A Wadi of Mud and Evil

'Wadi' is an Arabic term that you might remember from the movie, "Lawrence of Arabia." It is a valley that is dry most of the year, and sees water flow a couple days per year. My area in central Utah has a wadi with a lot of mud deposited on the floor. But water concentrates and carves out steep-walled slots 10 to 20 feet deep, in this otherwise flat area.

The edge of the slot is almost a perfect 90 degree corner. I was reluctant to walk within 3 feet of this edge, out of fear of it crumbling away. Looking along the mud slot I could see a lot of places where the walls had collapsed. In the narrower slots, this would trap a man.

But I poked at those 90 degree corners with my hiking pole, and found them surprisingly strong. My little sweetie pie walked along the edge, close enough to give her daddy a heart attack. At one spot she stumbled when she was only a couple inches from the edge. But she quickly recovered.

She might not have been too hurt if she'd fallen in, but in most places the slots were too deep for me to get in there and help her.

There were weird eroded holes in the slots. Usually they were too small to swallow a man, but they would certainly have swallowed Cutie Pie. The contrast in lighting between shade and sunlight was so severe that the bottoms of these eroded holes were not visible.

Invisibility, where Evil is concerned, lights up the imagination. Think of these holes as the plutonic, steam-spewing fumaroles in Iceland, into which the demonic Brida sacrificed her victims, in the "Last Kingdom."

When water goes to work on mud or mudstone, the strangest shapes can result.

You wouldn't think that mudstone could be eroded into a knife edge:

Weird shapes are unexplainable on one level. And yet they are all caused by differential rates of erosion:

Upstream of the sudden onset of the mud slots, you could only see faint troughs that looked completely harmless. But were they hollow and lethal under the surface, like the crevasses that swallow alpinists? I kept poking them with my wanderstöcke (hiking pole in English)

It was irresistible to imagine these stationary and shallow troughs, radiating with great speed away from the deep slots downstream, like cracks in a windshield propagating away from a stone chip you just received.

There were parallel mud slots. Sometimes this resulted in long peninsulas that could have been walked if I were braver. If the edge collapsed, the fall would have been 10 to 20 feet. At the bottom, would I have had a sprain or broken bone, only to discover that the cellphone signal had been lost?

A younger person might have felt temptation to jump across the narrow mud slots, with the suicidal recklessness that they are prone to.

Everywhere I saw inanimate nature transmogrifying into a sentient Malevolence, like the Crystalline Entity in Star Trek: the Next Generation.