2:15 a.m. - 2003-01-05
sinaguans
The soil that crunched beneath our feet as we scaled the volcano wasn't soil at all, but cinder. Black bits of pumice the size of breadcrumbs. Visible on this day only in those places where the snow hadn't taken hold; desolate tracts on the windward sides of surrounding hills. Half a midday moon hovered over the crater's rim, presiding sympathetically over an almost-lunar landscape of frozen pahuihui and leggy desert grasses. I paused at an overlook to take it all in and gasp a bit for air (was I low on red-blood cells, or were these the first ugly symptoms of smog withdrawal?). The road to the Indian ruins ran north of here, descending from the volcanic meadows into a region designated "Painted Desert"; a region which, according to my map, should have been clearly visible from my vantage but was not. What I saw instead was the surface of a lake of snow clouds and, on its distant perimeter, the shoreline of another mountain range. Altitude-induced changes in barometric pressure had pinned this front hard to the desert floor. So down the hill we hiked, and into the clouds we drove.
As we left the sunny high country behind, our breath froze on the windows. I rubbed a hole in the ice with the butt end of my fist and peered out at the close horizon of freezing mist that encircled our vehicle. By the time we hit the Indian ruins the tiniest flakes of snow were falling. Well, not falling exactly; just kinda moving randomly through space. And it was cold.
The ruins were impressive. A savage condominium that took for its foundation an immense outcropping of red stone. Three-quarters of the structure still stood. Staring through collapsed exterior walls into the tiny apartments through which generations had passed, I felt moved not by my youthful enthusiasm for primitive societies, but with an adult sense of humanity's enduring sameness. This feeling that the dreams and struggles that haunted this dwelling were no more or less noble than those which filled the freeway-adjacent tract homes we'd passed on the way to the park.
(this unknowable thing that gnaws, gnaws harder in the desert...y'know?)
