing for months. People are crying in the streets today because not much has changed. The radio tells me that in the past year 229 black people have been killed by police in the United States. Another source says it’s more like 979. Regardless of the number, it’s too many; police are not supposed to kill anyone but especially not innocent people. A few weeks ago, police officer Derek Chauven stood trial for killing George Floyd and was convicted of two counts of murder and one count of manslaughter. He was sentenced to 22.5 years in jail which no one seems to think is enough. That’s why so many people have taken to the streets to march and cry and rally for justice. Can they make a change, I wonder? Will a better justice eventually be delivered?

Speaking of justice, nearly half of the United States allow for capital punishment; I recently learned that Utah is one of them. There’s a movement among Utah lawmakers to abolish the death penalty which has been unsuccessful the last several times it went through the legislature. As is, Utah hasn’t imposed the death sentence in more than 13 years. The last person to be put to death in the state was Ronnie Gardner, who was executed in 2010 by firing squad. Aggravated murder is the only crime in Utah subject to the penalty of death which is exactly, what he did — twice — in the mid-1980s. His case spent 25 years in the court system before he was finally charged and when he was, the Mormon church requested that he be shot. You see, some Mormons believe in a thing called blood atonement in which sinners or criminals are made to bleed upon the ground as a sacrificial offering. They believe that if blood is not spilled upon the earth, the sinner’s afterlife will not include the glory of God. Firing squad, then, is a good way to both punish a criminal and secure a place for him in heaven. Apparently Mormons believe that even the worst criminals belong in the grand hereafter.

Death by firing squad is not something that happens everyday and therefore takes a great deal of planning and consideration. Ronnie Gardner was hooded and strapped into a chair with a target pinned to his heart. He was killed indoors where, just after midnight, five marksmen simultaneously fired a bullet in his direction. I was interested to learn that only one of the five bullets was real; this was less about avoiding a bloody mess and more about relieving the executioners of guilt. If there’s a one-in-five chance that your bullet was the one that killed Ronnie, you suffer only one-fifth of the shame. According to state officials, the execution was “done with absolute dignity and reverence for human life” which is, of course, an odd statement to make when talking about murder, the death penalty, and a firing squad.

Mercy! Mercy.

What is mercy and how far can it extend? How is mercy granted, by whom and to whom and for what purpose? For whom is the mercy in the executioner’s mask? For whom is the mercy in Derek Chauven’s jail sentence? For whom is the mercy in a black bear’s euthanasia? Is mercy the same as justice? Is mercy contagious? Is mercy longlasting? I wonder if mercy is also sometimes cruel.

I believe that most bad actions begin innocently. You light a match and it blazes out of control. You tell a lie because you’re ashamed. And sometimes you are just a black bear in drought, you’re just a black man on the street. Sometimes you are thwarted by your need to survive. Sometimes you don’t know how to survive in the face of such fear. Sometimes surviving seems to involve just one more chapter of your favorite book. What determines whether you end up in the crosshairs or under a knee, in Mormon heaven or in the arms of your parents? We don’t think about mercy until it’s needed and then we find it, take it, wherever we can. Perhaps some of us have been granted mercies we don’t know how to see.

Sitting on the banks of the Colorado River, watching the old Dewey Bridge swing and clatter, my thoughts are aswirl. I look between the fisherpeople and their tents and observe that my internal maelstrom does not seem to affect them. I observe the perky clouds and stoic rocks who appear equally unperturbed.

Why leave a burned-up bridge a few yards upstream from the new one? Is it meant to be a spectacle, a symbol, a ruinous reminder not to play with matches? I wonder if the seven-year old boy who is now twenty has revisited the bridge in recent times. Does he live in the area and cross the bridge often? For his sake, I hope he moved away.

Watching this rickety bridge, I will it to provide a useful metaphor, a way to understand these strange, overlapping stories that all come back to this place, this moment. I look and yearn and burn for some answers. Meanwhile, the river — which has suffered so many human-inflicted transgressions — flows unceasingly below.

I have recently donned the hat of a geographer and am quickly learning the whereabouts of this new chosen field. I am holding my previous projects in the geographic light, trying to discern how I got here, in both figurative terms and actual ways. I look to the recent past for signs of direction and I wonder whether I am on the right path. Current events are examined with equal scrutiny. Amidst so much global destruction, as systems fail and governments falter, as the future feels particularly unknowable, I hope that the source may become more obvious, sacred, and powerful.

As may not surprise you, a personally compelling definition of source is tied to the fact that every waterway comes from somewhere. I have become fascinated with the headwaters of rivers and creeks, in part because the birthplace of water is so fundamental to life on this planet and also because these wellsprings are often overlooked. Human bodies are 70% water; we are ambulatory reservoirs carrying around the waters of specific and different places, yet few people actually know where their water comes from. Even if they can name the rivers within their watershed, most folks can’t mentally map where those waters originate; fewer still have journeyed to that place. We are completely dependent upon such headwaters but take them for granted. Regardless, countless sources continually flow — unapologetic, unrelenting, beyond the reaches of human attention.

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to create a multimedia project about the creek that runs through my childhood hometown. I wanted to understand the relationship between Monument Creek and the city that grew up around it. I wanted to witness the dynamics that have shaped their 150 years of coexistence. Early in my research, I realized that the creek is not just the section that runs through downtown, that a creek is more than just one place. I became curious about its wholeness and wondered if its 27.2 miles could somehow be knowable.

Though the project officially wrapped up several years ago, I am still learning about the creek. I’m still learning about how I learn, how to unlearn, how to feel my way into the place of all things. Though I discovered a shared origin story with that of Monument Creek, I’m still, in so many ways, in search of the source.

I recently came across the following two bits of older, never-shared writing and found their juxtaposition particularly potent during this time of source-searching. To tease out this (ongoing and never-ending) journey of discovery, I’ve decided to only lightly edit them and keeping them in their present tense. I’m still understanding what these two stories really mean — for geography, for my hometown, for the creek, and for me. I’m curious what they mean to you, dear reader. I’d love to read your answers to the question-prompts at the end of this post.

The map tells me this creek comes from the mountains. The geologists tell me it comes from a spring.

But what is a spring exactly? How does water simply emerge from the earth? Does it drip, burble, splash, or erupt? It is not enough to speculate where or how this creek emerges, I must go and see it for myself. I must witness its exact source.

I have set out on this pilgrimage with a paper map, a digital one, a fanny pack containing a bottle of water and a very old granola bar. I drive up to Ute Pass and through Woodland Park and use GPS to guide me along a network of dirt roads until the dirt road crosses a blue line that I believe is Monument Creek. I park as far off the road as I can, feeling a bit uncertain. It would be far more accurate and honest to walk up the creek from the bottom. But this is how it’s happening, I’m exploring in bits and parts.

Though spring has come to town, there are still patches of snow up here in the north-facing shadows. The grasses are scorched yellow from winter, the only green belongs to ponderosa pines. The ground feels springy and wet as if it’s been storing up life that will soon emerge but hasn’t yet.

My map does not show a trail so I am delighted to encounter one that traces the creek. I follow the path upstream, prepared to bushwack if it veers too far from the water’s edge. I wish I’d worn taller boots or gators because, duh, it’s wetter than I expected.

Even after a mile or so, the trail is still surprisingly well maintained with little wooden bridges that trace through the increasingly marshy areas and keep my feet from getting too soggy.

It’s becoming clear to me that this creek does not shoot out of the ground or drip from a rock like a leaky faucet. Is that what I really expected? For some reason, I’m surprised to see how the water is pooling beneath stands of willows. It barely flows through the tall grasses and swollen earth. It trickles downhill only when the marsh has reached some kind of carrying capacity, once the willows are saturated and the ground is full. I like this gentle beginning. I like that the creek can stew in its own juices and nurture new life before it moves along downstream. It speaks to me of slowness, prudence, that there is a natural readiness built into the creek’s being. I think about my habitual way of rushing into things, of moving too fast. I wonder if this creek’s source can teach me about slowness; I’m sure it could teach me about time.

The trail suddenly dries out and begins to climb a rise of granite. Have I passed the creek’s source? I double back to be sure. A fallen aspen tree provides a place for me to sit and survey the scene. As my body, breath and heart rate slows, I consider the old granola bar and opt for a glug of water instead. Sipping from my bottle, I recognize that I have found what I came here for — the source of my creek, perhaps the source of my being — I raise my water in celebratory salute.

I suddenly want to cry or kneel or perform some kind of ritual. I did not think to bring an offering. With nothing better to give, I pour some water from my bottle on the ground. This water, that I gathered from the faucet in town, may actually contain some molecules born here in this place. I splash a bit more on the ground, returning it to its source.

Welcome home, I quietly utter to the water.

Welcome home, I imagine it whispering back.

I can’t believe that I was wrong. I mean, I’m wrong about so many things but my search for the source felt so real and true and profound. I even told an auditorium full of people how I’d found the source of Monument Creek, that it was a quiet willow-feeding marshy spring. People took great interest in this, as if I were reporting back from mecca or even the moon. And that’s how it felt — sacred and rare. But that was before I discovered my mistake.

This time around, I’ve got the same fanny pack and water bottle and a better map. I’ve been recording sounds so I’ve got my Zoom H4 field recorder, headphones, and something called a dead cat. I’m ready to see the real source and hear it too.

I retrace most of my original journey, but travel deeper into Pike National Forest. There are people here despite it being a weekday because the weather is nice and the mountains have turned green. Along both sides of the road are wide pull-offs where vehicles group around pop-up tents, camp chairs, sometimes a camper. The ponderosa are tall and the granite smoothly rounded; views sprawl in both directions under a slightly purpled sky.

I hear gunshots before I fully understand that this part of the forest is a shooting range. My initial thought is that people are just shooting into the woods because they’re drunk or because they can get away with it but then I see the bullet ridden signs, alerting me that this shooting is not only sanctioned but the primary purpose of this place.

I wish for everything to be different but this is what is.

In the place I had hoped to park is a camper with a flat tire and a busted window. A man sits in an aluminum and mesh chair. His hat shades glowering eyes. As I exit my vehicle, country music turns from mid-volume to max. A cigarette sparks to life. I am not supposed to interrupt whatever is happening here — a reverie, an afternoon bender, solitude.

I do not know if there is another way to the source because this is the path I plotted. Banking on the power of my albeit middle aged, white-girl smile, I lean into naivite.

Hi! I shout and wave over the too-loud Garth Brooks. Can I park here for a few hours? My trail is over there!

He waves me off, more scram than agreement; I gather my gear and scurry past bullet-riddled tree stumps, broken bottles, cartridges, cigarette butts, and a target that is the silhouette of someone’s head.

It’s only when the gunshots escalate that real fear sets in. What if he shoots up my car? What if he follows me into the woods? What about stray bullets from who knows where?

I turn on the recording equipment as the disbelief and heart ache settles in — Monument Creek emerges from inside a shooting range and I am heading into the thick of it! If I die in search of the source, is that a proud death?

Through headphones I can hear the chorus of gunfire — some are high pitched and zinging, others are quick and hard. There are booms too, big ones. Did someone haul a canon out here? The shots are not only ringing from different guns but from different directions.

I walk faster and don’t care if my footsteps taint the recording. Can the machine hear my racing heart?

It is about a half mile from where I park to the green pool that is the creek’s actual source. I see it from a distance and run to it until the splashing of wet grasses slows me down. I imagine the source creating a forcefield of safety and quiet that will protect me from harm. I haul myself onto a large granite boulder and, after my breathing has steadied, start a new recording.

I allow the machine to do its thing as I work to make sense of my creek’s unbelievable birthplace. I wonder how often this place is bathed in a ricochet of bullets and their deafening sound. I wonder when the first bullet rang out for the first time. I take comfort that this creek has lived longer than gunpowder and will hopefully outlive it too.

With my heart rate normalized, I’m able to listen to more than the shooting and I am surprised to notice that, despite the bombardment, birds still chirp. Insects buzz. I had expected them to nest elsewhere, at least to hide quietly when the shooting happens. But no, their singing continues.

Questions for readers and place explorers

• Do you know where your water, your being originates? If not, how might you learn about that source? If a pilgrimage is not possible, can you map or otherwise imagine the journey of water through your life?

• What are we to make of those humbling experiences, such as described in the first short essay, of mistaking the source for something it is not? What if, as in the second essay, the source — our source — is not where we expected?

• Monument Creek emerges from a shooting range. It makes me wonder how many other sources emerge amidst violence, recreational or otherwise. I’m reminded that so many children are born into and live amidst war zones; I wonder what that is like. I believe that all life begins with innocence and preciousness, in total purity. But what if the first gasp of air is riddled with gunshots? I’m not sure there’s an answer to that question, but it feels worth a ponder.

• How do you define “source” and is it something you search for? Do you believe that source is locatable in a spatial sense or is it something more ephemeral, like a fleeting moment or even a deity? Have you ever felt source’s calling, its proximity, or even the thrill of meeting it face-to-face?

• As a fledgling geographer, I’m interested in the esoteric or metaphysical readings of real physical, spatial phenomenon. Can our personal existential longings and search for meaning help to enliven our collective engagements with land (and water)? Can our encounters with terrestrial phenomenon give our lives a greater sense of purpose?

I’d love to hear from you in the comments about how you’re finding source (or purpose) in an age of so much distraction, destruction, and frustration. Best of luck to all those who seek! May your journey be rich and resonant and full of surprises.

Tens of thousands of years ago, a piece of the Oquirrh Mountains broke off and rolled into the waters of old Lake Bonneville. As the massive paleolake slowly drained, that black chunk of limestone emerged from the depths as a monolithic landmark. Like humans have done for the interceding 13,000 years, I was drawn to Black Rock and stopped there to rest.

It was midwinter and I was driving northwest across the Great Basin to a residency in eastern Oregon. Since the journey would take three days and having rarely been to the shores of the Great Salt Lake, I drove along its southern edge looking for a place to stop. Traffic through the urban core had been heavy and I was eager for a quiet place to eat my premade sandwich, so when the Black Rock appeared, I said “this is the place!”

I am not the first person to lay eyes on this landscape and declare it as chosen. In fact, those very words — “this is the place!” — erupted from Brigham Young’s parched lips when he and his weary Mormon acolytes crested the Wasatch Mountains and first caught sight of the lake in 1847. These religious zealots known as the Latter Day Saints had been run out of every place they’d tried to land — New York, Missouri, then Illinois — and, fleeing continued persecution, they pioneered their way over the Rocky Mountains in search of a new home. Within a few short years, 70,000 pioneers came to join the new Mormon settlement in what became known as Salt Lake City.1

For those traveling beyond the Great Salt Lake, there was a way around and through — between the lake’s south edge and the towering Oquirrh Mountains, on a trail known as the Hastings Cutoff. Along this trail stands our noteworthy Black Rock which, during the time of early Mormon settlement, was surrounded by water. A travel writer from that early era described the scene: “the Black Rock rose grim and ugly, like the foundation of some ruined tower…we had expected a grim and desolate landscape; a sullen waste of brine, stagnating along low ready shores, black as Acheron, gloomy as the sepulcher of Sodom. Never had Nature a greater surprise for us. The view is one of the most charming which could be imagined.”2

This charming view and the water that surrounded Black Rock made it instantly popular for swimming and by the mid-1860s, a bathing resort was erected with over 25 bathing houses and a hotel. To reach the resort, bathers traveled from the city for four hours along a rough wagon trail. Nevertheless, countless locals and visiting dignitaries alike flocked to Black Rock, including the French illustrator Albert Tissandier who visited in those early days and recalls, “Bathers were known to float as easily as corks, [but] the high concentration of salt could also cause divers' eyes to suffer seriously and even make them blind."3

Tissandier was one of many artists who, over the years, have created art featuring Black Rock. It is a favored subject of landscape painters, photographers and lithographers to this day. In fact, the first piece of art purchased for the State of Utah’s collection was James Taylor Harwood’s 1890 painting, “Black Rock Great Salt Lake.”4 As you can see, I’ve joined the ranks with a Black Rock painting of my own.

Over the years, the popularity of Black Rock Resort went up and down depending on the factors of economy, lake level, and changing interests in recreation; it often fell into disrepair. After one period of neglect, the resort was expanded in 1880 by new investors to include 100 bath houses, a bowery for picnics, wooden walkways, and even 21’ high swings; ambitious bathers dove from the top of the Black Rock formation. Despite competition from the much fancier nearby operation, the Great Saltair, the bathing haven at Black Rock was enjoyed through the Great Depression and into World War II. By the end of that war, a short rail line serviced the area and a major highway was built along the lake’s southern shore making it accessible in just under 30 minutes. Meanwhile, industry had grown up around the lake which eventually receded to reveal the whole of Black Rock, beaching the rock and its adjacent resort. Alas, a nearby natural freshwater spring dried up in the 1960s and signaled the final death for Black Rock Resort.5 In the decades following the resort’s closure, Black Rock became a site for bird watching and sunset photography but also graffiti, illegal bonfires and other forms of unsanctioned reverie.

When I arrived at Black Rock, no one was around. A parking lot sign oriented me to the fact that this site had been recently cleaned, protected, and registered as a historic landmark.6 Following a short trail, I came to the base of the landmark which, on that day, did not look very black. Winter-yellowed grasses shone richly in the midday sun; the sagebrush was bleached pale but still fragrant. Snow glazed the nearby mountains. Despite the best intentions of volunteers and the Parks Service, a few beer cans and plastic bottles were lodged in the sand of an expansive beach. Above the whole scene rose a smoking smelter stack.

To be honest, the smelter grabbed my attention long before Black Rock came into view. Driving along I-80, I watched its approach for miles and miles. White plumes twisted gaseously into the blue sky from a smooth, thin and very tall spire that seemed to dominate its mountain surroundings. I wended my way towards it, snapping photos from the road. It was only by serendipity that I found Black Rock, the former landmark of this region, huddled quietly in the smelter’s long shadow.

What is a smelter? In this case, it is an essential component of a very large copper mining operation. Copper is pulled out of the ground and “smelted” to rid the raw material of impurities and transform it into a usable material. Smelting occurs at very high temperatures and therefore emits gases, heat, and sulphur dioxide.

This particular smelter belongs to the Kennecott Copper Corporation (KCC) which has operated the nearby Bingham Copper Mine, one of the largest pit mines in the world, since 1906. In fact, this stack is the tallest free-standing structure west of the Mississippi River. Rising 1,215 ft above the Salt Lake Valley floor, it is 177 feet in diameter at the bottom with 12-foot thick walls; at the top, the stack slims to 40 feet in diameter with walls 12 inches thick. A large fiberglass duct carries gases up the center and out the top. The top can be accessed by an elevator that crawls up a gear track on the inside surface. It takes 20 minutes to ascend the stack, although workers only travel to the 300-foot level where, each day, they service the air-sampling station.7

Air quality is the reason this stack is so tall. It was built after the passage of the Clean Air Act of 1970, to which the KCC and other polluting industries were bitterly opposed. Despite disapproval from the EPA — who said a taller stack did not solve the problem of air pollution, it merely sent the polluted air further downwind — the stack was quickly constructed over the course of 84 days.

As I sat on a nearby rock and ate my sandwich, I gazed back and forth between Black Rock and the smelter stack. Traffic roared past on the freeway. A group of ducks squawked overhead. I felt confounded, delighted, and deeply curious. What is the relationship between the Kennecott Copper Corporation and Black Rock Resort? Did one spur the other into being? Did one eventually overwhelm the other out of existence? How do these stories of swimming and copper smelting affect one another? They must be related, if only because they both arise from the landscape and its exploitable features.

These experiences are quite dear to me — instances when different timeframes and stories overlap in one place. I can almost feel the palimpsest of history with all its attempts and failures, catalysts and consequences. I can see different approaches to land use and hear the clashing of divergent values, a chorus of voices claiming “this is the place!” but for their various, often conflicting reasons.

These kinds of dynamics compel me into a deeper consideration of this place’s nuanced story and its complicated future. What would the rocks say? What does the water remember? Is the air able to tell us anything? I don’t know how to answer these questions but I’m learning how better to ask.

This substack has been an opportunity to consider specific places, to give form to my research and articulate (well, try to articulate) my questions. I love this work but am not sure if it’s working or how it lands, whether it matters and to whom. I want to grow this creative research in ways that have impact and a wider reach. But how?

To find out, I’m returning to school! Next week I’ll begin the New Mexico Geography PhD program which is jointly offered by University of New Mexico and New Mexico State University.8 I feel all the feelings and all the doubts. Am I too old? Is school too rigid? What even is geography?

Over the past year, I’ve been quietly assessing this possibility. My wonderful mentors, both in and outside of the program, assure me that my work is valuable, that it can grow within academia and that it is, in fact, geographical. After a decade of independent work, I feel ready for the kind of rigor, camaraderie, mentorship, resources, and opportunities of PhD study. And after interviewing faculty and students and plumbing the depths of my longing, I’m so pleased to find a compelling program in my own backyard. Though I don’t exactly know what a PhD means for me, I trust that “this is the place!” where new doors will open.

I’m so grateful to you, my readers, for sticking with me over the last year and a half. To those who comment and like and especially to my paid subscribers, I bow. If you are still reading this post, thank you! I know you have other things vying for your attention, so the fact that you’re still here means you must be enjoying site & scene. Yay! If you’re not a paid subscriber, I invite you to upgrade.

Why upgrade? Because, given the confusing and tenuous funding situation facing universities, I’m prepared to pay my own way. I’ll be attending school part-time in order to continue my day job9 and work on a few creative projects. Therein, I hope to continue posting to site & scene during my PhD journey, continuing this self-made approach to investigating how people and places change one another. Though I’m soliciting paid subscribers, I plan to continue making the work free to anyone who is interested in seeing it; I don’t want to put it behind a paywall.

That said, I’m going to share nine new drawings below, accessible only to paid subscribers. It’s a wee reward for you loyal (and new) patrons! Upgrade now and you’ll get a glimpse of the studio’s freshest creations.

To make your support of this work more accessible, I’m offering a 50% discount on subscriptions — would you take me out for coffee every other month? That’s about what it shakes out to. If you’re feeling super generous, there’s a “founding” member level of $350. Or just keep reading along as a free subscriber — I won’t hold it against you!

Either way, I hope to gather enough paid subscriptions to prioritize this Substack as a sort of part-time job. Because it’s the job I really want! Writing and drawing about the places that fascinate me, with a community of supporters who care about land and water and the stories they contain — for me, THIS is the place!

Thanks again for joining me here and reading along. I celebrate your curiosity and attention span!

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The watermelon was sliced into crescents and then chunked into a bowl. From there it was served onto a blue glass plate with breakfast tortilla, salad, and a not-too-sweet cake. I carried my small feast onto the sun-warmed porch where friends gathered to celebrate a birthday. We whiled away the morning, telling stories and sipping coffee. I ate my way around the plate, saving the watermelon for last. It was delicious.

I don’t know where that watermelon came from because someone else brought it to the party but I found myself thinking about the watermelon later in the day, wishing I’d had a few more chunks since, at that late autumn date, it was likely the season’s finale.

Watermelons grow where I live in Albuquerque. In fact, the giant mountain that watches over the city is named “Sandia” for its sunset watermelon glow. I have seen melons at the farmers market so they must grow well here; it seems that they grow in a lot of other places too. In fact, I read online that watermelon is a highly cultivated fruit with more than 1,000 varieties. I also read that it’s considered a berry because each fruit grows from a single flower.

I got to wondering about the oldest watermelon and where it came from. As it turns out, the progenitor to the watermelon grew wild in the North African deserts and was cultivated by the Ethiopians as many as 5,000 years ago. With colonization, watermelons spread to nearly every continent on the globe. Going further down this research tunnel, I came across an article about a very famous melon called the Jadu’l watermelon that once grew in Palestine.1

As you may know, Palestinians have been known for their incredible farming, their ability to make the desert bloom. As you may also know, the Palestinians have been under some form of external control for generations. What I didn’t know until reading about Jadu’l melons is that Israel, which has occupied some portion of Palestine since the creation of its nation state in 1948, has almost always attempted to control Palestinian food production and consumption — the Jadu’l melon is no exception.

Since time immemorial, the succulent Jadu’I watermelon has grown in Palestine, especially around the city of Jenin, located in the northern West Bank. The melon grew large and juicy and, for centuries, was a valuable export to nearby countries and territories. It was not only delicious but, given its resistance to disease and adaptation to the desert climate, Jadu’I watermelons were an important symbol of resilience. The fields where they grew were central to Palestinian farmers’ lived experiences. According to one source, “Palestinian women gave birth in the melon fields; many sought refuge in the fields during the war; and many more remember the times when the watermelons were stored under beds to eat during the winter. This watermelon has stayed carved in peoples’ memories until this day.”

Unfortunately, Israel was threatened by the agricultural independence of Palestinian farmers and sought to interrupt both their cultural tradition and their nutritional sustenance. When the first Intifada broke out in 1987, the Israeli army was everywhere in Palestine. They cut water and electricity and introduced a 40-day curfew which interrupted the cultivation of Jadu’l melons and other crops. Palestinian farmers were forbidden to harvest their olive trees and during that time hundreds of thousands of olive trees were uprooted by Israeli forces. Meanwhile, Israel promoted the heavy use of chemicals, fertilizers and pesticides and forced farmers to replace native seeds with those from Monsanto, while Palestinian markets were flooded with cheaply produced watermelons from Israel. The Jadu’l melon, like many native crops, could not survive such conditions and came to live only in the Palestinian memory.

There was a last watermelon. From many to a few to none.

So often, we don’t recognize what is fleeting until it is gone. I wonder how many Palestinians could possibly be aware they were eating their last bite of an endangered melon. Did they succor its sweetness and imprint it in their bodies? Or did they assume there would always be more melon? How many people can still recall its flavor? How many other native fruits have disappeared?

This sad story about the loss of Jadu’l melons is not exactly the reason why watermelons have become a symbol of Palestinian liberation.2 It’s a much more complicated story that is also very sad. I’ll do my best to share it.3

From what I understand, the Palestinian people did not have a flag until the 1920s. The design emerged during the Great Arab Revolt of WWI. It displays three horizontal stripes—black, white, and green—overlaid by a red triangle. Those colors represent the four Arab dynasties and also the blood of warriors (red), the purity of noble deeds (white), the fertile Arab lands (green), and the defeat of enemies (black). Despite the Palestinians' help toppling the Ottoman Empire and despite the fact of their new flag, the League of Nations granted Britain the mandate to govern Palestine, encouraging them to eventually cleave from it a nation state for Jewish people. Following the atrocities of WWII and particularly the holocaust, many parties within the newly formed United Nations voted to partition part of Palestine for a Jewish homeland; Arab leaders voted against it. War ensued, Britain withdrew and Zionist forces moved in, 700,000 Palestinians fled, Jordan claimed the West Bank and Egypt captured the Gaza Strip. An agreement was made between the ruling parties and a green line was drawn around the territories to mark their temporary borders. Palestinians, despite being displaced, separated and occupied, established various councils and governments to seek fair representation and, in 1964, created the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Various factors raised the regional heat but the establishment of a Palestinian government was certainly one of them; Egypt’s control of the Suez canal was another. In 1967, Israel took up arms against its Arab neighbors during what is called the Six Day War, eventually claiming new territory including the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, while 325,000 more Palestinians fled the region. After this shake-up, Israel built a separation wall with military checkpoints and asserted control over the movement of their occupied people, goods, and natural resources. They restricted access to clean water and began to aggressively and illegally settle Palestinian territories. At this time, the Palestinian flag was outlawed.

Enter into the scene a renowned Palestinian artist named Sliman Mansour who, in the early 1980s, made paintings of Palestinian life — people working in fields, olive groves, and also the struggle of his people. Apparently, an Israeli official came to his gallery to confiscate his artworks, commanding that he seek permission to make an exhibition and never make work using the colors of the Palestinian flag. Another artist who was in the gallery that day asked what would happen if he drew a flower with those colors, to which the official answered, “Even if you paint a watermelon, we will confiscate it." The new rules sparked a resistance and artists all over the world began painting watermelons as a symbol, still used today, of Palestinian identity, liberation, and solidarity.4

During my research, I read about another Palestinian artist named Vivien Sansour, whose work spans from film to culinary history to agriculture. She’s the founder of the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library and in 2016, she found a few remaining Jadu’l seeds and planted them. On her website, Sansour writes, “these seeds carry the DNA of our survival against a violent background that is seen across the hills and valleys through settlement and chemical input expansions.” She sees these seeds as subversive rebels.5

I can only imagine what it meant for Sansour and her community to reclaim this lost fruit. They must have watched the seeds grow and eventually flower, cheering those berries into full-fledged melons. They must’ve savored that first bite, tears and juice mixing together in a beautiful mess. They must’ve spit those seeds with intention, maybe into a field but likely into a cup to carefully save til next season. But was there a next season? Will there be one yet to come? The article I read about Sansour’s watermelon revival is nearly eight years old. The article has not been updated with news of the war, nor has her website. I do not know if the seed library still exists or if, like so many things, it has been destroyed. Alas, there is so little of Palestine that survives.

Now it is early summer and I recently had my first piece of watermelon for the season. It was a handheld rind-encrusted slice offered to me on a very hot day at the pool from a tupperware brimming with other slices. I slurped its juicy flesh and couldn’t help but think of Sansour. I can’t really eat melons without thinking about Gaza and the genocide that Israel is systemically inflicting upon the Palestinian people. They don’t have melons. Heck, they don’t even have flour. They are starving to death while I slurp watermelons in the sun.

According to the UN, over 400 people have been killed while trying to access humanitarian aid in the last several weeks. That’s on top of 55,000+ Palestinians who have been violently killed in a war that they are not equipped nor have chosen to fight. Once again, Israel is using food to manipulate, control and ultimately exterminate an entire people.6 This is illegal, immoral, and must be stopped.

Here’s the good news and the bad news: this unthinkable horror is being empowered by US taxpayers. In fact, we gave Israel more money last year than 89% of countries spent on their nation’s militaries (and that’s just a portion of our defense budget). An October 2024 study on “The Cost of War” found that the US military spent $22.8 billion to fund and protect Israel in just one year, including $17.9 billion sent directly to Israel.7 This is too much. We can stop this. We must!8

As watermelon season unfolds in all its juicy glory, please succor its colors and scents, its refreshing taste. Such earthly delights are meant to be enjoyed. But please, each time you eat watermelon, let yourself be seeded with rebellion. Remember Palestine. And let yourself flower towards a greater and kinder humanity.

I haven’t posted here much as I’ve been tending to a sustained calamity that is, luckily, now subsiding. I hope to write more about that in a future post, but for now I simply beg your forgiveness. Also, I’ve paused subscription payments until I’m fully back on track. That said, I’ve got a few posts in the mix and hope to share a bunch more this summer. Thanks for your support!

I told him that we should prepare ourselves for the worst.

I mean, what could we possibly expect from a place I read about for the first time, just then, on Google. It was a hot spring, yes, but it was a hot spring under the interstate, near the border with Mexico, in a landscape completely dominated by mega-industrial farms1. It might be really bad. It might actually be toxic.

Dark had come quickly and scrambled our loosely made plans. Our vacation was over and we had begun the long drive home; still, we wanted to have a decent night (not one of hardship or high expense and certainly not one of all-night driving). We had our big truck with the pop-up camper so we could sleep virtually anywhere. We’ve slept at rest stops, in urban alleyways and Walmart parking lots, not to mention an uncountable number of campsites. We pride ourselves on being nimble. We honestly enjoy “roughing” it.

Rough is what I expected of the hot spring under the highway, and so I verbally prepared him and myself with images of broken glass on the ground, toilet paper clumped in the bushes. It was Saturday night and so I considered aloud the possibility of all-night parties with too-loud music and unhinged debauchery. I prepared us for the nastiness of contaminated waters — floating trash but also the things we can’t see: bacteria, pesticides, pee.

“If it’s really horrible,” I told him, “we don’t have to stay.”

He quietly absorbed my chatter, accustomed to the way I apologize in advance for things I can’t know.

After finding a wide open place near the hot spring that felt officially unofficial, safe if not unsanctioned, we slept hard and deep. In the morning we tumbled out of the camper to take in our surroundings. As is our custom, we set our chairs to face the sun and, incidentally, we also faced a large power station. We drank coffee with the last of our cream and talked for a few minutes about electricity. As the air warmed, we surveyed the desert scene.

There was a scattering of desert plants, mostly cat-claw acacia and other spiny bushes. Over by the interstate — which had roared us to sleep, not unlike ocean waves — there were clumps of palm trees. Between these various plant clumps, there were very large expanses of hard, flat dirt. This land of dirt and clumpy plants stretched out in all directions, as far as the eye could see, but aside from the power station, there were no buildings and aside from the interstate, there were not really roads. Yet there were many, many RVs.

There didn’t seem to be a lot of sense or order to how the RVs were situated, but most seemed set up to stay awhile. Some were nested within a festive outdoor setting, party lights strung up around a collection of chairs and a propane grill. Several had seemingly elaborate arrays of solar panels, complete with batteries and wires; some had dishes for satellite internet and more than one had a radio antenna. The RV closest to us had a little fence corral that must, at times, contain a small animal but at that moment did not. As we drank coffee, we watched someone walk towards the interstate in a bathrobe.

The parking lot to the hot springs was a taxonomy of camping vehicles. There were trucks and vans and a car that was clearly someone’s home. There was also a handmade camper vehicle that was a mash-up of several different mini-buses welded on top of each other. A man sat in the top part of that vehicle which was like a rooftop deck; he was clearly proud of his rig and wanted to be seen, but stoicly rocked in a chair with his eyes focused on the distant horizon.

At the edge of the parking lot stood a freshly swept pit toilet that was recently stocked with paper. Along the edge of the toilet building perched a variety of personal objects — a towel, a pair of sandals, a rainbow crocheted pouch — all lovingly arranged as an ad hoc lost and found. On a fence post in the shade of the pit toilet stood a proud jug, nearly full of grapefruit juice, that read in magic marker: I added ⅓ tequila. Please enjoy!

We ambled down the gravel path toward a small oasis of palm trees nestled below the ever-roaring freeway. A man sunbaked by Arizona retirement rode past on a bike rigged to carry a water jug over the handlebars; he waved hello. As we entered the fence-encircled bathing area, a few folks looked up and nodded. It became clear that we were among regulars.

There is something that happens in one’s mind when you recognize that you have underestimated a place and all the people who care about it. As I began to understand how wrong I’d been about these hot springs being dangerous or filthy, I felt a mix of embarrassment, delight, relief, and inspiration. It took a minute to forgive myself for so often expecting the worst, before I was able to fully absorb the true nature of the place and let myself relax.

We saw that others had draped their towels and bags over the chain link fence and did the same. I noticed a hand-painted sign nearby that read in shades of blue: stealing is bad karma.

Several people chatted breezily as they lazed around what I learned was the smallest, coolest pool. Two grey haired men sat facing each other in a heated cow tank. I descended a ladder into the large hot pool where a wiry old lady in a hot pink speedo clung to the edge.

“Did you shower before getting in?” she asked.

My face must’ve betrayed me because she pointed to a large tube outside the pool. As if on command, a man with a belly that drooped over drooping trunks turned a valve and the tube emitted a large spray.

“Just rinse there,” she said and then pointed towards the highway. “If you want, there’s a more private place in the trees where you can shampoo and soap off afterwards.”

After showering, we soaked for a few hours, moving between different tubs and the cow tank. One man seemed to know the whole water system, rearranging hoses to heat and cool various pools. Another man came to fill several jugs. People arrived and left again; everyone seemed to have their bathing ritual.

“Can you drink the water?” we asked the man with the jugs.

“No,” he said. “Too many minerals. I take it back to the RV for my wife to bathe. She won’t come here to the pools because she’s Filipino and very particular about these things.”

Since he had several jugs to fill for his wife’s bath, there was time to chat. He told us how they live in Alaska and drive down every winter to stay in this place. You can buy a permit to live out on the land for up to seven months at a time and that’s exactly what they do. There are certain rules about the size of RV; for instance, you need to have your own toilet situation. It’s a bit rustic for his wife’s tastes but, as he joked, she hasn’t left him yet.

Suddenly overheated, I lay face-down on the cool concrete pad that connected the pools. I closed my eyes to hear birds, lots of them. A lot of cars too. I heard a woman talking about how marijuana saved her life while two men discussed where to get propane. When a young man with dreadlocks entered through the gate, a number of people cheered.

It seemed like most of the regulars were nomads, there for a season or maybe just a spell. They’re there because of the hot spring but maybe they’re also there for each other. I watched a weather-beaten couple help each other into pristine white robes. Upon exiting, they waved aimlessly to whoever might be watching.

As it turns out, the world is full of magical places in surprising locations and good people who take care of what they love. I lay with my face tucked into my arm and felt my body regulate to the perfect temperature. What a marvel to encounter dignity where you least expect it. What a marvel to be a welcome stranger.

These hot springs belong to no one — well, maybe the BLM — but there are no officials, no fees, no guards or staff, just some minimal infrastructure and basic rules. Clearly, there are a bunch of people who keep the place nice; each one voluntarily doing their part to pick up trash, sweep out the toilet building, or tell the newcomers how to shower.

It’s extraordinary, really. People coming here and falling in love with it and then returning, year after year, to take care of it. Why do they love this place so? It’s not fancy. It’s under the interstate! It’s hot and dusty with no nearby towns. I’m guessing they love this place because it is free. Sure, there’s no one charging admission but that’s not the only kind of free there is.

Someone once said that freedom’s just another word for nothing-left-to-lose. I’m not sure I agree with this definition because, it seems to me, freedoms exist to persevere, to persist; their very freeness is defined by potential loss. We should have a different word for the freedom of stewardship — or am I talking about the stewardship of freedom? — the kind that’s chosen and community-sustained and place-based and holds a sort of decency at its core. Places that are truly free are truly precious and are therefore constantly threatened by capitalism and governments and disrespectful dicks who just want to trash the place. That’s why free zones require maintenance and stewards and a shared code of conduct. That’s why free zones don’t always last that long2.

Slowed by the saturating ease of a good soak, we sauntered up the gravel path and back to the parking lot. The double decker camper bus was surprisingly gone. So too was that jug of tequila juice. Sun baked the ground with increasing heat. Climbing back into our truck with thoughts of home, the wiry old lady rode past on a small bike, freshly showered; her hot pink speedo hung from the handle bars.

“Come back, now. Ya hear?”

We turned to wave but she was already gone. A plume of dust hung in the desert air.

For the long midwinter month of January, I live on the edge of a magic lake.1 The lake is magical for many reasons; for one, despite being many miles long and wide, it is only a few inches deep. It is also an alkaline lake meaning it is heavily salted, doesn’t freeze and easily evaporates. In summer, the lake disappears completely.

I did not grow up with lakes, not even rivers. Water was more than foreign to me; it was almost nonexistent. In recent years, I have come to terms with the fact of this waterlessness with the sorrow that one feels for other kinds of childhood hardship and neglect. Therefore, in recent years, I have moved towards water with the magnetic fascination of someone who has finally, as an adult, learned about love.

+

Up the road from where I currently live, there is a wildlife refuge. On maps, the area covers a large area2 of ground which, at this time of year, is mostly water. It is a marshy wetlands and a temporary home for migrating birds.3 The other day, I went to the refuge in search of a place to walk. I thought the refuge might have roads long enough to really move my body and I was curious to glimpse the lake’s other seasonal visitors.

The day I visited the refuge was clear and cloudless, almost warm. The lake was a mirror of the sky, broken only by patches of grass and a few Russian olive trees. Upon this blue mirror floated a large flock of white swans4. I have never seen swans in the wild and I felt astounded by them. Their necks looked just like in the picture books and, even from a distance, I could sense their impressive size. Also impressive was the large number of swans that floated together in one place. There were so many that, in my straining vision, they blurred into one. With binoculars, I might have been able to distinguish each individual bird, but to my eyes they appeared as something whole and majestic, a graceful many-necked being.

I cannot see swans without thinking about Roald Dahl. Have you read his mournfully sad story about the boy who was bullied into becoming a swan?5 The boy is horribly mistreated by others his age — first, he’s made to lie on the tracks beneath a passing train and then to help the bullies kill a swan who is nesting with her babies in a waterfowl refuge. Then, the boy is forced to climb high into a tree, the wings of the butchered swan strapped to his battered body, while the bullies shoot at him with a gun from below. Whether metaphor or fantasy, in the end, he flies away.

The refuge has a few campgrounds and a picnic area but as I walked along a long dike road, I saw no one except a ranger. He passed slowly in a white truck and raised two fingers from the wheel in greeting. It was midafternoon so I moved quickly to make the most of winter’s early-setting sun. Shadows cast by a high mountain ridge chased me out to the refuge edge and when I was overcome, no hope of more sun that day, I turned around. Moving back along the dike, I felt the temperature drop as many many birds flew in to settle for the night.

I had been warned in advance that the refuge is also a hunting range but I was still shocked at the sound of sudden fire. Crack! Crack!

I could not see from where the shots were being fired. It sounded like two, maybe three guns, not terribly close. Still, I wished for one of those orange hats. As the shots rang out across the lake, birds scattered and squawked in every direction. They did not fly in formation or with grace, they flew with a desperate will to survive.

The shooting continued for some time. I do not know much about guns or hunting, but there were enough shots fired during my walk that I was able to listen and carefully study their sound. There were periods of silence that I attributed to the hunters’ reloading or watchful waiting, and then a slow, intentional barrage of rhythmic cracks. I could almost conceive of the gun’s mechanism, but still do not know — does the loud cracking come from the bullet being ejected or from its explosion? I listened carefully for other sounds, the bullet whizzing through the cooling air, the soft thud of a bird killed in flight. I wonder if the birds cry out at the moment they are struck. I wonder what happens then.

Strangely enough, the swans were unfettered. When I passed by their chosen part of the refuge, their many-necked organism was still intact and seemingly unphased, meanwhile the geese and ducks and other birds were fleeing and screeching all over the sky. It is illegal to hunt for swans and the swans must know this and feel safe here, despite the cracking all around.

I know what this feels like, in a way. For here, at the edge of the lake, there is no cell signal. Internet can be reached only in one building that lies across the yard from where I stay. I go to this building to check emails and send messages but I do not look at the news and therefore only receive what information comes to me directly.

On the phone one night, I sat in this building and talked with my sister about the new administration that is throwing off all the protections and withdrawing from all the alliances. She told me about the gutting of the EPA, troops being sent to our southern border, that now there are only two recognized genders. Each story was a shock — a crack! — to the nervous system. The worst part, she said, is the total lack of sanctuary.

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Up the road from where I currently live, just across from the wildlife refuge, is a general store that is also a post office. I recently stopped in to survey the scene and was greeted by the very friendly gentleman working behind the counter. Since it’s the only place for many miles, he must know everyone in the county and knew immediately that I’m a visitor.

“You need beer!” he instructed. Come to think of it, I did. I asked his advice and settled on a six pack of west coast IPA. As he rang me up, we got acquainted.

“Watch out for cougars,” he warned, when I told him I was staying nearby. Apparently, a cougar killed a deer in broad daylight at the rest area across the road. No one saw it happen, but the act was captured on video camera.

“What do you do if you meet a cougar?” I asked, half knowing the answer but wanting to make conversation with the shopkeeper.

“You get real big and real mean,” he said, rising from his stool to demonstrate. He raised both arms above his head.

“Should I shout?” I asked, mimicking his big mean stance.

He returned to his stool to finish ringing me up. “You can scream and yell all you want. Just don’t run.”

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That night, it got very cold very quickly. I was snug inside my cabin, quietly reading a novel by lamplight when I was alarmed by a sudden

Crack!

I stopped to carefully listen. Minutes later, another crack. It was not gunshot, as it turned out, but the sound of the lake breaking apart in the frozen night.

Morning came and in the early light, I set out to witness the lake. Indeed, the lake had frozen and cracked apart in ways previously unconjurable by my unwatered imagination. Along the lake’s edge there were waist-high piles of ice slabs the size of table tops. The piles were not only on the lake’s edge but also in the middle; from a distance, they looked like frozen waves or frothing islands. Rocks had been moved and the shoreline rearranged by a great invisible force. There were also tiny fractals and fractures, everything cut with wet precision and studded with the glitter of diamonds. The changes were massive and tiny and also tremendously fleeting. It was so cold that morning, my vision blurred with wetness.

I wish I had hurried down to the lake’s edge when I heard it exploding the night before. I can’t conceive of how it happened! I wonder if this has ever happened before? I wonder if it has ever happened anywhere else? Or is this just what lakes do? Can you imagine the force that is required to pile table-top slabs of ice on top of each other? Did it happen all at once? Or maybe there was a slow groaning that pushed the cracked up lake into piles? I have marveled over geologic wonders of rock and earth, but I didn’t know about the geology of water. I didn’t know a massive lake could fold and break and pile upon itself. I didn’t know that such forceful breaking could also be so beautiful.

I had imagined the ice piles would disappear as quickly as they arrived and so, on the morning of day two, I ran down to the lake edge, surprised to behold their continued existence. There were still waist-high piles of ice slabs but their edges were slightly dulled, having melted just a bit in the previous day’s sun. There were new heaves and fissures, smaller cracks and a fresh layer of glittering frost. It was still marvelous but admittedly, a little less so.

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Here by the lake, days blur together and though each lasts a few minutes longer than the one before, they are still so short and cold.

As time passes, the ice remains and so do I. Most news hovers just beyond the cell phone signal, like a cloud that, for now, casts its shadow somewhere else.

Still, news of the cougar reached us today. Apparently, someone shot and killed it. Apparently, we can feel safe now.

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I think about the lake constantly but no longer run to it’s edge. When I eventually wend my way to the lake on long walks, I don’t so much look as listen. When the mountain ridge casts its shadow upon the lake — that’s when it makes the strangest sounds. As frozen water adjusts and ice moves, the lake groans and moans. It gurgles and burbles and pings; it even belches! There are cracks and pops but none so loud as that first cold night. My favorite sounds are those that move through the ice like a zipper or an arrow, you can almost track them with your eyes but there is never anything to see.

What is it like to be this lake? I can’t help but wonder. Does it ache with expansion? Does it groan over its brokenness? Does it remember the era, long ago, when its body was so large that it filled this entire basin with water? Does it long for the summer when it will disappear completely? Amidst so much change, is there anything familiar or consistent to give this lake comfort?

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There is snow in the forecast for this weekend. Today is the last day of bird hunting season. I’ll be here a while longer; I hope the swans stay too. As everything unfolds and cracks and piles up around us, I wonder what will happen next.

I left Winnemucca at just past 8am with a full tank of gas. I had selected my route to south central Oregon with little intel and zero experience; the route seemed as good as any, as far as I could tell. Departing from the interstate and what, to me, is “known” territory, the landscape opened and kept opening. Giant mounds of grass and brush appeared smooth in the morning light. Their surfaces spanned from a bleached winter yellow to muted gray-green in the shadows. The sky was a high, cold blue. I like driving but it was my third day on the road and I was ready to finally arrive. The car and I raced impatiently towards anticipated stillness.

I drove in silence after scanning the radio dial for anything but fuzz. Cell service dropped away, arresting my podcast mid-sentence. At first, I didn’t mind the silence. My brain was still unfurling from to-do lists and goodbyes, all the logistics of leaving town. Three day-old groceries had begun to emit their aromas into the sun-warmed car but there was not much I could do to preserve the food besides get to my destination and its refrigerator. I tried not to hurry.

As the hours passed, the land got bigger and blander. The colors became drab, the features dulled. Hills flattened and there were few rocks to be seen. Snowy ranges moved further into the distance. A few random mesas broke the far edge of flatness, barely visible at the edge of this forever-plain. It was as if this middle space, through which I drove, had been stretched until there was not much left.

Whenever I encounter such a large landscape, I feel surprised that I didn’t know about it beforehand. What is this place and how did it get into my world? The world that I thought I knew and have explored at great length. At times like this, I feel bested by the largeness of the earth, humbled that despite four decades of roving, I still do not have a grip on planetary scale. I feel I should’ve known about this never-ending emptiness and held a space for it in my mind, but it is impossible to know the earth in this way. I concede that there are endless numbers of tremendously large places that exist beyond my comprehension.

That there are innumerable vast places is good news because I am a person who loves a grand vista. My favorite landscapes tend to be sprawling and large. Expansiveness is my favorite feeling. Stoked by wide open spaces, I can’t help but breathe deeply and feel strong. I can’t explain why, but massive landscapes give me a sense of hope.

Not this one.

I watched the odometer click off the miles. There ceased to be road signs with any sort of way-finding information because, long ago, there ceased to be any towns. Oftentimes in rural places, there are homesteads on the horizon, a windmill, a stock tank. Other times there are elements of agriculture, a fracking rig, or a mining operation sending plumes of smoke into the distant sky. There was none of that in this yawning gray place. It was truly “no man’s land.”

I had not recognized the sense of security that comes with knowing that, if need be, I can find other people by tracing roads or powerlines to where they are. I can usually read a landscape to understand who lives there or what kind of work sustains that area. For hundreds of miles, there were no towns, no houses, no fences, no power lines, not even a cow.

I scanned the horizon for signs of life — antelope, elk, birds of any kind. There was not even a splash of roadkill to evidence the once-living. Come on! I cried aloud, exasperated with disbelief. It was another hour or more before a lone coyote finally crossed the road, clearly unhurried to prove its existence.

The road, other than the drab earth and the flat sky, was the only thing. Since it was the only thing, I started to wonder about the road — where it went, I would later find out — but also when it was built and by whom and for what purpose. It was a minimalist road. Two lanes of asphalt, defined by white and yellow paint, without much of a shoulder. And yet the entirety of the road was lined on both sides with tall, slender and seemingly flexible orange plastic poles that attached to stakes driven into the ground at regular intervals. The frequency of these poles was definitive, intentional. After some musing, their purpose suddenly became clear: the poles outline the shape of the road should it become buried under snow. As I have said, yesterday was cold and dry and snow felt like a distant possibility, thank goodness. Still, it was not hard to imagine this endless expanse disappearing. It was also not hard to imagine disappearing into its endlessness expansiveness; I felt myself become dulled and flat, camouflaging with gray green.

Glancing into the back seat, I took stock of the aging food and gave thanks for plenty of water, a sleeping bag, and a jack in case I needed to change a tire. If snow should arrive or should the car suddenly break down — god forbid — I could survive a night out. Or could I?

A total of five vehicles passed me going in the opposite direction. I wondered if those vehicles had driven this road when it was obscured by snow or if they, like me, were gawking at this place for the first time. All the passing vehicles were 4x4 trucks, all driven by men. They hurtled past with unflappable confidence. Where were they going, I wondered. Would they help me, if need be? Though it has often been men with big trucks who have helped me in the past, I feel wary and untrusting of them as a generalized group. I wonder if a foreboding and lonesome landscape like this makes people friendly or withdrawn, charitable or mean?

If it weren’t for the entertainment of worst case scenario fantasies, I might have fallen asleep behind the wheel; the landscape had become so barren it was unbearably boring. As the sun started its descent across the western sky, I watched the miles go up as the gas went down. Still no cell signal or radio. Still no towns or fences.

In the enduring silence, I became irritated by my thoughts. I saw myself getting grumpy and judgy. I want to be someone who can appreciate even the most subtle beauties. There’s a core part of myself that naturally advocates for the loveliness of things. Everything is interesting if you give it your attention, I scolded myself. But even after hours and miles of silent attentiveness, I found it hard to love this place. I tried but simply couldn’t.

Is it okay to not love every landscape I cross? As a thought experiment, I decided it was okay to hate a place. I gave myself the excuse of a long drive, the rotting groceries, my foreign eyes. Go ahead and hate it, I instructed myself. Try as I might, I found that I cannot truly hate a place that I don’t know.

If not me, I hope that someone knows and loves this place. It is unbearable to think about a place being completely unlovable. I tried to imagine those men in their trucks swooning over the vast nothingness. I tried to imagine the coyote rejoicing in this peopleless plain. Do coyotes love? Do grasses and shrubs? Does the earth? Or might those microbes in the soil wish for somewhere else, like the clouds and their shadows, that move so certainly and swiftly beyond the horizon?

Just then, the road crossed over an unforeseen edge and suddenly descended by steep switchbacks into a canyon, lined by water and trees. From one of those trees flew a bald eagle. I saw it soar and, with it, my spirit lifted as I drove on towards my destination.

Dear readers,

I’ve been slow to post here, and frankly everywhere on social media, these last few months. For me, it’s been a busy season of travel, deadlines, and also quiet watchfulness in response to the recent spectrum of political and ecological fall-out. I have several essays nearing completion and look forward to sharing them with you in the coming weeks. Thank you for your grace with my irregular posts. Your readership means so much to me!

POSTSCRIPT:

After hearing from a number of readers, I thought I might mention that my intent with this essay is not to condemn the place that I drove through (or any place for that matter). Rather, I tried to describe the feeling of moving through a place that is unknowable. Knowing a place takes time and effort and, for someone like me, not having the ability to invest in knowing a place can produce a sort of land-based dysphoria. I want to know all the places but sometimes must simply drive through!

If you have time and interest and want to read a wonderful essay about learning to love a desert place, please check out this essay by Barry Lopez called Love in a Time of Terror. I’m re-reading his book, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World, which gets its title from this essay. I highly recommend this book to any place explorers and readers!

I only saw one rainbow this year. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's the drought. Maybe I wasn't looking up at the right time. Maybe I jinxed myself by saying, somewhat in jest, that rainbows no longer exist.

The rainbow I did see was a double and it was backgrounded by some mountains and foothills that I love. It was faint at first and then grew so vibrant.  It was a special evening and I was wearing my silver shoes. Mitch took a picture as I posed exuberantly in front of my all-time favorite natural wonder. It was exhilarating and gorgeous and over too soon. Later, I saw other people posting pictures of the same double rainbow on social media. I had mixed feelings about that. In the weeks since the rainbow sighting, I have longed for more.

The new AI feature on my photo app allows me to type in something like "dog" or "beach" and it will filter through the thousands or millions of photos and collect what it thinks are relevant images. So, urgent to remind myself that rainbows DO exist and that I have in fact seen many of them, I typed "rainbow" into the app.

The selection AI produced was not complete, nor was it entirely accurate. That's because AI is still learning about rainbows and dogs and other things. It was fun to see what it thought a rainbow was.  What is a rainbow anyway?

The photo that caught my attention during the subsequent nostalgic scroll is an image of a rainbow that is not actually a rainbow. It's a massive sculpture of a rainbow, the size of a city block1. It's sleek and smooth and made of some material more durable than water droplets and light. One end of the sculpture sits in a parking lot and the other end is near the buildings of Sony Pictures. When I passed by it a few years ago in Culver City, California, I stopped in my tracks. I may have even shrieked. It was as if life became suspended animation. I wondered if I too had switched into cartoon.  I was elated that someone loved rainbows as much as or more than I do and decided to build a monument.2 I got as close as I could and snapped a photo. 

Encountering this image years later during my hunt for proof of rainbows' existence feels odd. That I re-encountered Sony's rainbow with the help of AI adds to that oddness. It's like a double or triple whammy of simulacrum. The joy I felt when I first saw that rainbow sculpture was real. And the thing that the sculpture emulates, even celebrates, is real too. But now this thing feels a bit flattened and cold. 

Painting this image did not bring me joy. It feels flawed and the colors are somehow off and the whole thing doesn’t make visual sense. There's something very weird about painting a picture of a sculpture that depicts a phenomenon that is actually so special because it is natural and fleeting. I don’t know what more to say about it. And I don’t know if I’ll use the AI function on my photo app again. I might prefer to spend hours looking through every picture I’ve ever taken and discern for myself whether it contains a rainbow or not.

At the beginning of the summer, I accompanied a group of students to the third largest tributary of the Rio Grande. Several drawings and a bunch of thinking later, I’m still trying to process the fact that this tributary is my city’s wastewater treatment facility. 

Technically, a tributary is a water body that flows into and joins a larger water body. A tributary is a creek or stream or river that hitches a ride to the ocean on a watershed-draining river, what is called the mainstem. Where I live, that mainstem is the Rio Grande. The Rio Grande is 1,896 miles long and drains a 336,000 sq mile area, half of which lies in Mexico. It is the 4th largest river in North America. 

The Rio Grande begins in the south central Colorado Rockies and flows down into New Mexico, then it creates the border between Texas and Mexico, and finally empties into the Gulf of Mexico. Before it was so heavily controlled and manipulated, the Rio Grande had large floodplains that sustained a massive amount of biodiversity. Animals and people moved through the area and eventually puebloan people built villages nearby. There are signs of human life in the area that date back to 10,800 BCE. Now Bernalillo County contains the largest city in New Mexico and is home to 672,508 people.1 In fact, there’s not enough water to sustain so many people so the county’s Water Authority adds to its supply from the Rio Grande and from area wells by diverting water from a totally different watershed into ours. Interestingly, this water would otherwise flow into the Colorado River and drain to the other side of the continent. Instead, dams on these Colorado tributaries — the Rio Blanco, Navajo, and Little Navajo Rivers — move water to the Chama River which is a tributary of the Rio Grande.2

The Rio Grande runs right past my house. I walk to see it nearly everyday. I did not grow up on rivers, so this one feels like my first. It is certainly my teacher and, overtime, it has become my familiar. Not experienced in relating to rivers, I have learned in fits and starts how to see it and how to be with it. Over the years, I recognize its patterns and the ways it changes. I now keep time by the appearance of sandhill cranes and by howling coyotes. I marvel how much land the river moves — an island can be created in a single season and washed out in a single day. I love this strange brown river — who knew that muddy water could bounce light and hold life so exquisitely?  The river both inspires and confounds me. 

It was a hot day when the students and I visited the Southside Water Reclamation Plant, so we started the tour early. After filling our water bottles and donning a ready supply of hard hats, we followed our enthusiastic guide to the first stop which was, appropriately, the restrooms. 

The plant was built in the 1960s and on our way to the newer buildings we passed by the outdated leach fields that are unused but still visible. I wondered what happened to wastewater before the 1960s and how long the current technology will last, whether these new buildings will one day languish in the shadow of something better. My questions only mounted as we moved through the facility. First, we climbed a tall narrow staircase to witness a series of above-ground pools roiling with brown water where bacteria feed on the waste. Walkways along the pools were equipped with orange life preservers, suggesting a potentiality almost too horrible to imagine. Later, we peered into a giant geodesic dome that was called a digester. Inside, triangle shafts of light lit up the watery space which was warm and stinky and full of microorganisms. Elsewhere, there were ultraviolet lasers that killed disease. Sludge is a word we became acquainted with, as it seems a part of every stage in the water-treatment process. As we moved around the plant, I was struck by the amount of chain link fence and the finely sculpted sidewalks and the lavender-colored fire hydrants. A network of white pipes connects the entire facility and, though it resembles a kind of waterslide, it actually circulates off-gased methane which is burned to fuel parts of the plant. Everywhere there are things eating other things, as the water is transformed and cleaned.3 

Meanwhile, the heat was oppressive. We could barely drink enough water to stay alive. Drinking water felt relevant to the tour and yet it somehow changed the way I tasted it. Drinking water felt both necessary and disgusting. It seemed to emphasize the inescapable reality that we are part of this water cycle and that within a matter of hours, our pee would join with the 76 million gallons of wastewater this plant processes each day. 

—

Water seeks water. Due to their structure, water molecules are strongly attracted to each other. There’s something in the way that hydrogen ions bond that makes water stick together. Droplets join and pool, water gathers and flows. But there may be more than science that is responsible for this attraction.4 

Indeed, water is necessary to the livelihood of all things on this planet. We seek water because we need it. And we seek water because we ARE water. I’ve been contemplating the fact that our bodies are 70% water and that we carry around the waters of specific places. I love thinking about the collection of waters I carry and I wonder about their provenance, their terroir.5 Is my body being flavored or changed by the nature of certain waters? Now I know that some of my water comes from  a river called Navajo and another called Blanca, I imagine my waters have traveled through red rock canyons, across deserts, through tunnels and pipes. There is a placeness to the water I carry.  

Do you remember the first grade joke when we learned that water is finite and therefore probably contains dinosaur pee? Well, the joke continues because water contains pee of every kind! Because everything alive carries water and then empties water. Water moves through us constantly. It travels through animals and plants and in and out of the ground. Maybe the water in me was once the water in you! We are all tributaries to the mainstem. We can’t help but flow together. 

The tour ended where the process ends. One-by-one, we passed through a locked gate and walked over a footbridge that followed a large pipe that emerged from the plant. There, we stood on the river bank and watched the plant’s effluent enter the Rio Grande. This water was is clear that it looks black next to the Rio’s muddy brown. This high contrast stripe eventually dissolves into the flow.

As a result of climate change, overuse, agriculture, and other factors, the river often slows to a trickle during summer months. Two summers ago, it ran dry through the center of Albuquerque. The waters had been receding day by day and then one morning, the Rio ceased to flow. There were distinct puddles of dying fish. The birds were suddenly quiet or elsewhere. I thought of the coyotes and porcupines and beaver. To me, this felt like a full-scale emergency. I couldn’t understand why the alarms hadn’t sounded. How could “normal life” simply go on? I contemplated stopping traffic on the bridge near my house to recruit passersby to quick! come help!6 Reflecting on that horrible few days, I now wonder if the river flowed below this tributary, if wastewater wet and replenished the dry beds. 

The word “tributary” is, of course, related to the word “tribute.” We all know that tribute is an item or act that pays homage, that remembers or celebrates, that shows gratitude or affection — like a tribute band or a tribute to a loved one. But Merriam-Webster also defines “tribute” as something paid in acknowledgement of submission, the price for protection. I like to think of a river’s tributaries doing all of this — that tributaries like the Rio Chama both celebrate and concede to mainstems like the Rio Grande. The price for protection is to join. And though the big rivers get most of the attention, it is the tributaries that make a watershed because the bigger rivers need the contribution and force of all those smaller waters to do what they do and go where they go. 

It’s all a big cycle and it’s all so connected. While writing this essay, I’ve finished two large glasses of water. It’s time for this intermittent tributary to release a flow downstream. 

I made this painting of a pit toilet because it is a miracle.

This particular pit toilet sits on the edge of a parking lot in Joshua Tree National Park where it is accessed by hikers and drivers and other visitors to the park. It is a simple structure — a single room with a covered porch, the entirety of which seems formed from some kind of dark-colored concrete. It contains a door that locks from the inside and a window to let in light. When I approached this particular toilet, it was open, accessible, and spectacularly clean. 

To encounter a clean pit toilet is a special sort of balm because you never know its condition from the outside. I have seen such bathrooms in terrible states of disarray with trash on the floor and poop on the seat, flies buzzing angrily around the stinky hole. Quite often there is a deficit of toilet paper. But this parking lot pit toilet was stocked with plenty of TP; six rolls of it were locked into place to prevent theft or wastefulness; another four rolls freely sat above them, still wearing paper wrappings.

The floor was swept, the walls were clean. The trash had been recently emptied and the vague scent of cleanser could still be detected in the air. I don’t often think about sleeping in a toilet, but this particular one struck me as a viable option should one need overnight shelter, should a sudden and unrelenting snow or sand or windstorm settle in. 

It was a hot storm-free day in Joshua Tree. During my hiking to a nearby palm oasis, I passed a hundred people on the trail, saw two rattlesnakes and a lizard family, and drank my entire container of water. And so it was a sweet relief to come into the shade of the pit toilet, lock the door, place my backpack on the floor, lift the pristine toilet lid and sit down to do my business. 

I sat with a straight back and listened to my urine fall down through the open pit, echoing into the chamber below. I could sense by the tone of that echo that the chamber had been recently emptied. Mine wasn’t the first to enter it and I wondered how many people had already laid their waste below. How many more pees and poops could it hold before needing to be emptied again? I read somewhere that over three million people visit Joshua Tree National Park each year. I considered calculating the average number of pit stops the average visitor makes and how many pit toilets might be spread throughout the park but quickly decided that without more volumetric information, I had no way of solving that riddle. Still, my mind lingered in the hole. 

Years ago, my mother was the leader of my girl scout troop. During our troup’s weekly meetings and seasonal outings, my mother was not really my mother. She was, instead, a more theatrical, kinda cool adult leader who hiked us up hills, knew all the songs, expertly lit campfires, and didn’t treat me differently from the other girls. One night, on a fifth grade camp-out, my mother led us to an outpost of rustic toilets that we called latrines.1 It was dark out and we each had a flashlight that we would take into the latrines with us because the latrines, like most pit toilets, had no lights or electricity. My mother was the last to go to the bathroom and we were aware of her flashlight’s halo, shining out through the cracks around the locked door. Suddenly, the light went out and she gasped, throwing the door open. “I can’t believe it! I dropped my flashlight down the latrine. One of you will have to go down and get it!” Because she was the leader and we were obedient scouts, we sort of cringed and awaited further instruction. She asked for a volunteer to be held by their feet and dangle down into the hole to retrieve her flashlight. Disgust overpowered collective politeness and we began shrieking and pushing each other forward. I looked at my mother trying to decipher this horrific assignment. Just before the girls became really upset, she flipped the flashlight on. “Gotcha!” 

I could regale you with other pit toilet stories because I have many. In fact, one of my earliest memories involves the hole in a Greek bathroom floor where my mother — this time, withholding her abundant mirth — carefully grasped my wrists as I stuck my tiny bottom out over the horrifying abyss in order to empty my bladder. 

Later, we had an outhouse at our family cabin. We laid a path of stones leading up to it and covered the outside with expired license plates. Because it was our outhouse and no one else's, we agreed it was possible to do our business with the door open,  providing a lovely view of the forest. Eventually we dug a well and a septic tank and installed an indoor toilet. Now the outhouse leans off-kilter behind the house, perhaps sinking into its hole.

In my 30s, my friends and I bought a tiny arid piece of unimprovable desert land and tried to live off-grid as a creative experiment.2 We were naive and idealistic but extremely hard-working. We loved the grittiness of living by firelight and melting cooler ice. We made a sauna for bathing and a bicycle-powered adobe mixer. We waxed poetic about figuring things out. We considered the humanure3 outhouse on our property to be a conceptual work of art.

For much of the world, toilets are not artwork; they’re a luxury. The World Health Organization says that 1.77 billion people use a pit toilet as their primary form of waste management. They’re trying to build more toilets worldwide because 673 million people do not have access to toilets. Whether that lack of toilet access is due to poor sanitation infrastructure, personal poverty, or homelessness, 12% of the world’s population is forced to practice open defecation. You can imagine that open defecation, especially in a highly populated area over an extended period of time, can cause all kinds of problems, from contaminated water to disease to a simple lack of dignity. In 2013, the UN deemed November 19 as “World Toilet Day.” I’m not sure what National Toilet Day entails (parades? parties? free toilets for those who need them?), but I hope it’s helping.4 

Back in Joshua Tree, I finished my business, closed the lid, and headed back out into the midday sun. 

I walked a distance from the pit toilet and then took a picture with plans to make this painting. I felt a little funny noticing the other tourists noticing me doing that. Part of me wanted to grab them by the shoulders and exclaim over the delicate balance of things. 

Can you believe how lucky we are to visit this magnificent place with its precious plants and amazing lizards? Can you believe that all of us can be accommodated here, in such large numbers, without poopy toilet paper tucked behind every bush. We couldn’t be here without the pit toilet! And thank goodness it’s a pit toilet and not a flush toilet bathroom with lights and sinks because this place is remote and delicate and it would be such an ordeal to install actual plumbing and all we really need is a well-maintained hole to temporarily house our waste.

I could barely contain myself from shouting.

Don’t take this for granted, the opportunity to shit in a pit. Because pit toilets are critical to the experience of wild landscapes — they allow us to hike and camp and enjoy with destroying our nation’s greatest treasures. And because pit toilets are built for equitable access by any human body that needs to pee, you might argue they are foundational to our democracy! Because of the pit toilet, we experience privilege beyond compare! Doesn’t that stir the patriotism inside you? It does me!

Instead of embarrassing myself by proselytizing to strangers, I quietly gave thanks to that boulder-strewn desert with its palm oasis just over the hill, its tiny flowers and famously giant cactus trees. Then, blind to the judgement of any onlookers, I bowed deeply in the direction of the pit toilet. 

Several years ago, I traveled around the American Southwest with a dozen college students in a van. We comprised a nomadic field school and our goal was to understand the places we passed through, often by meeting with experts and touring sites, sometimes reading aloud on the van’s PA system as we moved down secondary highways. Most often we learned through observation and direct experience, trying making sense of what we encountered on the fly.

One of the places we passed by was a Peabody Coal plant near the Black Mesa Plateau. The company had operated in the area since 1964 when an attorney who supposedly represented local tribes (but was, in fact, on the payroll at Peabody) signed away the mineral and water rights. Soon thereafter, Peabody scraped two strip mines into the sacred lands and began extracting coal. That land belonged to the Navajo and Hopi, many of whom were employed at the mines and benefitted from an expanded electrical grid. The “agreement” pitted the two tribes against one another in ways that only bad money deals can do. Meanwhile, the mines threatened the health of their water, air, and land — the things they held most sacred.

As we know, the arrival of Europeans in North America introduced their violent conquest of Indigenous peoples. Of the many battles and massacres over the American Southwest, this story begins in 1864 when the native people — 8,000 to 10,000 of them — were forced from their homeland and marched 350 miles to a military reservation called Bosque Redondo. The plan was one of assimilation which included the introduction of farming, the indoctrination of Christianity, and other “American” practices. The tragedy of Bosque Redondo deserves a detailed telling of its own; in short: the conditions were deplorable as thousands died of starvation and worse. The cost of feeding and guarding the prisoners reached approximately $1,250,000 in the first year, an expenditure that caught the attention of Congress who established an Indian Peace Commission to negotiate a treaty with the tribes.1

The 1868 treaty resulted in the creation Navajo Nation and, thanks to the negotiations of then-Head Chief, Barboncito, the reservation overlaps with Dinétah, the traditional homelands of the Navajo or Diné people.2 Since its establishment, the boundaries of the Navajo Nation have expanded several times and now the tribe controls 27,413 square miles, the largest landholding by any North American tribe. Most of the reservation is located in Arizona but it also reaches into northwest New Mexico and southeast Utah. This land is arid, expansive and strikingly beautiful. It’s unique geology results in distinct rock formations and high mountains, many of which are sacred sites. It also results in deep deposits of coal. Below all of this complicated beauty lies a vast aquifer. 3

Coal extraction in the area is nothing new. Since about 1300 AD, Indigenous folks used coal from the area for pottery firing and domestic heating. None of this was, of course, at the scale of 20th century industry. When Peabody came in, they built two strip mines across a collective 400 square acres.4 The mines produced an average of 14 million tons of coal per year; that’s a lot of coal over fifty years. After being unearthed from the ground, the coal was “washed” and then transported as slurry through a pipeline to a generating station 273 miles away. This process required 3 million gallons of water everyday, all of which was pumped out of the reservation’s precious aquifer.5

Over the years, the aquifer dropped, affecting local wells, farming, livestock, and the tribes’ connections to what they hold sacred. The ecological impact of mining was hard to square with the wealth of jobs it brought to the tribes; there was a lot of tension, to say the least. Various entities sued Peabody Coal over the ruined and missing water and over the course of about a decade, the coal operations slowly ceased (or at least moved elsewhere).

The students and I traveled through coal country during the time when the closures had been announced and production was winding down. It was that moment when the machines had halted yet nothing had really changed. Sometimes it is hard to be a teacher, especially when the lessons are not entirely clear. Together, we explored the issues. We turned the possibilities over one by one.

We felt haunted by these massive structures of extraction, knowing they would eventually succumb - whether by plan or by nature - to removal, destruction or ruin.

We wanted to cheer for the death of coal but worried about all the workers; would they find new jobs?6

Would Peabody be held accountable to clean up this mess? If not, would the water make a comeback on its own?

Without coal, where will the region’s electricity come from and will its industrial practices be any better?7

Students wanted answers but knew their teachers had none.

Like a cloud of black dust, the future hung unsettlingly in the air.

Eight years later, I suppose it still does.

Hite, like many Utah towns, was founded by an enterprising prospector. Cass Hite came to Glen Canyon in the 1880s in search of gold and when he found it, a small gold rush ensued. The boom didn’t last long but a town named for Hite grew there nonetheless. Hite was located on an easily navigable part of the Colorado, a river that had few opportunities for safe crossing. After the gold rush bust, there was a uranium boom and many people came to the area. A man named Arthur Chaffin built a ferry that brought people and their cars across the river, one or two at a time. Over the years, Chaffin helped build roads and bridges in the area, opening a scenic part of Utah to automobile traffic. He was a man of determination and saw an opportunity for tourism. One source tells how, in 1932, Chaffin borrowed a bulldozer from the Utah Highway Department and carved a road into the steep rocks and canyons, forging a connection between his place and the outer world. The enterprising ferryman opened a tent motel and a post office which made up the town’s entirety. Hite developed into a small riverside oasis, famous for its fruit trees and melons, until 1964 when the town was submerged as Lake Powell filled. 

One of my happiest childhood memories is from a multifamily vacation at Lake Powell. It was the summer of 1992 and four families from church drove out across the desert to rent two houseboats and a speed boat for skiing. There were eight adults and nine kids and even though we outnumbered them, I think it was the adults who had the most fun. The adults really let loose; they performed monologues and heroic feats and, because we were church folks, we knew all the same songs and so there was constant singing and a lot of laughter. I’ll never forget how one mother water-skied topless. Later, she triumphantly stirred the boat’s toilet with a stick so there was room for the remaining days of many people’s poop. I remember floating in an inner tube for hours until the adults finally allowed us to swim back to the boats.

I grew up with these people, not just the kids but especially the adults who were our choir directors and trip leaders and bible school organizers. All of these folks, including my parents, worked together to run the church’s community theater group. Of the extended family that was First United Methodist Church, these were the core favorites. I saw these people as many as three times a week for nearly the entirety of my growing up but never before had we busted out like this. Though I’d spent years of my life in these people’s homes, not to mention on choir tours and mission trips and our church’s “high adventure” camping excursions, this was different. At Lake Powell, we found ourselves floating and motoring through a completely new world without an agenda, nothing to practice, no necessary prayers. We were dear friends bound by something that transcended a building or an ideology, something that held up despite the busted boat motor or a night without beer. 

The Colorado River is big and mighty. It trickles out of the Rocky Mountains and gathers force as it splashes and gurgles across the arid southwest. It carves out the Grand Canyon and the Colorado Plateau and winds its way south to the Sea of Cortez. Before it was dammed in two places, becoming the water source for 40 million people, it was unpredictable, ferocious, shaping the earth in magnificent ways. The River’s 1450-mile journey begins in the highest of mountains, traveling through tundra, tumbling down cliff walls and crashing through stone to emerge in the driest and hottest of deserts where the river spits bits of sand into a place unimaginable from the river’s alpine headwaters. The drainage basin or watershed of the Colorado River encompasses 246,000 square miles, an area that touches seven US states and two in Mexico. So many streams and creeks flow into it: the Dolores, the Roaring Fork, the Gunnison, San Juan, Virgin, Gila, Salt, and the Green. For centuries, Native people lived along this river basin, migrating with the seasons, the floods and droughts. But when European settlers came west, they wanted to build towns that were irrigated but safe from flood. They figured out how to move water to where it hadn’t gone before. With waterworks, more people could settle the arid lands and with more people capable of such labor, those mammoth feats were actually possible. And so development boomed. The 20th century was a flurry of construction and engineering that introduced new pipelines and culverts and channels, troughs, tunnels, aqueducts, conduits, ditches, tubes and diversions. 

In 1900, one such diversion was built in the Imperial Valley to provide farms with water from the nearby Colorado River. Historically, the river flooded various parts of southern California. Silt and soil was deposited by the river, causing its delta to move back and forth across the land like the tail of a lizard skittering over hot rocks. But people found it hard to build their lives on a floodplain; the water had to be moved. A few years after the diversion was built, it got clogged and the attempts to remedy the clog failed. So in 1905, the river flooded into the landlocked Salton Basin, creating a lake. It wasn’t so bad at first. Birds came to nest, farmers flourished, and a resort town was built on the new inland Salton Sea. But by the 1970s, the lake shrunk and with the run-off from local farms, the water turned to poison. Huge numbers of birds and fish died, scattering the shore with their toxic bodies. Because of this ugly sight and the intensifying stench, tourists stopped coming. By 1999, the waters receded so much that whatever had flowed into the lake from nearby farms was now exposed to air. It dried up and blew around, filling the neighboring communities with toxic dust. The Salton Sea has been called the greatest environmental disaster in California history with millions of dollars recently allocated to its remediation.

Long before the Imperial Valley got sick on its own shit, people wanted the Colorado dammed. It was too erratic, too unpredictable; if not subjugated it might destroy all that the west could become. Between 1931 and 1936, Hoover Dam was built in the Colorado’s Black Canyon. But the water and power supplied by the new dam wasn’t enough for the growing population; plus the raging resource clearly had more life to give. So in the 1950s, the Bureau of Land Management acquired the site most desirable for a new dam and reservoir by negotiating a land swap with the Navajo Nation who ceded Glen Canyon in exchange for the return of stolen sacred land elsewhere in the region.

I watched a film about the Glen Canyon Dam that was made during the time of its construction. It is the mid-1960s, so the narrator wears a dark suit and smokes in front of the camera and speaks in that crooning voice that gently booms with authority. The film opens with dynamite, a massive canyon wall is seen exploding from aerial view. From way up there, the narrator’s voice proclaims the river “a monster” and “a thing to be tamed.” In the next scene there are giant earth movers and more explosions.

We learn that roads had to be built to reach the canyon’s rim, then a bridge to cross it. Within moments, cranes hoist equipment in and out of the 700-foot canyon while a fleet of never-ending trucks carry dirt from the bottom to the top; heroes in hard hats swarm everywhere. A company town is built to support the workers who number in the thousands. In order to build this massive dam, the monstrous Colorado must be diverted and so two giant tunnels are engineered to change the river’s course with hyper-meticulous control. 

While the waters are being manipulated around the dam site, a huge concrete plant is installed nearby. Cableways taught between movable towers span the canyon, from which buckets of concrete swing over the chasm and carefully pour into tall wooden forms. Construction starts at the bottom of the canyon and, as the concrete dries, the forms and equipment are moved higher and higher. Eventually it is done. A little over ten years after the first explosion, the dam is celebrated in a public dedication. The story concludes with a Navajo marching band playing the national anthem from atop the bridge. Lady Bird Johnson addresses a crowd of 30,000. The narrator’s voice swells with the final phrases of music, welcoming progress to the west and the wide world beyond. 

In the end Glen Canyon Dam cost $187 million to build. It was 710 feet tall and contained 4,901,000 cubic feet of concrete. By my calculation, that means the dam weighs half a billion pounds. When all that weight was amassed and shaped but before the last layer dried, water was allowed back into the canyon and began filling up behind the dam. Glen Canyon was chosen for a reservoir because it could hold an immense amount of water. It’s so big that it took over 17 years to fill; in 1980, it finally hit capacity.  When full, Lake Powell is 180 miles long with 1,960 miles of shoreline. Its volume holds 6 million acre feet of water. Now, an acre foot is about 326,000 gallons of water; that’s enough water to cover a football field in a foot of water. When I try to calculate the weight of 6 million acre feet of water, my calculator nearly breaks. It’s over 16 quadrillion pounds or 8 trillion tons. 

Someone must’ve spent a lot of time in Glen Canyon with maps and measuring devices and doing fancy math. All kinds of equations went into figuring how the reservoir might fill, to what level, and then how the dam might be managed due to fluctuations in rainfall, snow melt, and evaporation. You see, a dam is more than a big fat wedge that seamlessly holds back the flow of water. Its primary function is one of control, releasing calculated amounts of water at specific times. Ideally, it’s designed to maintain some kind of balance because the rivers and reservoirs downstream are each impacted by the dam’s levels and the river’s flow. The dam requires man to take control, to maintain control, it puts man in the god seat. And you can hear this in the film narrator’s voice — a fist-pumping, flag-waving, river-suppressing pride.

I wonder if there was fist-pumping in Hite when the lake came to engulf the town. Hite is at the north end of Lake Powell and so when the water backed up behind Glen Canyon Dam, it was one of the last places to fill in. Arthur Chaffin was an engineer and a roadbuilder, a steward of progress. He and the Hiteites must’ve known their town would drown but what’s it like to watch your orchards and tent camps go underwater? It’s hard to find information about Hite on June 5, 1964 and what little I’ve found makes it sound like Hite just flooded, filled up, washed away. But you just have to wonder: did the water come suddenly or did it creep over days? Who was watching? What was the feeling in the air? Does a thing like that make you hate lakes? Arthur Chaffin, of course, lost everything in the flood and after successfully suing the federal government, he moved elsewhere with $8,000. But that’s all I know. $8,000. How did that feel? 

…

Something like duty pulls me to places like Hite. I’m fascinated by sites of exploitation and extraction, as if bearing witness can somehow fix it, as if seeing it for myself in real time and space can somehow breach the soundbites and google searches to color in the gaps. I’m interested too in the quiet mysterious places and I search for the palimpsest that time leaves on a place, the traces and non-traces, the things seen by those who remember or know. Most of what has ever happened is invisible — it’s dead and gone — but I like the way my imagination gets sparked when I ask myself to imagine something about the place I’m in, something that history suggests but isn’t apparent. By learning to see things invisible or forgotten, I’m training my night vision to better navigate in the dark. It’s a form of ghost hunting, really. 

To reach Hite, I travel down from the north on the road that Arthur Chaffin made. It is a beautiful road lined with canyons of white and red rocks. I stop at a scenic pullout, high above the river. I eavesdrop on a bunch of bikers comparing notes about biker apps. From above, the river looks small and timid. It is a hot May day and the Colorado’s iconic red earth appears in high contrast to the shocking new green that smudges the river’s marshy curves. I peer into the heat, scanning the wide canyon bottom for signs of the lake. Back in the van, I check the map to confirm Hite’s location. 

In the 21st century, we don’t doubt maps. In fact, we don’t even need maps to know where we are. Our phones know direction and terrain better than we do; we just have to follow instructions and maintain a constant signal. But I’m a map lover and a luddite and I know how patchy cell service can be in these parts so I’m using my atlas to navigate. My 64-page DeLorme Gazetteer features oversized maps of Utah’s every inch. It shows roads and landmarks, topographic features, place names, campgrounds, towns, historic sites, creeks, peaks, lakes. It has different color codes for private land versus public land; it names the recreation areas and national parks and military bases and Indian reservations. On page 53, Lake Powell is like a blue centipede scrawled across a quarter of the page, its long tail wiggling north. In this map, copyrighted in 2019, Hite is touched by blue. And so when I come down off the cliffs and cross the river over two grand bridges and follow the signs to Hite where a campground and a dock and a visitors center were built at the lake’s edge, a horror comes over me.  

I’m not sure what I expected to find - an underwater post office? A dock full of boats? Some sunburnt and singing church folk let loose on vacation? I anticipated looking at the lake while imagining what had been there before but I had not anticipated looking for a lake that no longer existed. The maps have lied. The water is gone. 

I park the van and, because there is no shade, I stop in the blazing hot glare of noonday sun. I pull on the door of a closed ranger station and then step across the blistering parking lot to find the bathrooms similarly locked. Beneath the lip of a slight overhang, I examine the now-dated parks service signs where figures on water skis fade into a white glare. In the sudden heat, I feel mocked by this deceptive lake. All that remains is dry cracked earth.  The pavement fractures and heaves; it is quickly too hot to walk. 

Back in the van, I give thanks for the roof’s cover as I cruise slowly through the recreation area’s abandonment. There is a campground evenly arranged upon the land, each with a picnic table and a tent site and a hooked pole from which to hang caught fish. There are picnic areas too with iron BBQ grills that, in their overexposure, feel both ironic and sad. The place blazes and blinds. It is a hell place, a ruined place, a place that no one might ever come again. I drive down the boat ramp until it docks into red dirt. 

Here was the bottom of the lake. Here was a once-drowned town. Here was a place where kids jumped into the water, parents warning to stay clear of the motor boats. Here is where fish were thrown back after the day’s catch was made but the fun wasn’t yet over. Here was the flood plain of a river before it was dammed. 

I step onto red earth and walk among new sage brush and bright tamarisk. I find an orange buoy still leashed to a giant concrete anchor. A narrow dock is cast aside, sunk, discarded on the shore of this dirt. I feel humiliated for these ridiculous objects, languishing in the pathetic dust. They groan with abandonment and, through the heat’s mirage, they shout a lesson about obsolescence and waste. This is a landscape burned with muted failure. Was it worth it? the bouy taunts haughtily. Was it worth it? The dock echoes hotly.  I cannot answer; the heat has sucked every explanation from my mouth. I leave quickly, run out by the blame of dead objects. Back on the highway, a confused shame — is it mine or someone else’s? — drags behind me like a blocky concrete anchor. 

…

When my parents split up, I was 15. I remember that I was sitting in the living room making mix tapes on the family stereo when we were called together for an important talk. The news of their break-up was so surprising that I didn’t even cry. My parents never fought and our family seemed happy. I couldn’t make sense of it and busied myself with the stops and starts of my recording project. 

When my parents split up, no one else could believe it either. So no one really talked about it. It was confusing; it made no sense. Our entire world was made up of families just like ours - white, Christian, happy - and none of them split up. I understand now that my parents’ divorce felt so surprising because the rupture came from far below the surface; it was tectonic, geologic, not visible to the naked eye. The long-term wear of their disconnection was not disastrous but it rubbed them to the point of exhaustion. We were all constantly exhausted living the American dream, running from school to choir practice to dance class to forensics to swim meets to youth group to play rehearsal and finally to bed. Ours was a privilege of constant extracurricular activity, made possible by the fortitude and teamwork of middle class nuclear families. When my parents split up, no one asked very many questions; they just got busy doing something else. We all kept singing in the choir but we didn’t hang out afterwards anymore. Our family’s break up made a long low rumble that darkly echoed through the church’s halls.

I’ve never really understood why the church families didn’t crowd around my parents and dowse them in love. Instead, it seemed the four of us were left to drift off; we didn’t know we’d been untethered and drifting until there was no way to get back and by that point we may not have even tried. It’s been decades since I’ve seen the folks from our Lake Powell trip. The adults are getting old now and almost all the kids have kids of their own. It’s stunning to think that people can be family for more than a decade of your life and then, in no time at all, they become distant strangers. It’s kind of like a great big lake that one day dries up. While you were busy doing everything else, the water suddenly receded from the place you built your dock. 

For so many reasons, Lake Powell is a tragedy. The Glen Canyon Dam was built during an era when rain and snow fell more abundantly across the Southwest and it banked on there being a similar future. But the region has grown more arid and is 20 years deep into a serious drought with climate change affecting every estimation of what might become normal. In a place with such high temperatures and walls of solid rock, the lake loses 50 inches or 690,560 acre-feet of water each year to evaporation. In fact, it has only been filled to capacity once — in 1983 — and has never been full again. Now, the lake sits at 35% and is shrinking still. Every year, the lake loses more water than it gains. Some call Lake Powell a “dead pool” because its levels have dropped so low that it’s essentially unusable.

I flee the non-lake, flooded with memories and sorrows. I think about my childhood reverie, the hours of diving and floating, how surely the lake and I swapped parts of ourselves. In this way, Lake Powell feels a bit like my lake, because I knew it once — intimately, joyfully, with all of the trust and wonder that is childhood vacation. But what stake can I possibly have in this lake, in this river? Am I entitled to its quenching waters? And am I responsible for its dead pools and bad dams? I try to apologize to this place but in the echoing silence, I’m reminded that places don’t forgive. They just keep changing.

Before the dam, Glen Canyon was a wonderland of gorges, spires, cliffs, and grottoes; it was the biological heart of the Colorado River, with more than 79 species of plants, 189 species of birds, and 34 species of mammals. It was also a cultural treasure with more than 3,000 ancient ruins. As the lake dries up, landforms are reemerging from the waters, hinting at the wonders of the deep. Many people are calling for the lake to be drained and the dam removed.

What will be revealed if the lake is drained after all? Will the Hite post office finally appear? I imagine the canyons will reemerge, coated in dead fish and plastic bottles and the deteriorating remains of so many summer vacations. Lake muck will dry up and blow around but the water lines will probably stay. The maps will need to be redrawn.

Hite reminds me that things are never as they appear; they certainly don’t go as planned. Whether you come away with $8,000 or divorced parents or a hell-scape of a campground, it’s hard to know what you have until it’s too late. And yet something miraculous is always emerging from the deep. Something is always changing.

I roll down the window and shriek into the wind as I keep on moving down the road.

Questions for readers and place explorers:

• Where do you witness the palimpsest of history? Are there places within your landscape that have changed dramatically during the course of your life? I’d love to hear your thoughts about the markers and makers of those changes.

• As I wrote this essay, it was fun to think about adult joy from a child’s point of view. I wonder if there are places in your memory where you witnessed your parents relaxed and happy? I think we might need a few more of these stories in circulation!

• Do you think that Lake Powell should be drained?

• How did you do with the longer read? Should I keep it shorter for shorter attention spans? These things take time and labor, so let me know what’s working for you!

Side note: this essay is the 11th chapter in my in-progress manuscript that documents my COVID-era travels through Utah; it’s called Into the Folding Swell. Stay tuned for news about its publication!

Please forgive the lapse in my postings. Today I’m going to update you on what I’ve been up to, where I’ve been, and what I’ve seen - since it’s all so very site & scene. To make up for my silence, I’m going to share multiple field drawings with you in this post as well as a little personal background related to my work. 

Also I want to say: thank you for reading! If you like what I’m doing, please comment or like it. I’ve received so many thoughtful emails from readers and while they make me feel wonderfully seen, they don’t help me build visibility on Substack or connect with other readers. I encourage you to post your comments in the app because that helps build a conversation and community. I assure you this is a safe space, so please share your brilliant thoughts and observations with other place-minded folks!

xo EE

I've been making place-based work for nearly 25 years1. Most of this work has interrogated land use, private property, rapidly changing neighborhoods, and the aspects of place that have been removed, forgotten, or covered over. My work has taken me to many places, far and near. In each new place, I walk extensively. I go to places both planned and spontaneous. I keep my eyes and ears open with the hyper-awareness of a newcomer and outsider. I throw myself into observation and fieldwork, visit local museums, interview experts; I consult roadside signage, libraries, newspapers, and maps. I aim to identify the stories, relics, symbols, sites, and visual signifiers that might evidence a region’s multi-layered beliefs about land and its use. 

Recently, I exhibited the first phase of a project called From Source to Mouth which investigates the creek that runs through my hometown of Colorado Springs.2 Through various forms of research and over several years, I have come to understand the creek as a whole entity, as a living being with unique qualities, and also as an essential part of myself. That humans are 70% water means that we not only depend on water but we carry water with us -- the waters of distinct places. Since embodying this discovery, I’ve become rather obsessed with local water, especially the marginalized, overlooked and often overworked water bodies that flow through arid places. This fascination recently led me to the Mojave Desert. 

In April, I did a two-week residency near Joshua Tree where I explored the local waterscape. Because I had so little time to engage with experts or tour facilities, I relied on google maps and what I could observe in plain sight. I’m trying to develop what might be called landscape literacy, a practice built on the idea of places being legible, readable, and so I drove and walked through the gathering spring heat to decipher what I could from the water I could see. 

If you go looking for water in California’s high desert, you might have a hard time finding it. There are some seasonal streams, a few small seeps, and almost-always-dry drainage ditches that move the rare rains when they suddenly fall from the sky. Despite this lack of visible water, the populations of regional towns are booming. The high desert is no longer a scattering of homesteads and mining camps; there are suburbs and apartment complexes and even a row of big box stores. Where there are people, there will always be water. As I was quickly reminded, you can’t exist for more than a half hour in the high desert without succumbing to a thirsty dryness that’s hard to quench. 

Where does desert water come from? How does it move to the places and people who need it? 

I wore a wide-brimmed hat and carried a gallon jug as I wandered the towns, their outskirts and far-flung beyonds. I first saw the above-ground reservoirs — beige cylinders painted to camouflage with the landscape but all too smooth to be borne of the natural world. Encircled with barbed and razored wire, the beige monoliths were quietly unstaffed but carefully monitored; their contents were clearly very precious. After spotting the first pair of reservoirs, I began to notice them here and there. I noticed how their downhill sides gave birth to pipes large enough to double as a waterslide. My eye scanned the landscape for big pipes and found them attached to nondescript buildings, pumping stations and other razor-encircled infrastructure. I took many photos and returned to the studio ready to draw. 

Drawing is one of my favorite ways to process information. Hunched over a piece of watercolor paper, I use gouache and pen to depict a scene that I have visited. I use my photos as reference but don’t attempt to render them exactly. The photos remind me of how things look, the relationship between objects, and how I felt when I was there. In many ways, my field drawings are also portraits because I think about each one as representative of a place. I choose the angle and subject matter carefully but allow my hand to be wonky, spirited. I love to make many drawings — the more the better — curating the individual sites and scenes to collectively describe a region or place. Through the act of painting, I witness how things are made and, in so doing, I can consider why. 

Two weeks is not long enough to learn why desert’s waterscapes are the way that they are. With more time, I’d tour water treatment facilities and dams, talk to hydrologists who operate the canals and pumping stations, visit the nearby military base, learn about community wells and find folks who have a more delicate relationship to water (as sacred, as something to protect.) I would love to literally map where water comes from and how it moves, highlighting the sites of historic floods, underground aquifers, water wars, superfund sites, important wells running dry. I would allow myself to wonder: Who is responsible for water? How has water, in this place, been used, valued, wasted, protected, or held sacred? What stories can desert water tell us about that which has been hidden, erased, or forgotten? And if this region, burgeoning with new settlement, has a water source that is primarily unseen, how do people know if they’re using too much? 

For now, I have handful of drawings and a growing curiosity. 

Santa Fe is an old town and long before it was a town, it was a pueblo. The earliest known inhabitants built a cluster of homes around what is today’s central plaza. At that time, the nearby river flowed year-round which is why the Tewa people called it Oghá P'o'oge or "white shell water place." The Navajo combine "bead" + "water place" for its place name: Yootó. For hundreds of years, this was a watery place.

Then, in 1598, the Spanish came to this area and ever since, people have been struggling for its possession1. First to arrive was the notoriously violent Juan de Oñate who did many horrible things — he murdered and enslaved Native people, the Tewa village was removed, and a plaza was rapidly constructed in its place. The plaza included barracks, a chapel, a prison, the Governor's palace, and ostensibly a well, all surrounded by a large defensible wall.

Under Spanish rule, Native people were not allowed to practice their religion and were often flogged, jailed, or worse. In 1675, a Tewa man named Po’pay was imprisoned on charges of witchcraft. From his Santa Fe jail cell, Po’pay plotted a revolution and upon his release, rallied two dozen Puebloan communities to take action. This was extraordinary because those communities were spread over a 400-mile radius and spoke six different languages. Because the Plaza was the seat of power, it was a focal point for the Revolt. Horses were stolen from the plaza, stores were pillaged and its perimeter was barricaded. Eventually, Po’pay cut off the plaza’s water supply, driving the Spanish southward to what is now El Paso. For twelve years, the region was free and each Pueblo ruled itself. However, drought came to the land and persisted, allowing the Spanish to make a “bloodless” reconquest.

For more than a hundred years, the Spanish ruled Santa Fe. Meanwhile, European settlers was venturing westward across America and beyond. The Santa Fe Trail brought wagon caravans of people, goods, and livestock. Eventually a fence was built around the plaza to protect it from grazing animals. Trees were planted and paths were laid; irrigation came to the plaza.

Then things got complicated. When Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1825, Santa Fe became the capital of the New Mexican Territory. When the Republic of Texas seceded from Mexico in 1836, it attempted to claim Santa Fe as its own. The State of Deseret, now known as Utah, also laid claim to Santa Fe around this time. In 1846, the United States went to war with Mexico and US soldiers marched into Santa Fe, claiming it for themselves. A few years later, a treaty bequeathed Santa Fe to the burgeoning US and in 1850, New Mexico became an official territory. Despite the upheavals and changes of the 19th century, the Plaza was a site for festivities, celebrations, trade and government; to accommodate such activities, a bandstand was built and the plaza was paved. There must have been a flagpole too, to signal so many shifts of power.

Still, more fighting came to the Santa Fe Plaza in 1862. Just as the Civil War was ending, a confederate general proclaimed possession of New Mexico. His troops marched into the Santa Fe plaza and, on that much-used flagpole, promptly flew a confederate flag. Days later the soldiers were defeated in the Battle of Glorieta and New Mexico was won for the Union.

To commemorate the battle, a monument was planned for the plaza’s center. A committee was appointed to design the monument. Organizers hired local stonemasons to craft an obelisk, a tall and narrow four-side column that tapers towards a pyramidal top. Obelisks date back to the ancient Egyptians who carved them out of a single stone to adorn their temples and honor the sun god, Ra. Obelisks were popular Civil War monuments because of their powerful stature and their ability to pay tribute to a multitude of fallen veterans.

Santa Fe’s was a 33-foot tall marble obelisk that sat atop a square plinth, each side mounted with a carved panel. Three panels commemorated the Union soldiers of the Civil War. The fourth remembered US soldiers who served "in the various battles with savage Indians." At the commemoration of the memorial in 1867, a time capsule was laid into its cornerstone. Two months later, the Union general who chaired the committee was killed by a political rival.

In subsequent decades, the plaza hosted concerts and picnics and became a gathering place for tourists and locals alike. Restaurants and shops soon crowded the plaza which is festively decorated with farolitos at Christmas. On special weekends, ethnically-themed markets draw tourists from around the world while year-round, Native craftspeople come to sell their wares beneath the deep portal of the Governor’s Palace. And every September for the last 300+ years, Fiestas have celebrated that “bloodless” reconquest of New Mexico.

With so much activity concentrated in the plaza, some people wanted to replace the obelisk with a gazebo. Others wanted to swap it for a statue of a conquistador. In the 1950s, the obelisk was protected through historic preservation but many people took issue with the word “savage” and eventually it was illegibly scratched out.

The plaza has been an important site of protest. In the early 1900s, women marched on the plaza demanding their right to vote. Every year since World War II, people have gathered there to demonstrate against nuclear war. Over the years, the Plaza has hosted the Women’s March, rallies for Earth Day and for a Free Palestine.

In 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement came to the Santa Fe plaza. It was a national period of racial reckoning that led to the toppling of many racist monuments. On Indigenous Peoples Day of that year, many people gathered around the obelisk to decolonize the space by bringing it down. They chanted “land back”, carried hand-stenciled signs, painted blood-like handprints on its base and, using chains, broke the monument in half.

After several protestors were arrested, the broken bits of obelisk were quickly removed and a plywood box was constructed to protect the plinth. In the subsequent months, a variety of signs were installed to explain the incident, continue commemorating fallen soldiers, and warn of further destruction. Meanwhile, the Santa Fe City Council spent $300,000 to do a survey about what to put in place of the obelisk. The council still hasn’t announced any plans and, three and half years later, the plywood box remains.

Plywood was invented in 1797 and is a ubiquitous building material fabricated by pressing wood, fiber, and glue into sheets of varying thicknesses. It is durable and somewhat affordable and is used for many kinds of construction. Commonly used to board up windows of vacant buildings, plywood can be understood as a function of protection and property, but also abandonment and emptiness. As it weathers, plywood symbolizes impermanence, failure, obsolescence. This plywood box in the center of the Santa Fe plaza might mark the absence of the obelisk but it is a monument unto itself.

I cannot speak to the complex histories or current dynamics that define Santa Fe, but I recognize that the town is moving through yet another shift of power. It seems that this temporary plywood monument will eventually be replaced with another; who decides is the uncertain part. Some folks still want a conquistador statue. Others are holding out for that gazebo. Others just want the site flattened. In the meantime, plywood seems to accurately signify that Santa Fe’s sense of itself is very much under construction.

When I think about the Santa Fe plaza, I think about its first place names and their reverence for water. I think about how water has been present long before humans arrived; hopefully it will outlive us as well. In the meantime, water has sustained this growing town and has quenched the thirst of each resident, visitor, soldier, conqueror, and revolutionary. Everyone who has ever been to Santa Fe has drunk of its waters. Why not replace the plywood box with a simple drinking fountain?

Questions for readers and place-explorers:

• I love thinking about places as palimpsests, where layers of history stack on top of each other, sometimes leaving residual traces that comingle with the present. With this essay, I tried to convey how the Santa Fe plaza is a living palimpsest. What places have you encountered that feel similarly layered, complex, even conflicted?

• Hundreds of monuments have been removed or replaced in recent years. Do you imagine that the new monuments will endure for forever? Can you imagine a future moment when today’s values will be overturned?

• What monuments do YOU think should exist? In Santa Fe? In your own town?

• Can water (not interpretations of water, just water) be a monument?

We rode our bikes through New Orleans on a calm, sunny Sunday. We like biking as a form of exercise, as entertainment, but also as a way to learn a new place. We don’t ride in a straight line and we diverge from formal paths; instead we ride up and down neighborhood streets, jump curbs, ford traffic, in order to see what a place really looks like.

That day, we wove through the streets and along the shoreline with stories ringing in our ears — just the night before, friends spoke of past hurricanes and the damage done and how they survived. So our eyes were attuned to the freshly constructed levies that now fortify the city; as desert dwellers, we know little about floods, much less hurricanes. And so we looked for wreckage and newness and tried to imagine this place under very different circumstances.

In a neighborhood affected but not totally ravaged by Katrina, we encountered brightly colored houses, vacant lots, hipster breakfast joints, and then a monolith of warehouses. The warehouses went on, block after block. Their collective footprint was made more impressive by their echoing obsolescence. I find such emptiness fascinating and sad. I wondered how long these buildings were productive and whether their vacancy was a sign of localized ruin (flooding, for instance) or if it signaled a larger shift in the industrial zeitgeist. We moved through monolithic shadows at the speed of curiosity.

As one concrete form gave way to another, I began to recognize elements of informal underground activity. All along the row, there were encampments, subtle signs of squatters, graffiti — some beautiful, some not. Artists had assumed one part of a building rather flagrantly. Laundry hung from a random third floor window. Smoke from trash fires stained more than one wall. Someone napped inside a car, their heels propped up on the open window. We rode carefully — not quickly but not without a sense of purpose — quietly trying to glimpse a small sense of what was going on there. Eager as we were to witness this underbelly in plain sight, we felt eyes upon us and tread trepidatiously.

As the warehouses gave way to shoreline, I breathed deeply and felt the hairs on my neck lay down. As if on cue, a man carrying a tuba hurried past us. He expertly crawled up a steep grassy embankment and then disappeared from view. A few moments later, a gaggle of women also scrambled their way up, passing a large box of donuts between them as they climbed. Curious, we pushed our bikes up to where these characters had led and found ourselves on a raised dirt path with a view of the water. Then suddenly, as if beckoning us further into this portal of wonderment, a trumpet player called up from below, “have you seen a marching band pass by?”

Only in New Orleans.

As the party amassed on a small peninsula of busted up concrete and verdant clover, we dismounted to explore in the other direction on foot. Enjoying the river’s breath on our humid skin, we stumbled upon a memorial of small sculptures gathered in someone’s honor. We saw a sign erected in the memory of someone else. And as we walked through a labyrinth crafted with junken parts and adorned with hand painted signs, we realized that this place between the river and the city was more than a geographical in-between. Then we heard the brass begin to blow.

There, on the water’s edge, just beyond the shadow of the warehouse block, twenty-some people made music and ate donuts on a Sunday morning. Tuba and trumpet were joined by many others. The mood was somber but joyful, as if to proclaim that death is part of life. We wondered if this was an unusual occurrence but sensed that elsewhere throughout the city and on many other Sundays, there were brass and donuts and remembrances being shared.

A barge passed by on the river. Birds flew overhead. The warehouses bore witness to it all.

And we rode off down the grassy slope and to another place, knowing that someone, a stranger to us, was being humbly, gloriously, and totally sung into the great beyond.

Questions for readers and place-explorers:

• So much of the built environment becomes repurposed after its initial use has ended. What are your experiences of witnessing this kind of creative reuse?

• In my story above, I don’t discuss the message “capitalism is the virus” that was painted across the face of the warehouse I chose to paint. My thinking is that the image conveys elements of the time and place that augment the story in subtle ways. But what do you think? Does the incongruence of image and story confuse or enhance your experience as the reader?

• From my observation, there is much about New Orleans culture that bucks the status quo, that works outside of capitalism, that finds resilience in detritus. I’m fascinated by the mix of danger and celebration that seems to be in the city’s DNA. I wonder if aspects of the landscape inform these kinds of cultural qualities?

• What do you think of my Substack? Should I continue?

There are water slides in nearly every town. In nearly every town, the water slides are dormant because the pools that surround them were drained months ago. Patio furniture was hauled into storage or stacked beneath a sheltering overhang, just outside the locker room door which has been bolted shut for the duration of winter. The snack bar is closed and all perishable items have been removed. The staff have found other jobs more suitable for winter months. A lifeguard waits tables. A pool boy shovels snow. Pool goers are now elsewhere too, mostly indoors.

All winter long, the water slides endure. They sustain snow, sleet, and whipping winds. Waiting out the long frigid nights and battered by the worst of weather, they hold steady. Over time, the sleek plastic sides of the water slides may crack with cold. Their riveted joints may loosen and leak. If their interior water systems were not adequately drained when the leaves began to change color, they may at some point be necessarily torn open, gutted, and replumbed. But let’s not think too much about the mistakes or accidents that lead to maintenance, for spring is here and the season of water slides is suddenly within the realm of not-too-distant possibility.

It is true: mighty blades of green poke up through the near-frozen ground. Hardened buds crack open with the force of tightly bound blossoms. The wind has found a new force as well; it goes across, up, down, and around, blowing with the frenzied aliveness that begins a new cycle. 

Spring Break has only just ended and the kids are back at their desks. Many articles of clothing are found deserted on closet room hooks and at the bottom of swing sets because the weather is now so unpredictable that well-meaning parents dress their kids in clothes for all seasons and all seasons now happen within the course of a single day. 

It is still unthinkable that before too long we will be removing nearly all of our clothes to bask in the sun. Today I sat close to a south-facing wall to catch the sun’s reflected warmth, like dogs do. Summer is still a ways off, though children and water slides can now count the weeks until they are gleefully rejoined. I can almost envision the line of dripping bodies waiting their turn to climb the ladder. I can almost hear their chlorine-scented screamy laughter.

I can imagine that, despite the inanimacy of water slides, those behemoths of finely sculpted plastic must regain some sense of purpose when the weather finally warms. To slickly carry a multitude of children and other revelers from summer’s heat — slickly, quickly, careening safely right on the edge of fear and delight —  into a refreshing pool: this is a water slide’s function.  Indeed, there is no pleasure quite like their slippery, shriek-slathered joy. For now, it is just spring. Water slides wait, like the rest of us, for the season to change.

Questions for readers and place-explorers:

• What objects in your landscape hold the promise of a future season? What feelings does it conjure to witness these objects in their dormancy or disfunction?

• Did you know that the water slide was invented in 1906 and presented as part of New Zealand’s International Exhibition? Visitors to the “water chute” rode fully-clothed on specially rafts that slid down a ramp and into a lake.

• I notice that most pools have removed their diving boards, especially high dives, due to liability concerns. Why do you think that water slides have survived while their pool-side counterparts have not?

• Has spring come to your neck of the woods?

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When you drive a particular stretch of highway several times a year for most of your life, you know that a highway is more than a route between two locations. More than a journey, you might come to know that section of road as a sort of entity — a place or even a character. Over time, that road can develop the familiar qualities of an auntie or a lifelong friend. It can even become a part of you.

For me, that stretch of highway is a 380-mile segment of Interstate 25 between my home in Albuquerque and Colorado Springs, where I was born and raised and my mother still lives. 

I have been driving this section of highway since long before I could operate an automobile. Up and down, back and forth, my family traveled to New Mexico throughout my childhood. We have a cabin in the mountains near Santa Fe and drove there many times each summer. As a young person I was prone to car sickness and never passed the time with books or video games. I was one of those kids who looked out the window. 

It may be those drives up and down I-25 that shaped my navigational and spatial sensibility. Somehow I came to understand, in a bodily sort of way, that our path traced the base of the mountains. Out one window I saw Cheyenne Mountain or the Spanish Peaks or, my favorite name for mountains — the Sangre de Cristos. Out the other window were plains — Great Plains! — as far as the eye could see. On the way home, the views were seen in reverse out of the opposite window. 

Like any kid, I was eager to get there already, so I gathered landmarks and committed them to memory. I would mentally tick each one off as we approached our destination, whether that was the cabin or back home. I tested myself to remember the names of towns in the order they appeared; I soon learned that Cimarron followed Springer and Walsenburg came after Colorado City, each in perfect succession. There was a barn with a horse on top. Then the ruins of a church. A radio tower with the top broken off. During the winters between our trips to New Mexico, I often forgot my favorite landmarks and so each summer was an opportunity to rediscover them and delight (again) in their memory. Over and over, I felt reassured about the order of things.

Lately, I have been driving up and down I-25 more than usual. Unlike those childhood drives, I’m now often alone. Things have changed about this drive — there is a new gas station near Maxwell. The roof finally caved in on the abandoned building near Aguilar. But the towns are still in the same order; most things haven’t changed. 

Heading north, I watch as the desert climbs into hills dappled by pinon and then settles into waves of grasslands and sky. I wait for glimpses of snowy peaks. Even now, I never miss the exact moment where, from a certain point of view, the Rowe mesa looks like someone took a bite out of it. How many times have I delighted in this bite? How many times more will I remember to notice? 

Having driven this road many hundreds of times, I encounter places as layers of memory. With each familiar landmark, I remember remembering it.

I don’t recall stopping for lunch or gas on childhood drives but I remember stopping once to watch a church burn down in Wagon Mound. My dad must have noticed smoke or flames from the highway with enough time to exit. We pulled into the village, piled out of the car, and stood watching with a bunch of strangers as their church went up in smoke. I don’t know what I was thinking that day and with each successive passing of that town, I remember the void of my mind and wonder. 

During college, my friends and I drove a VW bus on this road and broke down. Rather than call our parents for help, we slept in a roadside ditch and hitchhiked to the Albuquerque train station the next day. There were skunks lurking in the ditch that night and some quiet, shadow-like humans too.  I cannot cross Raton Pass without reliving that experience once again. The accumulated relivings now probably surpass the seemingly never-ending duration of that historic and unforgettable night. 

There was only the one VW bus but there were at least five Subarus, two Hondas, a couple different trucks and my dad’s Astro minivan. There were cars with bald tires and others without AC. Beater cars never kept me from driving home; they just meant I went slower or with abandon, sweating or in silence. The cars have held various dogs and boys, oftentimes Christmas packages or a book for mom. With so much coming and going, it seems like there should be some trace of my passage, a token of my existence, a path worn into the earth. The road gets pocked and resurfaced but basically stays the same.

I wonder what it means to know this particular stretch of road. Has it made me into a certain kind of person? Have the characteristics of scenery or the quality time somehow shaped my world? I might be different if my highway wound through forests or along a coastline. But this is my road. I am so I-25. For when I survey those familiar horizons where the plains meet range, I recognize myself. I remember how much I have always loved clouds and yellow grass and the long expanses. I never tire of those craggy mountains and proud mesas and enough space between little towns to notice all the little things. Most of all, I remember that no matter which way I’m driving, I’m always headed home. 

Questions for readers and place-explorers:

• what roads have defined you?

• is there a better word for a place, like a stretch of road, that is experienced not as a destination but as an experience of passage? I’m guessing other languages might have a word for this expanded sort of place.

• I love to speculate about the person who painted this God is Real sign. What does it make you think about?

• do you think God is real?

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