Going Afield--Southwestward in a Hesitant Springtime

 We returned for a second visit to the Black Mesa region, out at the tip of the Oklahoma Panhandle in April, 2022, following on a first trip in late winter 2021. I had picked April for coming back there on a hunch that April brings to those southern plains what May brings to Minnesota and the Canadian border region--greening up and songbird arrivals--only to notice the bleached yellow of the grass left standing the length of Highway 325 to Kenton, Oklahoma, which is a walk away from the border with New Mexico. Winter appeared to be hanging on to the land much as it was way up north, though snowless and crisp with sand and yucca plants.

Our arrival was on Easter Saturday, ahead of which, by phone, our host invited us to the yearly Easter pageant held nearby on the premises. Starting that evening at seven with the judgment and crucifixion of Jesus, at six the next morning another half would pick up with His resurrection and reappearance among the disciples.  So we joined the line of cars and pickup trucks proceeding a mile or so up the road in the lowering of evening, and saw what was to be a play with costumed actors on the cliffside within part of the mesa. All the audience parked and sat in their cars and trucks facing the cliffs like an audience at a drive-in movie. An announcer could be heard through outdoor loudspeakers and through everyone's car radio, if we tuned into one setting at the bottom of the dial. I found myself awed by the pantomimed enactment of the Christian story, set into the loftiness of the natural cliff amphitheater rearing high to our front and right side, with zigzagging pathways all the way to the top and in their midst the opening to a cavern--Jesus' tomb--the round cut-stone door rolled to the left.

As soon as we pulled away from our cabin in the shivery-cold dark of Easter daybreak we heard the pop-pop of tire trouble from our left rear wheel. Jerry got out on the gravel roadside and inspected all the tires, seeing nothing abnormal, and the sound quit as I sped up to match the pace of traffic in front of us. But parked again at the amphitheater, I got out and looked at the left rear tire, finding a bolt, with thread and nut jutting at a startling height from the middle of the tread. We finished taking in the spectacle of the troupes of disciples, Pharisees, scribes, procurator, Mary the mother of Jesus and Mary Magdalene and at last the risen Messiah, all the satin robes gleaming red, pink, purple, aquamarine, gold, black and white proceeding on routes more vertical than level as the sun rose to light the cliff with its pathways and ledges, the re-opened tomb and the three crosses uppermost at the peak, yesterday evening's rags signifying the crucified by now stripped away from the wood. Once we'd bumped our way down to the gravel and dust beside our cabin and set about removing the wheel, the tire by now crushed in folds and stinking of ruined rubber, Jerry detected a hole through the metal alloy of the rim between two of the spokes; that bolt had pierced all the way from the tread to the wheel as we crept the necessary short ways to a privacy we'd have done better without. Later we joked about changing the tire in the midst of the pageant's last act while the robed players descended the cliff to help out, building some modern-day roadside salvation into their message.

The next three days, as we waited for shipment of a new rim to the nearest Toyota dealer--many miles westward and north in Trinidad, Colorado, we had few options but to explore the Black Mesa on foot and by car, Jerry driving at a gentle pace with the lightweight 'donut' spare tire at risk of a blow-out far in rocky back country. Our host Jane filled us in about the area's drought, worse than that we'd endured in Minnesota over the previous two years; at least we'd had intervening scatters of snow or rain during ours, whereas locally, she said, no moisture had fallen since the last August. The cacti throughout the ranch crouched brown and puckered where not already dead, and thorn trees I could not name stood barren everywhere back from the budding cottonwood giants that lined one tributary of the nearby Cimarron River, much of it dry or in separated pools, winding its way northwestward. I gained one life bird species, the pair of ash-throated flycatchers in a thicket sprung from the streambed, birds willing to pose, however wary, vocalizing in alarm notes that alternated with courtship calls. Through three days of varied chill and dry heat with nearly constant wind, any birds were a scant few in number and variety compared to what I'd imagined before we came: one or several loggerhead shrikes that perched, foraging, among the thorn trees, the odd mockingbird, and bursts of sparrows across the pastures and slopes of scrub--birds quiet in the concerns of their apparent migration to mountainsides, prairies and tundra higher up the continent. Surprisingly numerous were the lark sparrows, the most I had ever seen in one place, now and again with vesper and white-crowned sparrows intermixed.

Black Mesa State Park

Even a parching scrubscape has a feel of animal potential, like a burn or a bog a thousand miles to the north, home of my heart and my artwork; and coming in the mysticism stoked by the Easter pageant, from a regimen of reading on the origins of and later bases for Christian faith was a reminder that Jesus and those convinced by his life and resurrection were desert walkers. An old philosophy that had soured for me was one I had built upon a vision of the stuff of life--mud, sand, rock, living matter, trickling water, mysterious enough to console me with its own mechanics, familiar, imaginable, a diversified embodiment of divine mystery. For many people stuff obedient to defined laws of physics remains enough to relax the mind and soul. But by now, I  draw courage from--indeed need--evidence of divine energy borne of a faraway yet encompassing source of things that knows us each as we can't know each other or ourselves, that's able to transform any material, any situation into something beyond what our limited reasoning would allow. With my wavering faith in the eminence of the supernatural embedded in the natural and scientifically understood physical, I find I've gained confidence that this landscape may, along with most, scorch to extinction generated by the trapped heat of our industrial gases and yet may, here and elsewhere, flutter again much later with foliage and flowing streams. Because that is the potential of ultimate Creation. Yes, and we owe our homage and life-saving work to tend it, protecting it for our era and the future as we protect ourselves. Long-term survival is a function of time in a magnitude that isn't ours to try and reckon. The scarce native creatures I saw there, always suddenly and by surprise--like the herd of pronghorn skimming along pathways beset with thorns, and the jack rabbit escaping me in kangaroo-bounds fast as an accelerating car--someday, somewhere may get their chance to increase; the coveys of quail I had hoped to find may end up common and daily visible--maybe, in another dimension, lovers of earthly creation will dwell alongside all these things and more. Maybe I am also delusional, but entirely so, probably not.

Meanwhile the Black Mesa remains a place hard to live in; animals of every kind need space around them to sustain themselves with enough water and nourishment; cattle, which are big in the local economy, must disperse themselves while their owners carry feed by truck to them as there is not enough grass for grazing. Conditions are lacking for growing hay. Landowners like our proprietors, Jane and Bobby Apple, who've stayed in that countryside for three generations have long since become savers and recyclers, gracing the various guest lodgings that include a log cabin and a stone house with a trove of the things that define a kitchen, the finds and keepsakes that cheer up a home anywhere they're put. Antlers in pairs throughout the guests' log cabin serve as coat hooks and towel racks. Mismatched dishes pulled out of bygone homes, given away or resold at thrift stores or yard sales await use on sideboards or in plain wooden cabinets under the sink. All of it homey with function, pieces on the wall inscribed by someone's hand or painted with a scene, hung and placed to give comfort to travelers little known to the hosts. 

Prickly pear

We avoided crossing any of the big cities lying between Black Mesa and home, driving state highways and old U.S. 2-lane routes instead, so that my conception of modern-day America shifted and gentled, ever so slightly. I had not realized there was quite so much tallgrass prairie throughout the agrarian state of Kansas, because we passed through the Flint Hills going westward and the Gypsum Hills coming back, and we saw a huge amount of grassland especially covering hills that no one had wanted to till and apparently no one much was grazing either. In Missouri and Iowa, greening, whipped and soaked by evening thunderstorms, we saw lots more wild old grass, with buildings scattered as if in deference to stubborn realities of what remains affordable. The motel room in Clarinda, Iowa was itself an exhibit in make-do and harvested material that in another, maybe more prosperous economy than what many of us live within now would not have occurred to the builder or remodeler as inviting decor: corrugated steel seen oftener on farm silos alongside the bed, and rough-milled raw boards of cedar used as corner trim from someone's rustic sawmill in back country that may have been the mountain West.

We're so many of us coming back from a shutdown, a shortage or tragedy, learning to do what we can to repair damages. In 2020 Vine Arts Center, the member gallery just north of Lake Street in Minneapolis, was hit with jets of destructive water when sprinklers in the ceiling went off reacting to a fire on the roof, ignited when a bar just up the avenue went ablaze during the George Floyd protests. Hardwood flooring warped and lifted up, electrical and other structural ruin ensued and the gallery, along with a lot of neighboring studio space in the Ivy Building was forced to close for months to undergo repairs. At least one entire body of artwork was destroyed. Just now in spring 2022 the Vine is virtually ready for use, needing only replacement lighting and ceiling fans which have been ordered. Plans are in discussion for a first member show in September. A drawing group has been welcomed to use the gallery space; soon members and the public will again gather there to boost the careers of Minnesotan and regional artists, musicians and writers with monthly shows, readings, concerts, you name it.

There is a never-ending, but even heightening, demand on us that we learn creative responses to what happens around us. Our climate everywhere, I think, is becoming harsher and unfavorable for the rituals we rely on like food production, foremost of all. We are being forced against our will to contain our growth and impact upon this earth. Re-openings remind us of what we can--it may be now or never--start to do for ourselves and each other. The Earth has long been an intensely co-operative place.