Requiem [COMPLETED]

Vincit Omnia Veritas

All of these things happened so long ago that by comparison my life was nothing, not even a second's worth of those eons which built the Rocky Mountains, or in which volcanoes covered the southwest. I lost myself in this eternity of shifting earth and heavens; so many lives existed in this one which encompassed the history of Earth. I marveled at how many people had crossed west to California and Alaska almost two hundred years ago and how this landscape was exactly the same now for me. Less than an inch of erosion had happened since: rock arches stood unchanged and would stand thousands of years yet before falling. It was a wholly different scale than my life.

I was in the midst of map-making for geology 390k: a Geologic history of the Four Corners states. I quietly had a personal map project that I carried on while doing the required structural geology maps and formation depth maps: I carried a private journal everywhere with me and daily drew the vistas and landscapes that gave me an overwhelming sense of awe. For most geologists, seeing hundred-foot high arches and thousand-foot deep gorges made them giddily cantor about taking strike-dip measurements and hammering off rock samples from dangerous perches on the edge of precipices; for me, I wished I could have afforded to buy a camera. So I sat and sketched as best I could.

I'd found some partial shade behind a dead twisted pinion pine on the edge of the mesa. Besides the assignment, I was drawing my own image to remember this place.

I love maps. I could draw maps all day; not the ones that are sold in gas stations of road networks, or for hiking. I loved maps that showed my understanding of a place. I like maps that show me where I am when I'm trying to get from point A to point B; when I'm in the place I want to be, I want to make a map that will remind me who I am here, what other things are, what the history is. What the story is. Lots of native cultures excel in this kind of map-making; for them the landscape is sensate and conscious; the land is filled with living wills and memories. Each identifier—a boulder, a mountain, a lake—has a story of why it belongs, and the role it plays in the culture of the people who live by it. A mountain lives, senses your approach and can throw up challenges or willingly let you succeed in scaling it. Nature is both wild and watching. You are never alone. Even the rocks breathe, choose when to fall, willing their own movement and final destination.

In such landscapes, to know the stories is to navigate through time and space, like Hansel and Gretel following the bread crumbs they'd left behind. These maps may vary in their accuracy with measuring distances, but they richly endow meaning—of our own lives and others. On highway maps, the world around me was the opposite: stationary, listless, without will or meaning. It was just lines and numbers arbitrarily dissecting blank spaces, as if nothing had existed before the surveyors crossed the void, drawing as they went. Whenever I looked at an atlas or a gazetteer I always got sidetracked wondering what had come before, what had existed before Europeans came along and painted over it with white.

The sky was so brilliant with sunshine that it washed out to almost white, fading to blue with the black-blue mountains on the horizon, and around the bowl of sky where it met the red mesa behind me. I had almost forgotten what nature, real outdoors nature felt like after the last few years living in the city. The dry breeze was so heated it didn't relieve us at all and the sun sent out waves that burned my eyes. The light became stronger, fuller as we moved west and south. It got so strong that it started to wash out the landscape, bleach colors to sand until the sun fell again and everything started to look like it was bleeding from heat exhaustion.

There was something true in the overwhelming vastness of the canyon lands around me, the sensation of climbing hot sandstone, smooth under the hand like a sculpture, the red dust that stained my hands and made them smell like iron. It wasn't happiness, but a sense of peace, knowing that this rock recognized everything. It had existed before the dinosaurs. The millions of years of its forming and solidifying, and then millions of years more as it watched the earth change. It was like a very old person who could no longer be surprised by anything. The communion of touch was soothing, almost like holding hands, as if it could impart some of its peacefulness to me.