long day with a 12-mile round-trip trek into Sycamore Spring. could not have made the drive in with anything less than a Mercedes Unimog, a Hummer would have been too wide. SUVs don’t have tires with enough bite. so, two-foot-drive it is. better that way. though tiring even when the air temperature is modest. sun was not.

there are cattle being grazed on the BLM land that surrounds the wilderness, and technically they are not supposed to be near the spring or in the wilderness area at all, though I find one gate completely down, and cow shit in some stages of decomposition all to frequently. cattle cause tremendous shifts in the landscape. although it would be hard to tell exactly how or what aside from the obvious disturbances of the soil from the cloven hooves, and the dessicated pies. they re-distribute large quantities of grass and other seeds through the grazing and shitting process.

a frequent thought exercise while making these long walks is to imagine the landscape manifesting as a time-lapse film rewinding back to pre-settlement, and pre-human times. this also purges the frequent song loops that arise while walking — some inane Abba riff will get stuck in head, god knows how (or maybe god places this curse of cultural meme-play on solitary human stragglers). the loop will keep time with the walking pace.

the moment I step off the jeep track and enter the wilderness area beyond the slender fiberglass demarcation signs, up a wash, the energy of the place shifts. walking along another much older jeep trail that has been unused for years one sees the damage as well as the natural regeneration process overtaking the road, destroying it eventually. once the surface is defaced by a vehicle it rapidly erodes with the sparse but often violent rains. sections of the trail now are reduced to a single track or narrow gullies making it easier to bush-whack.

a mile or so down the track is Sycamore Spring, near the head of Peoples Canyon. it is bursting in its place, in this time. at the mouth of a narrowing deep canyon: upstream the dry wash has a trickle of life for at least 200 yards up from the actual spring, a trickle moving across a white bed of welded tuff. shallow pools of tepid and greasy water buzzing with flies, hornets, bees. the spring itself is surrounded by huge sycamores about to leaf out, some substantial cottonwoods, jumbles of downed wood, deep dried leaves, juniper, myrtle, mountain mahogany, segueing within 50 feet on either side back to hard-core desert like all the surrounding space for at least 20 miles to the east and 300 miles to the west, 500 to the south and north at least. saguaro, cholla, teddy bear, barrel, beavertail, mesquite, ocotillo interspersed with short grasses and flowers. the transition is stark and stunning. I am greeted by a pair of Peregrine Falcons who, for a few moments make my presence welcome, but only as an interloper. one sits high in a sycamore screeching occasionally, the other circling on the thermals, they eventually glide down stream to the deeper canyon. there are several deep pools under the trees covered with a yellow skim of pollen, numerous frogs and tadpoles are in the water. this is a wild place.

first pix of the year — I always forget to switch the white balance as I jump around, so, violet and yellow skies, huh? doesn’t quite look like this on the Peavine Trail, but it was a bright winter day, warm, and that made for a very fine 15 mile ride with no trouble from mountain lions. good.

the second anniversary of the accident. while doing yoga, the body muses on the possibility that the technological solution to the shattered spine will fail, catastrophically, one day when in the Warrior One Pose. rendering the body in two halves. one which does not function, and one that might.

There is no happiness for the man who does not travel. Living in the society of men, the best man becomes a sinner. For Indra is the friend of the traveler. Therefore wander! — Aitareya Brahman

so, movement beckons, re-reading Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines, and recalling the little snippets of antipodal behavior that resonate. going walkabout, as the Aboriginals do, seems to be a highly developed form of psycho-geography with a substantial spiritual element fused into the embodied core.

but two years later, I am calmly ecstatic when I am able to do a six hour bush-whack in a landscape where I recognize most of the elemental features as well as the more universal vibe of the place. to do the same in an unknown place would cause a bit of stress, but with an equal dose of thrill. to see the unknown world, absorb the sounds, colors, the people, the life. what more can one ask in this incarnation?

a dying fire, late in the moonless night, crickets singing all the while, on the leeward side of the summer solstice.

the Enigma of Presence. being here is the initial event that triggers all else.

there in the other national park, not this one, feeding the animals is simply a specific event/action that further distorts the fabric of the local universe, where presence causes wholesale materialization of the local universe itself.

so, leaving the world is the ultimate de-materialization from impressing that outer world. talk about reducing carbon emissions!

finally, Iceland surfaces with an honest account of the genesis of much of what appears on the island as an exotic landscape. well actually it is a BBC expose by a reporter who happens to be married to an Icelander. severe deforestation, followed by the primary surface vegetation, grass, being totally eaten by sheep, who kill grass when overgrazing by eating the roots. followed by the normal strong winds, and there goes the 3 – 10 meters of rich volcanic topsoil, straight into the Atlantic. you are left with a hard cobble surface with partly eroded stones of varying size. occasionally you can see the process as it is happening — mesas sitting some meters above the hard pan surface, mesas made of topsoil, capped by thick shaggy green expanses of grass. all the land was once up there, covered with grass and trees. (more images)

spring is here. birds in the garden are in a frenzy of be-ing.

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.

so much stimulation. skunks, 8-point bucks, fish, minnows, crayfish, bats, Mormon Locusts, lizards, snakes, sage grouse, sagebrush, the Yampa, the Green, Steamship Rock, the sandstone, the sky, storms, swimming in place in the river, hiking Sand Canyon, waiting for rain. two days in Echo Park is a lifetime of regeneration. will definitely bring Loki here. 14 years ago I was here last. it has changed. the broad park with 20 or so huge cottonwood trees is half gone, consumed by the river, the trees lying like skeletons of monstrous beasts in the low water. that whole area is now closed for camping, and a ‘regular’ campground established at the point where the road exits the canyon on the way down. nicer that way, gives the wildlife a better chance in that area. strange how much the topography has changed, though, I had not expected it. not to mention the colonization by tamarisk. that has changed the shoreline. watching the stars last night, sleeping in the back of the truck, head on the tailgate, waking at regular intervals, seeing the sheer wall above and behind me, changing color, shade, as morning approached. and the rotation of stars silhouetted by the massive cliffs in every direction. no bugs to speak of, but tonight there seems to be many.

Sand Canyon, a long hike starting rather late in the morning, so that when I reach as far as I feel like going, it is in the peak of the heat and Light radiation bath. early on, there were plenty of cool shady spots to catch, resting in the silence, but on the way back down to the river, the heat and Light was searing the eyeballs. pressing down on the head. and making everything stand out in etched presence. (find edge). convolve the edge with a Dirac Delta function to send it to infinity. and it becomes the key value in knowing, at least in the moment. for each manifestation of energy in the universe, the critical point is the edge. how to maintain the energy right to the edge. but not beyond. (an aura is the inability to stop energy at an edge — it suggests a permeability, or that energy permeates everything. spreading to infuse the next manifestation. intertwining with and loving the Other.

a raptor harries me from above: death from above (the calling-card moniker of the Charlie Company 1st Battalion 8th Cavalry), rapacious cawing, echoing off the walls of the canyon, its yearling young joining in short flight or resting on a ledge far above me when I stopped to watch from under a cottonwood tree. I am not a welcome addition to the area. later I covertly watch the same raptor giving the same abuse to a passel of ravens that were coming downriver. ravens are everywhere that I have lived in the last years. there was one raven in Iceland, a huge one, who would come into town in the winter, I would cross his path in the crisp and dark mornings outside the house on my way to the bus stop at the top of the hill. he would greet me in a gutteral “craaaaaaawwwwwk.” I would look up, and wish for the best that spirit can offer to another being. and recall the ravens of Kehlsteinhaus, Hitler’s “Eagles Nest” near Berchtesgaden in the Austrian sub-Alps. the place looking like the home of the Nazgul in Lord of the Rings, in a greasy fog. while down below in the valley, American military officers relaxed and played golf. spoils of war. carrion.

a day so full of unspoken in-press-ons (no other human contact save for a few limited conversations) that spirit simmers at the surface. want to keep it there. will be here again in the near future. even though it is not so easy on the car, but if this is the main thing I do with the car, well, it will be worth it.

Classes begin tomorrow at this Institution of Higher Learning. What drives it? The desire to learn, the quest for knowledge, or simply the will to accede to the power base that stands ascendant in this Nation-state. Recalling the skies here is a pleasure of deep memory and mindfulness that brings my eyes some great energy, although I still am in the state of feeling that the outdoors is hostile. A left-over from life in Iceland. Yet, as though far away, my skin luxuriates in the sensations, drawing me, a topological being, forwards into the landscape. Driving is a safe of passing through it all, but I see many things to be imaged.

Loki is up early because he is sleeping on the bed in the kitchen and there are only Light curtains on the windows. I have something of a rare hangover (timburmann, I think, in Icelandic, for wood-head). Shortly after breakfast we head down to the swimming pool with Rebecca Rún, Loki’s island playmate who lives next door. The pool doesn’t open until an hour later because the electricity is off somewhere. Friends Hoffí and Kristín arrive on the 1330 ferry, so MB goes to meet them. I stay swimming with the kids. Late in the evening, around midnight, after a big dinner of leg-of-lamb I head to the north end of the island on a too-small borrowed mountain bike that I know will give me sore thighs tomorrow. There is a dirt road all the way to the Light house that stands on the highest point of the island about two-thirds of the way north.

The north half of the island is private property, but MB called earlier in the day and got permission for me to ride to the end.

In general, visitors are discouraged, but this is mainly to protect the vast number of breeding birds. The island has the largest single breeding population of arctic terns in Europe. These are incredibly fascinating and beautiful birds. I’m not an ornithologist or avian freak, but I can watch the terns for hours. It is unbelievable that they fly all the way from South African and Antarctic waters or so, each spring — although, watching them, you understand immediately that they represent a rare peak of efficiency and grace-in-motion. The entire ride I am accompanied by terns and other birds who swirl up from the heather and grass to run relay with me for one reason or another, all making their own characteristic sounds. I was wishing I had brought fresh batteries for my tape deck … The sounds are varied and mostly piercing, and in the case of the tern, they can actually presage a physical attack from the birds, whose sharply tapered beaks are potent weapons. Other birds on the island are Oystercatchers, Whimbrels, Curlews, Snipes (yes there is such a thing!), Woodcocks, Ptarmigans, Godwits, and Skuas. Birds comprise the vast majority of living things in Iceland, I both ignore them and concentrate on them. Although I don’t startle any Eiders, there are plenty of them on the island — usually seen segregated in the coastal waters — the brown females with a passel of chicks, and the black and white males swimming in a group. I recall once on Hrísey, out hiking on the east side of the island, I saw one of the score or so known White-Tailed eagles in the country doing some serious aerial acrobatics as it was being attacked by a group of terns. I was last at the north end of the island four years ago, in the very spot with Nick

Chris

Debra, Stefan, and MB, who was, at that time, almost eight months pregnant with Loki. On that night it was rather clear, or at least we got to see the sun make its transit, grazing the surface of the ocean direct to the north of us. Tonight, there is a gray pall hanging over the ocean, actually touching it just a few kilometers off shore, so the sun is not seen, except indirectly in the constant shifting of the Light omnipresent. I stay at the end of the island for a couple hours, enjoying the solitude, knowing this will be as far as I get to isolation in the coming months. The Solstice has taken on special psychic meaning for me since I moved to Iceland, and the Summer Solstice is actually a heavy time in that it is the moment when the days begin to contract until they vanish into the blue-blackness of the Arctic winter which is a complete immersion. Total immersion in a substance that is anti-Light, a Light that pulls one deeply into the earth from the other hemisphere, the one that is facing the Light … Somehow, although the landscape here is apparently vast and constantly receding from the eye, there is another aspect to it, that of closeness. When the wind dies down, and often wind still is characteristic of the midsummer sunsets, the surrounding space contracts until it appears as a room, a geometrically bounded space converging on the eye. It is knowable in a Cartesian way, within the span of the body. This is exactly what happens where I am restlessly pacing. The edge of the cliff 200 feet down to the ocean appears as clear as the corner of a room. The grassy hummock behind me is etched with a clarity that makes it sensually two dimensional. The sky is just … there. Waterfalls, where streams fall down the cliffs that line the outer few kilometers of the fjord, can be heard clearly though they are at least 6 kilometers away. They are … there. Distance is relative or just doesn’t seem to factor in perception.