Flower of Stone, and other special sightings and stabby things

By Paula D. Barteau

Big Bend 

October 19, 2015

I found several clumps of what I believe was Selaginella lepidophylla or Flower of Stone, an ancient species of desert plant that can survive total dehydration in a dormant state and revitalize when exposed to water. 

Flower of Stone

I feel like there is a consciousness in the rocks here that might function in the same way. This place feels old and tough and graceful, like it's hovering on the edge of sleep, just watching to see what happens, like it might wake up at any moment.

Prehistoric smile

I made a nest of thorns out of that feeling.

Nest of Thorns

Eggs of Stone

I found a piece of string in a puddle that was not in fact a piece of string, but two worms mating. They were each between one or two feet long and about the diameter of an angel-hair pasta.  I think there was a colony of bees living under a rock next to the puddle who came out in large numbers to drink from it.

Tiny Crystal nest

I went for a hike one morning and got completely absorbed in my own thoughts when my foot slipped and I sat down to keep from falling, only to realize that a herd of 15-20 Javilina were crossing the mesa about a quarter of a mile bellow me. They were sprawled across the mesa, each taking their own path down from the hill, but all of them made their way to a small sand stone arch at the bottom of the mesa and passed through it single file on their journey. I didn't have my camera with me and when I went back the next day they didn't show up.

Javalina trajectory map

The Nihilism out Here on the Ol’ Missile Range Resort Will Slap You in the Face like a Tipsy Friend

By Paula D. Barteau

White Sands 

October 22, 2015

It feels like a video game out here. The sky looks like a lake and if you lie down at the lowest point in the land scape the clouds look like reflections of the dunes that graze them. Planes fly over the park regularly, not the kind that are full of people. The kind that kill people. Everyone around us is playing.

I think about Alan Moore's Watchmen, the part where you realize what's been happening on that island all along.  I wrote a paper in a freshman philosophy class about Laurie Juspeczyk and the concept of Free Will. I got unanimously positive feedback on it, someone wrote "mindblower 10/10" on the back before handing it back.  It's the only thing I have written for school that I've ever wanted to reread and my hard drive ate it.

I think about my chemistry teacher in high school who, apparently tired of chemistry as a topic, spent a class period justifying to us why bombing Japan in WWII was objectively the correct moral course of action. His mental gymnastics routine looked something like, America is the greatest country in the world and not bombing Japan would have changed American culture and this would somehow be a great historical loss. He tried to support his side by positing the one we've all heard, that not using the atom bombs would have led to more deaths than using them. This was not his central point though and he did not invite us to examine it.

I start to feel sick. Maybe it's the fumes from my emergency blanket structure, maybe it's fumes from something else, maybe it's just the last day of the last trip.

I think about over population and how there can't just magically be less of us. I think about the mechanisms of exploitation and dehumanization. I wonder if the dead can forgive and if this is the same question as whether you have to listen to the living if you can dismiss them instead.

I write a joke for Fred in the sand and hope no one asks me about it.

I think about robots playing, about consciousness you can't see because you are conditioned not to believe in it.

I feel like an alien that's about to explode, so I take a walk.

On the way back to camp I find an elaborate design traced in the sand catching the light from the setting sun in its grooves. This is my favorite part of Land Arts, stumbling unexpectedly into someone else's art.

Everyone is dancing when I get back to camp. We dance, we sled, we try to eat all of the food left in the coolers and bins, and we learn a dance called Strip the Willow.

There is nothing like this course. So many people have helped us in different ways on our various trips, and this last leg couldn't have happened without the extreme generosity of a park volunteer named Ron who let us sleep on his floor instead of braving an incoming thunder and hail storm.

I am sad for many things, but grateful for just as many.

DFTBA everybody

Shenanigans

By Paula D. Barteau

Valle Vidal

September 27, 2015

The stream here is so clear that you can see the fish that live there in perfect detail, even though they're too fast to be studied. I watched the fish for hours. They are so small and beautiful, about the length of my hand.

There are Rosehips growing along the bank. I picked some and made rose hip syrup to go with breakfast to keep away the cold everyone seems to be peripherally fighting.

Harriet picked some and made tea that we drank on the river bank.

I wanted to be connected to this place, so I asked Clark to sew me into the bank of the stream. It was cold.

I invited everyone to have their faces painted and don capes and fly a kite with me.

This site has been so much fun. Everyone has projects and performances going on.

Eleanora dug an earth oven and invited us all to eat the bread and vegetables she baked in it all day.

CB and Clark built a Zozobro out of willow shoots for us to burn our worries in at the end of the trip.

Clark set up a swing in the woods.

CB hung her paintings in the outhouse and did an official gallery opening in the toilet, complete with fancy drinks.

Harriet brushed her hair for the first time this year, with stunning results.

And Erin and Andrea put on a performance the last night of our trip. To find it we had to walk through the dark, following a string from tree to tree by touch until we happened upon a candlelight flickering through the trees.

Documenting the Documentation: A Photo Series

By Paula D. Barteau

Turkey Creek/Gila

October 14, 2015

Count the Cameras!

Thoughts from Four Corners

By Paula D. Barteau

Shiprock

September 24 2015

Malcom explains the circumstances of the Peabody Coal Mine to our group

So much happened today.

We're in Dinetah, on Larry Emerson's farm. He agreed to let us stay here. I think he had, maybe has reservations, but I am thankful he did.

Sometimes you need to be pushed outside of yourself. The thing about ignorance is you're always inside of it and sometimes you forget that, you forget that you are the product of a specific culture that separates you from others who aren't.

Larry spoke to us today at dinner, about how life works in cycles. Evil comes out of forgetting that, that your future will become someone else's past when you're gone. When you forget that you come from the world before you.

Before coming here we read Dahr Jamail's Toxic Legacy: Uranium Mining in New Mexico and I have had a quote from Larry King, a Dine miner, stuck in my head all day:

"We knew when a safety inspection was coming because all the tunnels not being used were barricaded, workers were told to use respirators and other safety gear and do things that weren't done on a daily basis...Then after the inspection, a couple of days later it was back to normal, no safety and no respirators."

The people who live here have been dehumanized. The institutions of racism here have physical forms: Cell phone towers sticking out of the birthplace of Changing Woman, fracking towers puncturing earth where men and women are buried and still visited by their relatives, hundreds of fracking towers and their accompanying containers of flammable gas clustered on the outskirts of a town that has no hospital, no infrastructure for disaster relief. One such tower, located near an elementary school, caught fire once. The school was evacuated by passersby, not by fireman or health officials.

 Water is sacred here, and the water has been poisoned. Many local farmers are currently prevented from working by the Animus river spill, sheep have died within hours of drinking the water near the Peabody Coal Mine, research into the long term effects of the uranium in the municipal drinking water are only recently receiving funding. People have died of cancer in houses they built out of Uranium tailings they didn't realize were dangerous due to the mining companies' extraordinary indifference to the lives of their employees.

The mouth of the Peabody coal mine

The resilience here is as astounding. I feel overwhelmed and unsure how to contribute to the betterment of the situations here, but I promise I'll do my best and to continue to ask how we can live lives that are not dependent on destruction.

The life here cannot be paved over

Perspective

By Paula Barteau

El Vado Lake

September 20 2015

My favorite painting teacher, Leon, used to tell me as my face got closer and closer to the watercolor I was working on, that paintings are not meant to be smelt.

I suppose the same goes for some sculptures.

But, he also used to tell me that it's not whether or not you make any mistakes, but what you do with them that matters.

Willow Olla Voices

Willow Olla Voices
By Paula Barteau
October 15 2015

Many Hands picked my myriad twins
They walked up and down the banks looking for those of us they could use
These banks are the walls of our veins
Life within life
Maybe too large for them to see
We are the cells and the organs of our home
Every population is a different system
Equally important, equally alive and individually aware
Though we are all dependent

Though they hold water
Water is the blood of place, it constitutes the blood of creatures, all of us
They would not pour all of their blood into a pool and build pipes to take it away
To something else’s body and expect to stay alive
Blood has to flow through tissue afferent and efferent, never stagnant

We are sorted out and bent together, all dependent, as we’ve always been
They ask us with this structure to hold things, to hold water, though we already do
This thing that we become cannot
They ask us to become a structure with their hands,
Their hands are full of water, but cannot hold water when cupped together
Not for long

Fire and flood are our breath,
Both vital processes to the function of every system
They would never hold their breath as long as they hold ours
We are forced to fever, the fires burn too hot and wide to heal
Destroy what they are necessary to germinate
The floods destroy more than they make room for
Our body reaching past the temperature that kills the infection to kill itself
These are the symptoms of unnecessary medication

Now in our strange new form we are returned to the earth
Where we may rest, take root, and grow
Acknowledgment that the form that we take on our own is no less aesthetic or worthy
Than the form they have given us with their hands

Reciprocity to give us back to our home
To make new homes for others in exchange for what they take away
Acknowledgement that their hands hold the same water that runs through the veins of us the wilderness,
Even as it slips through their cupped fingers

This poem was written for the Gila Wilderness, the oldest national wilderness in the United States which is currently home to seven threatened and endangered species: the Southwest Willow Flycatcher, the Yellow-Billed Cuckoo, the Northern Mexican Garter Snake, the Narrow-Head Garter Snake, the Spikedace, Loach Minnow, and The Chiricahua Leopard Frog.

Layers of Time

By Paula D. Barteau

Cebolla Canyon

September 5, 2015

You can see the layers of time here. There are fossils in the rocks, potshards and petroglyphs, collapsing cabins from the homestead era, and the sounds of ATVs and gunfire up and down the road at night. It’s funny what those layers of time tempt you to imagine. People have been talking about their dreams here more than the other sites, talking about the energy, the magic. I felt it too, something about the night air that feels conscious and alive.  I’ve attributed the possible creepiness to all the men with guns driving around looking to shoot some animals, but it’s interesting to think of some other kind of presence here and the different ways it might be perceived.

This place reminds me of home. The landscape, the plants, grasshoppers the size of small toads dressed in brilliant motifs. Teri, our guest artist, lead us in a deep listening exercise the second day of camp. I was surprised to find that when I closed my eyes and listened to the landscape I knew almost all the sounds I heard. I was struck the most by the wind, I used to hate the windy season when I was growing up, but I recognized the sound of the wind in the mountains like something very specific from my childhood. It sounded like the voice of home. It's nice to think that home is sentient, that it would be aware of me if I came back.

Before we left, I decided that I wanted to focus on the relationship between anthropomorphism and dehumanization as tools to project values and thoughts onto things outside ourselves while dismissing their actual existence. The idea of a place having some inherent consciousness spoke to this train of thought and I tried to imagine how it would manifest to other people. We think in terms of the things we’re familiar with and the cultural associations that go with them, but there’s so much that no one knows.  I tend to think in terms psychology, priming, the physiology of emotional response to external stimuli, suggestibility in groups of people. Others might think in terms of history, or spiritual energy. I talked with a friend once about how chemistry was magic, that magic was not in any way effortless but one of the most tedious subjects to understand. I have another friend who says the same thing about math, that the moment of comprehension of what is actually going on mathematically can be extremely ineffable and personal. I like the idea that magic doesn't depart with mystery, but only starts to reveal itself with incremental understanding. 

There are so many things that no one knows, at least no one present; so many things out of the reach of falsification, only accessible through subjective conjecture. I like not knowing. I think a lot of people decide to believe in their subjective conjectures, to feel like they know, people who believe in science and spirits alike. It’s interesting how that happens, what we decide to believe in, and how we cope with dissonance. My favorite coping mechanism is not knowing.

A Reminder That We Are The Ultimate Invasive Species

By Paula D. Barteau

Glen Canyon Dam, Page AZ

August 31, 2015

Glen Canyon Dam is a complicated dilemma.

It provides water and electricity to Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, and California. It generates hydroelectric energy that is much cleaner than coal, and more efficient than many clean energy alternatives, but the construction of a hydroelectric dam drastically alters the ecosystem of the river it harnesses. Sediment that used to provide camouflage and sustenance for many organisms downstream of the dam is now building up slowly filling Lake Powel and increasing pressure on the dam’s structure. The huge difference in depth on either side of the dam has changed the temperature of the water on either side, limiting what can survive in them. The dam interrupts the migratory routes of fish and consequently changes the availability of food for animal populations on both sides of the dam. The construction of Glen Canyon Dam involved the extension of existing highways, the construction of six different power plants, the founding of an entire town, and an uninterrupted stream of traffic through Dine land that lasted the six years it took to finish the dam.

Glen Canyon was home to multiple sacred sites of the Dine some of which are now under water, those that are not are now subject to increased tourist traffic. Most of them are not protected by any organization and have no public notifications or markers to keep tourists who do not realize their significance to Dine culture from desecrating them.

Some groups of people are organizing to get the dam taken down on the grounds of being unsustainable, illegal, and harmful to the environment. Five states depend on the dam for necessary resources and I don’t think it’s going anywhere, but it serves as a reminder that the lives we live are dependent on destructive forces that take and change the lives of others.

What does it take to live lives that don’t?