White Sands National Monument is full of monsters

by Erin Gould
White Sands
October 29, 2018

White Sands is a very strange place. It is stunning. And it is terrifying. They tell you not to pick up objects you see half buried in the sands because it could be an unexploded bomb.

I have a hard time reckoning the landscape that I see before me as the place that the first atomic bomb was detonated just 73 years ago.

Did you know that the term "fizzle" refers to a nuclear detonation that "grossly fails to meet its expected yield," i.e. a nuclear explosion that does not explode correctly and likely spreads radioactive material throughout the environment. When they were preparing for the Trinity test, they constructed a 214 ton steel vessel to protect against any fizzle. They named the 14 inch thick walled sphere "Jumbo." They didn't end up using it.

Major General Thomas Ferrell, the second-in-command of the Manhattan Project, described that first detonation in an official report:

         "The lighting effects beggared description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray, and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined ..."

This bomb, the one that "must be seen to be imagined," was of the same design as that dropped on Nagasaki a few months later, resulting in the deaths of some an estimated 60,000-80,000 people. 

Did you know that the White Sands Missile Range, which entirely contains the National Monument and at 3,200 square miles, is the largest military installation within the United States. 

There are ghosts in White Sands National Monument. There are monsters. There are histories that I cannot even comprehend.


These things may sound antithetical, but I spent a good portion of my time at White Sands National Monument playin at being a monster.

Do you think they miss me?

by Erin Gould     
Turkey Creek, Gila, New Mexico
Sometime in late October


I spent most of my time with this one sycamore tree. They are so beautiful. We spent many hours together; I was in their arms for a good portion of each day and slept under them each night.


I love how they sound in the morning.

I have been reading The Language of Plants, an anthology of essays that consider both the intrinsic and extrinsic language of vegetal life. I am not going to lay out the many instances of scientific evidence or the philosophical arguments, but plants use and understand a variety of forms of language. They are intelligent. They learn from past experiences and plan for the future. Plants see. Plants smell. Plants feel. Plants hear. Plants speak.


I was thinking about what I will call “tree-time.” How many sunrises and sunsets and full moons and summer equinoxes has this sycamore seen? How many bird songs have they listened to?

I have been collecting the round, spiky, strange, aggregate seed clusters from sycamores for a long time (at least by my perception, maybe the sycamore would disagree). My almost-mother-in-law asked everyone to bring something that represented freedom to Passover dinner a few years ago and I brought a bowl of them. I wonder how many potential trees I carried out to Espanola that day.


I have never really tried to get to know one tree like this before.


Do you think they felt me there? Heard my calls of “good morning” and “good night” from where I laid inside my tent each day? Appreciated the gifts I left in their branches as I cried and said a “goodbye,” an “I cannot wait to see you again,” an “I will never forget you”?

What would the world look like if humans paused for any moments to stop and really think about the lives of the trees around them? What would it look like if more of us gave a shit about vegetal individuals beyond wanting them to be beautiful and scenic and clean our air? What if we said “them” instead of “it”?


If I make it back to that site, and camp under that tree, will they remember me?


It has been a couple of weeks since I broke down my tent under that sycamore. I miss them already.

f--- that fence

Erin Gould
Nogales, AZ
October 16, 2018

Though I have been living in New Mexico, a border state, since 2013, it was my first time seeing a border fence, a physical, metal, regular, orderly, imposing manifestation of our made up line between "us" and "them". It was oddly normal. 

The normalcy is oppressive.

I should have hated this object, this symbol, but I kind of liked it. 

I was also highly aware of my body in that space, one protected by white privilege, and the feeling of state surveillance on my skin. That strip of cleared land felt dangerous.

I don't know if I have ever consciously felt that level of cognitive dissonance.

Paco asked us to take in this place in silence, an instruction for which I was grateful. Otherwise, we may have just been chatting.

I found myself drawn to the plants that were reaching through those even, bright, framing negative spaces in the fence. Do you think those mesquite know how transgressive their branches are?

I'm probably not supposed to swear here but fuck that fence.



I was listening to NPR yesterday morning and heard this story:

   "Newly elected Democratic mayor Arturo Garino was busy with Election Day when the Army arrived in Nogales and started erecting coils of glistening razor wire along the tops of the border wall that separates his small U.S. town from its sister in Mexico.

    "Razor wire, concertina wire is not what you want to see on a fence with two countries that have been friends and traded forever," he said.

     President Donald Trump announced a little more than a week ago that he was sending troops to the border to support U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

     "And now here we have a wire, you know, downtown, el puro downtown," Garino said."

What does the fence look like how? How much different would I feel in that space? How much different is the experience of the people who see and interact with that fence everyday? What does it feel like to have razor wire bisecting your town? 

Fuck that razor wire.


(ALSO--- check out Borderlands Restoration Network and all of the amazing work that they are doing to combat the ecological and community harm wrought by the physical and conceptual border at:
http://www.borderlandsrestoration.org/ )

(ALSO--- thank you to everyone at BRN that met with us, Perin in particular for her late night map workings, and Francisco Cantú and Karima Walker. It was so lovely working with you all.)

healing places

Muley Point, Bears Ears (formerly a national monument protecting traditional indigenous ways of life and sacred, ancestral lands before the Trump Administration illegally gutted it)

October 2, 2018

By Erin Gould

This morning, trying to make myself eat breakfast while sitting on the edge of Cedar Mesa and watching the sunrise on this surreal, sculptural landscape strewn with towering stone monuments commemorating the power of wind and water and time and trying to comprehend the movements of the churning, twirling mist moving over the epic entrenched river meander made by the San Juan, and then getting engulfed as those mists were warmed by the rising sun and rose, I was vastly overwhelmed. I am too small of a vessel to contain that much awe and gratitude.

I keep thinking of that one Romantic painting, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog by Friedrich, and wondering where exactly it was painted. Did that wanderer not only feel that Romantic notion of the sublime but also love? Love both for that place and love from that place? I remember thinking about the “sublime” as a great and terrible beauty/ immensity/ void, of feeling insignificant. Being in this place, getting lost in this mist, seeing the tiny airborne water molecules catch the light individually and glow like gems, observing the clouds dance over huge, ancient rock formations as nimble tendrils caress the earth like caring fingers, does make me feel small but in no way insignificant. I feel deeply connected, touched to me essence, my core. I feel LOVED, actively. I feel grateful to be inside of, to witness and take part in, this rich abundant ecosystem. Jonah Yellowman, a member of the The Utah Diné Bikéyah Board of Directors who kindly met with us earlier in the week to talk about Bears Ears and the incredible work being done to protect it, called this a place of healing. I believe him. This is the healing that I ache for, to be held, tenderly, by the majesty of this place. Not to lose myself in nature, but to feel so much within myself, to be filled to the brim and feel loved enough to let myself overflow.

I ended a six-year partnership with my fiance, Max, this last May. I really believed that we were going to spend the rest of our lives together, sharing love and experiences like trees share nutrients and water, and witness each other grow old and wise. I’m not going to get into specifics, but it was awful; it is awful. It feels like I cleaved off a huge part of myself, of the person I was planning to become, of who I wanted to be and how I wanted to live.

When we speak of breakups and love faded, we say that we are heartbroken, heartbreak, broken hearted. “It broke my heart.” It is so tangible, clearly visible, contained; you can see the fractured/ ripped/ severed edges. There are pieces to mend back together. There is a site, a cause, of the hurt. My sadness, my heart ache, is so vast, like this landscape, that I cannot see a beginning or an end. It has taken up so much that it has saturated me; I am that sadness. How do you heal something that has no clear wounds, let alone any borders? For the last few months I just didn’t try. I looked only out because I was terrified by the boundless sea of loss inside.

But I think that I am figuring it out. How do you heal an endless ache, an ocean, a dense, engulfing fog of hurt? You dilute it. You fill yourself, over your edges, over your brim, and let it all flow out. I have been filling myself with joy and love and gratitude and grief and hope and awe and wonder and I have been allowing it all coalesce, diluting, desalinating my sadness, and I keep receiving, keep allowing myself to be filled and overflow. I wasn’t letting myself truly feel; in trying to shut off my sadness, which had become so large, I had to shut off almost all of myself. But being here, seeing everything that I have seen and listening to everything I have heard and learning everything that I have learned and loving and being loved by all of my friends here, the juniper trees, the wind, the rain, the moonlight, the landscape, has exposed me, opened me, and left me vulnerable and so grateful.

This uncovering has allowed me not to actively mend my heart but to add to it, to burst its boundaries and become something greater, to hold more, not less. That sea of hurt is still there, I think that I will always carry it with me, but I am diffusing its potency, letting the molecules of my sadness mingle with all of the rest of it. I am a well with no cover, taking in everything that is given to me. And it is beautiful.

This is a place of healing.

Protect Bears Ears (I mean, what kind of person would actively not protect it?).

fracking and juniper trees and dreams and history and colonialism and horror and harvest moons

By Erin Gould

Did you know that the roots of the juniperus monosperma (one-seed juniper) species of juniper trees, one of the many, have been found to reach 200 ft below ground, making it the plant with the second deepest known root systems on earth? Isn’t that amazing?

Did you know the average fracked well is 8,000 feet deep?

Did you know that there are 40,000 wells in Northern New Mexico?

While we camped at Angel Peak in the Greater Chaco Region of Northwest New Mexico, I slept under the limbs of a juniper tree on the top of a hill. Just on the other side of this hill was a fracking well. The sounds of it, mixed with the whisper of swaying juniper branches, slept with me every night. I cried every day when I told that juniper tree that I was sorry.

I am so sorry.

Junipers grow very slowly. A five foot tall tree could easily be 50 years old. The average juniper lives to be 350-700 years old. The oldest known juniper tree, a Western Juniper, lived to see 2,675 years.

How long has my friend lived on that hill? How much has changed there? What did that hill look like when New Mexico wasn’t a state? Before European colonialism reach it? Did they know Juan de Oñate?

Gas was found in Seven Lakes, New Mexico, about 20 miles south of Chaco Canyon, in 1911. This tree was already huge by then. How old do you think that well is?

Oil and gas companies don’t have to disclose the chemicals they inject deep into the earth.

Did you know that two thirds of a juniper tree’s mass is underground? How sensitive do you think those roots are? Did this tree feel it when that well over the hill was being drilled? Does it feel the roar of the compressors?

During a discussion about self care, Asha had us root our feet into the dirt and asked us to imagine being a tree. I did this and could not stop crying. After this exercise, I hiked back to the tree under which I slept and explained why I had thrown myself into its branches and was leaking salty tears into its leaves. I told this tree about my horror, my disgust, my grief over the pain and suffering caused by human greed on this place, on the people who live here, on cultural traditions already ravaged by hundreds of years of racism, on the trees. I cried in the arms of a friend and felt better/ cared for/ loved.

I read that the Hopi believe that juniper trees carry the spirit of the caretaker of the earth.

How many collective years do you think the juniper trees in Northern New Mexico carry between them?

I am so sorry.

Stifling and Space

Stifling and Space
Erin Gould
September 23, 2018
Wild Rivers

Yi-Fu Tuan in Space and Place says that "solitude is a condition for acquiring a sense of immensity," as our thoughts around other "are pulled back by an awareness of the other personalities who project their own worlds onto the same space." 

While at Wild Rivers, I spent as much time as I could sitting alone with my feet dangling over edges  of rocky cliffs, listening to and tasting the wind coming up from the river. Though I was sick and so disappointed to never be well enough to make the trek down to the Rio Grande or the Red River, I reveled in the openness, expansiveness, and sense of freedom I felt in those quite moments with 800 feet of vertical breathing room.

"Space, a biological necessity to all animals, is to human beings also a psychological need, a social perquisite, and even a spiritual attribute." 

The space (both physical and temporal) I took was a vital mental breath, a resetting from the pressure constraints of such close social and creative contact with a very small group of people that I did not know well and with whom I did not feel entirely comfortable expressing my full range of emotions. 

Stifling is the word that comes to mind when I think of that week at Wild Rivers. The gorge saved me, the wind refreshed me, the light moving above/ through/ over the immensity of open air created by that ancient rift in the earth's crust, displaying a history of change and movement more enormous than I can comprehend, kept me grounded when my most basic needs, alone time and a non-fever/ mucus/ misery ridden body, were often inaccessible. 

(Did you know that some of the piñon and juniper forests at this site contain trees that are 500 years old or that the Taos Plateau volcanic field has some 22-million-year-old volcanic vents or that some scientists believe that the Rio Grande Rift will become an ocean several million years from now?)



Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: the Perspective of Experience. University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

eyes and thighs and soles and lungs and limbs and making accidents

Erin Gould
September 23, 2018
Rio Grande Headwaters, CO

I often talk about happy accidents when I am making art. But maybe happy accidents are really just a state of receptivity, of embracing potential, of loving the process of improvisation and experimentation and exploration and play. And that is something that doesn't just happen to you, like an accident; being open means being vulnerable and it is genuinely scary to set out with an intention, loose your way, and find something magical that you couldn't see before you started. It is hard, but it brings me so much joy in my life and vibrance in my work.

Land Arts of the American West should really be called The Practice of Creating Happy Accidents and Knowing What to do When you Make Them.

Rocks breathe, too.

Sometimes the wind doesn't want to play, but maybe the American Dipper does.

I pulled a rock from my sole and a willow branch from my eye.

Aspens tremble and have stretch marks like my thighs. 

I am happiest in trees, with strong arms around me, holding the entirety of my weight, dancing me into bliss (noun:

1. supreme happiness; utter joy or contentment:wedded bliss.
2. Theology. the joy of heaven.
3. heaven; paradise:the road to eternal bliss.)