Life at the Lowest Areas

What do I see? It’s a dry pothole with trees at the lower areas so that you could not see the bottom. The rocks that surrounded the upper half of the hole seemed very unstable. I looked at the scene from afar and examined it as a space. I saw an unstable, rocky, 75 foot- diameter pothole with a lot of plant life and nests in it, nothing more. It was difficult to “see” this space as more than what it looks like.

What else could have been in that pothole? What should I have seen? I closed my eyes and embraced the energy. I opened them and my vision blurred until I saw a brown and gray canvas with a green, pink, yellow and orange paint splattered design in the middle. It was beautiful. I looked with my heart, seeing a completely different place. There was a palette with many colors of plant life at the deepest part of the hole. With my new eyes, I saw that there is life in the lowest of areas.

There is life in the lowest of areas. As a human being, a lot of things seem insignificant to me especially if they are smaller and lower than I am. However, I am not very big at all. I remove myself from relation to these lower life forms although it is exactly what I am and where I am. They are what turn these lifeless spaces into booming places. This pothole is a sanctuary for birds. This is also a place for the plants to survive and hide themselves from the harshness of the desert sun. We forget to give our green neighbors much thought. They tend to form no bonds. They do not speak a language nor do they make eye contact. They do not cry, laugh or smile but we learn in science classes, that they are indeed alive. Are we the judges of all life? Do we have that right to “put them in their place”?

If we think about it, we are just a tiny blue dot to the entire galaxy. To the galaxy, we might be as expendable as trees are to us.  However, we know the truth that in that speck there is life. We human beings think, act, love and live. We should share our planet with everything in it because everything is a servant with its purpose in the great circle of life. Nothing is small.

However, does that mean we treat everything, no matter what size, like royalty? Do we treat bacteria like human beings? Do we have to please all matter? Are we wrong to have vegetarians or even eat anything at all? I believe it is a matter of balance, survival and knowing our role in the grand scheme of things. Yet it’s a question with no answer but a million more questions. Now I “see” that this pothole is not 75-foot diameter cavity but a bottomless pit of questions with answers to which only God knows.

A Milbert’s Tortoiseshell butterfly, brown with creamy yellow bands on its wings, signified moisture since they breed in swamps and wetlands.  We were indeed at the site of Dry Falls Lake, somewhat of a cultural hub in comparison with the other locations.  We were witness to the basic formula that water supports life.  Many fishermen sat, waiting in their boats for a Trout to pull their line.  The backdrop to this comparatively lively scene is the sheer rock face that is the 400 foot tall and 3.5 mile wide former waterfall.  And this too, had plenty of goings on to observe.  Crows and Ravens flew from one nook to the next.  This wall of rock is a perfect habitat for anyone with wings and hollow bones.

Somewhere amidst my observations I became aware of my tendency to focus on life, or the signs of life.  Until having settled into the environment of Dry Falls Lake, I was noticing merely the signs, feeling as though this was an empty and lonely landscape.  Actually, I suspect the fact that there were people, animal activity, a variation in plant life and water, is why I was so certain we had reached a destination at all.  Had we marked on our maps any of the coordinates along our walk before the lake, I may have taken significantly more time to accept that we had reached our location.  The activity at the lake made it less difficult to assign meaning to what I saw.  I didn’t need to search for signs, or speculate the history very much at all.  Arriving at a place where life was unfolding before our eyes made for a quick transformation of space into place.

The longitudinal groove is a feature in the tabled lands of the Dry Falls area.  The elevation is about 1,500 feet above sea level but the water that gnashed and carved this groove peaked at an immense 1,800 feet.  Being there one would not know it.  The land is rough terrain superimposed on an ultimately flat expanse of ground.  At the crest of a rise you can see for miles.  There are discernible way points: the Dry Falls Interpretative Center, big agriculture silos, and toothpick structures with fiddly bits of wire strung between them, stringing out in a thin line against the horizon on the edge of a far-off gorge.  In this sense, one can know a place for its location, triangulating it mentally with no fear of descriptive failure.

However there is a deceptive abundance of emptiness in the land.  Maybe it is the way the still, echoing physical features allow the interstate doppler to invade – even at a two-mile distance.  Perhaps the answer lies in the way the flat land and engulfing sky reign sovereign over psychological tendency toward diversity.

It is a land and sky that isolates and targets an individual.  There is little to glean from such an area.  It reflects emotions and thoughts back toward the viewer.  It expels place.

When I was at the longitudinal groove I did not see the basalt ledges, the mineral blocks, or the anthill as special or meaningful.  There is a distinctive disparity in the ability to inspire original thoughts about place or identity other than what is already in the observer’s mind, what is already embedded in the observer’s world.  The longitudinal grooves at Dry Falls were utterly desolate – not only by the stale and arid regional climate, but also in the place itself.

Being there I thought this gave it a label of meaningless.  Now I realize, in a world of distinctive places, the strength in existing without a high degree of individuality and special meaning is a feat in its own way.  This realization gives the area place.  Dry Falls is a place so far removed from meaning that it allows you to simply be.