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.
