When Nothing is There

These lines from a poem in Mary Oliver's recent collection reminded me why I love this place so much:

I go out
to the pale dunes, to look over
the empty spaces
of the wilderness. 

For something is there,
something is there when nothing is there but itself,
that is not there when anything else is. 

*   *   * 

from "Extending the Airport Runway"
in A Thousand Mornings
Mary Oliver, Penguin Press 2012 

From the perspective of a culture that revolves around cycles of building and manufacturing alternating with cycles of consuming and discarding, it does seem that there's nothing out here. It's not even a very good place for recreation. One of our "neighbors" set up a tent on their property the summer before last, apparently hoping to enjoy a little fishing and camping. They left the tent in place when they went home, and it quickly blew down, exposing the belongings they'd left to the sun, the wind and the scavengers who haunt Blanca Flats. When they returned a month or two later, they set up a pre-fab shed. The shed lasted for awhile before it finally gave in to the wind and fell apart.

Jake and Shelby have always loved to sniff around the remains of that place. There were apparently a couple of canine guests on the property at one time, and our dogs are either attracted to the scents they left behind or to the burned traces of a barbecue. When I walk with them down that road, I always have trouble dragging them away. A few days ago, just to see what the dogs found so enthralling, I went to explore the site.

There's nothing there now but a big hole in the ground, where the people have set up an impromptu landfill. A faded black sofa inhabits the landfill, along with the discarded toilet that seems to be an obligatory part of the landscape around here (there's one of those on our property, too, left by the previous owner). So this parcel of property has devolved from a campsite to a storage space to a dump.

Why do some people think that in landscapes like this, where nothing is there to appeal to the building/consuming mind, the only acceptable alternative is to use the land for waste disposal? It's more than just a practical decision, I think; it's an act of contempt, a gesture of resentment against a land that didn't welcome them on their own terms.

Lost Villages

The basalt hills rise

like abandoned villages

from clouds of snow fog. 

Distance plays tricks on the eye here. I can never photograph the San Luis Hills the way I see them -- so close that every shadow and hollow is visible from my window. In the aftermath of snow, they stand like empty buildings in banks of white fog, like the mirage of a failed human settlement. 

I'm always a little dismayed by the way my mind projects the images and sounds of civilization onto this barren landscape. The wind sounds like the voice of a radio announcer; the hills look like broken huts; the full moon is a streetlamp behind my shoulder. If I moved back to Denver, would I hear the North wind in the drone of traffic and see basalt hills in the skyline?

Looking back at the photos I've taken of the view facing South, I'm reminded that there's a stark monotony in this landscape. You have to look carefully to see the variations that unfold through the hours and the seasons. As hard as I try, I don't capture the way life proliferates here, even in the winter. The fat cottontail rabbits bouncing across the dirt roads . . . the noisy finches squabbling over seeds . . . the enormous black raven who's taken up residence near the house.

Instead, my imagination dishes up empty villages. And the cries of ghosts. 

Morning Smoke

One skein of smoke

rising against brown hills,

solitary fire.

I suspect that living in a remote area encourages a morbid fascination with neighbors. I'm especially fascinated with the little settlement to the South of us, a collection of hybrid dwellings that appear to be uninhabited -- most of the time. But every now and then, I spot a tantalizing scrap of evidence of life. A plume of smoke on a frosty winter morning, a battered white truck pulling up to the settlement, an outdoor fire burning on a windy January evening. We've actually seen our neighbor walking around his property, and Eric met him once at the Polish convenience store in Blanca. In the evening, when I turn the solar panels to the East to catch the next sunrise, I look to the South to see if I can spot the lights on our neighbor's house. We're never really sure if he's there or not, or how he comes and goes, or what he does. But we are certain he exists. A neighbor's existence is always reassuring.

The second photo is not our neighbor's house; it's our front yard. The wooden structure once held a cistern that collected water from our well pump. I later filled it with tumbleweeds and left it in the yard, where I've unofficially declared it "land art." In Denver, this would violate about ten different zoning regulations.

Lunar Maria

A rising moon

meets the basalt hill

at the slope of earth's memory.

The inception of the Rio Grande Rift in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado was accompanied by voluminous mafic volcanism preserved in part as erosional remnants on an intrarift horst within the current axial rift graben of the San Luis Valley.

Journal of Geophysical Research, vol. 96, no. B8: "Oligocene Basaltic Volcanism of the Northern Rio Grande Rift: San Luis Hills Colorado"; R.A. Thompson, C.M. Johnson and H.H. Mehnert; 1991.

* * * *

The basalt hills behind our house are ancient shapes, the soft aftermath of ancient volcanic activity. In the evening the hills seem to embody the earth's memory, gently sloping into darkness.

Basalt is an igneous rock, porous yet dense, the color of charcoal. The lunar maria are the basalt plains of the moon. Once believed to be seas, the mare basalts are actually vast, dark plains created by volcanic explosions.

The Visitors

After summer winds,

their scattered belongings

transformed by winter sky

This land appeared to be uninhabited until the owners temporarily took over in the summer. Like everyone who visits the Valley for the first time, or who innocently attempts to set up house here, they weren't ready for the wind. They set up a tent for their fishing gear and cooking equipment -- the wind blew it down. They installed a plastic shed to store their things -- the wind ripped it apart. So now our visitors have given up, it seems, and have left their belongings to the vagaries of the wind.

Ever since they surrendered to the forces of nature, their stuff hasn't gone anywhere.