"In the Mustang Rain" (c) 2007 Stu Jenks
[Images: "Spiral in the Mustang Rain", "Agaves in the Mustang Rain"]
It was a Male Rain at my apartment earlier today: buckets from the sky, bright lightning, flickering power in my apartment, yellow-tan sand and water in the motorways. Here though, it's a Female Rain: gently falling, my glasses clean and clear under the bill of my Krispy Kreme hat, bare legs barely getting wet from the mist.
It's late in the afternoon. Been reading the last Harry Potter book. Hard to leave the house because of that, but I have to, for the Mustangs called me. Well, 'Called' is a little overly dramatic. Closer to say, I could see The Biscuit and The Mustangs in my mind's eye and those images wouldn't go away. I know what that means. I won't be happy until I surrender to a trip. So I did and here we are. Plus I really long for a short hike up some stout hills.
No cattle on the range today. Saw a couple cattlemen though just a few minutes ago, as I turned onto the muddy dirt road that leads into the Mustangs. They were out with a small tractor and a blade, smoothing out one of the tracks that crosses the range. Land isn't theirs. Land isn't mine. Land belong to the State of Arizona. They lease. I come for free. Guessing they don't really need to be out in the rain, with a blade this afternoon. Roads ain't that bad. I bet they just wanted to get out of the house and play in the mud.
I park sooner that I normally do. The track is very muddy after all. Maybe the cattlemen are doing the Good Lord's work. I park and walk the rest of the way in. Having a 4 x 4 truck doesn't mean I don't get stuck. Just means I can get stuck farther away from things.
The rain is a delight. It's the monsoon season in Southeastern Arizona, one of the best kept secrets in Tourista-Land. Everyone around the country sees 115 degrees in Phoenix on The Today Show, not knowing that just two to three hours south of The Surface of The Sun, is a region of a lot more rain, a lot less heat, and a lot gentler people. Only tell your best friends now.
The bushwhack up is easier that I thought. The rain has pushed down the tall grass. The footing is sturdy and true. The drip, drip, drip of the Female Rain doesn't impede me but rather helps pull me up the hill. I stop along the way to shoot a spiral or two in the conglomerate rock. There are a lot of spirals here, made from the merging of different molten rock. They look like fossils but they appears to be quartz mixed with basalt. (Then again, fossils are mineralized organic material, and this land was underwater eons ago. Could be prehistoric snail shells or something like them.)
I drew a spiral in the mud back behind me, near a corral, a half hour ago. Didn't take its picture. Was more of a prayer, a reminder that the journey always goes on. Never stops. Even in death. The end of my mud-spiral flew out and open toward the North. The rock spiral glistening at my feet does that too, yet better than mine. That's fine. It's not about me, really, my quest for Art and Beauty. It's about something timeless and eternal. I just use the Personal to get to the Universal. And no matter how old or bald or broke or lonely or fat or scared I feel, the path always goes on, with or without me. I just have to walk it as best I can while I'm here, find some friends along the way, use my volition for The Good and The True. Not perfectly mind you, not always with my head held high, but I need to just move the feet, even when I don't feel like it, and again do the best I can. God and I are partners here, with other people too. I ain't a puppet. He/She/It ain't no puppet master. And the other good folk who walk with me, in front, behind and beside me, are all equals too. The illusion is, that it is otherwise, that we are not the same, that we didn't climb out of the same ocean.
I've only gone about halfway up. Going to be dark in a couple hours. Don't want to be hiking out in the dark. Off to the south, across a mile wide valley are some hills of the Southern Mustangs, peaking in and out of the clouds. First they are obscured completed in white, then ten seconds later, a peak shows through; a half minute after that, full details can be seen of the ridge-line; another minute later, back to fully obscured in misty clouds. I sit on a rock, try once or twice to shoot the mountain across the way, and then realize, this is for the Mind's Eye, not the camera's. Photography is a wonderful lie sometimes. It can show the details, the specifics, even sometimes create something that isn't there, but mostly it fibs, giving the strong illusion that what you see is what there is. The slow swirling motion of the mist, the tap tap tap of the rain, the smell of the grasses, the cactus, the ocotillo, and agave, a fragrance that can not be describe well or bottled. The smell of a Barn in Heaven, with angel clouds to boot. Turning these sights, smells, sounds in a three dimensional sphere of existence into a two dimensional photographic window is one tall order. But I try, partly to stir my emotional memory later on, but also, sometimes, to seek the Eternal and share it with others. I try as I can. A Fool's errand that I must do, in order to be happy.
I get back to the truck with much time to spare. Looks like I have another hour of light. I drink some Coke Zero, and light a Camel. I look in the back seat and see my copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I grab it, open it to page 424 that I book-marked before I left my apartment and read "Harry fell, panting, onto grass and scrambled up at once..."
