Edward Nugent's Blog - Posts Tagged "hiking"
Essay from Litterary Orphans
This essay was first published in Issue 26 of literary Orphans Magazine. Enjoy.
Mind Canyon
Though it is early, the sun is intense and promises a withering day ahead. I swing my hydration pack onto my shoulders, adjust the drinking tube, and take a swallow from the bite-valve. Picking a path through what appears to be widely spaced chaparral should be easy, but there is actually little open space between the spreading, spiny branches of the palo verde, mesquite, ocotillo, and uña de gato bushes. Chollas fill any clearing in the brushy forest, ready, with their bulbous branches covered in hair-like spines, to grab the incautious or unsuspecting passerby. Pitayas reach up and spread their arms like huge, green and black striped candelabras. Cardones dominate the canopy; their thick, green trunk and forked branches reach twenty feet or more into the clear, blue desert sky. The ground is hard and rocky. Finding a livestock trail that threads through this forest is welcome.
The trail is not straight but curves and bends; weaving up and over the rounded ridge, it descends into the wide, rock-strewn bed of an arroyo. I turn left and walk upstream. Though it is dry now, even here, where the arroyo has widened to at least sixty feet, the magnitude of the late summer floods is marked by the highline of debris a few inches higher than my head. Branches, uprooted bushes and trees, even stones, are driven, wedged, and wrapped around the paper white trunks of the palo blanco trees rooted on the silty islands of the braided watercourse.
As the arroyo narrows, the sandy, stony bottom turns to a boulder-strewn passage that, instead of walking, requires a ballet of hopping and balancing to the imagined crescendo of surging water and crashing stones. There are interludes where the floods have swept the floor clear and clean all the way to bare rock to reveal shallow sandstone ledges, like pages of an open book, each page a single layer, an episode, in the cycle of a once covering sea.
In the rocks, I can see the epic of their creation: The Earth is split as the Pacific Plate pulls from the North American Plate. The ocean pours into the widening gash. The Baja Peninsula rises from the newly created Sea of Cortez. Volcanos spew clouds of ash; layers of rose and gray lava flow and bury shales, sandstones and conglomerates, and in many places, metamorphose those marine layers into more durable schists and gneisses. Magma bulges and heaves from below, which fracture the layers above as it forces them upward. The pressure and heat shoot molten minerals into the fractures where they cool and harden. Sun, gravity and the seasonal rains sculpt the nascent range to reveal peaks and carve canyons. The Sierra Giganta is born.
I gain elevation quickly, though almost imperceptibly, as the canyon narrows. White, dark gray, green, yellow, and orange intrusions angle across walls of layered taupe, maroon, and pink. Where the stripes cross the canyon floor, they form dry dams several inches high to barriers that must be climbed or skirted. The walls widen and recede, as I reach the catchment basin. The canyon’s serpentine twists and bends are now behind and below me.
In the shade of a mesquite tree, I stop to rest, snack and reflect on the landscape. It is late spring. The low-growing plants are brown or tawny yellow. Most bushes and trees are leafless. Even the dusty green branches of the palo verde trees are bare but tipped with tiny flowers that resemble a crown of pale yellow-green mist. With their bristling, prickly beards, old man chollas gather in patches. The cardónes’ green skin covers their frame of vertical, wooden slats that expand to store water from the rains, only to contract during times of inevitable drought.
As I stretch out in the patchy shade of a mesquite tree, I see a flit. I look closely and can see a cardinal; its vivid red matches the flower blooming at the very tip of the otherwise lifeless-appearing palo adán. I hear its distinctive tiú, tiú, tiú, tiú. The longer I am still, the more bird songs I hear. I recognize the descending scale of the canyon wren and the whirring, lu, lu, lu, lu as a white wing dove takes flight. It is canyon music.
A whisper of breeze, like breath, sweeps up from below. Each canyon has its own, distinctive breath. Here, the breath is intermittent, cool, faintly scented with copal. It softly brushes my skin. My mind drifts with the breeze.
What suite would Copeland compose to capture this landscape? What instruments could conjure the rending of continental plates, the blasts of spewing volcanoes, the groans and shrieks of a mountain range being born? Could its movements rage like the flood, and rise and fall like the wind? Would birdsongs form its chorus?
Can this place, this moment, be expressed in word, canvas or song? Once roused, must imagination seek expression in form?
In the heat of the afternoon sun, I stir. The spell broken, I must return.
Edward Nugent
Mind Canyon
Though it is early, the sun is intense and promises a withering day ahead. I swing my hydration pack onto my shoulders, adjust the drinking tube, and take a swallow from the bite-valve. Picking a path through what appears to be widely spaced chaparral should be easy, but there is actually little open space between the spreading, spiny branches of the palo verde, mesquite, ocotillo, and uña de gato bushes. Chollas fill any clearing in the brushy forest, ready, with their bulbous branches covered in hair-like spines, to grab the incautious or unsuspecting passerby. Pitayas reach up and spread their arms like huge, green and black striped candelabras. Cardones dominate the canopy; their thick, green trunk and forked branches reach twenty feet or more into the clear, blue desert sky. The ground is hard and rocky. Finding a livestock trail that threads through this forest is welcome.
The trail is not straight but curves and bends; weaving up and over the rounded ridge, it descends into the wide, rock-strewn bed of an arroyo. I turn left and walk upstream. Though it is dry now, even here, where the arroyo has widened to at least sixty feet, the magnitude of the late summer floods is marked by the highline of debris a few inches higher than my head. Branches, uprooted bushes and trees, even stones, are driven, wedged, and wrapped around the paper white trunks of the palo blanco trees rooted on the silty islands of the braided watercourse.
As the arroyo narrows, the sandy, stony bottom turns to a boulder-strewn passage that, instead of walking, requires a ballet of hopping and balancing to the imagined crescendo of surging water and crashing stones. There are interludes where the floods have swept the floor clear and clean all the way to bare rock to reveal shallow sandstone ledges, like pages of an open book, each page a single layer, an episode, in the cycle of a once covering sea.
In the rocks, I can see the epic of their creation: The Earth is split as the Pacific Plate pulls from the North American Plate. The ocean pours into the widening gash. The Baja Peninsula rises from the newly created Sea of Cortez. Volcanos spew clouds of ash; layers of rose and gray lava flow and bury shales, sandstones and conglomerates, and in many places, metamorphose those marine layers into more durable schists and gneisses. Magma bulges and heaves from below, which fracture the layers above as it forces them upward. The pressure and heat shoot molten minerals into the fractures where they cool and harden. Sun, gravity and the seasonal rains sculpt the nascent range to reveal peaks and carve canyons. The Sierra Giganta is born.
I gain elevation quickly, though almost imperceptibly, as the canyon narrows. White, dark gray, green, yellow, and orange intrusions angle across walls of layered taupe, maroon, and pink. Where the stripes cross the canyon floor, they form dry dams several inches high to barriers that must be climbed or skirted. The walls widen and recede, as I reach the catchment basin. The canyon’s serpentine twists and bends are now behind and below me.
In the shade of a mesquite tree, I stop to rest, snack and reflect on the landscape. It is late spring. The low-growing plants are brown or tawny yellow. Most bushes and trees are leafless. Even the dusty green branches of the palo verde trees are bare but tipped with tiny flowers that resemble a crown of pale yellow-green mist. With their bristling, prickly beards, old man chollas gather in patches. The cardónes’ green skin covers their frame of vertical, wooden slats that expand to store water from the rains, only to contract during times of inevitable drought.
As I stretch out in the patchy shade of a mesquite tree, I see a flit. I look closely and can see a cardinal; its vivid red matches the flower blooming at the very tip of the otherwise lifeless-appearing palo adán. I hear its distinctive tiú, tiú, tiú, tiú. The longer I am still, the more bird songs I hear. I recognize the descending scale of the canyon wren and the whirring, lu, lu, lu, lu as a white wing dove takes flight. It is canyon music.
A whisper of breeze, like breath, sweeps up from below. Each canyon has its own, distinctive breath. Here, the breath is intermittent, cool, faintly scented with copal. It softly brushes my skin. My mind drifts with the breeze.
What suite would Copeland compose to capture this landscape? What instruments could conjure the rending of continental plates, the blasts of spewing volcanoes, the groans and shrieks of a mountain range being born? Could its movements rage like the flood, and rise and fall like the wind? Would birdsongs form its chorus?
Can this place, this moment, be expressed in word, canvas or song? Once roused, must imagination seek expression in form?
In the heat of the afternoon sun, I stir. The spell broken, I must return.
Edward Nugent
