Thursday, October 18, 2012

"The Clock Stopped Long Ago"

or Sandia Park, New Mexico


The sandstone glowed in late afternoon sun.  A raven called as it passed overhead, a deep, throaty croak that rang briefly before melting away.  Its wings beat with audible effort—not the quick flutter of the Oregon juncos and scrub jays darting between junipers, but a good, sturdy flap as it pulled against the air.  That, too, melted into nothing.

The afternoon leaned against a vast backdrop of silence.  Small sounds leapt out, like grasshoppers from a meadow, without disturbing the silence at all.


Away from Albuquerque's urban junkyard of a soundscape, on still days in the piñon and juniper deserts of the lower Sandias, white noise disappears.  Not just from cars and airplanes and swamp coolers and power tools, but from nature, too.  No constant, companionable sounds fill the space around you:  no mountain brooks gurgling and splashing, no clattering leaves in aspen trees or big-tooth maples, no grasses thick enough to rustle.  Silence surrounds you like sandstone, shaped only by the sweeping wind.  The coyotes, howling at sunset or in the chill dark before dawn, make little pinpricks of sound, like stars glimmering one at a time in the enormity of space.

Doesn't the rock look like a coyote?

I found myself pondering the middle layer of experience between the very small and the very large—the shady-tree-and-gurgling-brook level of experience—during a few days' stay at a casita in Sandia Park last week.  Ansel Adams said of New Mexico,
"It is all very beautiful and magical here, a quality which cannot be described.  You have to live it and breathe it, let the sun bake you into it.  The skies and the land are so enormous, and the details so precise and exquisite that wherever you go you are isolated in the world between the micro and the macro, where everything segues under you and over you and the clock stopped long ago."*
The micro and the macro.

Sandstone

The view from that particular bit of sandstone

To say that New Mexico is a place of extremes is certainly true, but maybe not quite enough.  It's more that the stuff that ordinarily lies between extremes, the broad stretch of middle ground where humans tend to look for ease and comfort, is absent.  I can think of many places of spectacular grandeur—the Colorado Rockies, the Grand Tetons, Idaho's Sawtooth Mountains—where you are dwarfed and awed by the magnificence around you.  You have companions in dwarfishness, though.  The forest trees may tower over you, the lakes may be deep and cold, the elk may bugle hauntingly out of a chilly late-summer night; but they are all still somehow on a human scale, comprehensible, embraceable.

Here, though, you feel like the odd one out.  You may be dwarfed by the whole of the landscape, but you are taller than most of the things that grow on it—when anything grows on it at all.


You are like Alice in Wonderland, if she'd been caught between the Eat Me and Drink Me phases, a little too large, or much too small for your surroundings.  You're isolated between the enormous


and the exquisite,


 in awe of both, but not belonging to either.  You feel vulnerable



in an exhilarating way,



and after a long, glorious day of vulnerable exhilaration you are grateful to the junipers, with their soft, shaggy bark,



and to the piñons, with their fair to middling size, for bringing things back (somewhat) to scale.



You know it isn't really a timeless place.  The clock keeps ticking; the modern world does intrude.

Poised as you are, though, between pointillistic details



and wide expanses,

in that deep quiet, you find balance, and a peace that does seem timeless.


And you wish with all your heart, that for a few more days, time really could just stand still.

__________________
*Quoted in New Mexico. A Guide for the Eyes, by Elisa Parhad.

18 comments:

  1. I knew you were working on a mega-post!
    I see a coyote and a phoenix.
    The middle-sized pinon hanging off the rock looks like it's had it's fair share of vulnerable exhilaration.

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    1. I hope it wasn't too mega, b-a-g--it felt a little self-indulgent.
      My sister was telling me that when trees go all twisty and bendy like that it's often a response to something the roots are doing underground. I wonder what's going on under the surface of that middle-sized piñon's rock!

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  2. Blimey Stacy, what an exhilarating, vast (and micro), astonishing place. I don't suppose I would do anything other than just stare (with my mouth agape a little .. and drooling a bit) at such majesty. Your photos are outstanding as always ... but I fear you have mistaken a coyote for a rock. Welcome back. Dave p.s. Stacy's weed - yay!!

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    1. Ah, Dave, it was just amazing. Most of those views are either right out the cabin door or within a few yards, too. I did a lot of standing stock-still and staring, though I tried to keep the drooling to a minimum, what with needing to conserve moisture in the desert and all.
      There was a lovely prickly pear a few feet from the porch that had pinkish needles against pinkish sandstone. I didn't know they accessorized so well before.

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  3. Stacy - The desert is truly an exquisite place to be... It calls out for you to sense the bigness and the smallness of nature. I try to get down to Crestone in the San Luis Valley as often as I can - just to do nothing at Nada Hermitages. I usually just turn off and turn in. The pix are fantastic!

    Mark N Denver

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    1. Mark, another friend was just telling me about Crestone, and the joys of doing nothing there. It sounds like a wonderful place. I hadn't really spent much time in the desert before like this--I usually head for mountains and cool greenery instead. Now I can't imagine not returning! Thank you--I'm glad you enjoyed the photos.

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  4. your landscape sings with the Karoo, great wide sweeps and huge skies, but our rocks and mountains are different. My exquisite detail would be the Karoo violets (gentian family) and so tiny I almost trod on them. Was hunting for the intense blue, but didn't realise the plants were quite so micro.

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    1. Diana, I often feel when I see your out-and-about photos that NM and SA are very much akin--at least in the overall feel. Maybe not so much down at ground level.

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  5. You have captured New Mexico perfectly. It is a vast place with no scale for perspective. An enormous area that you feel lost in even when you know where you are. I love the coyote rock! At first, I thought you had really captured (in pictures) a howling coyote!

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    1. Holley, thank you. Yes, enormous--even when you're looking back at your starting point and can still see it. I would have loved to see a coyote howling, let alone take a picture of it! The rock was kind enough to stay still, at least.

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  6. Both you and Ansel Adams put things wonderfully.

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  7. Stacy you have described NM perfectly and the blue sky is like nowhere else I have been...I love visiting these isolated spots in NM where I do feel like I have intruded into another time and place..a vortex where time has stood still and maybe an ancient civilization still lives...what you described is why I want to live in NM...it seems my soul is at peace there.

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    1. Donna, October skies are such an amazingly deep blue--even here in town I've been in awe looking at them this month. (Not that skies can't be blue in cities, of course. But the context isn't quite as dramatic as those sandstone cliffs!) You would love this place where I stayed, I think--you're really surrounded by that sense of stillness.

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  8. Hi Stacy, lovely photos and some wonderful food for thought. Your landscapes are so large and vast and empty (and so brown). We don't really have places like this. The nearest ones I can think of are the open flatness of the fens, the gentle rolls of the Dales or the bleak emptiness of the highlands. The scale range you've described is in all these places, but I've never noticed it until you pointed it out here.

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    1. Thank you, Sunil. The brown takes a lot of getting used to for some people--the first thing I notice now when I see photos from...almost anywhere else, really...is how amazingly GREEN they are. This is a bit extreme even for us, though, after two years of severe drought (only about 5 inches of rain so far this year). I've only seen photos of the places you're describing--my impression, for whatever it's worth, is very much that they have a similar overall feel of these open places in NM, even if with fewer cacti: huge skies and low grasses and a sense of exposure that's a little disconcerting.

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