I held misguided beliefs about this valley in my younger, more unconscious days. I had no esteem, no regard for the geologic structures that dominate here. I believed it all to be dead, inert, and consequently immune to damage and not worthy of respect or study. I had as little regard for its fate as a child would in stripping leaves from a branch or branches from a live tree. I trod over these rises and ridgelines carelessly. I kicked loose huge boulders atop canyon walls and watched in delight as they gouged the hillside at regular intervals and shattered in the creek beds. I cursed the narrows up the creek there for nothing more than impeding my progress upstream. My disrespect was revealed in countless ways, and it was borne by the land in silence. Now I know better. This valley is alive.

Come down here into the wash with me. I want to show you how I came to this discovery. It was this granite outcrop here that opened my eyes. See how this wall is inclined?  These veins in the rock, coursing through from the upper left there to the right corner here at our feet, give the secret away. An unexpected window view into an entity. It is as if a tissue sample was left under a microscope in a morgue, with the corpse long pronounced dead, and yet the cells on the slide still pulse and squirm. Notice how the veins are lighter in color than the surrounding granite. The geologists say this is simply a crystallization of feldspar caused by the differential cooling of magma. I know better. These veins are interlaced throughout the valley. This land pulses with a heart of its own. This valley is alive.

Go ahead – reach out and trace those veins with your fingers. Cool to the touch – not much body heat in this valley. The heart must pulse once every hundred million years or so. I made it a habit to come to this wall on full-moon nights and watch the sheen reflected from the granite, able to tell the veins only by omission. Such is, I believe, the way it is in our lives as well. A concerted effort to observe the silences, the dead spots, oftentimes reveals the truth of matters.

It has occurred to me that the washes and gullies of this valley, the rounded rises and sharp channels, the convolutions of this terrain must look like a fissured cerebral cortex exposed to probing from the peaks. A graphic image, no doubt, but a metaphor that captures the essential nature of how we come to know the intangible parts of  those dear to us. When we pursue a deeper relationship with a loved one, we naturally turn to questions and speculations on the personality, the temperament, and later, in an attempt to get beyond the superficial assessments, the psyche, these peculiar amalgamations of energy, structure, and pattern that coalesce into the faces we recognize and love.  It is no different than seeking to know the lay of the land.

This wash, I have discovered, is one of the most revealing places to delve into these substrates. Look at the sides here, where the flash floods have abruptly stripped away a veneer. Cobbles, all sorts, all sizes, embedded in this fine sand matrix like raisins in pudding. The variety is staggering. Every time I look at this display, I am overtaken by surprise, as if I had stumbled over an idea, a construct, a subset of beliefs in my own head whose presence was unknown to me. Pull a cobble out there – see the depression it leaves in the wall, a smooth hemispherical hole. The sand is damp and cool to the touch. You have removed something of substance, some element of the land’s psyche just as surely as if you had excised a fear from the human mind – fear of silence, of inactivity, of surrender. To me, these stones are reminiscent of specific mannerisms, the habits as elemental as building blocks comprising and defining a personality. They are as hard and resistant to change as concrete. In time, the gap will either harden enough to support its place or crumble, causing a small slump here.

 Up and down this wash you can see several of these slumps. Here is one. Grab a handful of pebbles there. I am a firm believer in certain principles: elements of the moment portend the future, particulars of the microcosm inerrantly reveal the macrocosm. You can read the entire psyche of the valley by sorting through the pebbles you hold. What have you got there?

There’s a conglomerate. This dull one, a dolomite from upcanyon. This – this is black sandstone, hard to tell from the basalt in the valley. I’ve yet to see black sandstone outside of this valley. This gray, elongated one with the green edge – shale, stained with malachite, also from upcanyon. It has an interesting connection with the lone hill there in the middle of the valley.

The theory currently in vogue in academic circles is that the hill is an isolated chunk of an ancient landslide, originating either in the west there, or behind us to the northwest. Sometime long ago, an invisible plane of strain manifested into a sudden crack, and the break was swift, devastating. Imagine hundreds of thousands of tons of intact fury, a chunk as big as a city block, rumbling down this drainage. You could not watch such a spectacle without approaching a schizophrenic break, I am convinced. Stress, breakdowns, these cataclysmic events trigger all sorts of subjective responses. Stress can be a palpable medium, setting up sympathetic vibrations through layers and layers of stratification to bring about unexpected effects in areas far removed. To the south, for example, there is a spring that was opened up by these rumblings. It gushes now with an unspent sorrow.

The hill came to rest where you see it. There are two formations visible in the hill, both younger in age than the formations outcropping at the mouths of the western drainages. The shale is the lower formation. This fact is the primary reason for the theory. Then, too, there are smaller rises scattered up the valley floor on the alluvium that may also be remnants of that slide.

Hard to believe, I know. This desert seems as permanent and unyielding as anything could be. The strata and intrusions give an impression of immutability and strength. It is largely a false impression, a facade like the ones we all wear everyday to attest to our competence, our cheerful optimism, our alleged self-esteem. But this desert’s history is a chronology of excess and its consequences, strengths, yes, but with attendant weaknesses, the exploitation of those weaknesses by outside or inherent phenomena, and a lack of integrity. It is a history of massive failure masked only by aeolian graces.

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