I woke early, and in a way, feel like I’m stealing some private time as I quietly slip out trying not to wake anyone.
I have this journal in my hand, my blue jeans on because its a little chilly as the sun comes up behind the massive red rock, known as Church Rock.
We drove in late last night, later than we should have – we were punchy and tired, and we pushed a little farther than we should have, but more to the point, we could barely make out the sites.
The office here had long been closed and the restrooms were locked and I was out of beer, and nothing was right. So we had a bite to eat – no cooking tonight, just salad or cereal according to your preference, and then to bed, a little reading and lights out after a long, long day.
But this morning, it is a different world.
At 7 am I wandered over to the office and signed us in & picked up the keys to the showers and restroom, which were fine, although the ladies would have no use for them until nearly 10:00.
Meanwhile, I take my free coffee (free coffee! and its good!) – sit down at a picnic table and contemplate my surroundings.
Behind me stand a number of massive humps of red sandstone from the Mesozoic era. They look it too. For all the world, I could be in Bedrock and the Flintstones could be living among the trees that dot the top we had only seen by the rise of the yellow moon last night in a notch between two of these sleeping giants who surely witnessed dinosaurs trod this very ground even as we drive vehicles powered by petroleum oils derived from the remains of that same era. The moon last night cast a spooky light on Church Rock in the notch between these two massive tongues of sandstone embracing this campground.
But as I sit here and sip my coffee in the pleasant quiet of the ancient early morning – and as the shadows slide down the rock faces and across the grass toward me, retreating before the oncoming sun, I try to recall the events of the past few days as thousands upon thousands of Monarch butterflies dance before and around me.
Their peculiar fluttering, resting, darting and dancing has a hypnotic and restful rhythm – clearing my mind, but also my heart and my soul as I ponder the eternity of this resting place along their phenomenal migration from the jungles of Mexico to the northern forests (or at least what remains of them)..
How do these tiny fellows accomplish their feat?
Does it have something to do with the unseen quality of this place, something still magical to us, something for which we yet lack the tools to measure or perceive directly, except intuitively, as if out of the corner of the eye? Or is it that for them, like me, this place just “feels” right? This is where I’m supposed to be, this is what I’m supposed to be doing, dashing around the southwest in the heat, from rock to canyon, from pictograph to petroglyph, from ruin to ruin, contemplating the passage of time, and considering that the old ones – the Anasazi – were here only a thousand years before us, and nothing at all remains of them except a few scratches in the rock and a few stones stuck together with mud in the notch of a sheer cliff face.
And before them came the “Basketweavers”, who left us even less – just a few pictographs in isolated places, miraculously preserved in the arid desert shadows among the rocks and crags – telling us tantalizingly little about them except that they farmed and wove and traded with fisher people as well as other hunters of the plains and mountains as long ago as 2500 B.C.
And so four and a half millennia are to these butterflies nothing – they have been making these seasonal migrations for millions of years – who knows how long? Tens of millions, hundreds of millions? Admirably resilient for all their apparent fragility.
And what shaman or hunter sat in this very spot three thousand years ago, among the crags of these red rocks, watching the sun rise, pondering similar thoughts amid clouds of Monarchs fluttering through eternity?