Another Neurodivergent Queer Writes A Blog!

The land is woven through with story, held into connective resonance by the stories, even made into place by the emplacement of a story’s teller and their audience within that space through the social magic of the story.

What is geology other than witnessing the land tell its stories of itself and inventing ways to access those stories through core samples of this lakebed or that basin? The great void of the Grand Canyon is full with the stories of itself, each layer another chapter slabbed atop the next, the void itself speaking its own.

But it is odd for a European to think like this, isn’t it? Places do not speak in European folklore, though animals may on occasion. As far as I know no clouds ever revealed the way to a Hansel. The forest did not lead the way for Red Riding Hood—and anyway if a forest were to be granted agency in a fable, it was a horrid thing, a source of eventide terror. This is the pitiful legacy of cosmic isolation Europeans carry.

K(ing)ofA(rizona) Mountains, AZ

There are ancient beings in these mountains known by an acronym of a mine. Or, to put it better, not only are these mountains ancient beings, they have so deigned to grace us with images of themselves in their anticipatory historical present.

To the north of me here, a wide cliff face, jutting upward from a broad base, culminating ultimately in a long vault like the ceiling of a long house. On the face of this cliff, a spectacular story conveyed in an image no less clearly than the illustrations on Athenian ceramics, one I will not however share for a sense in me warning me against it.

Much closer to me rises another inspirited peak, on the west face of which is revealed a lightly clad figure, a traveler, attended by either a small bear or a very large canine. He is headed south, directly leading me toward what is now called Mexico, but what is properly O’odham land, that last bit of desert above sea level before the sea itself strikes the dry with its brine, lands that gave the O’odham the salt they’d trade around for much of the foods that sustained them.

But I don’t know the stories of this place. I can guess at it, but I don’t know what I’m seeing even as I recognize the scene. I can’t read them right, and rightly I have no right to read them. The Quechan belong here, or more likely one or more of the other more northerly Colorado River tribes. These are their stories around me, and it fills me with longing to experience that emplacement, that sense of knowing the stories that connect you to the land around you by the fact of your knowing them.

The Elephants, CA

I had no name for these mountains until just tonight when I recognized that elephants were all around, calcified, agatized, quartz-bearing auriferous elephants. Not normal-sized elephants, but mountains. And everywhere I look now I see another elephant, mothers, bulls, even youngsters. Last year it was only in a specific spot in this space. This year they’ve shown themselves to me so that I see them everywhere else in most of the landforms around me. This place is The Elephants now—to me, at least. It is sacred ground—to me but also many others I’m sure.

These mountains have been assigned a Government name, an artifact of European colonization, but I won’t insult them with it or tip you off where this place is by naming them. This isn’t about them, anyway. I’m not here to tell you every single thing I adore about this place, or why you should totally follow my socials so I can show you every other place about to be ruined from putting it online. This is about connecting with a place in an unexpected fullness.

There is either a miner’s shack out here, or else a shaman hut, or, well, let’s call it a hermitage. Their eyes are always on me; it’s unmistakable. I brought them a special rock I’d carried around since last time when I’d found it in a wash. I walked up to them and greeted them, wishing, “Live free, friends,” as I backed away.

Ironwoods line the washes here in an otherwise bare landscape. I was invited to one spot along a particularly majestic wash, where a truly impressive Ironwood thrives, along a sort of riverbank maybe six feet lower than the low rocky ripples arching along the landscape. This particular Ironwood offered us shelter from the midday sun, and kept western gusts at bay. I have no proof or even a particular sensory input I can convey or even construct in my mind, but it was an invitation, like a flash of inspiration.

I did things for this place. And I continue to do things for this place now that I’ve returned. The litter from decades of its visitors’ consumerist neglect, the metal tins, the tin-can and glass-bottle slag from long-abandoned fire pits (because whatever you put in a fire pit today will be all over the ground outside it within a decade by the looks of things), plus worst of all an ungodly amount of crumbling plastics… I carted out buckets and bags of it before this place welcomed me. Even today, once the sun chills out in a few hours, I’m going to a site I stumbled into yesterday with nails and glass and even a disassembled dresser drawer—no sign of the dresser anywhere.

It’s disrespect to the land, and to my mind it’s equal disrespect for a person to see that garbage and do nothing about it.

So maybe that invitation was a kind of reciprocation: here is this beautiful stretch of land far removed from anyone else, like the beach of a shallow lake only six feet deep, and even though it’s like the water’s been sucked away, you can still see its presence by what its power has done to its edges, the opposite edge being no more than five or so yards away. I accepted that invitation, something like a literal inspiration, an invitation breathed into me, a vision of the camp matching my imagination’s long rumination from out of the nothingness itself.

This place has been in my mind ever since, and now months later in the fall, I found myself suddenly eager to return. And when I did it was like the full embrace I’ve needed, the shoulder to cry on, attached to the mouth that tells me, ‘So here is the grief, all of it, now let’s get it out and make something of it.’

They are sacred to me, this space and those nurtured within it.