[U]nder such a government as this, [people] think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them… Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn. (“Civil Disobedience”)

From the cholla and ocotillo-impaled plains below the Chisos Mountains in southern Texas lifts a hoodoo of weirdly columned and eroded rock. My friend Bob had there once before, with a compass and various astronomical calculations from a virtual gizmo he’d downloaded to his phone. Bob is an architect interested in the way buildings—of all kinds, from rings of European standing stones to temporary cathedrals made of cardboard—speak to the deepest affective systems of the body. He was pretty certain that the hoodoo was an ancient site from which to watch the winter solstice sunrise. This year he and his wife, Wendy—another architect, and a planner of adventures–wanted to return and test the idea. They’d watch to see precisely where the sun would lift at the part of the year when time, at least as it’s measured in the sky, seems almost to stand still. Did I and my partner Dave want to come along?

Did we ever. Throughout the autumn the strain of both workplace and national politics had left me feeling unmoored, often desperate. We’d been on the losing side of every clash so an appointment with the sun sounded restorative, a way to catch our breath and recalibrate. Shortly after the 2016 election, a friend from Argentina—he had perspective, and experience!—had spoken to me about how to keep one’s personality intact during a long struggle against dictatorship.

“Be active, yes, resist, but also keep time for family, for friends, for turning inward,” he said.

 For Dave and me both, turning inward also means going outside, losing for a while the anthropocentric sting of daily life—Thoreauvian unplugging, if you will. Contact! Contact! Thoreau wrote of his time on Mt. Katahdin, in the ecstasy of stone, and wind, and mountain height. Who are we? When I was younger, in the decades when winters of below-average temperatures still rolled across the Northern Hemisphere, his voice in my mind was often the one unfurling from the mountain, or the one in the Pond chapters in Walden, richly conglomerate with wonder and observation, especially those of the winter and its ice, followed by the coming of spring. I chafed at his bigoted scorn for whom he called the “bog-trotting Irish” and I felt certain he wouldn’t have had much room for me, a woman, in his literary chats in the cabin or his excursions into the realms of rivers and moose. Still, over decades I loved him, from late in adolescence on past menopause. These days Thoreau chides me not about the lack of simplicity in my life, but about the nation’s Hobbesian violence toward Others—despite his own gaze-inflected shortfalls—and the antagonistic greed for property, the lust for guns, the country’s betrayal of its best intentions. And, his silence implies, just what am I going to do about it?  Daily, my efforts fall short, and yet they leave me exhausted.

Yes, we told Wendy and Bob, yes. An appointment with the sun.

We couldn’t get all the way to the Chisos by the solstice. There were other obligations, deadlines—some of us needed to turn in the semester’s grades. But we all made it down to those mountains near the Rio Grande just a few days later, and on Christmas morning we left the car parked at a trailhead and hiked out under moonless starlight. It was maybe two miles out, a level pathway on the basin floor, and we walked fast in the pre-dawn cold, occasionally pinning kangaroo rats with the beams of our headlamps and listening for owls or coyotes. All around us stretched the northernmost reach of the Chihuahuan desert. Hours before the warming air would lift the scent of mesquite or Mormon tea, I could smell nothing but cold and stone.

By the time we reached the formation the air had softened with the approach of sunrise. We hauled ourselves up to a level rock shelf, partway up the hoodoo’s pedestal, facing to the southeast. The mountains stood like paper cut-outs, straight-edged pyramids, with one prominent notch commanding the horizon. Bob had theorized that on the shortest day of the year the sun would lift precisely in the center of that cleft and then crawl up the mountain’s silhouette, tracing the edge with diamond-light. As the seconds sluggishly passed—time seems to always slow down when you’re cold, I’ve noticed—Wendy and I nibbled stiff breakfast bars and jiggled around inside our coats. An occasional bird twerped from a spiky shrub.

The v-shaped cup of sky on the horizon filled with pale light, just as Bob had predicted. Happy and expectant, we examined the changing color of the stone behind us, looked at the hints of carvings. I gazed toward the river, where the distant bluffs were beginning to resolve themselves into distinct landforms, places we might visit later. By now, I thought, Dave was likely up with his camera, heading toward the small riparian canyon where he hoped to find pyrrhuloxias, a kind of southern cardinal the colors of dawn—fawn-gray bodies with spiky red crests and corn-colored bills.

But when the sun finally appeared, it popped out partway up the mountain’s edge, not at the bottom of the v. Were we too late? Christmas was four days past the solstice… if we’d been there on the morning of the 21^st, would those few days have made the difference?

We considered precession, the Earth’s slow, top-like wobble—a cycle of almost 26,000 years. People have lived in and moved through that part of the continent for more than 10,000 years. The lithic record lies, far less visible than breadcrumbs in a forest, across the arid Trans-Pecos landscape, artifacts from the age of vanished animals—the camels, elephants, and horses from the twilight of the age of ice. So long ago, would the Earth’s relative position on its own axis have made a difference to what anyone standing—like us—on that very ledge might see of the sky? Maybe I was looking even further to the past than I’d realized for some moment of transcendence.

All at once the day star, having warmed the back wall of the hoodoo behind us, seemed to speed up. It left its apparent contact with the mountain’s silhouette and lifted into the crisp winter sky, once more the familiar sun. To the southwest, the light reddened the Ponce Sierra cliffs and the canyon carved by the Rio Grande, erosion sixteen hundred feet deep, the work of some two million years. The two sides faced one another like perfect mirror images, forming a T-shaped notch, an open keyhole through which anyone might safely pass. On the slower hike back, I kept stopping, looking the way we’d come, watching the early-morning shadows slide away from the pedestal of stone, and the distant cliffs lose their roseate tint, assuming the colors of sand and old, dried blood.

Back in full daylight, the all-too-human world returned to our full attention. From a bluff above the Rio Grande, we heard recorded music—Feliz Navidad—floating northward to where we stood. Below lay an almost Arcadian scene—a rowboat resting on the southern bank beneath a bosque of cottonwoods, sunlight glinting on a rippling shoal downstream. We parked near a boulder where little wire figurines were laid out for sale—saguaro cactus, smooth in its plastic-coated filament; a scorpion, iconic tail raised above a body that seemed to consist of a continuous ribcage; a tarantula, legs like so many bent-knuckled fingers. With a hand-lettered sign and a box for donations, the items waited for tourists to complete the transaction based on trust. “Merry Christmas!” called out voices from the far bank as Dave chose one for his biologist-daughter. Meanwhile, Border Patrol, in their menacingly white vehicles, prowled the roads like predators of the Anthropocene.

The next day, we’d head back north to Kansas. Shortly after New Year’s, I’d return to the campus where, for the first time, I was planning to teach Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” in an environmental literature class, and my mind turned restlessly to the preparation. In my notebook I had been transcribing passages, contemplating what we might find of value and what we would critique.

This American government—what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity? It has not the vitality and force of a single living man; for a single man can bend it to his will.

That afternoon, we all went down to visit the river. The sun was warm, the water was cold, and when I waded in the current I felt my body was the very point of contact between the two. We took turns trying to skip stones across the water to Mexico. One after another, trying for the right angle, the well-timed wrist-flick, we aimed toward the opposite bank. I was the worst. Bob was pretty good. Wendy was elsewhere, off walking somewhere beyond the bend. Dave was the best. He lobbed stone after stone to bounce across the surface, and the ease of each successful pass was the perfect symbol of connectivity, skittering first across the water, then making a final hop onto shore, marking each time the riparian line of ecological connection.

Buoyed up by friendship, health, and the elemental presence of the continuing world, I felt filled with both grief and gratitude, my body joyful in unfettered presence, my heart weighted, still, with the gravity of the nation’s rotten politics. We didn’t know, not yet, about the children in cages. The drowned bodies of father and daughter draped limply on the bank of the Rio Grande were a specter more than a year away.

But in the timeless quiet of the river and its floodplain, it came to me what the hoodoo sun-watching station looked like from a distance, and I took it as the revelation that, in fact, I had needed all along: a clenched fist raised from somewhere within the Earth.

Wild dogs, song dogs, pad and sniff and shit. Humans trudge through ocotillo and creosote bush, prickly pear and mesquite. We climb to a field of outcropping and boulders: some of what geologists call the Tucson Mountain Chaos. Major volcanic eruptions beginning at about the time of the Triassic extinction (ca. 200 million years ago) scattered “chaos” over an expanse that had also once been inland sea and swamp and grassland, a setting that has pretty much seen it all. Boots today crunch over all that time and terrain, and hikers sweat into their socks and seek out thin lines of shade cast by saguaros.

A rock and tortoise are racing in the dry wash. Endlessly seeping water becoming turquoise. Horned lizards harvesting ants.

*

Startle a desert tortoise (Gopherus morofkai), and it will make “hisses, pops, and poink sounds” or “pops, whoops, huhs, echs, bips.” Those lucky few who have heard such music can’t seem to agree. Also an alarmed tortoise may empty its bladder to repulse a predator, ultimately a foolish move; that’s where it keeps its precious water supply for reabsorption into its body. This fear-response/bladder business questions how we trust evolution to make adaptations that improve a species; in fact, there is no ideal tortoise waiting at the end of an evolutionary trail. Nothing lasts. Nothing is finished. 

The trail is out and back. We cross the dry wash twice. We cross the dry wash twice.

 *

A regal horned lizard (Phyrnosoma solace) protects itself by cryptic behavior: sitting motionless and looking like the desert floor. If a coyote grabs a horned lizard, the lizard will squirt blood. From its eyes. Into the coyote’s mouth. 

When it rains, desert tortoises dig depressions to catch and retain water. When it rains, horned lizards raise their backs to create an incline for water to flow down into their mouths. When it rains, the dry wash on the Wild Dog Trail fills brown and crackles and sizzles with clastic rock and desiccated sticks that have broken away from ocotillo and mesquite. 

Horned lizards—twenty million years of eating ants and conserving water. 

*

One understanding of deep time came out of northern California, the Sierra foothills. Out of Gary Snyder’s home and a rambling poet-conversation between Snyder and Lew Welch. The poem is quoted quite a lot, but it has earned the right. It’s one of Snyder’s “Little Songs to Gaia” from Axe Handles.  

 As the crickets’ soft autumn hum 

 is to us, 

 so are we to the trees

as are they 

to the rocks and the hills.

The sentiment was apparently Welch’s, but the perspective offered him cold comfort.  He ultimately walked out of Snyder’s house after leaving a suicide note. And yet—the note ended with directions: “I went Southwest. Goodbye. Lew Welch.” Why, unless you wanted to be found? Welch’s long poem, “Song of the Turkey Buzzard,” closes with instructions for his sky burial. “On a marked rock. . . / place my meat. / With proper ceremony disembowel what I / no longer need, that it might more quickly / rot and tempt // My new form”

Deep time is abysmal. In the eighteenth century, geologist James Hutton, wrote about that flash of recognition and fear: “We find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.”

And that bloody eyeball evolution: The math is terrifying. Twenty million years of horned lizard eggs. Fifteen eggs in every clutch, every year. One eye-bleeder survived; its blood repulsed a coyote. Then another. 

Hutton again. “Little causes, long continued” bring about the greatest changes. Studying the great unconformity in Scotland, a break in the geological record between two strata that signified 80 million years of erosion, gave Hutton an awful sense of what “long continued” could mean. Contemplating it, he and his colleagues became “giddy.”

The wash runs alongside the trail. Simultaneously and sequentially, rock and wash live different lifetimes.

*

Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko connects a non-linear understanding of time to a quantum understanding. “The Pueblo people and the indigenous people of the Americas see time as round, not as a long linear string. If time is round, if time is an ocean, then something that happened 500 years ago may be quite immediate and real.” Time is relative to the observer. Time doesn’t pass; it’s simply there. 

In time, the ancient Hohokam society irrigated their crops with water from the Santa Cruz River.  In time, the Santa Cruz ran dry. In time, the wash that bisects the Wild Dog trail, like the wash near Silko’s Tucson home, channeled water into the Santa Cruz and finally the sea, completing a primal cycle. In The Turquoise Ledge she writes, “The boulders and rocks of limestone and quartzite originated in the Great Sea. As the stones from millions of years reckon it, man and machine are no more than a shadow of a mote of dust.”

Sun slows the blood. There is no song without a maker. A hiker is tortoise, is rock.

*

To make room for humans, horned lizards have to give up ants. Ants vanish when humans pave over the soil containing their colonies while aerosol-ing them out of existence. But somewhere a horned lizard changes coloration to resemble pavement, develops a taste for trash. Desert tortoises wander the streets and driveways looking for soft dirt to push their faces into for the night. But habitat loss isn’t their worst problem. Ravens are. Over a period of four years, one researcher found 250 punctured tortoise shells under one raven nest. Ravens follow human sprawl into the desert, thriving on litter, garbage, and roadkill. They have quickly evolved from a symbol of thin-air wildness to a trash bird of desert truck stops. The desert tortoise hasn’t kept pace; it still takes ten years to develop a shell strong enough to withstand a raven’s beak. One mitigation experiment involves lifelike tortoise bots containing an irritant that squirts a raven when the shell is attacked. If technology can’t evolve a better tortoise, maybe it can evolve a skittish raven. Or, in time, a live desert tortoise with an actual booby-trapped shell. Or a parking lot lizard. Small changes, long continued.

In time, nothing last. A rock blinks, blinks again, becomes clast, migrates to the sea.

*

At its northwest end, Wild Dog Trail extends another mile or so on a sand entranceway to the Signal Hill picnic area. On a boulder pile that overlooks the surrounding saguaro forest is an impressive accumulation of petroglyphs dating from the Hohokam period, which peaked from 1100-1450. Among the various designs and animal forms, a large spiral dominates the hilltop.  No consensus on a spiral’s symbolic intent exists, and quite possibly the meaning is none of our business. But absent a scholarly or private understanding, the pattern conveys motion. Inward or outward, descending or ascending. Whether reaching back to the Hohokam artisan who incised the design or spinning out to a time waiting, the spiral path provides no resting place.

The desert burns, saguaros migrate. A tortoise dreams of cool earth and rain. Waiting. The dry wash contains its history: a grassland, a swamp, an inland sea.  

I go out of town in order to forget the town and all that is in it.
Hazlitt, “On Going a Journey”

It’s January in the middle of Iowa; you’re finding your footing on new terrain. You’re under the great open skies of the Midwest on a seventy-five acre refuge: part timberland with a small swatch of remnant prairie. For the first time in weeks, it’s one degree above freezing. The ground is partly frozen, partly thawed; partly cleared but mostly overgrown—a trail bed broken by deep, cloven prints where deer have dodged fallen branches. There are no maps to carry, no posted signage. Change is a wild locale. You’re several steps behind your guide, a colleague from your spouse’s new visiting MFA gig at Big Ag. Being here is all aspirational, part of a time-honored American tradition—get out into the wild and away from what ails you. Midlife worries, malicious code, institutional malfeasance? A whiff of fresh weather is goodbye to all that—a walk’s wishful thinking and more. Those micro-fleece boots collared with faux fur you bought back east, in a whimsy of weather panic? They signal exactly how much of a hiker you’ve been. Fields, where you hail from, are mowed and mapped with white lines for athletics.

The landscape’s a text you’re trying to thread yourself through. The route you’re tracking plummets; the trail through the tangle is marked with ribbons. Raptors shriek overhead. The land starts to slope downward; you follow a turn through dense overgrowth and start to lose pace, periodically struggling for traction. Your host for the trek, Professor Z, saunters ahead. You have a hard time wrapping your head around geological time, the fact that this “emptiness” once thrummed with herds of bison. By its nature, a space of preservation is also the footprint of everything that’s been lost. Taxonomy trips off your host’s tongue: the agro-forestry projects that spawn three species of fungus; the milkweed and meadow blossoms planted for prairie restoration; the practice of bringing students out to the property with “no agenda” other than appreciation of place—the word for which, you’ll learn, is topophilia.

Branches of thorny locust (Gleditsia tricanthos) mar the path and have to be pushed away. You draw a deep breath. The indigenous trees possess a virulent armor: barbed spikes at least a finger’s length long, reddish thorns of near biblical proportions. Your Canon Powershot Elph zooms in on a network of carmined complexities. Your spouse preps for the semester in a sunlit apartment on temporary lease, the cat curled up on a futon, your Portable Joyce splayed out on the carpet. A percolator burbles on the kitchen countertop. The brick townhouse you share in Baltimore’s suburbs is seventeen hours away. You push away thoughts of semester separations. The ideal pilgrim travels lightly—giving into the wild, leaving the village behind.

In the here and now of the walking trail, the eye is constantly drawn away from the upcoming turn to the next revelatory thing. And this is what lends the walk a welcomed atmosphere of escape. Downed trunks laced with lichen still bear the teeth prints of beavers that felled them seasons ago; they linger in the quiet, strange shrines, silent valedictions. The sun drifts behind clouds; the temperature begins to drop. Up ahead, through the denuded trees where the sound of the current rushes in, Bluff Creek—a tributary of the Des Moines River—drives its way over and under a few jagged islands of ice and worn granite stones: glacier rubble that’s been placed to bridge the banks. A campfire stained with ash anchors a small clearing—the only sign of grad students who sometimes gather here in warmer weather, notebooks or beers in hand. You snap a few panoramas, swing back to the return loop of the trail.

Thoreau famously chided his fellow citizens for being “faint-hearted crusaders” rather than free men—by which he meant that those who have said their farewells and paid their debts, can strike out with keener sense of adventure, can forget the world that is not the woods. By those standards, today’s walk is a tame stroll, not an “expedition,” and half of it, he would have quipped, is merely “retracing our steps.” But you know he isn’t quite right: to walk outdoors is to weave a path beyond the rooms you inhabit, to let headspace expand—a quiet labor of resisting modern life’s frenzied pace.

“The eye is enticed by a path, and the mind’s eye also,” writes cultural environmentalist Robert Macfarlane, who holds the same view on landscape as George Eliot—that it “can enlarge the imagined range for self to move in.” Weeks will unfurl; your sabbatical coincides with your spouse’s first semester here, and together you’ll amble through arboretums, take runs on trails that pull you further on, toward the ever-visible horizon.

The day to retrace your steps comes sooner than either of you would like. Three years later, you’ll give away bookshelves, balcony stargazing chairs, kitchen counter bar stools. Plotlines unfold; a gig comes to its end. At the farewell, you’ll join your spouse and clink glasses with the grad students who’ve come to know you, too. Faculty friends will offer toasts; Professor Z will e-mail her regrets. Outside the neon-lit taco bar, Lincoln Way will be laced with snow. You’ll divest the apartment of futon, well-worn platform bed. Before you step into the small car packed to capacity, you’ll take one last look at the sky, the horizon line clear against a rare winter color—mapmaker’s blue—and snap your last few photos. It’s so beautiful, you’ll say, watching crows track above the stubble fields. The wind will gutter your breath.

But for now, in the January of your arrival, you keep up your end of the conversation, listen through the registers of Midwestern nice. I know right away when I take people out here, who will fit in, who’ll want to stay. What is a welcome; what is a test? Will you learn to read markers along the trail? Professor Z is ranging through topics, talking about apiary projects—the bees that didn’t survive the recent cold snap, how caretakers found them flash-frozen, how strange to see the swarm trapped in their imperiled, waxed abode, poised as if preparing for flight. Her Prius warms quickly as the wheels spin free of a muddy spot, the emptied hive a white blur in the rear view mirror before it vanishes in the distance.