A friend and I drove this week out to the desert for a quick solstice camp under a massive rock formation. The rocks are just immense. The size of two- or three-story buildings, in giant piles or standing solo. They fill the landscape, on and on, they’re the touchable evidence of plate-motion, very old and dwarfing.
Roaming around, I thought of a snippet from the California poet Kay Ryan’s 2014 poem “All Your Horses” –
a larger
amount is
no longer
a larger amount.
The Joshua Tree region is hallowed ground for rock climbers. We saw people trad climbing and top-roping. These days, I go mainly to touch the rocks and clamber. These saddlebacks of bare rock. These foothills of boulderstone. By day they hold heat. In the morning they’re so cold. They’re quartz monzonite, hard rough granite. My palms were quickly red and sore.
The desert is vast, seemingly endless. It feels timeless to me, that deep time we talked about, but perhaps the rocks, in their extraordinary piles, are hands on the clock. Surrounded by creosote scrub, desert saltbush, and the bizarre-o joshua trees themselves. It’s real America. It’s imaginary America. At cocktail hour, we listened to Otis Redding Christmas songs.
After a fire, I threw a tarp on the ground and my sleeping bag on top. Enough wine meant I could fall asleep quickly, then I woke around three a.m., laying on my back. I stared at the stars for what felt like an hour. Multiple meteors. Multiple airplanes. Satellites drifting (or something else?). And around me all these remarkable stones going nowhere.
From that same Ryan poem:
you think it again:
you have lost
count.
I’ll be off next week for a long winter’s nap. But in tomorrow’s Sunday supplement: a holiday playlist, some recent best reads, and portraits of snow crystals.
What the what
Meditations in an Emergency is a weekly essay about something beautiful from author Rosecrans Baldwin. Supporters receive a Sunday supplement with three-plus ideas of things to love, plus a longer piece once a month written in the woods ⛰️