the Wednesday flight to Auckland looks in doubt as of today. volcano Cordon Caulle shot so much stuff up to extreme altitudes (over 15 km) and some of that got caught in the jet stream of the Roaring Forties weather pattern, and now, a week later it’s traveled around the globe and hit southern Australia, Tassie, and eNZed. crossing the Tasman Sea is best done by boat. sheesh. Darwin Station keeps an eye on it all locally for the VAAC.

already entering the drone zone of movement, though, regardless of what goes on with the ash cloud. though would not relish being a passive observer of an ash-compromised turbine engine. Air New Zealand hasn’t canceled any flights versus all the other carriers who have up to Quantas which has canceled all their flights to Tassie and eNZed. what to make of that? the NASA images are at least definitive, and surprisingly not referenced in Australian media anywhere.

Again, back to voice. Given the process of coalescing. In order to bind threads of disparate disciplines, different socio-cultural systems, and idiosyncratic paths, a voice which allows some transcendence of localized protocols of communication is necessary. That voice must needs to be poetic in a fundamental sense. It need not have a particular density or timbre, but it does need to be located somewhere within and without any and all those disciplinary spaces.

Is a poetic voice immediate or is it cumulative? It is supposed that the smallest increment of uttered language, the phoneme can hardly be a poetic vocalization. So, maybe language is generally cumulative, accretionary, in that geologic sense of layered erosional deposition, reification, burial, uplift, and consequent re-erosion. In this instance, it is then possible to find a shiny-smooth cobble of, say, cloudy quartz. Well-balanced, raising expectations of imminent knowledge of something when in the hand, pleasing to the eye. What are its origins since arising from the heart of stars: silicon, oxygen. At one point following the gravitational accretion of the planet, the silicon was oxidized by some environment rich in oxygen. Silicon dioxide. Under pressure, super-heated, igneous differentiation allowed masses of these molecules to collect and form crystalline agglomerations within a cooling batholith. Uplift and erosion brings that raw mass to the surface where it is shattered slowly, washed by waters, and dragged downwards by gravity. The cobble is smoothed with many others, and buried with all those, pressure cementing them all again into a single mass, a conglomerate. Another uplift and erosional cycle breaks the conglomerate cement and releases this smooth stone into a creek bed, into a river, where it is further polished. Holding it in the palm, what is its voice? What does it say? How does it speak to its temporary holder? What does it say other that the mute message of gravity to be let down, to be given back to the earth? If the holder knows, they might read signs in the surface, in the raw presence of the thing-ness of the cobble. The signs point to histories and pathways. The reader has to understand the basic elements of those signs in order to create their own understanding as to the origin of the object. But of its pure presence, nothing need be known, but only the immediate experience of the Self in juxtaposition with this thing. Naming all this is the root of language.

As the poetic, the transformed erosional product of language, the cobble might be heaved through the wall of the proverbial glass house of culture, period. Howl.

dislocated, and wind-blown to another place (in the night). retrospecting from a great distance. not a travelog, but a long narrative story in pieces. a different kind of writing, but not too different: carrying some mapping of the movements imposed by life as it is/was. question: would all the fragments, displayed, end up having a meaning? or would they remain fragmented, and infinitely far from the lived life? can the flow that one feels while passing through this immediate temporal region be truly experienced by an Other, or not.

the San Andreas Fault dominates the feel of this place, though it is only a scarp of low hills cut by displaced drainage washes. I didn’t get to a focal point of the flat valley floor, a complicated outcrop with a sizable pictograph/petroglyph wall up near the entrance to the Monument. it has restricted access, and was closed when I came into the valley. but today, head further south to the southern exit from the valley, where the dirt track parallels the fault scarp a hundred meters to the east. the displaced gullies cannot be immediately decoded by their odd shapes — where the topography is shifting north/south 33-to-37 mm per year. ya’ gotta run to keep up!

Follow the fault scarp east-south-east across the Grapevine and down into the Mojave near Victorville, and end up in a very isolated area of the near Mojave — up at altitude, so it’s very cold and very windy, though that’s nothing new in the High Mojave in December. Simply unload the back of the truck enough to curl up and sleep.

If you look for the truth outside yourself,
It gets farther and farther away.
Today walking alone, I meet it everywhere I step.
It is the same as me, yet I am not it.
Only if you understand it in this way
Will you merge with the way things are.
– Tung-Shan

Loss, and the new. Preparing for the forward-fall to engage the conditions that hydrocarbon burning precipitate: back on the road, hydrocarbon flaring, with a slow drive down to Carizzo Plains via the “Petroleum Highway.” Along which are the still-operational fields of California’s early oil boom. Drive by the Kettleman Dome area, a structure that I examined as my first exploration review at Unocal back in 1982. I had to gather all alternative methods data, produce some maps and structural interpretations, and an exploration strategy that correlated seismic and well-log data sets.

Tracking the San Andreas Fault. The knife-through-birthday-cake-icing scar that runs from the here to the there of California. Rupture zone riding. Making images and writing. The usual. Or the unusual. Beginning or Ending.

This after the Solstice lunar eclipse last deep night which hung in a cleared sky slowly transforming eye-socket receivers into Light-cups, catching a burnt sienna flux from every sun-rise-and-set on the limb of the planet, at the moment. Very fine. And gone for this life’s time. On Earth as it is in Heaven.

On this movement, at this time, cars fill Interstate-5 everywhere, all the time. The pavement is uneven and shattered in some places from the heaviness of the truck traffic as well as the bankrupt state of the state of the Union. wads of toilet paper fill the grass at the scenic overlook like albino poppies. Later, I leave the interstate for less travelled roads, much less travelled, I see very few cars at all. But then there are oil pumps and pipes.

Brunch with Homare, years have passed since we crossed paths, how that goes. He and his wife have moved into a really nice place right off of CR 36 in Denver. Then back to Boulder to catch the airport bus to DIA and on to Portland. Erica picks me up in her scrubs, straight from the hospital. I haven’t seen her for, what, a decade? Back to her place where she makes dinner for her boyfriend Greg, and myself. I had forgotten she had a catering business in the long-ago past. Between geology and cardio-vascular surgery. Sheesh, have some more wine.

Leaving when done with breakfast and cleaning and packing. A couple rituals yet — gathering some sage and some yellow Weber sandstone powder. A beautiful sojourn. The place is so rich, so un-circumscribable, no matter how many dances of words one would make around it. Best is the ability to press into the body the power of be-ing and the power of life. And Light. And the gravity of the earth. Fundamentals to the heart. The drift of cloud and shift of wider weather patterns, leaving Light on upturned face, changing all the time.

Maybe put out a call next spring to have others join. Then again, maybe not…

What changes flow into the ongoing process of life during solo retreats to power-full places? I think a lot about all the others who I know, and do wish that there were folks who would be able to join me in these places. Some folks I would like to have join me and others, I know, wouldn’t appreciate it. Everything would be different, especially the bushwhacks and the rambles; the cooking and eating, sharing meals, and just hanging out together would recall so many prior times, and the deep and satisfying fun that was had by all.

The hikes: while most attention has to go to the movement itself, as there are considerable risks to walking solo in such places, mind may drift from immediate situation and the larger questions of what has become, what does become of life. It’s more of a noisy mess, but it is easier under these circumstances to do the yogic step away and allow the chitta vritti, the thought-noise, to simply happen, knowing that being in the moment is far more important and has deeper implications than any projections onto future (and very much theoretical) situations or into re-living historical situations. The pull of the un-fettered mind into both those spaces is strong, and the best tonic for that is the risk of solo bushwhacking where there is a steep penalty for not paying attention. I do catch myself every so often, verbally, aloud, slow-down slow-down slow-down, after I make a mis-step or blunder. The most common is when traversing some slick-rock face and stepping on a small pebble. That’s all it takes, send you 10 feet or 100 feet to the next ledge down, or to the canyon floor. Doesn’t make much difference how far, an injury would be immediate life-threatening even if it was a minor sprain — if immobilized, you would have to deal with at least one night out, maybe more, with hypothermia, then dehydration being the most problematic, then the problem of becoming predator food, the problem of attracting help could be very difficult, if in a slot canyon or off the normal known trails. I carry a loud whistle, and do leave small notes in my car which would direct search parties to general areas, but the terrain is vast, and there is much topography that would make searching difficult. I think they would wait a day at least before even checking the car anyway. Unless you told someone specifically that you would be in touch. There is no phone access, and so on, uff. Well, the point is, focus and caution have to be taken very seriously when soloing. I would do things rather differently if with one other or a small group. There is immediately a sizeable extra safety factor. Not that it would suddenly make risk disappear, but an innocuous stumble on the rocks wouldn’t immediately become a life-and-death situation.

What about these time-lapse movies? What are they about? I don’t know what to make of them, but have spent numerous hours making them — 2 minutes per hour is the rate that I’ve been using — a frame every 3 or 4 seconds to make a PAL 24 fps film. I guess I’ll make a dvd or maybe a single work, but have to think of the sound-track for them, that’s difficult.

Anyway, head out, south through Rangely, down the Book Cliffs, through Loma and meet Collin and Marisa at the airport office of their business, the Colorado Flight Center, get pizza and beer, and drive up the hill to Glade Park to have dinner with Bob, their next door neighbor.

try a couple more timelapse shots, but they are unsatisfactory with all the technical drawbacks. Stability, resolution, quality, etc. Nothing to be done about it without a 10K investment, or more.

Instead, after the driving rain all night, start a fire in the morning, still raining, but gradually it tapers off, though it is very cloudy. The guy who came in late yesterday in a Ford Explorer with a Rocket Box on top left at some point in the morning. Gah. No place to go! He’ll end up in a ditch somewhere.

I decide to do the traverse from the Pool Creek road over to Sand Canyon since the lower mouth of the canyon is not accessible because the Yampa River spring run-off level. On the way, I decide to drive up to the Bench fork to see where this guy drove — I am stunned to see that he took the branch up to the Harper’s Corner road, with the 18% grade. No way, after a night of rain, and, as I see when I get out of Pool Creek Canyon, snow down to about 6000 feet, so the last two miles of the road would be absolutely impossible. Just the drive to the fork is bad with the red clay sticking in the treads on the tires making them useless aside from the fact this is a relatively level road, so, no problem. I see his tracks, and even the difference of a few hours (time for the road to dry some), he was having more trouble that I was. I could see the difference of a few hours of drying time. I can only hope that there is no additional rain before Friday when I have to head out, south to Glade Park. I imagine that he is stuck somewhere on the road, though, hopefully not blocking traffic! (Of which there will be none, because after that weather, they for sure closed the top of the road for people coming in.)

The traverse the wide and clear bench to Sand Canyon is subtle but effective. Several kills, and between those and the barrel cactii colonies and the Indian Paint Brush (Castilleja linariifolia) flowers, plenty of that counterpoint coloration that is so outrageous in the West. The silver-green-blue of the sage, then these absolute vortices of color with the flowering plants, stimulating in the soft and wet Light. Found another 14-point rack, gah, these animals are big! Wouldn’t want to encounter a mad one! End up on the canyon rim, just across from where Sebastien, Jeff, Chris, Wendy, and I hike to from the old camping place, years ago, there are some extant shots of folks sprawled on a small bench of sandstone, resting, and eating M&M’s. I recall looking across the canyon at that point, thinking how it looked, how it impressed form into eye. Today, climbing down that formerly observed face was steep and tricky. All the while, wondering about cougars. A series of nice overhang/caves at the top under the limestone cap rock, so, continued the series of cave panoramas, hope to have three decent works to perhaps make into large-scale print works.

The psycho-geographic process in this situation, this environment, this weather, is strictly controlled by the contingencies of the total situation. There is little choice, per se, but rather the application of experience, or lack thereof, to the movement through, across, into, and of the essence of the place. Movement is dictated by will throughout the body, but it also immediately comes up against the contingencies of place. Unlike the Sonoran Desert, the actual number of spiny plants is not near as great, but the small size means easily overlooked, heavy boots are a necessity. And care becomes more about the stability of the foot-fall rather than what the foot might intersect. Some time is spent exploring several small side-canyons where there is plenty to absorb.

Have an incredibly erotic dream with Jennifer D., back from the Culture Capitals 2000 project in Prague. Will have to email her. Otherwise watery squint-eyed watching of rotating the stellar field.

This morning, a raptor circles a hundred meters away with its mate hidden in the trees along Pool Creek, making a creeeewing sound. It’s the same noise it made when I wandered over to the creek earlier in the morning. All the birds are noisy — it makes a multi-dimensional flow which lies on the ear with pleasing insistence. No need to move the head, as the sources are in motion and occasionally in sight.

No one else down here today. I could feel it on the way down, the road just opened late in the day, although it didn’t seem in bad shape at all. They’ve been improving it with trucked-in gravel for a majority of the fifteen miles over the last decade. There were a few spots where folks had driven through when it was wet, and this was something of a mess — a hint of how horrible it can get after a storm.

Been thinking about the bush-whack agenda for the next ten days or so — with some trepidation regarding the carnivores, the mountain lions (Puma concolor — pumas, cougars, catamounts) specifically. The experience several years back in Upper Pool Creek Canyon comes to mind, and is not one that I would want to repeat. So it goes.

(Canada) geese (Branta canadensis) calls are echoing around, coming from upstream at the confluence and downstream from the opposite shore under Steamship Rock. Last night I kept thinking it was people on rafts talking, but it’s no human heard for the last 15 hours.

How to connect this place with the Wendover experience. The sporadic expressions of military order — literally expression — generated from the huge globe-spanning techno-social system, compared to this place.

Para-state organizations (sanctioned by law or social(elite) mandate) can operate at a less intrusive level than purely geo(political) entities — they don’t tend to attract near the enmity of a military presence, yet they have the same affect of tapping into the life-energies of a population and gathering that energy back into the geo-political entity that sanctions their existence.

Coke in China: gets the Chinese people to drink, to spend life-time/life-energy on Coke’s strictly controlled energy source. This process supplies the Chinese government with convertible/abstracted energy (money) in the form of direct and indirect taxes on the process — on Coca-Cola, on the salaries of the workers, on raw material import tariffs, etc. It also clearly supplies Coca-Cola with the same. Coke draws human energy into a system which guarantees the flow of that convertible/abstracted instrument.

Hunting, gathering, human-driven agriculture all demonstrate this on a granular level where it is relatively easy to see the connections and full pathways of energy flow. But as the techno-social system gets more complex, the connections are more widely displaced. Then with the addition of abstracted systems of exchange, the system becomes very complex and it is difficult to tease out the interconnections of even a simple example. However, even deep in the abstracted system, individuals are using their life-energies/life-time in maintaining the widest-scale pathways of the globe-spanning techno-social system. We are all implicated! And, indeed, observing this clearly on any scale — from ‘natural systems’ to any scale of social system — it is easy to extrapolate the limits and consequences of what is only to be considered a sustainable system at a cosmological scale. At localized and extracted systems levels, such as “human life on earth,” it may not be sustainable, is not sustainable. But the extraction process is purely abstract, and considering things from a holistic/unified point-of-view, it is sustainable. The universe will go on. Sounds like a contradiction.

So, how to reconcile all this to different scales, locales, etc?

Transit of Utah. From west to east, along a winding trajectory from desert to forest to desert, oil drilling, wind power, gas stations, Mormon farms, gold mines, high-security military bases, municipal alarm towers scattered across the landscape — for warning the population surrounding the bases where testing of bio- and chemical-warfare devices is ongoing — warning them of impending disaster. Continuing on the isolated Pony Express Trail, then descending into populated areas. Calling ahead to Dinosaur to see about road conditions. Plenty of snow on the Uintahs, plenty! At the last minute after checking out the Green River campground on the Utah side, I get word that the Echo Park road is open. So, gas up, including the extra tank, and head in from Jensen. Excellent weather, and finally arriving, no one else around, very good. Get the pick of the few camp spaces, #5, 7, and 9 are the best for shade, seclusion, and access to firewood — though shade is not the issue at this time of year, more important would be the access to morning sunshine to warm up — but since there’s no one else around, I can use the #6 picnic table in full sun in the morning for breakfast. So, I take #7 and offload/set-up quickly: already charged at being here once again…

Neal makes it in from London after last weeks aborted attempt from having the flu.

A loop north around the Silver Island Mountains paralleling the Bonneville Salt Flats traces may textures of rock, sky, and the interface between. Numerous forays away from the truck into the landscape, looking at everything, smelling everything, hearing … nothing … or so. The space vehicle rumbles onward on the bad road. Bad road. All bad roads lead away from, further away from, Rome.

Leave the car, be here now. The desert commands that (or the fearful response, deny here now, and insulate the embodied self from any manifestation of here, get back to the car, now).

Turning to the west at the north end of the mountain fault-block, I am suddenly met by five huge white Maremma (or Great Pyrenees?) sheep dogs, each over 100 pounds, ready to shred whatever fleshly appendages might be protruding from the truck. They were guarding a sizable flock of sheep who were busy razing the already marginal winter foliage. gah, why they allow sheep farming up here, I’ll never know — the BLM’s “multi-use” philosophy destroying what land cover there is left in this place. The circuit continues across the playa from Pilot Peak and on to Leppy Pass and a human installation.

(Ed. note — have solved the image gallery as you can see. Seems to be relatively glitch-free and less work than my previous solutions. This is one image from a number — Pennsylvanian-Permian-aged lime/mud-stones, highly contorted. Do hope to get all of them up from this trip so far, sooner than later. But there is so much code to do for that — I still haven’t settled on a means to display images on this blog — there are several pre-packaged plug-ins for WordPress in this regard, but I haven’t decided. Not going to Flickr things nor use Facebook as the data management and control is passed off to those cloud services (not to mention the perverse End-User Licensing Agreement terms). The travelog blog means was good, but the file structure of WordPress does not lend itself to any automation if I use that older technique, and I desperately want to get out of the manual compilation work that I have been doing all along. It’s incredibly time consuming and easily bunged-up with (simple) code errors. Ach, as this site evolves into its 16th year, it remains something of a millstone, given the relative paucity of traffic (1 – 2,000 hits a day total).

Aim for the nearest topological features to the south, some small intrusives, an isolated fault block, likely, rhyolitic basalts of some sort (with some peridotites or greenstones possibly?). Lake Bonneville paleo-shorelines are visible, with a prominent one slicing the hills like a poorly-made isometric topo model. The hills are technically on the Air Force test range, but I disregard the signs (parking behind some low hills across the road in order not to attract attention).

Definitely a different regime than, say, the Sonoran desert. Here, the land seems more sterile and has only very low scrub, most less than a foot high. Low or black sagebrush (Artemisia), salt brush (Atriplex), rabbit brush, black brush, tumbleweed (Salsola pestifera), and a handful of other species are thinly scattered, with either desert varnish, pebbly sand, or the occasional small colony of cryptobiotic soil. Can’t really tell if this lack is a direct result from severe overgrazing (this is, after all, BLM land) or just a harsh (colder, drier!) regime here compared to the relatively abundant biota of the Sonoran.

Plenty of evidence of other human intrusions on top of the igneous stuff that these hills are made of. Bullet casings, scraps of glass and metal everywhere, bullet holes in anything worth shooting at. Two mines have burrowed into the earth, leaving debris, holes, and mounds, a refrigerator with major firearm damage, a twisted bike frame, and the shattered glass crunching underfoot.

The hills are much larger than they initially appear, a frequent phenomena in a landscape without the normal metrics for scale (trees and human structures). A great view in all directions from the top.

A lake shore sand deposit in the form of a light tan mudflat attracts my attention on the talus-skiing descent, as it is bisected by the old roadbed which exhibits the typical roadbed riparian affect — with visibly larger brush on either side of the eroding pavement — the direct affect of the slight concentration of runoff precipitation. Walking here in the flats one feels … exposed … as the occasional mining truck speeds by a mile or so away. The only relief among short sage brush are the holes dug by coyotes into smaller varmit holes, now that would be something to watch! Good for spraining an ankle if step is not watched closely. The only other difference are the widely scattered aluminum beer cans, mostly effaced of any markings by the brutal sun, sitting pell-mell in the sand.

I notice later that the Nikon has more crap on the CCD, about which nothing can be done — you can see two spots in the lower left center of the images. My irritation with this camera system increases as the years go by. I am constantly astonished at the poor quality of the lens, along with the dirt accumulation on the CCD — it’s a closed system, for god’s sake, how does it keep getting dirty? I don’t even take the lens off, ever! I think the Canon system is superior both optically and technologically. But nothing to be done about it, unless I decide against getting a new laptop and instead get a new camera. Ach, I get tired of technology!

Arrive at CLUI mid-afternoon, after a slow and cold morning with a walk among the juniper and the outcrops of limestone there in the Goshute Mountains, looking for something, not sure what. The final 100 miles is on an empty road, northbound with the dominant paleo-shoreline of the ancient Lake Bonneville appearing (everywhere) tracing an almost-human-alteration-looking bench line at the elevation of 1,555 m (5,100 ft.) feet above sea level — Wendover is at 1,308 m (4,291 ft.), that is, deeply submerged in a conceptual Lake Bonneville. More on that later. I will have to walk portions of the shoreline at some point. Matt is there at the residency compound so we immediately launch into a conversation that is broad, but specific in its range of subjects. There is the organization of CLUI itself, I am tremendously curious about it as a social entity and how it survives (and thrives) in the relatively hostile (to culture-orgs) environment of the US. Then there is the location here, as Matt takes me on a two hour driving tour of the facility and the town, I am really amazed at the depth and richness of the relationship he (and the organization) has fostered with this place.

We end up at a great Mexican restaurant, The Salt Flats Cafe, at the Blair exit (#4) off I-80. Have to go there again, the chili rellenos were quite good.

not far as-the-raven-flies from the Baldwin cabin, over Ohio pass and to the east, here on the west side of the West Elk Wilderness. mild mountains. none within eye-shot breaking 12,000 feet. sedimentary, overlain by thick deposits of welded tuff, ash, and other volcanic ejecta, andesites, unstable, friable: the West Elk Breccia, 34 million years old.

and in the interests of not moving too far and getting as high as locally possible, Moseley Ridge, made up of those breccias, looks do-able, sort of. at least the view east from the top should be decent — the back of the Maroon Bells. bush-whacking. the first obstacle is an aspen grove with more downed timber than standing. the only progress possible is by balancing on the downed logs and moving along those. off the logs, it’s impossible. steep, turns out the whole western slope is slumping with fissures and extremely steep inclines. it is a real bush-whack. two hours of slow movement through the vegetation only to end up on talus that looked a whole lot smoother from the valley floor. very unstable. each step, leaping from rock to rock, never knowing which one might start to roll down the steep incline. the incline gradually steepens towards the base of the final (unattainable spires). giving up 100 meters from the saddle when rain starts making the rocks slick. low risk threshold. slow and wet retreat.

Prof. Fred Henderson III of Mount Princeton Geothermal, LLC, meets us in the late morning (thank goodness!) for a briefing on the geothermal development that he is overseeing in the area. the ultimate goal is a heat-exchange/re-injection power plant based on several high-flow wells into the hot spot that drives the hot springs. he then takes us on a two-hour tour of the area mapping out the geological regime and sharing some of the development info for the geothermal prospect. the major problem in the valley (of Chalk Creek) is the complexity of property ownership and the density of residential development. this entire area is carved up in relatively small lots with homes and is a very desirable location, so people will fight any drilling, piping, whatever is necessary for the plant, this, knowing it is an alternative energy source which will offset some of the coal-fired electricity production that the West is so dependent on. the coal plant that supplies them with electricity is out of sight, though, and there are sure to be a minority who will resist anything remotely industrial in appearance while the mountains fade into the growing coal haze.

the last stop is at a recently completed well that officially has the highest recorded heat gradient in the state of Colorado. I do a portrait of Frank and his wife there, it’s on her property.

(noting that the Chalk Cliffs for which the canyon is named are not actually chalk but rather hydrothermally altered Precambrian granite which in places will crumble in the hand, while those unaltered are hard as … rock!)

after the tour, a last slow soak with those rust-e folks still left, then reluctantly descending from the mountains, in conversation.

the work for the Williamson living room is finally finished and gets installed the day before I arrive. it works out quite okay for the space (opposite a huge picture window looking out on North Table Mountain). the Center hasn’t manifest itself at quite this scale before. the process was time-consuming, but Cyndy, a customer-service rep at Reed Photo where it was printed and mounted made it fairly painless. a good exercise to run through with digital scans of some of the black-and-white negatives scans I’ve been making. not too expensive, and quite spectacular quality on Fuji papers. mounting is expensive, however. but the whole process seems ripe for exhibition development of works that I started sketching 20 or more years ago — in the form of (long)tall scroll pieces that have multiple images on a single hanging piece of paper. gotta get to it! a slow day recovering from the long day before. Rick briefs me on the spike in activity surrounding the recent shale-gas plays in North America. missed that development in the last years, totally. StatOil alone plans 15,000 wells in the Marcellus formation of Pennsylvania and New York states. holy cow!

I join Joanne on a half-day excursion to Verde Springs at the headwaters of the Verde River. she is an old acquaintance from the mid-80′s when she and Mike led biology and geology field trips at the local community college — I was on a memorable week-long one to Death Valley in the winter of 1985. the hike today is part of local Earth Day activities, although she has been leading these monthly for the last year as part of the public awareness campaign that the Center for Biological Diversity is mounting in opposition to the plans for massive groundwater mining by the towns of Prescott, Prescott Valley, and Chino Valley. a representative of the Nature Conservancy was along as well to introduce the land that they recently bought protecting one of the most sensitive areas of the riparian headwaters. there was an eclectic group of folks from a thirteen-year-old to several couples who’ve retired to Prescott.

we started out at the 100-year-old Sullivan Lake impoundment in the middle of Paulden which is fully sedimented and the dam itself is crumbling. it sits at the head of a 20-meter deep canyon cut into a late Cenozoic basalt flow that forms the immediate subsurface for much of the immediate area. Joanne gave a brief overview of the issues that are threatening the Verde headwaters. the primary one being the construction of a huge pipeline by the Prescott city government that will tap into the Big Chino Aquifer, spur rampant development, and have a major impact on the springs that feed the Upper Verde.

we then proceeded to the parking at the Little Thumb Butte Bed and Breakfast where we hiked down to the river at the confluence of Granite Creek and the Verde (not until I did a before group portrait). upstream of the confluence the Verde is blocked by the influx of sediment from Granite Creek and forms a turbid still water lake that is cut into the canyon sediments — clearly the Sullivan Lake dam silting up has deprived the river of its normal sedimentation load and caused heavy down-cutting of the pre-existing flood-plain (which now lies about 8 meters above the current water table). this has largely destroyed the riparian environment above the confluence. I would suggest the first thing to do is to begin to cut the dam down, slowly, so that there can be a incremental release of the 100 years of backed up sediment to bring back the former water-table level and reclaim the upstream riparian environment. this solution is likely impossible given that the upstream watershed feeding Sullivan Lake has significant human development of the huge watershed area which covers Paulden, Chino Valley, and much of Prescott as well as the entire Big Chino Basin.

there are many significant Hohokam archeological sites in the area, structures and petroglyphs alike: the ancient ones were here in force. and disappeared as they did elsewhere in the region. suddenly, in the mid-1300s. unfortunately these are minor sites compared to other more spectacular places, so often petroglyphs are chipped and defaced, and certainly the areas have been thoroughly cleaned of movable artifacts. it is illegal to disturb any findings, but the laws are almost never enforced.

we wander upstream to a wide but now down-cut and parched floodplain with large and elaborate (and inscrutable) petroglyphs chipped into the desert varnish that is present on basalt boulders fallen from the cliffs. then we head back below the confluence where the canyon transforms into a rich riparian environment with the river simply appearing in the midst of the gravels first as a stagnant trickle. as we go on further downstream it grows rapidly with the influx of numerous springs coming in from the north side of the canyon through some fractured limestone (and ultimately from the Big Chino Aquifer. I spot a long gopher snake lounging on a branch in the riverbed. the fish increase in size as we move down stream. evidences of beaver activities are everywhere. we lunch at the Nature Conservancy segment, wade in the creek a bit, head downstream another fifteen minutes and then wander back to the cars in the hot afternoon sun.

Joanne has taken many tens of people on this hike and rightly assumes that once people have experienced the richness of the riparian environment they are more likely to be able to imagine the consequence of its potential loss. as everywhere in the West, and increasingly, in the world, water becomes an object of contention — to some an economic commodity, to others merely another extractable resource, and to the entire ecosystem that depends on every drop, an indispensable ingredient of life.

access to the area is somewhat restricted (much of it privately owned), but the headwaters area that is managed by the Arizona Game and Fish Department as the Upper Verde River Wildlife Area is open to the public. highly recommended!

Palli‘s MFA thesis project nude studies at Concordia is up and running…

Automated nude studies abstracted through geological intervention. Simultaneous geophysical interpretations of notions of nude-ness in the real-time of natural forces. Tectonic ripples through the core of the Earth.

data mining, cross-correlation of disparate data-sets, data interpretation. how to interpret incoming data. how to make sense? does any one making-sense method excel over another? if it’s measured by viability and sustainability, where does art fall? the survivors are the ones left behind. the winners transcend? waiting for the cataclysm. knowing the codes of seismicity, and models of the rumbling earth, and the consequences of it all, taking it onto the body maybe illustrates our disconnect from the elemental. but how to get it back, how to reveal the elemental? dig hands into the dirt!

deep in the shadow of the towering sandstone cliffs, in the dark fracture zone, Pool Creek breathes life into the heat of the mid-summer day.

the Solstice, in Echo Park. what more to ask?

walking upstream in Pool Creek Canyon above the abandoned ranch. cross one branch of that major fault, and there the creek is, totally spring fed, gushing from a sand bank in the center line of that huge fault. continue up the canyon in the dry wash. find a cave with a crude lean-to fashioned in it. hung with clothes, boots, and other items. old, very old. at least 50 years, perhaps 75. on the wall are a couple rock paintings. the clothes are working ranch clothes, the rock paintings appear to be authentic. I do not disturb anything, but am very conscious that my boots are making footprints in the sand floor. continuing up the arroyo, the canyon is defined by subtle and massive structural essences of the rock. on the uplifted side of the fault, the underlying limestone shows in the wash. the down-thrown side is at least 1000 feet lower. dramatic geology, good location for field mapping exercises.

sense a mountain lion at one point, the sage is often taller than my head, so, walking through deep brush, scrambling over rockfalls, peering into the numerous caves formed in the eroded sandstone. shooting many images. this is one of the best walks taken in the area. with plenty of cool places to stop, even in the vibrating mid-day zenith of the Solstice sun — overhangs, caves, some Douglas Fir trees, large old junipers, and areas of over-hung canyon wall, rising a few hundred feet above. the absolute depth is about 800-1000 feet, perhaps a bit more. I do not go as far as I can, but stop for 30 minutes to remove fox-tail burrs from pants, socks, and boot liners, where they are beginning to drill into my skin.

Loki does not accompany me.

we later swim/wade upstream to the Green/Yampa confluence and explore. the Yampa seems a few weeks yet too strong to cross. the current is strong even in the hip-deep areas, making a perfect speed for swimming a hard workout in place. the flow of the Yampa is around 2000 (cubic feet per second, cfs), it was twice that at the beginning of the month (see the USGS water data site). in May it can reach up to 11000 cfs on occasion. the Green is half that, and does not very from around 900 cfs because of the Flaming Gorge Dam. there are a pair of beavers who have found a sheltered cove to hang out in, noshing on aspens up to five inches in diameter which they have cut down and dragged to the river, leaving strange markings in the sand whilst doing so.

the previous day, coming down from the Uinta Mountains, we pass the monstrous phosphate mine which has modified a significant chunk of the south side of the Uintas. I continue work on the Domination of Landscape series to be uploaded later. everywhere in the west is plenty of material for this project. unfortunately.

two rather friendly, though dark granite bears flank the entrance to the building I’m staying in. granite everywhere. that’s always the first thing I notice in Finland. the density of building materials. granite. the window in the bedroom looks out over the entrance from the second floor. another bedroom in Helsinki. realized in conversation last night that I’ve been coming to Finland for 13 years already. wow.

Finnish flags are unfurled on every building. not sure what that’s about.

head down to the Andorra Theater to meet Andrew and Sophea to see the movie The Planet. part of the Lens Politica Film Festival. I see Steve Kurtz walk out of the previous film early. I don’t know him, and didn’t really feel like interacting. he walks away through the mostly empty lobby. the movie is darker than Al Gore’s tour-de-force on the same subject of global warming. and it covers a bit different territory including e-waste, and developing-world attitudes about the problem. experts paint dark pictures, and pictures paint darker pictures. dark. realizing I likely won’t last to 2050 seems auspicious, though there is a curiosity at the idea of catastrophic change, planet-wide. what terrible lessons that would hold for those who are alive. how they will revile the fools of this present age. but the planet has the potential to re-generate another species if (once!) we eradicate ourselves. give it another 250,000,000 years. why not? or is our presence here a unique expression of order not to be replicated ever. what is it about these imaginations of disaster projected by science that seem to fascinate so much? and in the end, it is still us in the developed world, sitting in theaters in our cities, receiving the images of film producers, telling us what is in the world, rather than us out in the world, be-ing there. fully.

Everything depended on geology. Any damn fool could see that the vegetation was directly responsive to the bedrock. Hence birds and wildlife were responsive to it. We were responsive to it. In winter, our life was governed by where the wind blew, where snow accumulated. We could see that these natural phenomena were not random — that they were controlled, that there was a system. The processes of erosion and deposition were things that we grew up with. An insulated society does not see how important terrain is to someone who has to understand it in order to live with it. Much of it meant life or death for the animals, and therefore survival for us. If there was one thing we learned, it was that you don’t fight nature. You live with it. And you make accommodations — because nature does not accommodate. — David Love, to John McPhee in Rising from the Plains

back up a familiar wash in the Marble Mountains, close to another Wilderness-designated area. arriving at dusk after an intermittent drive across the Sonoran desert from Prescott. conversations range over media, culture, education, social systems, software, teaching, art, and, uh, what else? weather, geology.

full-moon hiking up the wash into a zone of chaotic conglomerates, alluvium, diorites, granites, limestones.

as Anthony stated once: re-arriving simultaneity. back in Echo Park. brew some black tea, and wander down to the water’s edge. after craning neck for a long look at Steamship Rock. the river seems high but not near flood stage.

frogs texture the air with the only sounds except for birds. a few people in the small camp ground. maybe a total of 5 people in the whole place. and one just left. hoping that there will be only silence and nature this evening. as my small stove roars while heating water. taking glasses off when NOT looking at this screen. what is it that the glass shields us from? full-tilt apprehension of the world. blurry.

different amphibians make sounds now, others stopping, the texture becomes more varied as I listen more closely, something I can do only when I stop typing and sleep the hard drive. so, I do that now. the battery is low anyway.

fast visions, from the top of canyons rims, looking down, from the bottom, looking up. eyes play across surface that shows infinite ages, black sun-stain, and the textures of frozen dunes. cracks, shear zones, friable under-cutting, plants growing in cracks, fracture zones 200 feet high, they plunge beneath the alluvium into the crust, contorted from slow tectonic spasm, gray on the more horizontal areas, psychedelic lichen colors blend to gray and at the same time, divulge each frequency direct to a single rod and cone. life is exciting.

wander through the tamarisk-free zone that park managers have created as an experiment. started that some years ago, and the regular riparian species appear to be re-colonizing the area. wondering if they used some kind of herbicide on the tamarisk — it looks like even shoots are dead.

standing, neck cricked, for long periods looking at the stars. first time to identify naked eye the Andromeda Galaxy. dim but massive. so far away from any significant Light pollution, the sky takes a couple hours to fully Light up after sunset. so that one can walk by starLight. though there are almost no details.

shoving into the month. already moving again. house emptied more-or-less. now out in the Mojave. near Kelso. on the usual overnight stop between Prescott and San Francisco — in the Granite Mountains southeast of Kelso Dunes — perfect temperature, negligible humidity. so, star gazing bare-chested. Sirius, Arcturus, Vega, Antares near the waxing moon. Jupiter ahead. took the back way to I-40 at Seligman — essentially continuing out Williamson Valley Road for 65 miles. deep through isolated ranching territory on the fringe of the Prescott National Forest and something of a soft terrain of limestone, basalt, some red-rock, and green vegetation cover from the recent two weeks of monsoon. even caught a small storm that cleaned the windshield. making virtuality more transparent.

the Mojave as it always is. despite encroaching red-yellow air at sunset from eLAy and other less tangible impacts from humans, bats are winging about, some animals and birds out there — jack rabbits, nothing else seen, but likely there — and the plants, rocks, contributing to the raw being of place. and the ever-consequent silence laying heavy behind any sound. even starting up the computer for a bit of writing is a noisy industrial incursion. and with battery running down very fast. so that words either have to form now or simply dissipate into the real ether! setting the alarm early to have a slow breakfast, tea, before the sun breaks the boulder ridge immediately to the east. want to get on the road in this black car so that at least all the hours of the heavy mid-day sun are not spent inside it. coffin.

back to look at stars as battery dies.

moving down the Berounka River, back towards Prague, only a bit faster than the floating ice. melancholic in the brown coal inversion haze, winter settled deeply into the Silurian limestones, all the way into their own holy karst hearts, a single winter. only just a blood-pulse of all the winters of the Bohemian Massif. back to when it was a shallow tropical sea.

deciding last night not to tell the students when to arrive for morning start-up for the workshop, so they are up until 0300 or so, keeping me in uneasy slumber, Marcus as well, who ended up staying over in the dorms too. so they are nowhere in sight in the morning. after a hearty oatmeal breakfast which Marcus says is the highLight of his impromptu visit to Beroun so far, we wander out into the landscape to shoot some. ending up on a intrusive gabbro sill, standing high above the railroad station. later, all but two of the students leave for Prague, and later in the afternoon, Milos comes back from Prague, mostly for a meeting with students of the Technical University who are working on some media projects. it is disappointing that this workshop imploded. but I think it is due to the extreme fragmentation and lack of focused attention in the first two days.

later in the afternoon Dr. Cílek, the Director of the Academy of Sciences Institute of Geology pays us a visit and delivers a fascinating talk that wove the human historical, mystical, and mythological elements of the Bohemian Karst region around Beroun with the underlying geology and speleology. we were supposed to go on a day-trip with him tomorrow, but Milos had to cancel it because of a lack of interest of the students. a real shame. it was a stretching excitement to meet someone from a geological pursuit who also shared a profound interest in phenomenal life and be-ing with a clear trans-disciplinary role to re-form traditional thinking models. I would hope for another opportunity to make a tour with him. googling Silurian Devonian Beroun karst trilobite tells much about the potentials! especially the French-Czech paleontologist Joachim Barrande who generated a yet-unparalleled series of comparative studies under the title “The Silurian System of the Center of Bohemia.”

All told, the complete “Systême silurien du centre de la Bohême,” published between the years 1852-1911, consists of eight volumes in 29 tomes in quarto, 8224 pages of text and 1606 lithographic plates. It contains descriptions and figures of 4565 species, with a few exceptions all coming from the Lower Paleozoic marine beds of Bohemia.

dinner later with Milos, Boyana, and Victor at the pizzeria, after visiting a photo exhibition installed in the Lower (Prague) Gate tower of the Beroun city fortifications. a view over what once was a drawbridge. it is too cold for walking around.

6-inches of wet snow, starting last night, but by noon, the sun begins to drive it away rapidly. the normal view from the porch where the photo is taken is about 90 miles all the way to the San Francisco (Kachina) Peaks, the remains of a 16,000-plus-foot stratovolcano (now only 12,633 feet left after a catastrophic explosion before human habitation of the area. the Hopi Indians consider the peaks a holy place, the winter home of the kachina spirits and the source of rain clouds for crops. of course, you can’t see them today. too many clouds

pissing in the night, first the awareness of a full bladder, then the struggle into a wakefulness or forceful sleeping to ignore it all. or checking the air temperature in the stellar darkness. chilling. unzip the bag and squirm out, sandals on, turn around, open the door. skin is less sensitive to the cold with sleep-warmth stored up. intake breath with the brilliance of horizon-to-horizon density of stars. vision is possible. it’s not totally dark. the Orion nebula clearly a nebula. planets almost shedding shadows on dark ground.

up in the morning with the sun cracking the southeast horizon. dense fog filling the entire valley to the south, covering the railroad line and floating the mountains far beyond on a silver sea. have a fast breakfast, load-up, and drive to the Cadiz-Soda Lake road, but there has been so much rain in the last week the road is flooded so instead retrace path to the old Route 66, paralleling the rail line east to Needles. stop at the BLM office and have a chat with Murl, a local with tremendous knowledge of the Mojave area. trade stories and show respective trilobite samples, mine not too bad, considering that I had little memory of the place and that I found outcrops that had not yet been worked over completely. thence on east, into the Arizona (Sonoran) desert with the Saguaro and cholla cactus. each growing in specific and very distinct ranges. The Saguaro limited to south-facing rocky hill- and mountain-sides, never in the flats. the cholla often in north-sloping gravel alluvium. as the local nursery-lady, working in the native flora department said to me — “if it (a particular native plant) isn’t growing somewhere, then it can’t grow there…” without enough help to overcome the negative characteristics of the location, water, soil chemistry, Light, etc — obvious, but profound at the same time…

the desert is green, some areas like a billiard table, wildflowers will be resplendent later in March and April as the rainfall in the last month has already totaled more than the usual annual fall.

clouds race towards the highlands to find the winter storms. still in the lowlands, I trace a prickly pear and a Joshua tree in electron fullness.

regarding the DVD that I pseudo-released a year ago. feeling for an “explanation” of why it is impossible to make a release of a work that is based in an art form that is performed live, juxtaposed with the wide issue of re-production and re-creation.

A performance of a composition that is indeterminate of its performance is necessarily unique. It cannot be repeated. When performed for a second time, the outcome is other than it was … A recording of such a work has no more value than a postcard; it provides a knowledge of something that happened, whereas the action was a non-knowledge of something that has not yet happened. — John Cage

few stars last night. high clouds move in right after the 1700 sunset. by 1900 there is a massive halo around the moon. there is a mouse in the back of the truck, with me. after several wakeful moments waiting to determine the situation, then, seeing the dang critter in profile against the window, I end up getting out of bed and ripping everything out of the back, piece-by-piece until I find a little brown desert mouse and shoo him out. finally fall asleep.

shifted locations, heading north towards Kelso, after a long detour to check out the fossil beds near at the south end of the Marble Mountains. after some poking around, and dredging up very fragmentary memory of place, engaging a coyote in a call-and-response dance around the steep and rugged terrain, I finally focus in on a rich location for the trilobites, or at least, the right place. finding a complete trilobite is something of luck and persistence. in the end I come up with a few fragments that are interesting, one with a head about 5 cm across, but very fragmentary (inarticulate, that is). all the while the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe rail line just to the south stays busy as long trainloads of stuff go by every 15 minutes or so. I make a recording at the Cadiz crossing, but find that my microphone is screwed up, between that and the heavy wind blowing. decided not to tour around too much, so, just headed into the Granite Mountains, stopping in a jumble of granitic intrusives something like Joshua Tree. the wind continues, but the altitude here is about 1000 meters higher. it’s COLD. missing a warm hat. the camping spot has sizable cholla cactus, juniper, and mesquite between the huge boulders. but it is north of the mountains, so the sun goes away at 1530. I cook half-a-dozen eggs, eat them for lunch-dinner, make some tea to warm up, but end up sitting in the cab of the truck to keep warm. hoping that the wind breaks enough to start a fire. if not, it’ll be an early night to huddle in the back.

no break. gusting, chilling. bright moon, few stars shining over orderly and neat blobs of buff phenocryst-laden slow-cooled granite. almost stumbled into the cholla tree that I parked too close to. gotta file the location at a high-level memory for night-retrieval in the case of a bathroom run. it would be a sad time to run into one of those in the dark, or anytime. so, no quiet sky-gazing, or fire-sitting. the box of firewood that I have been toting since the Dolores River trip with Loki, Lexie, and Janet will go back in the truck in the morning. and it’ll be up and away to Livermore as soon as I get up and start moving.

oh, dang, sleeping in the back of the pickup. plenty of room, but my back just can’t handle it anymore. tossing and turning, trying to find the combination of padding underneath, from available materials, to compensate for the flatness. always this way on the first night of camping. now breakfast, it’s windy, so, writing here instead of getting out and putzing around. trying to read and determine the location of the geological photos I got online compared to where I am now.

articulate or inarticulate trilobite (genus Olenellus or Dicellomus) hunting. first gotta find the local outcropping of the Chambless limestone, then trace down in the stratigraphic sequence to the bottom of that. or, figure out where the Zabriskie Quartzite is and trace upwards to several tens of feet of thinly inter-bedded quartz sandstone, shale, and limestone stringers. the Latham Shale is not ridge-forming or resistant to erosion, so it is found by default, identifying the two sequences that respectively over- or under-lie it to determine it’s location. a trained geologist can identify the rock types, but that information is no longer resident in my head in large or intact quantities, so, it’ll be haphazard. I have a few possible locations in mind, looking at the mountain directly above the wash, along with an old mine site which I want to check out.

inexperience and lack of sleep makes the surface seem rougher than it is. standing upright is an acquired skill, hiking is an acquired skill, and bush-whacking, the art of hiking off-trail, is no trivial extension of both those. here in the desert it is made somewhat easier by lack of vegetation and a clear view of possible objectives, but that fact does not make the scrambling across the surface and the constant calculation and re-calculation of optimal pathway any less processor-intensive. that and the fight to staying upright against the effects of gravity.

but. after a day of making two long hikes, it is possible to stand on an uneven talus slope and make a visual traverse without starting to fall over. the body beginning to adapt to the situation. a heavy climb up the stratigraphic column. no trilobites, but I did locate some nice samples of horizontal borrow structures — most likely the Latham Shale, but otherwise, it was difficult to figure out where in the column I was. the non-conformal contacts between several formations are not smooth, flat-lying, or revealed by the surface topography and have absolutely random strike and dip (zip and stroke we called in CSM daze). so, while making an ascent and some traverses, I was jumping through many different samples. of course, my geologic knowledge of the area is extremely limited, with no petrology lab background or even background reading except for the one field-trip document from Rick Miller at SDSU.

The future belongs to portent, as on the night that the first Gulf War started back in 1991, when Hekla vomited back what the US military throwing at the earth in the Gulf region; so, as on the eve of the unfortunate re-election of the Bush Regime, Grímsvötn in the middle of Vatnajökull feels intense gastric distress about future warring and earth-raping, and belches in protest: so it goes. This is the same volcano that caused the massive and catastrophic flooding in the fall of 1996, when the sub-glacial lake of the same name located in a large caldera breached its banks and sent a huge volume of water blasting out under the glacier, coming to the edge at and blowing out a 2 km wide chunk of Skeitharárjökull, cutting a 1 km wide swath through a terminal moraine that stands about 200 meters high and a kilometer across. This flood left giant pieces of glacier ice, some the size of large apartment blocks scattered across the jet-black expanse of the sandur (out-wash plain). And took out 15 km of the national ring road. All in 5 minutes. There’s the story of the local policeman from the town Vík nearby the glacier who had gone out on early morning patrol on the ring road, and forgot his coffee thermos, right after he turned around to get it, he saw the flood in his rear-view mirror. Thank god for caffeine-addiction! MB, Loki, and I cruised through the region and jeep up to the glacier face in the early spring of 1997 where I shot quite a bit of material. Good thing, as all those huge chunks of ice were completely melted before the tourists arrived that summer. Quite an incredible sight though.

Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival… a survival of a hugely remote period when… consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity… forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds… — Algernon Blackwood

drop by Galerie + to give Pálina some papers and to check out the show by Krístján Steingrimur, a former colleague of mine at the Art Academy, and the present Rector of the Fine Arts department. very direct work. intriguing were the samples of stuff (literally) from different locations (GPS/UTM-defined). reminded me of my sand collection. I had collected several hundred small round plastic pill-boxes filled in locations all around the world. then, at one point, during a move-related purge, I took all the samples and layered them in a one-liter pyrex lab bottle which looked great, sitting on my desk in my UNOCAL office. it wasn’t quite full, and I never sealed the top layer, so the first time it tipped over (when I was moving to Boulder from Santa Monica), all the beautifully colored and layered sands mixed to a bottle of uniform gray earth-stuff. so much for anti-entropic efforts.

fall sweeps across the land, from the north. thought it would take a couple weeks, but all the trees are changing, the poplars (Populus alba) as pungent as ever when the air is still, yellowing from the inner leaves, outward to branch ends. the rowans (reynivithur, Sorbus aucuparia) berries hanging in heavy clusters, walking under them, invisible birds (wrens or músarrindil in Icelandic, Troglodytes troglodytes and redwings or skógarthröstur, Turdus iliacus) chatter incessantly somewhere above. only in the rowans. but it doesn’t seem that they are celebrating the berries, more, some nervous discussion about the approaching winter. nah, just noise of be-ing and living in the moment. the higher mountains far to the north, the ones that gate the fjord into the Arctic have now a heavy cap of snow. they do have more-or-less limited permanent snowfields, but the new snow completely covers the tops. in mid-winter, everything is covered from top to sea level. the sides of the fjord, which in the clear air seem much more vertical than they really are, broad and stepped, tinged with alizarin, rust, vermilion, and gold where the miniature Arctic willow and other small bushes are spectrum-shifting. musing on the dip of the Tertiary flood basalts that make up the entirety of this area to a depth of 3000 meters. as a mass, they dip slightly, perhaps 5 degrees towards the center of the island, rising layer on layer towards the sea on the flanks of the fjord. from adiabatic depression of the center of the island persisting from more extensive Ice Age glaciation perhaps? or something else? this feature complicated by the fact that the island underlain by abnormally buoyant magmatic activity, conjectured to be a mantle plume, though this particular concept is presently under contentious revision. the whole island, approximately the size of the US state of Georgia (100,000 km2), is an igneous petrologists and vulcanologists wet-dream (albeit a cold one!) — they focus on vesicles, picrites, and intrusives. of course, foreign glaciologists and their graduate students are always boondoggling here in the summers with expensive field work as well.

staying in Mare’s flat in the Old Town. the building dates from the 13th century. bedroom window wells are a meter deep, lined with the gray Paleozoic limestone/dolomite which seems to be the sole natural building material available here. turns out, it overlies extensive deposits of oil and alum shales as well, the Ordovician Dictyonema oil shales (polevkivi) used to supply the country with a domestic energy source along with peat production. but mining has decreased steadily since the 1980′s because of a lowering in cost of competing energy sources.

Dictyonema oil shale (DOS) is a formation of the Tremadoc stage (Pakerord and Varangu regional stages) of the Early Ordovician. It is often called Dictyonema shale, Dictyonema argillite, alum shale, etc. The name “dictyonema” was given after the benthonic root-bearing [i]Dictyonema flabelliforme[/i], which turns afterward to a planktonic nema-bearing [i]Rhabdinopora flabelliformis[/i]. DOS is not a methamorphosed formation like a common argillite, so the fragments of name “dictyonema” or “argillite” do not carry the true scientific meaning. In our works we stressed the quality of Dictyonema shale to be a low-grade oil shale, but DOS was mostly known as a source rock for uranium and some other heavy metals. — R. Veski, V. Palu

the limestone has a completely different architectural energy from Helsinki’s dense black-red granite, not least because of the age of the buildings it was used in. not sure if this region was at the edge of the Weichselian (Holocene) glacial coverage of the Scandinavian region, but suspect so. how else would the small berg of limestone that the old town rose on have survived? any serious glaciation would have plowed it flat. all the soft sand of the coastline, not to mention the south Baltic basin coast itself suggests that this was the fringe, like the Great Lakes were.

can’t figure out how to turn the sauna on, but, oh well, enjoying the very quiet evenings. noticing my predilection to snap on any media source for a fill of anti-silence. so it goes. and missing the news fix.

Dad passes this evening. after this long struggle, and a long life. code blue, Janet calls, racing into the hospital. Nancy and Mom there, holding his hands. his heart couldn’t bear more time here. I am just home from school, exhausted. stop what I am doing, and concentrate on a slender thread of consciousness. Light some incense. crumble some sage harvested for just this purpose from the depths of Sand Canyon off the Yampa, press it deep into the palms, smelling the released sweetness. burn some, the smoke mixing with the incense. an intuitive impulse says “write the time now.” on a 3×5 card, I write the time, 6:52. a call comes ten minutes later, he has passed. as birth is the surfacing, death is the submerging of soul back into its own, its transitory place. time shivers, small waves move outward, and the bardo of passing opens. unmeasured intuition and connection. still small voices, suspension of the material presence.
(more …)

a long walk along the canyon wall to some kind of fault, at the west end of Steamship Rock, named by somebody who had been to a city on the water at some time in life. the slight dip of the strata at one of the end of the rock shifting to vertical dip at the other end. like the prow of a ship. rising above, the Solarium Deck, the Captain’s Quarters, the row upon row of lower decks, a good half-mile long. the area of vertical layers marks my eye, a huge fault, or maybe a sharp monocline, something. have to look it up when home.

on the dash of the car, the bones from one or several Prairie Dogs that Loki found when Ethan and he were exploring the dog village in northwest Boulder. after breakfast with Marty and her friends there in Boulder.

camping. under the sheer sandstone wall, the night full of wakings for a variety of reasons. Loki with nightmares about flies, ants in his bed, and the pure vibrations of stars through the pick-up cap windows. Milky Way demarcated black sky.

a hike in the Granite Mountain Wilderness area with Uncle Al. we spot a horned toad, lizards, and the cholla and prickly-pear cactus are in bloom. the air is hazy with the wildfires near Baghdad. high winds keep the air feeling cool to the skin, though the sun is intense. I dress with my typical sun-protection of a baseball cap with a bandana under it, hung rampant over the back of my neck and over my ears to protect from the radiation. piñon pines, Arizona thistle, many other plants that I don’t know the names of. granite underneath it all, an eroded batholith. hard angular fragments of pink feldspar and white quartz, sandy soil. black magnetite in the creek beds tells of gold, but there is not much, if any, left to Lighten the money-lust of the eye.

a trip to Keillir, on Reykjanes, on the way to the airport. a volcanic cone that I have been wanting to climb for ages. good imprint to have in mind/body, ’cause it’s visible from many points of the region. And has that special shape. a cone with a slightly rounded top. was feeling like I was hallucinating a bit, looking closely at the moss-covered Quaternary lava surfaces at macro- and micro-scales, stepping in mud, lying in small grass patches out of the cold wind, eating apples and cookies, drinking water, scaling the final pitch to the top, sliding, slipping, and at the top, looking at the surrounding land, small ash cones poking up everywhere, flow upon flow forming the flat matrix of earthly presence, and sure evidence that there is a big effing crack somewhere below the surface just aching to spew again, someday. cloud skimming from North Atlantic, sun pale blue, really.

already some place different. two flights yesterday, one from Reykjavík to Oslo over lovely Hekla, who decided with moment’s notice to erupt on Saturday evening. the second flight ends in a heavy Vestfjordene cross-wind and the pilot almost sliding off the runway, just two or three meters from the edge with the leeward wheels. and a hard double bounce with a sharp list in between. not a nice feeling that time. but back in Bergen. rain, and another workshop. interesting situation. complex groupings of beings. needing to continue extending the research into the dynamics of group interactions. chafing at the cafe9.net morass. the conflict between whatever and whatever. in the invisible arena of remote presence. ah, f**ked-up.

Starting off this morning in Lahti, sunshine, a few snow flurries, and doing a little web work. I just did a rather radical structural change on my site, and there are the usual glitches to overcome… The bus travels along the main route between Helsinki and St. Petersburg which is being widened from two to four lanes. A long-secret fantasy of the geological self materializes in a scaled-down way. When traveling along, I have often thought, or, well, did in the past — it is a childish wish, I suppose — that it would be cool to see a place with all topsoil and alluvium removed. Another words, see a place as it exists on bedrock, stripped of pretense and history and erosional after-effects. One context in which I thought about this frequently was from the lust for placer gold. Gold, with its high density (19 times as dense as water), always concentrates at the bottom of a placer system — that is the main principle that drives the classic gold-diggers of the Colorado, California, and Alaska gold rushes of the 18th century. The gold sinks down through rushing water, it settles to the very bottom, being in most cases the most dense free element in a dynamically differentiating hydraulic system. It is usually covered with whatever black sand, or magnetite is around, a mineral that often is found associated with the typical hard rock sulfide vein deposits of gold. So, stripping all Light alluvium and soil away, one would be left with hard rock with, under the right mineralogical circumstances, the cracks and crannies filled with the heavy placer gold in nuggets, flakes, and dust., Finland, beneath, is another story, one more mundane though perhaps at least a bit sensuous. Where the road is being widened, one step undertaken after all vegetation is razed, is a clean removal of the soil. Underneath this relatively thin skin of organic humus — thin by the temporal proximity of the last Ice Age which only recently even made the possibility of settlement of all of Scandinavia — underneath is the undulating, rolling, positively curvaceous gray and pink granite surface. This mapped infinite half-space glacier-tooled interface was scoured smooth and is interrupted only by the occasional glacial erratic — the rounded boulders that vary in size from large cars to bowling balls.

Structurally, things are different. Days have a different insistence of being which drives them, weeks likewise. Never thought too much about months and years, except now I have to make teaching and travel plans up to ten months in advance. The spring will be another sequence of movements — Iceland, Finland, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Lapland, Sweden, Iceland, and then finally back to the US in June with Loki for the summer. Being relatively immobile here in Colorado with the exception of the drudgery and stress of car-commuting 20 miles to Boulder three or four days a week, well, life is different. Cycling around is a joy, here in the middle of October, the sun is still brilliant and warm, the air, well, during the day, is still warm, though there have been several nights of frost already. Colorado has become back into memory and sensation a realness which draws me out. Looking backwards to the times in Iceland, how I could lose my social being, my need for others completely unfilled, the interjection of the jealousy of the ex to keep others at bay. And how different I feel here, watching Self and Others age gracefully. Careers formed. Lives forming. Eah, but nothing that I can mediate by language pulls me close to what is REALLY happening. There is a vast flux of human society that is completely un-represented. Representation. Why even care? It is possible to move powerfully in a region of … (case closed)

In a real conversation, a real lesson, a real embrace, in all these, what is essential takes place between them in a dimension which is accessible only to them both … If I and another “happen” to one another, the sum does not exactly divide. There is a remainder somewhere, where the souls end and the world has not yet begun. — Martin Buber

And there it is. Life in the offing. I had a rough week. Intense actions. Friday evening, I end up shopping on the way home. that is a concentrated activity that I don’t enjoy. food. shopping. I hated it in Iceland, for sure. but more here. Like going shopping for anything, it just doesn’t seem to be fulfilling … telephone call … I strike my forehead after I hang up. she was a real love of mine, but I guess I never told her. undeclared love is such a lost anomaly. always rooted in the past, that vanishing of any knowing. ahmmmmmmm. but the recognition, the coming-to-know of the past is such a rare thing. anyway, I never knew what love was then anyway. I start thinking of the area in Italy that has been seeing so many earthquakes. I’ve spent a fair amount of time there (although not since 1994). I am bummed that a good friend, a painter, Claudia Piell, has two houses in Umbria where that terrible series of quakes has been happening … Another sculptor friend in Finland was going to be doing a collaborative show with Claudia in Venice around now. No email and the regular post for both of us is forwarded multiply, so I won’t hear from them for some months. Kaisu, the Finnish artist, sends me a photo and letter. I miss Kathryn’s visit to, Finland in June and July to see Kaisu and do a workshop there. But I wonder about the places where Claudia and I were in Umbria in 1989. I need to revive some of those images. before time passes too much.