Wampum

This morning Jonah took me outside for a dawn (plus one cup of coffee offset) walk. First he took me to Zeke's Peak, a gentle incline. I deferred when he wanted to traverse the minor arrete to descend on the other side of the formation -- an easy walk, except when done by two, holding hands, and I didn't want to let Jonah, who crowhops and closes one eye and squints with the other and reverses back and forth over distances of a few yards without notice and who winds his two crossed arms like a possessed windmill every few minutes, I didn't want Jonah to try this little cake walk with 20' roadrash potential on either side on his own.

Then he asked to go upstairs, meaning the nature trail at the south end of the camp, which he, Gracie and I did yesterday, climbing up the sandstone and on to the top of a nearby lava covered ridge. But he wanted to go along the major arrete that is formed by the cliffs on both sides of the formation shown in MB's first photo below. Again, while it is a cake walk, the 200' roadrash potential on either side brought me to a halt, so we turned and went in the direction of Whistler Ridge and beyond, towards Hagan Canyon, stopping to visit a watercourse where the lava is smoothed by water-borne sand, to the point where the water and sand jump and fall down a sheer cliff, where we turned and returned.

It was a pleasant walk with him, we don't really use language when we're alone, and I have to focus on the reality of enjoyment of what we have, not fixation on language drills at every conceivable, and many inconceivable turns.

As we walked past the cliffs, and just in passing, this is where the director/producer of Jurassic Park placed the "Badlands" of "North Dakota", which is a reasonable use of artistic license, and where the writer of Jurassic Park placed a raptor fossil, which as Sam knows better than I, raptors evolved in what is now central Asis, and have never been found in the Americas (or Antarctica, Africa, West Asia, Europe or Greenland), which is an unreasonable use of artistic license, I was struck by the self-similarity of the erosion.

The remarkable thing is that primates sense structure in something as random as the erosion of capstone and softer understone layers. Yes, it looks like repeated colonnades. Yes, it looks like temples in South Asia, whether Buddhist or Hindu. Yes, it looks like ... Bach's Tocatta in Fugue ... theme repeated and repeated and repeated in variation. But the amazing point isn't what it resembles, its that it sembles at all.

Five egrets watched us leave, perched just over the road on a black lava outcrop, white on black, and as out of place in the desert as people on the moon.