Central Utah. The pressure is on. I am always pontificating about the West being praised for pretty scenery while the actual reality is rain, or rather, the lack thereof. That means there should be something to say when we finally get a little rain. We only got a tenth of an inch but on Mancos shale that was enough to get my van stuck. I waited awhile and then used "poor man's four wheel drive," that is, pressing halfway down on the parking brake, while revving the engine to about 2500 RPM in order to overcome the braking.
Shouldn't something seem different after the rain? You will hear that deserts smell good after a rain. They do, if there are a lot of creosote bushes. That is more of a Mojave Desert thing.
I was near a reef that had no creosote bushes or any vegetation, so there were no signs of the renewal of life from the world of plants. No animals or birds were to be seen.
So that's it? A big nothing-burger after rain that should be seen as miraculous? The best place to look for something is in the arroyos, where water congregates. I wondered if you could ever encounter anything like quicksand. It was a bit fun to read the Wikipedia article about quicksand, but it was not to be seen.
There were "alluvial" marks made freshly in the arroyo. They weren't worth photographing, but I thought they were interesting. I saw lots of small waves of sand outside the arroyos.
What a strange contrast: puny, humble ripples of one kind or another near my feet, while in the distance was a landscape formed by millions of years of differential erosion from water. It is easier for a human being to relate to these small ripples, as if they best represented the reality of rain.
But Schopenhauer would not have agreed with that last statement. He went on many walks with his small poodle and probably would have enjoyed this walk through the wet arroyo with me and my little cock-a-poo.
true symbol of nature is the circle...reality belongs to the permanent forms of things, the Ideas alone, and which was so clearly evident to Plato that it became his fundamental thought, the centre of his philosophy......As the scattered drops of the roaring waterfall change with lightning rapidity, while the rainbow, whose supporter they are, remains immovably at rest, quite untouched by that ceaseless change, so every Idea, i.e., every species of living creature remains quite untouched by the continual change of its individuals.
Comments
Yes it can happen, many years ago I came upon a Border Patrol Jeep that was stuck in a very shallow wash. They had driven out into some quicksand that looked to be just a sandy wash and were promptly stuck all the way to the frame.
Hollywood has given the world a completely warped idea of quicksand.