Start to try making time-lapse sequences from the immediate surroundings. Lousy and/or old equipment, a quasi-functioning power system, and the results show it. Add a portable generator, a better tripod, longer cabling, a 3-CCD camera with chip memory (ah to be free of tape!), and a laptop with a battery that lasts longer than the start-up sequence. I’m ready to cash in some of my retirement piddle to cover it. Maybe $10K I could get away with all of it, including a decent audio recorder? That, along with a better 4WD truck and I’d be part of the pseudo-elite for once. hah. So, anyway, now, marooned in Echo Park by the intense weather, (I was warned, fair enough, but I told the ranger that I wasn’t planning to come out until Friday next at least, anyway, so things should dry up by then, and that I had enough supplies for at least two weeks if not more). Stormy already today, late morning, humidity pulled the clouds up, and while attempting some decent time-lapses, it gets worse. What else is new? Maybe I end up sitting in the car just writing. There are rain filaments across to the north.

Cutting tamarisk growth behind camping site (#7) to feed the fire. Keeps mind busy, with flinging sharp blade biting into hard wood. No help around in case of an accident. This sharpens the wits.

Stormy all through the night, thinking rain, flooding, flash-flooding, getting stuck at the top of the road out, having to back down that 18 percent grade, having to take the bench road out, 35 unknown miles of semi-jeep trail. The maintenance guys cruise through camp yesterday, have a short chat with them. One says he’s taken the Bench Road in his wife’s van. And the weather is to be here all week, so it’s not the small squalls that are happening in between sunshine, but the accumulated wetness and snow in that red bentonite clay at the top of the drive that will be treacherous, not to mention the precipitous drop-offs! Yikes.

Do a short but very steep eight mile cycle ride up past the ranch to the fork in the road below the upper stretch of Sand Canyon. I so surprise a large raptor — a juvenile Red-tail who is sitting on a low branch in a grove of cottonwoods along Pool Creek — that he doesn’t move, except for watching me cycle by, up hill, a mere ten feet away. He watches with very dilated pupils, black, wide for the prey he was likely waiting for, mice in the twilit encroachment. Death from above for some sacrificial victim, perhaps themselves learning to survive. Death from above with little chance for escape.

Towards midnight, stand in the center of the open grassy space of the canyon, in the cloudy star Light, watching supplicating palms reflect the Light from eye corner. doing stretching and some tai chi in the extremely dark but luminous space. The eye so sensitive after adjusting. Though there is also the awareness that for the puma, this is still quite bright, with pupils the size of a quarter. Attracting all the Light there is into tuned neural system to activate all carnivorous be-ing.

But in the drama of weather, it is difficult to concentrate on writing. Maybe that is part of the problem — the inability to write in the midst of things. Instead this need to draw away from it all. To have a solid and secluded space to withdraw to in order to process the constant influx. Increasingly I understand the archive to become a legacy issue — that the archive is what I am after I’m gone. Nothing more than that. The trace of a resonant passage through this place, this time, this incarnation, this life. Its level of order expresses how long it will persist. Although the substrate that it is written upon will also determine its longevity. In massive stone, not in electromagnetic dipole configurations on disks. Although perhaps the particular substrate is not so important in either way. The monumentality of materialized legacy is no guarantor. And a (simple) text will survive long if it carries energies that stir resonance in more than a few people. There is no strategy for promoting the precise character of a work — except to see that it comes from a space closer and closer to the impressions of life itself.

So, what are the themes of the thesis work today? The process of amplification, the process of social ordering versus inevitable thermodynamically described counter-processes, the road as a real/metaphoric model for both personal presence and social order. As I sit at the end of the road here, Echo Park. I think that is the attraction of this place, it is, literally, the end of the road. There are two cul-de-sacs, one at the campground one in front of the Ranger’s cabin, and even if desired, there is really nowhere to drive after that. Even the walking is obstructed much of the year by the rivers, although one year I recall making quite a hike across the Yampa and into the north-eastern side of the confluence. Prepared, it would be great to go further into those territories, but one would have to rig a floating transport device to get a supply of equipment across the river and into a further base camp. I somehow doubt that I will have that chance in this life.

But the end of the road, for all that entails, the point where transport methods have to devolve, step-by-step, until they are reduced to footfalls, but even then there is a limit. Here in this country, the fall of the foot is determined by the strength of the body, and the knowledge of the terrain. This knowledge has to include a means for sustenance, water primarily, but, after that, food. There is plenty of undrinkable water, and plenty of difficult-to-capture food. Then what?

Without either a strong back-country knowledge (especially food sources), and some minimal equipment (rifle, knife, fire-starter of some sort, (metal) water container for boiling water, water-proof clothing) it would be tough indeed.