head out to Sycamore Spring earlier this morning to allow for a longer period to explore. four liters of water rather than two. forgot to take the pruning saw to take out some of the tamarisk trees growing in the wash. will do next time out. how the cattle wear ways through the bush: I followed many of those ways, but they are, in fact, infinite in number and go nowhere but elsewhere. leaving spaces where anything edible is gone. and the microbial soil is crushed and eroding. only splattered shit left behind in various stages of dessication. just as all other forms of life process energy and leave waste behind. eating on the move, because there isn’t enough nutrition in one place to really graze and shit one of those classic UFO-shaped pies, those are the product of pastoral abundance. the desert is not abundant in any way except in lack thereof. it takes at least 100-200 acres of this land per cow per year, possibly double, triple that. why even raise cattle here is the loud question I would ask the ranchers. how long does a cowpie last? here they are hard and indeed could be made good use of in a cow-pie-throwing contest. at the immediate moment of exit from the humid gut, the pies fester with flies, the hairy and loud kind with the technicolor backs and eyes. in a frenzied dance likely for the water content alone. fast dessication hardens a crust which keeps a core amply moist for some days. this attracts some kinds of burrowing creatures who build tunnel complexes that riddle the whole-ness. the pie eventually loses it’s bilious green color and grades into a bleached beige of a rag used to wash a car a few times. they seem to persist in this form — dried and digested grasses, cellulose — for a long time, years to be sure, possibly decades? probably a decent fuel source. how many acres used to gain one pound of meat on these beasts?
then there is the presence today of snakes. I see seven. hopefully not prophetic. four were pretty positively rattlers. that based on sound and sight. the other three were not. I got one good audio fragment of one of the rattlers which I shall upload eventually. chilling. the repeated encounters make me wish for a pair of leather snake chaps. it also transforms my attention into a focused exercise of moving awareness. watching everywhere within a couple meters (yards) of the feet. (recalling that a rattler can strike a distance two-thirds of its length) and one of the snakes I saw was easily a six-footer, as fat, as they say, as a man’s arm.
after an alternately adrenaline-pumped and relaxing hike, Sycamore Spring greets with greener trees, the peregrine falcons, the other birds, gurgling water, frogs, dragonflies, cattail, the snakes, and evidence of more — javelina, deer, and such. after a lunch of sardines, avocado, Wasa rye crackers, and nuts, I decide to continue down the canyon as far as seems prudent. the width varies as does the water quantities, as the spring water goes in and out of sandy sections. I have to wend my way around boulders the size of small cars to trucks, worn smooth. at one point a huge Cottonwood has died and fallen across the canyon, immediately below that is a pool cut deep into the rock, it is full of water, and is at least eight feet deep. several frogs are chilling at one side. I scramble my way downstream for about an hour, but decide after a particularly challenging section to begin to head back. any injury here could easily be fatal although if capable of getting back out of the canyon, the cell phone might function, otherwise, it would be days before help would arrive.
the hike back is tiring when I take a bushwhack short-cut which cuts off about a mile, but the trade-off between rougher terrain (very much so!), and that mile is more than paid for by the amount of ravine scrambles and having to carefully scout the way ahead. storm, thunder, a spattering of rain, wind makes the truck tremble; full moon, the waking moon, stand, look, ponder, wander, stand, look, watch, meditate, mind gradually emptying of words and being replaced by the absolute anti-symbolic regime of things-as-they-are. not words for things, not pictures of things, but the simple imbricate truth of thing-as-it-is — immersed, connected, continuous, and very much alive. reductive thoughts purged. and now simply embodying the form of wisdom impressed on the sensory body, not the meaning: where next to place the foot, what not to touch. what looks different, what is the same.