abydos

It seems that if I time-traveled back to an ancient Egypt, if I was part of a society on this very same piece of earth, but thousands of years ago, I would be preparing for the afterlife.  Or thinking about it, or making appropriate offerings - hoping that the god, along his procession way, would notice my efforts.  There is a procession way out here in the desert sands, sort of. At least, the archaeological evidence speaks to a great deal of activity with another plane in mind. Shrines, graves, subterranean tombs, and funerary structures of all kinds, constructed over centuries, were built as portals connecting the present to the eternal. The living were involved in relationships with those who had crossed into another realm. I cannot, in good conscience, call this other realm the place of the dead because it seems so lively and populated - at least it was viewed as such. No wonder some folks today ponder the likelihood that ancient Egyptians were in cahoots with alien beings. They were in communion, in their hearts and minds, with their ancestors and gods.

cairo and carcinogens

A fine layer of particulate settles on everything, the first strata toward an archaeological record. It rests on leaves and vertical walls, a patina of the tailpipe era. Zamalek, Cairo’s diplomatic quarter and an island in the Nile, is architecturally rooted in the early 20^th century. Its packed-in structures (both colonial and boxy modern) are graying. I followed my colleague and friend – he remembers the winding path much better than I - to the art supply store, a coffee shop, and a fair trade store.  We passed fruit vendors and souvenir shops. I bought a pomegranate stirring those neurons, with any memory of Arabic, to life. We walked until an unfamiliar weariness filled us. Jet lag? Less oxygenated air?

The night before I pushed 100 lbs of luggage through customs and bargained for a taxi. Rush hour traffic gave us close to two hours (and it can take 30 minutes) for the sensory barrage. Cairo is absolutely packed. Somehow everything ancient and contemporary, coexist. It feels dilapidated, shabby, and sheik, and it’s never still or quiet. Even the call to prayer, five times a day, echoing from hundreds of mosques, seems to slow the city half a beat. It feels voracious – devouring, dividing, – a metastasized city world.   Traffic made five and six lanes where four were printed on pavement. Horn honking continues almost unabated into the earliest hours. But how else could you survive this migration? The sidewalks are broken and always ending, leaving people to wade through traffic. The man, navigating this driving tetris, bringing me to the Golden Tulip Hotel Flamenco in Zamalek, does this job night and day - but says he likes Cairo best at night.

Cairo is one of the most polluted cities in the world – surely one of the most polluted I’ve been to. There’s much to explore and enjoy in this outrageous city world. Cairo is often the place that comes to mind when one utters “Egypt.”  Maybe Egypt conjures a resting sphinx or rising pyramids. Those places are here too; the city grows under the gaze of these monuments, and a wall stops them from growing right up over top.

american research center in abydos

I’m writing from the blessedly quiet American Research Center in Abydos, set down in a swale between dunes, a low spot formed by a water flow (though no water flows now). It’s 7 am December 17^th - nine hours ahead of my old New Mexico time zone. Most of the team is sleeping, apart from my British friend Tim – a doctoral student at Brown University. He’s reading here in the sufra (living room) – something about Napoleon’s Egypt. It is incredibly good to be here; getting here was full of those gyrations typical to Egypt travel. We couldn’t take the train – it’s off limits for Western travelers. We rented a van, waited for a police escort (for hours!), and cruised the rough desert highway south arriving at 8pm – nearly 12 hours after our planned departure.  This still, cool morning is refreshing after Cairo – and a calm before the commotion of the dig, which we’ll begin tomorrow. 

utah - we need this wilderness

Utah - for some a land of promise. For me, this is the landscape of Ed Abbey and Terry Tempest Williams. I'm northeast of the Aquarius Plateau, the territory Wallace Stegner referred to in his 1960 Wilderness Letter as a lively and terrible wilderness. I'm here to visit my own park ranger mom and my dad now living in Capitol Reef. They're living in an eden called Fruita, in orchards established by settlers in the 1880s and watered by the Fremont River and Sulfur Creek. This community has its own history - you may learn more here.

Capitol Reef became a national monument in 1937, but the geography we see as a part of the monument has been desert, then sea, then desert, and sea again - each era a layer, each strata a story of an older earth. The newer and intrusive layers mark volcanic eruptions or coagulated magma - cooled then exposed, like caps atop the red sandstone. The layers have character. The Dakota sandstone is full of mussel shells.

The Chinle formation is the most colorful. It's green, gray, and burgundy composition, ready for O'Keeffe, was a swampland that decayed into bright and curdled hills. 275 million years of the earth's history is exposed in uplift and canyon drainage.

For its grandeur we've made it a national park. Set it aside - a protected space that we keep safe even from ourselves. And it contributes to the health of our psyches. We need to see that we have foresight as evidenced by safely kept wild lands. We need to see that we today, and our predecessors too - carefully conceived of, and continue to understand, the fact that we are nature and we need nature. We need a place like this terrible wilderness especially now, while oil floods out into the Gulf of Mexico - as it has for more than 50 days after the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig.
Wallace Stegner's Wilderness Letter made me understand that even if I come only to its edge - I need wilderness to exist. Not only I, but all of us. He said we are a wild species - and something will go out of us should we lose our wild places. He wrote in that letter a paragraph about the very place I am now exploring.

". . . let me suggest the Robbers' Roost country in Wayne County, Utah, near the Capitol Reef National Monument. In that desert climate the dozer and jeep tracks will not soon melt back into the earth, but the country has a way of making the scars insignificant. It is a lovely and terrible wilderness, such as wilderness as Christ and the prophets went out into; harshly and beautifully colored, broken and worn until its bones are exposed, its great sky without a smudge of taint from Technocracy, and in hidden corners and pockets under its cliffs the sudden poetry of springs. Save a piece of country like that intact, and it does not matter in the slightest that only a few people every year will go into it. That is precisely its value. Roads would be a desecration, crowds would ruin it. But those who haven't the strength or youth to go into it and live can simply sit and look. They can look two hundred miles, clear into Colorado: and looking down over the cliffs and canyons of the San Rafael Swell and the Robbers' Roost they can also look as deeply into themselves as anywhere I know. And if they can't even get to the places on the Aquarius Plateau where the present roads will carry them, they can simply contemplate the idea, take pleasure in the fact that such a timeless and uncontrolled part of earth is still there. "

(This excerpt of Stegner's letter was posted by The Wilderness Society).

But on this trip we did more than come to the edge of the wild - we went in. We walked through skinny canyons, soaked our feet, suffered fierce wind and even stubbed our toes in a manner that would make Ed Abbey proud. He was a park ranger too - and was faced with a predicament still a challenge in even the most beautiful places. That is - to make people get out and see them, not only drive through them."What can I tell them? Sealed in their metallic shells like mollusks on wheels, how can I pry the people free? The auto as tin can, the park ranger as opener. Look here, I want to say, for godsake folks get out of them there machines, take off those fucking sunglasses and unpeel both eyeballs, look around; throw away those goddamned idiotic cameras! For chrissake folks what is this life if full of care we have no time to stand and stare? Take off your shoes for a while, unzip your fly, piss hearty, dig your toes in the hot sand, feel that raw and rugged earth, split a couple of big toenails, draw blood! Why not? Jesus Christ, lady, roll that window down! You can't see the desert if you can't smell it! Dusty! Of course it's dusty - this is Utah! But it's good dust, good red Utahn dust, rich in iron, rich in irony."

Desert Solitaire, Ed Abbey

You must come here - however you visit - just do. Come to its edge, watch a sunset, and maybe leave your metal mollusk shell. I think you will be compelled. The night sky is protected from the haze our cities shoot out toward space. You will see stars, planets, and maybe skipping meteors.

I leave you with Stegner's closing words. These are the words that make me sure we can keep sane if only we un-hunch ourselves from our machines, our devices . . lean back on solid rock and gaze out."We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope."

Very sincerely yours,

Wallace Stegner

___________________

And very sincerely yours,

Gaea McGahee

Now I must go out - to a summer full of the backcountry - on the Mountain Desert Trek. So long.

water on earth . . . day

Today - Earth Day - let's consider water. Water drying up, dirty water, and water coming in bottles.

Bottled water is weird. It's even unnatural! If you live in a nation where water - good for drinking - comes right out of the faucet then bottled water is a waste of money and materials. One thing that will make all our water worse is all the stuff we're putting into it. And making more bottled water (the irony) is polluting and wasting water by turning it into a commodity. Check out The Story of Stuff Project and this clarifying episode on The Story of Bottled Water.


In my travels through Peru and Bolivia, Egypt or Mexico . . . I've struggled with the bottled-water-issue because, well sometimes it's all there is to drink! By drinking it, I add to the production of plastic in our oceans AND take in whatever plastic-y toxin is leaching out of the bottle and into its contents. Yikes! Yet in these places - where the water coming from the tap isn't safe people need clean water. Not to mention many, many people don't have taps to turn on and drink from. In Bolivia I met some folks working with SODIS - an organization helping educate people about a way to get purified water by using the sun's UV rays to kill bacteria. PET-plastic bottles (or better yet) glass bottles filled with funky water, can be left in the sun for 6 hours allowing the sun's radiation to kill pathogens and make the water safe for drinking. This solution saves lives.


Finally, about water drying up - or being bought up, I recommend the documentary Flow: for the love of water. They offers some hearty sips for thought. The facts their website will link you to are shocking - 1.1 billion people on earth have no access to clean drinking water. No access. None. And this lack of water sanitation claims more lives through disease than any war claims through guns (www.water.org).

This Earth Day may those of us who can consider giving up the plastic bottle - or tradeing it for a glass one. And may we also consider a substance we're likely taking for granted - water.

what's grand in utah

If ever you hanker for red rock canyon lands and the sense that you are an intrepid explorer head to Cedar Mesa and the Grand Gulch country of southern Utah. There you can throw on a backpack and hike into a spot like Collins Canyon where in a few hours you'll trek past Banister Ruin (above). It's well preserved thanks to the sheltered location and includes a roofed kiva!

These places housed the ancestors of today's People people. They dot the southwest and in Grand Gulch so many are tucked away in nooks and on south-facing sandstone ledges. They have lasted for centuries - time capsules that hold the history of a people.

They tell us that farmers lived here - managing to create enough surplus that they needed these clever storehouses for their corn crops. The canyons are well watered for an arid land - some have running streams and productive springs. The canyon walls that sheltered families were etched on too - here a collection of petroglyphs stand out, cut through the desert varnish (stained or oxidized rock layer) to reveal the lighter rock beneath.

On my second morning in a canyon labyrinth I bent to scoop water. The canyon walls were close here - they seemed to be on all sides, except for the blue strip above, and reflected in the running stream.

This places drew inhabitants for centuries, then they left and archaeologists and cowboys came. Writers, poets, and backpackers too. Edward Abbey roamed this land long enough to correctly (I believe) observe, “Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit” . . how right on he was - still is.

dogs and other nations

Dogs have been our companions for ages. They may be descended from wolves or several species from the Canidea family, but we know we became fond of them long, long ago. In the southwest we can find their bones in the archaeological record sometimes buried with a person or with careful attention to their grave. Maybe they were offerings, maybe hunting companions or traveling companions. In the cool of a rock shelter, maybe they were warm sleepers. It's true that there are cut marks on some disarticulated bones. Perhaps some were eaten.

How we feel about our own dogs today is fairly diverse too. Some have jobs, some have homes, some I saw in Bolivia ran in packs and foraged for their food. The dog I knew was the kind of person I think of when I read Henry Beston's view of animals.

"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth."
— Henry Beston

I'm glad that as human beings we have for centuries founded friendships with these animal nations - to better enjoy the splendors and face the travails of life on earth.

Hanna pup
2000 - 2010

A dog's life must be a big adventure - and yours was . . . archaeological expeditions, escapes from peril, you were content with travel, dreaming rabbit-chase dreams. You kept us all company - you, a most loyal friend. Good dog. Good dog!