Dies de los Muertos — November 1-2

Back on April 29 I was hot on the trail of mineralization; it hadn’t quite clicked with me yet that Mt. Sugarloaf was in any way geologically active. But I had figured out that it wasn’t just a sand dune; it capped a “hub” point in the swirl of local faults and folds. So I scrambled up to the top of the Dome to see if there was anything distinctive about the rocks that I could notice, anything that might connect with the other strange sites i’d been learning about. (I’d been up there once before, but I was young and blind and dumb, then, with my East Cost glasses on. This time I went with my Science Goggles.) These are, I figured out gradually, recent subaerial exhalative mineralizations of the copper series: chrysocolla (blue) and malachite (green) and there is even some azurite (azure, of course); on very old metamorphic rocks pushed, or sucked up the straw, or shaken in liquefaction, or steamed, or boiled up through the sands, to the top of an old diatreme that lets out on the dome’s crest: think of a submarine hatch, or, a whale’s blowhole.

That day was exciting; it was when, for me, the penny dropped — the Universe changed — all the madness of porphyries and hydrothermal vents and chalcopyrite and the crown-shaped burnt craters suddenly appearing on other hillsides, started to make a kind of sense. BUT — when you see how I found them arranged — or how somebody had re-arranged them — you’ll understand how another penny dropped that day — the Universe changed — and real anger crawled over me like a nasty spider. This is our country, folks. We each owe it to the murdered victims of fascism to stop this in our place, in our time.

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I don’t even remember, except as flashes of anger, how I kicked the spider to death. It certainly isn’t how Nature puffed them to the surface. But this is how I left the dome of Sugarloaf that day, hoping no other hiker would ever have their soul scalded by recognizing that they had once held that pattern. I was too sad and ashamed of my country to post this a few months ago, and too vexed to share with Patient Reader my joy over finding these sea-colored gifts of creation in the desert. Now, I’m ashamed I did not post this story, so I offer it to the dead.

RIP, ALL SOULS WHO PERISHED FROM FASCISM, HATE, RACISM AND HOMOPHOBIA. RIP, ALL WHO EVER FOUGHT AGAINST THE SPIDER.