no.1

By Sarah Canelas

Headwaters of the Rio Grande, SW Colorado

September 9, 2018

Time exists strangely out at the Headwaters of the Rio Grande.  It seems like the span needed to finish projects has been distorted.  We were warned about this beforehand, but the firsthand experience, itself, is another thing altogether.


It runs both slower—and faster.  Dilates strangely.  It feels absent in its normal sense, but also absolute.  Present—in an inescapable, physical manner.  And we can see it everywhere, just—


Not in our usual societal chronology.


In day-to-day life, we’re regularly confronted by the passing of time.  Specifically, by human markers of time: eras, decades, years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds.  And while we see them in our timekeeping, they exist more immediately in our physical surroundings.  Everything in society can be dated; we live in the inescapable context of cultural periods.


Still, it’s not that these markers—these references—don’t exist out in the Rio Grande National Forest.  But they’re quieter when not human.  With a lack of societal density in the area, markers are easier to miss if you’re not actively looking.


And right now, time out here exists in the movement of the sun, the decomposition of the dead, and the hunger of our bodies.