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clay along the highway
in Abiquiu
New Mexico

Natural Forces

Just before the onset of the real summer heat, when mornings were still crisp enough to need the car heater, driving someplace early, even though the air conditioner would be running on the drive home—my son and I headed off to Abiquiu for a hike. “Did you know that in the Sahara,” he said, “water freezes at night and the air temperature still gets into the triple digits during the day?”

These extremes, this sense of the natural forces ranging so freely over the land, is part of what I love about the desert Southwest. It’s like living in a piece of music with strong dynamics.

My son is 10, and he was a little nervous about setting off together on our first summer hike, afraid I’d make it a training march, a test to see how many miles we could cover. After a mile or so he was relieved—“this is easier than I thought,” he said. We poked along, stopping to look at bugs, tracks, stones. Crossing a tiny drainage, the trail was sandy clay. Our route lead us up a short box canyon with a steep, rubble-strewn scramble at its end, allowing us to ascend to a high sandstone mesa overlooking the Chama River valley.

The sky was deep blue above the yellow and red sandstone walls of our canyon. Looking closely, we saw the sweeping patterns of the fossilized sand dunes that these cliffs once had been; we craned our necks up, following the cracks rising in the smooth, rain-streaked faces of the rock, and back down, our eyes following the paths of the house-sized blocks that had fallen from the walls and rolled to the floor of the canyon. We put down our backpacks and scrambled to the tops of a few of these. “Imagine,” I said. “This huge boulder came off from the top of that cliff, crashing down. The sound it must have made!”

I speculated about when this event might have taken place. A hundred years ago? A thousand? Ten thousand? Or maybe only five. One giant block had rolled on top of a juniper tree, whose old gray branches were still protruding from under the edge. The presence of time—the feeling of great age being so immediate, so easy to touch, so apparent—this compels me. It is a feeling I want to capture in my work. Clay records history with the same paradoxical immediacy the canyon does: fleeting, spontaneous gestures are recorded forever on the side of an old vessel…a splash of glaze, a fleck of ash. I love to pick up a pot and feel as though I’m peering into the past itself.

We climbed up and nearly out of our little box canyon, reaching a spot just below the lip of the mesa where our dog would go no further over the rough sandstone chunks. She sat down, unwilling to be lead higher, even by pieces of peanut butter sandwich. My son and I sat down too, enjoying the view for a while. A ponderosa pine had grown hundreds of feet tall against the opposite wall of the canyon, and we looked over at it, eye-level with its top branches. In the sky a hawk circled, its wings seeming never to move. For a moment we, too, were still.

I find inspiration in this stillness, in these rocks and in the creative spirit that seems to reside in the earth itself, in the forces that both construct and wear away its forms. Life in that little box canyon seemed still, perpetual—but at the same time fleeting, ephemeral.

On the way home I detoured past the road cut where I’ve been digging a dark, crumbly, primary clay, a shale rock that has decomposed where it formed. I shoveled a few bins full, sweating in the afternoon sun, and my son was happy when I got back in the car. We could get going, and get cooled off—I set the air conditioner on high.

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