Today, after that small amount of moisture in the night, the entire place is vibrating. When standing still, there is a loud and continuous background buzzing that is non-specific in source direction. Standing near a particular blossoming plant, there is the sensation of particular bees and other insects doing their thing, but otherwise, there is this background humming that has no point source but rather simply is — like the hissing of blood in the ear.
On the way in to Sycamore Spring both times, I note the existence of a lone Cottonwood tree growing up in the middle of a lightly sloping alluvial fan below a sizable unnamed mesa. The only possibility for a Cottonwood to be there is water, and plenty of it. A good objective for a bushwhack. After the numerous encounters with slithering and rattling things yesterday, attention to movement and especially foot placement becomes aligned with breathing. Of course, any movement has to be calculated when in such an environment. Miscalculated movement will be punished by some extremely sharp and pointed object intersecting and likely penetrating the body wall. I escape these four days with only two of those painful encounters, both arising in the thin slice of time between a visual scan of upcoming terrain and a glance at some specific object within the field of view. Then aiiii-shit! as the pain jolts upwards from compromised shin.
This bushwhack takes me to the Cottonwood. It looks to be around a hundred years old, there are a few other water-seeking plants, a tamarisk, rooted in a whitish rock ledge. Apparently some near-surface water is available. Paradise in the shade under the tree. Except for the stench of death which I trace to the desiccating corpse of a cow 20 meters away in the scrub. The shifting wind brings eye-watering wafts on occasion, but otherwise I spend an hour or two soaking up the energy of being under the lush green canopy surrounded by hard-core Sonoran desert. It is a singularity like Sycamore Spring on a smaller scale and with no running surface water.
Minuscule F/A-18 fighters are frequently dog-fighting in the airspace above. In the day and night. Moving in and out of unaided vision, tightly circling each other, dropping flares, and, with afterburners, roaring in such volume that all ambient sound is swallowed. For our nation’s security. So it goes.
Otherwise, commercial flight contrails gradually fill the sky with high-level cirrus clouds that soften the terrain and its re-radiative impact, but this effect diminishes the Light of the desert — and with that, its nature; along with distorting the energy flux among the organisms living here. They did not evolve with spent jet fuel clouds hanging overhead to shade them from the burnishing sun. This is a problem. Just another problem that the human species have applied through their amplification system — this is the waste product, waste energy, which alters the environment.
The rest of the day is a slow and rambling return to base. Run across some small mining digs, one trenched into a pegmatite dike that includes some coarsely crystallized black tourmaline with its classic trigonal (rhombohedral hemimorphic) cross-sections. Someone has tramped this land, and in the hunt for extractive wealth, has, literally, left no stone un-turned. The West is everywhere scarred by these digs from small two-meter test pits to the massive kilometer-wide open-pit gashes. That mineral bonanza, that natural ‘surplus’ regime drove and still drives the development of the West. Straight north of here about 15 kilometers, is the Phelps-Dodge copper/molybdenum open-pit monstrosity. Without which, well, as the old Colorado School of Mines bumper sticker suggested — Ban Mining, Let the Bastards Freeze in the Dark — the developed world could not exist.
