As the Road Turns

.We took a drive 'up top' last Sunday through our connecting canyon which is Mark's confessed favorite pure leisure drive. In this photo (if you click and enlarge it), you can almost see where we would previously drive straight ahead instead of taking a new curve off to the right. If you attempted that now, you would plunge over a cut a dozen feet deep, probably taking out a high pressure gas pipeline in the process. Ill-advised.

In case you missed the heads up, I am about to get metaphorically obnoxious here so return your tray to the upright position and extinguish all smoking guns.

Just like that road, we have found that what seemed like the clear and obvious path of our plans out here can change in a matter of months or even from hour to hour. The Rock of Damocles was a minor concern but what a gas field rep said yesterday was not. What he learned yesterday was that the five mile road to our Rat Town was not classified as a road used by several gas field operators. What that meant, ominously, was that if the creek gnawed further into the hard rock of the mesa walls in a few places and washed out this elevated road, it could be officially abandoned ... and not replaced. As you might imagine, this was not joyous news to these two people living at the very end of it. The alternative routes are just as seasonally affected (or more so) and would add at least an hour to our established and already prolonged access to civilization.

Now I am wondering if the delay in receiving our pre-fab new buildings was not but more benevolent works of ethereal allies. Having pragmatically ignored such synchronicity in the past to my detriment, I am inclined to have the new buildings delivered 'up top', far removed from these crumbling roads and the The Rock of Damocles . This is where the oddball and the engineer often clash with a brilliant display of sparks, where the unseen and intuitive collide with calculable hard data modeling.

Tomorrow, I would like for the two of us to journey up top once more, to revisit that area which we had both considered a good future home site last August and then compare it with the other possibilities Mark has come across since then. It may well help decide if we should change our time-line abruptly now or remain in the Rat under the Rock until further notice.

I will return in a few days with the results of our exploratory trip. Rat Town might well arise three hundred feet above my lofty dreams of just last month, then again, it might not. So many logistical, natural and human factors to weigh in so little time.
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Saturday's Walk

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Yes, I'm back so soon with another post. Consider it my penance for missing so many days last week.

We both lolled around pleasantly absorbed in reading far too long on Saturday morning to consider a full day 'up top' looking for elk antler sheds seriously. Instead, we chose to wander up the road and across the creek for one last look over a piece of 'our' land before the gas field commandeers it into perpetuity (sort of a modern feudal arrangement and we be da serfs).

Since Brou and particularly Daisy are not inclined to ride in the truck but will chase it down the road to the end of the known world, it was to our great advantage that they both ran up the mesa after ... well, who really knows what. Mark and I ran to the truck and were soon high-tailing it down the road while I watched for frantic descending hounds to follow. Woo-wee! We did it!

After kicking up dust for just short of a mile down into our nearest creek crossing and climbing back up to the far side, we rolled over the newly graded well site and piled out at the far side. I had barely pulled my hiking boots (those beloved rubber boots) out of the truck bed when I saw a brief flash of black down the hill behind us. "Daisy?!!" Sigh ... and Brou. Both panting furiously but neither to be denied an adventure.

Mark headed off to the West and I headed East. The dogs shared themselves back and forth between us until they realized that Mark would return to the cab to finish reading his Wall Street Journal in just a couple of hours. I had paced through the sage to reach and follow the abandoned road along the base of the mesa and both dogs eventually became committed escorts for my hike.
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I dropped away towards the creek, somewhat south from the old road and, as we rounded a bend, I saw this huge boulder between the road and myself. Something didn't look right about this big rock which could have buried the back quarter of the Rat without a trace. It was sitting on a fresh bed of piled earth which had not yet flattened and smoothed out in the rains. I moved in closer and saw fresh white battle scars on its face and immediately thought of Quig and the D8R but there were no vehicle tracks of any sort on the road this far in, let alone grouser tracks.

Then I noticed orangish colored tree debris to the right. As I walked back closer to the road, I realized that these were the sparse remnants of two full-sized cedar trees and the story began to tell itself. This boulder had recently broken loose and thunderously bashed its way down a couple hundred feet to finally rest just beyond the old road bed. It most likely let loose from the light-colored area half-way up the mesa face where what looks like two dark triangular eyes and a nose stare down on us.
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You can click on all photos to enlarge

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I clambered barely up the foot of the talus field to take the above photo looking back down over the boulder's path. I passed another flattened cedar, massive divots and piles of freshly shattered sandstone to get there. If you placed a floret of broccoli on a block and smashed down upon it with your fist full force, you could not have flattened it out as completely as these cedars were now. This is also when I noticed a deeply trenched gouge across the road just behind the boulder. The monster had finally stopped bouncing and slid the last 15 feet across the road bed before running out of momentum. (These photos do not capture the scale at all; everything in this landscape is immense beyond what any of us are used to).

I then recalled hearing what I thought was a demolition explosion in the distance recently. I also thought about 'The Rock of Damocles' still perched over the Rat. These canyons are still changing at the prod of nature's rough and relentless hands.
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Humor of the Day (from the Katlady)

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We finally figured out why Mushy doesn't like cats ...
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The Rock of Damocles

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I will expand on one of my comment replies of a few days ago. The question was whether the mesa directly behind us offered any protection. I considered the matter and realized that it offers little protection. According to the top dwellers, the canyon bottom does offer some break from the incessant winds which often bring a biting dust with them. Unfortunately, our settlement of two lies against a north mesa face and in the direct path of the common westerly winds. The season of the winds is just coming upon us again after a fairly calm spring, summer and fall. The vanguard of this new wind time, of course, fell upon us just as we started our rat trailer skin project. The arrival of the first cold nights snapped us out of our pleasantly lolling summer stupor and then ensnared us between its chill and these rising winds. We will do what we can to finish the remantling of the entire trailer but realize that we might have to concede defeat and retreat to the interior for the winter. If that happens, we might rekindle these efforts with the first returning warm days of spring. But then again, we might not, still enjoying our newfound sense of irresponsibility. The insulation and tight new siding will definitely help deter the summer sun's long, hot fingers from reaching too far into the Rat's soul.

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The windows which I had to uncaulk and remove today to release the last of the aluminum siding are now whistling with the night's furious winds. I must remember to climb the ladder tomorrow and salve their gaping seams. If the overcast skies aid the winds in their marrow-frosting mission again tomorrow, we will have to have a pot of continually warm herbal tea on hand. We even dipped into my apothecary of sliced ginger root marinating in vodka. A small shot glass of this will drive away the deepest felt chills. It may also put the most saloon-hardened of cowboys to flight and one whiff sends the cats and dog into retreat but it works as intended! Try it!
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After writing off any meaningful protection from the mesa, I thought about the possible detriments. Geologically, these mesas are the children of unending erosion and, given enough time, will join the canyons below in a homogeneous plain. According to stories we've heard and from what we have seen, there are times when the process involves a more violent action than mere grains of sand sloughing away. Although rare, sometimes a large mass will crack and fall or sometimes an entire face will simply slump into the valley below. In our case, there is one rock directly above the trailer which looks like it could consider a gravity-driven career move. It wasn't something that we noticed when we had to do a hurried survey of suitable places for the Rat. On the other hand, now that we have noticed it, it's not like we stay up all night waiting for the other big rock shoe to drop either. Let's face it, if we were safety-obsessed, we would be holed up in some flat corn field subdivision, well away from haz-mat zones, high tension lines, fault lines, driving ranges or whatever else folks enjoy agonizing over. One of my favorite stories was by Brautigan wherein he describes their family moving to a house with natural gas. It was a new and sublime source of dread for his mother and he describes the effects of her infectious misery as they all sat around in anguish, waiting for the house to blow up at any minute. For me, it nailed life with our mother right on the head. None of us are immortal so why devote too much time to such things. We both feel more fully alive each day now than we have for years and, for us, that quality is everything.

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Next post: ... if the big rock don't fall ....

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