Gone Analog - Part III The Rock Man and the woman who follows. File this one under Julie didn't read all the signs quite right and was the Rock Man full of it or not???

December 10,

Don't tell anyone but I think I hit Thumper

I don't know how I forgot to tell you last night, must have been snow blind or something, but I think that I may have run over Thumper last night.  Out in the middle of nowhere, the bunny was waiting for someone to light the road so he could cross it.  As I drove by, he ran in my path.  I felt a tiny little thump.  Oh no.  I said goodbye to him like my Hari Krishna friends told me to do many years ago and kept driving.  Oh dear.

I think that I have a good reason for wearing a watch.  Because I forgot a flashlight.  Once again, I am atop a mountain, well a smallish one, far away, but I am up there.  And I am photographing and walking and photographing and watching the sun go down.  At first I am concerned about how long until sunset.  I have walked quite a ways up, but finally I just decide that the sunset is more interesting.  I tell myself, no more pictures and then, there is something else that I see.  So anyway, I end up on the mountain with the sun down, though the last golden emanations are still lighting the way down.  I am off the hill in time to watch the sky turn many different colors of pinks.  Sublimely mine.

And it turns out that I was a bit of a sleuth today.  Hunted around the town and talked to various and sundry peoples.  Found out that this guy that I am going out with tomorrow - though no confirmation yet this evening - is quite an event.  He has published 24 or 25 books.  He had an article in the local paper that caused quite a stir.  Says that he can read the petroglyphs, that they are actually a language.  He has found a cave filled with artifacts that is still intact, worth big bucks.  The Forest Service is pissed because he is possibly inciting people to hunt for the goodies and that he is contradicting popular wisdom on the glyphs.  Well, we all know that tendencies are for society to be condescending when it comes to estimating other cultures.  Why couldnt  there be some kind of written word or communication.  Why ever not?  Hopefully, the Rock Man will come through.  He promised to take me to some "beautiful places" and it should be a very long day.  Keeping all extremities crossed to increase my odds of success.

And you know how sometimes people just need to tell you their whole story?  Happens often to me.   Anyway, this woman at the Bureau of Land Management is doing that today.  Also, she's giving me all sorts of tips on places to go looking for minerals and other cool things.  She tells me that if I'm going into the cave I need to be sure to bring a gun.  Now, I cannot imagine what would be in that cave that I would need a gun for.  Did you guess?  I would have thought men but she said that they are full of snakes.  Yikes.  Now, I have no problem with snakes in a general sort of a way.  I have even been known to throw rocks at rattlesnakes when I am far enough away to get them off their ass so to speak so that I can see just how big they are.  Just so you know, this strategy usually pisses them off and they do decide to come and get you.  Just in case you were wondering.

Anyway, I told them that I was under the impression that snakes went dormant in the winter.  Not all of them they assured me.  Well great.  I am certainly remembering this as I am climbing down the faces of boulders this afternoon - just exactly where a snake would be to soak up the last rays of warmth.  I don't mind snakes that arent poisonous.  It is the ones that make you swell up and turn twenty shades of purple before you die that I don't want to meet.

So, we'll see what pans out for tomorrow.  Wish me luck.  Other than that, I am ready to hit the road.  Been here long enough.  I'll come back but for right now I am ready to leave.

I am sure that there are other details that escape me but this is all that I am capable of remembering at this point in this particular day.

December 11

Anticipation

I am heading off with the rock man this morning.  Waiting for him to come and pick me up right now.  We're going to Las Cruces and a couple of other sites hopefully.  I am completely loaded down with lenses and film.  Taking an ice chest to leave some of the unexposed stuff in the car.  Exposed film never leaves my sight.

I don't know if I was ever meant to be in one place for very long.  Indoors can be such a prison for me.  I love to be out, especially photographing.  I prefer a longer leash, fresh vistas and dirt roads that vanish into the horizon.

December 11

The Rock Man and the woman who follows.  File this one under Julie didn't read all the signs quite right and was the Rock Man full of it or not??? 

What to say about today. Disclaimer, disclaimer - so much male preening behaviour, that the stories that I am about to relate may or may not be related to any sense or form of reality.  But, they were in fact all told to me by the Rock Man and so I report...

We drove out to Las Cruces and hiked in to a site that was a mile or two back into a ravine.  On the way out of town we got stuck in a roadblock for the missile range and sat for around forty-five minutes.  We stopped to have breakfast burritos at a place called Burger Time before heading off the road.

The area is known as Lucero Draw.  We parked off the road near a factory that was sufficiently nondescript.  The terrain is fairly monotonous in a desert sort of a way.  Once you look closer many little secrets are given up, but only if you take the time to inspect the lay of the land.  The smells are so wonderfully minimalist.  I love the fragrance of the desert.

 
The rock man and I talked the whole time.  Really it was more like an interview of sorts.  He told me that nothing happens by accident and he had been thinking that he needed a photographer to help illustrate some of his work and then I call.

He picked me up at the motel and pretty much as we got started I began to hear all about the government being the third antichrist, all the tax money that the IRS takes though they are not an elected body and on along this vein.  He also has some absolutely priceless stories about being shot at, bombed, strafed and arrested while doing his job out here in the land of the top-secret boondoggle.  I didn't know that part of the Star Wars, Ronnie Reagan's not Steven Speilberg's, was out in this area.  And there is some enormous laser thing that blasts things to hell.  Once he was out on a job just in front of the barn doors that keep the thing under wraps when he sees the M P's hauling ass, just bouncing in their little jeep over the dunes.  He is telling himself that they must be having a good time otherwise why would they be doing something that looks like they are being pounded to shit.  Anyway, the doors are opening; these guys come screaming up saying that they are about to be killed. He explains that they have a permit and the badge and these guys must know that they are out here.  The M P's insist that whatever the circumstances, they are about to be blinded or worse by the laser that is being turned upon them.  Get the hell out, crash through the gates, whatever.  There being no demand for blind archeologist, archeology by Braille not being perfected, they follow the M P's and spend the next few hours hunkered down behind a dune.

I didn't realize how absolutely Wild West it was out here.  We drove by many famous massacre sights.  The Apaches were completely dominating the territory for a brief time.  Horrific killings, dogs whose rear legs were cut off and left to bleed to death, oxen tied up and left to a slow death, people scalped and all sorts of really ugly things like that.  He is a walking date book full of times and dates and details.  He has worked on excavating many of the sites of these massacres.  He has been in a cave where Billy Kid (no "the") holed up with his gang and carved their initials.  He grew up finding arrowheads, cavalry buttons, sabers and all of the other deleterious of the passage of the wild Wild West.

Talking of caves and snakes he confided that he didn't bring his gun because he didn't want to scare me.   Did you know that the German Air Force is here too?  The Lufftwaffe.  He says that we have sold off the country and pretty soon we will be taken over by foreign armies from within.  Nostradamus, Hopi legends and all of that stuff.  These are not things that I necessarily want to be hearing from someone who is driving me off into the middle of the desert somewhere.

So off we drive to our dirt path up the arroyo.  We start off and he walks faster than anyone else that I have ever walked with.  I am carrying gear and all and so just trail behind a bit, trying to keep up.  I suppose that is an occupational thing.  When you survey places for ruins and archeologically significant sites before someone can dig or otherwise disturb the area, why would it pay to walk at a normal pace?  I point out that his pace is far faster than mine but it doesn't slow him down.  I keep up somewhat, wondering if I am slowing him down.

And by this time he is telling me that he grosses big bucks in his business.  Alarm, alarm, alarm.  This is a male preening behaviour that I am very familiar with.  He explains to me how he has read these Petroglyphs and predicted things.  We look at the symbols that I have taken as one thing and he explains what he believes their meaning to be.  The ones is this arroyo are basically centered around the plunge holes.  A plunge hole is where the water falls off of the thick layer of sedimentary rock in this particular canyon and forms a deep hole or grotto in the ground.  This would have been not only a source of water for the Indians but a good place to hunt for the animals that come to drink.

There are heads drawn with a line of thought connecting them, the layout of the arroyo and places to find water carved deeply into the rock.  There is one rock that has somebody's idea of erotic or just a graphic female figure.  There is a natural formation that is a deep hole cleft into the rock; black rock of some sort surrounds the opening.  Without going into graphic detail, suffice it to say that I have just seen my first erotic stone art. Faintly carved in, at least hard to see in this particular light.  Hard to imagine just who did this one.

Anyway, I am there taking pictures and he goes on to tell me that he is going to let me rest and walk on up to the plunge and see if it is still there.  He doesn't want me to have to walk all that way if there is nothing there.  I tell him that I won't be far behind and go ahead and do my shots.  I wander on up the arroyo and hear him walking back down as I'm at another site looking it over. Our paths are once again joined.

So, off we go, up the balance of the arroyo.  We are on some pretty slippery trails that I am questioning myself and my sanity on.  I don't typically walk on the sides of alluvial hills with friable rocks dancing to the bottom.  Just not my cup of tea if you will.  But there you have it, we are going to each site, viewing each glyph and I am not going to complain nor whine about that. 

I survive one side of the canyon doing this and then we head off to an even worse ledge on the other side.  I have a few cuts and scratches but am not any the worse for it.

We end up back down the canyon and I cut off to go back and shoot some black and white at one of the sites. Some really amazing sedimentary rocks full of nautilus shells and all other sorts of goodies.  We are hiking back and he is asking when I'm coming back and planning the next assault.  There are plenty of places to go and see.  We can get onto some ranches and places that no one else can go.  He tells me how he respects these people and that they understand that and allow him onto their places. He tells them that they may own the land but they don't own the history.  He respects their right to privacy and will not disclose their sites if they do not wish it.  Makes for the opportunity to return.  I took a couple of pictures of him at various places in the canyon.  I'll send prints in exchange for the time he took to show me out here.

He tells me that he is frustrated that the Forest Service ignores the work that he has published. Rock art is a favorite term of theirs that sends his blood to boil. More comments that I cannot repeat here due to their personal nature and I am out of this picture for all degrees of the future.  Hmmmm.