It is strange that "hiking" usually means walking in the mountains, when in fact, there is nothing in the mountains in the desert Southwest. Mountains are just heaps of rubble. Sharp rocks. Nothing green. No animals, except a "borrego." Stumble and bumble, slip and slide.
In the arroyos in my neighborhood, the world seems lifeless, too, but only from a distance. Close up you are surprised by all the green vegetation. The ironwood trees can be 30 feet high! I can't resist pronouncing the name, ahhrrrnwood.
I am camped low, where the arroyos flatten out. The "streams" split and then rejoin in the most confusing way. This is not true closer to the mountains, where the arroyos have steep banks or sidewalls and where the confluences are sensible and predictable.
This put me in a whimsical mood. My mind drifted off to a Jimmy Buffet song that by chance I had listened to again, a few days back. ("Changing Channels.") Just then an owl left a tree no more than 10 feet away from us. Such a big bird. He flew away silently. An owl's head looks like a football helmet. It would be a good place to hunt for mice.
As luck would have it I had been reading a book about the history of Venice, Italy recently. The book tells about how Venice was founded: the estuary of the Po River was a great place to hide from the barbarians who were ravaging Italy, with all its confusing watercourses and sand banks. That all makes sense to a reader, but to really experience it you must canoe or kayak in a marshy area. Or walk desert arroyos where they flatten out and finally debouch onto a desert plain.
While still in a whimsical mood you can think of some of Bernard Cornwell's novels about the shifting sands and dunes of Frisia, the Thames River estuary, or the Somerset marshes where Alfred the Great barely hung on to the Last Kingdom of the Saxons.
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| from estuaries.org |
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