i posted a set of these last year

More Postcards from a Family Roadtrip

Through the American West



T———,

At dusk there is a shift change. The swallows swoop and disappear. The bats a noiseless cyclone as they make their egress. To achieve a good round number, I’m calculating bats per second. They won’t fly in your hair, though the fear is legitimate.

Opting for echolocation,

M———



T———,

In this town the water makes better suds. Tastier too. Creatures evolve to blend with the landscape despite the manganese. Stratified sandstone purples. Behind me someone asks if iron oxide arrived here from the core of the earth.

Following dinosaur tracks,

M———



T———,

The wind can make parabolas of sand. To avoid burial, I try to outgrow the dune with the yucca. Thin and spindly. If a drift, a collapse. Heat and radio waves emanate from literally everything.

Comparing baseball diamonds to satellite dishes,

M———



T———,

Saguaro have more arms than is properly anthropomorphic. A cactus too close to that maidenhair fern. The farmstand melon is ripe but nary a knife for miles. This rock is quite porous; it dripped on me.

Washing just the dirty part of my pants,

M———




T———,

It looks like a wood chip but I promise you it’s a mineral. We could just let the silica seep in, petrify. If a curse imposes, you can send it back with a note of apology. Every waitress asked me red or green.

With better lapidary skills,

M———



T———,

Can this natural bridge be superimposed on a catenary arch? I keep having these feelings I worry are religious, but I still don’t know a butte from a mesa. A plateau of subtle distinction. It’s all earthly from my boat.

At a wakeless speed,

M———



T———,

A narrow passageway will intensify the drama of entering a room. The kind of place without velvet ropes. Standing on the head of a drum, the tour guide was acoustically accurate. Please sit in the origami chair.

Cropping the masonry out of the photograph,

M———



T———,

You could scrape crude geometrics into the skin of this lava, but someone beat you by six hundred years. A deer with a head at both ends. This place where you can touch both walls of the canyon simultaneously.

Rafting a virgin river,

M———



T———,

I hike in order to feel alone. If there were a language with nothing but vowels and glottal stops. Or we could hot air balloon. I’d see everything in late afternoon light if I could.

From the highest point in Texas,

M———

fact:

It smelled like a gerbil cage on the #28 bus today.

the city of albuquerque is nice

if for no other reason than they have given me free wifi in the airport! I'm about to fly back to OAK and complete the Third Annual Hajj to the Sacred Scenic Byways of the American West, as I'm going to call it. My little avatar on this blog is made from a photo from last year's Hajj, and I'm hoping that if my photography skillz were mad enough, I'll have a new one. Hopefully from the Rainbow Bridge, which may be the coolest thing I've ever seen. I'm certainly one for list making and superlatives, but it's a hard decision in the category of coolest things I've ever seen. Unfortch my photo won't have water in it as that particular waterway is intermittent and is dry at the mo.

I won't get into crazy details about where I went, but here's a general list in case you're interested: Albuquerque, the Very Large Array, Roswell (detritus from the crash is not on display for "insurance reasons"), Carlsbad Caverns, Guadalupe Mtns (I made it to Texas!), White Sands, Saguaro Nat'l Park, Taliesen West (Frank Lloyd Wright's "Desert Camp"), Zion Nat'l Park, Glen Canyon/Lake Powell/Rainbow Bridge, Painted Desert/Petrified Forest, Petroglyph Nat'l Monument. There may be some more I'm forgetting. It was a lot. I added two new states to the list, NM and TX, so I'm up to 36 out of 50 now. Pretty pretty good, although I can't imagine the circumstances that will bring me to, say, Oklahoma or Arkansas anytime soon.

Been out of the loop for a week now. No crossword puzzles or anything. Looking forward to rejoining civilzation.

overheard

I overhear a lot of things at work. Two yesterday:

4-ish year old boy walks into the ladies room with his mom and announces, "I am a man. This place is for girls."

Thing two: There's a new exhibit that involves being able to talk on paper cup and string telephones across the musuem. I saw a dad and his 15-ish year old daughter talking on them. You have to kind of yell into them because, gee, sound really doesn't transmit all that well on string, so I heard the dad shouting into the paper cup, "I LOVE YOU TOO. WHAT? I LOVE YOU SO MUCH!" It's funny and touching to hear intimate words shouted into a paper cup.