KABLAM!!!

TUESDAY: It was like a scene out of a Science Fiction movie, the kind of big extravaganza

Ernie calls a Sci-Fi Eye Fry. We drove West on I-40 and saw the apocalyptic steam cloud frozen in the cold air over the energy plant outside Holbrook. There was actually nothing apocalyptic about it, but we were playing Mahavishnu's album, Apocalypse, on the car stereo, so we couldn't help confabulating a little bit. Besides, we knew we were on the way to a site that must have seemed like a little piece of the Apocalypse when it formed: Meteor Crater.

Every time I’ve been on I-40, my traveling companions haven’t wanted to see Meteor Crater, voting me down. This time it was just Ernie and me, and we were in accord. About 50,000 years ago, a big iron meteor slammed into the sedimentary rocks of the floodplain/ancient ocean in Northeast Arizona and made a fascinating crater. A big trailing chunk that probably broke off when the meteor impacted the atmosphere was found in Canyon Diablo (the Devil’s Canyon we passed through on our first day?) and is on display in the Visitor’s Center. It’s a roughly egg-shaped chunk of 97% iron, maybe 2 1/2 feet from end to end, and weighs almost 1500 lbs.

I want it.

Since it was January, we couldn't take the hike all the way around the rim, due to snow and ice -- Alas! But we were able to hike about 1/10th of the way around, still a good distance, which gives you some idea how big the crater is. Its big enough that it can actually fool you in terms of how deep it is. You have to look at the postage-stamp-sized fenced area in the middle of the bottom, where the original drilling site is. Daniel Barringer owned the mining rights -- never found the iron he thought must be buried beneath the surface, but the Barringer family have acted as stewards of the site ever since.

We were told geologists are allowed into the crater. Another good reason to be certified as one of those creatures. I took lots of pictures and vowed to return.

There were three places I had never been prior to this trip: Meteor Crater and Sunset Crater were fascinating, but the place that captured my heart was Walnut Canyon -- and we almost didn’t go there!

We were planning to drive straight to Flagstaff, but when I saw the sign for Walnut Canyon, I said, “What the heck, you want to see it?” and Ernie said “Why not?” It’s one of those whimsical decisions that turns out to be good fortune. The canyon is close to Flagstaff, it's a hidden treasure that you find at the end of a little forest road. There, you can see the edge of the extensive sedimentary strata in this part of Arizona. The Canyon is layered (from bottom to top) in cross-bedded sandstone (Toroweap/Coconino) that used to be sand dunes next to an ancient seashore, weathered by wind into rounded shapes with swirling lines, topped by layers of Kaibab limestone from when the sea extended farther inland. The creek has worn the canyon down several hundred feet, and the water carved natural caves into the limestone, so it made a good place for cave dwellings.

Walnut Canyon is a little paradise whose South-facing wall is warm in the winter, and where you can find junipers, ponderosas, and desert plants (including cactus) living side-by-side. The canyon is still visited by descendants of the people who used to live there, for festivals and religious observances.

We we bundled up for the 45 degree weather when we started down, but it felt like spring on most of the trail, thanks to the direct sunlight.

We decided to drive to Sunset Crater because it was also close and it was only about 3:00 p.m. We took the Lava Field trail and were astonished -- lava that’s only about 1000 years old! It’s a massive flow of wild shapes, and the contrast with the snow is interesting. The volcanic cone sits above, partially collapsed, its ashy side still too sterile for most plants.

We got lost on Historic Route 66, in Flagstaff, trying to find our hotel. But finally we stopped and begged for enlightenment, and got back on track. Ate good comfort food at the Galaxy Diner, and went back to the hotel to decompress (in pajamas).

WEDNESDAY: If you want to Find Flagstaff, look for the volcanoes. But without Highways 89, 180, and 64, and the National Park Service, you wouldn’t find the Grand Canyon until you fell into it.

It’s a lot more obvious on the Eastern end, where the big trees peter out and you can see the distant edge of Vermilion Cliffs. If you drove farther North on Highway 89, you would eventually cross the bridge that spans the Colorado River -- at that point, the canyon is more of a gorge.

The Grand Canyon is so amazing, it should be seen several times. Especially since the first time you see it, it’s kind of scary. I was about 8 years old when my mother and my Great Aunt Hazel took us to see the canyon. I was totally unprepared for it. That’s how I found out I was afraid of heights.

But 11 years later, I went to see it again. I actually felt drawn by it. On a whim, my boyfriend and I drove there overnight, in a 1962 Dodge Dart with a push-button transmission and no back seat. We found out you can’t get a room in a hotel near the Grand Canyon unless you make the reservation months in advance. So we slept in the car.

This time was the third time I visited the Grand Canyon, and this time a passion for geology drew me. I felt nervous on icy edges, but I sidled up to the railing and took dozens of pictures. I looked at those incomparable vistas and couldn’t get enough of them. Some day I’ll hike one of the trails in. I’d like to journey down the river too.

The weather has stayed perfect. The gods of geology are smiling upon us . . .

THURSDAY: After shopping in the Historic District in Flagstaff, we left the land of lava for the land of sedimentary rock -- Oak Creek Canyon. The last time Ernie and I were here was on our first Honeymoon, 20 years ago. That time flew by while we worked hard and barely kept our heads above water. Now we’re caught up, paid off, and ready to shift gears. This time, we hiked in two spots off Highway 89A, one in the Northern part of the canyon, and good ol‘ Slide Rock.

Slide Rock

is going to require it’s own blog entry.

Music For Road Trips

When you see this list of albums I've posted here, you might think I'm trying to tell you that you should like classical music, and that's not my intention. You like what you like -- especially on a road trip. Most people put on music that will entertain them and keep them from getting bored. I'm just trying to suggest another type of music for your car: the Road Trip Soundtrack. How about music that goes with the landscape? And in Arizona, that landscape can be very strange.

I'm not saying you should play an actual movie soundtrack. I would especially avoid the scary ones, like Hans Zimmer's gorgeous, spooky score for The Ring and Bernard Herrmann's Psycho. No, I'm saying that plenty of other orchestral music is great for Road Trip Soundtracks, and here are some that we enjoyed when we took our 2nd honeymoon in January. Driving West on Hwy 60, through /Devil's Canyon and the hoodoos that haunt the road all the way to Globe/Miami, we listened to Debussy's Harp, by Yolanda Kondonassis. It's whimsical mood fit the landscape surprisingly well.

And so did Geoffrey Simon, conducting the Philharmonia in some of my other favorite Debussy works. This is one of the rare albums that doesn't include the usual pieces, like "Prelude To The Afternoon of a Faun" or "La Mer" -- pretty pieces, but not my favorites. What's wonderful about this album is that it contains some of the most fantastical music Debussy wrote, including "Nocturnes."

Vaughan William's Sinfonia Antartica seemed made for the snow-and-wind-swept landscape of the Petrified Forest in January. And His Fifth Symphony always evokes the Grand Canyon for me. His Third Symphony portrays the beautiful, lonely places of the world, including those in Arizona.

Harps of the Ancient Temples is one of the most beautiful albums ever recorded, and we played it several times on the road. It especially fits the places with petroglyphs.

One of the best soundtrack moments we had was unexpected -- it happened on I-40, just outside Holbrook, as we approached the big power plant on the South side of the Highway. The outside temperature was under 40 degrees F, so the steam hung over the power station in a massive formation, instead of evaporating. I had put on Mahavishnu's album, Apocalypse, and it couldn't have expressed the weirdness of that sight better if it had been written for it.

The trip would have been great even without the music, but it was cool to be able to play those albums. We rented an SUV for that trip, Ernie named it Jay Silverwheels, and it had a terrific sound system. It would pause the CD when we got out of the SUV, then start it in exactly the same spot when we started the car again. Totally spiffy.

If you've got a car with a good sound system, you may want to try these. Or even at home. As for me? I had to return Jay Silverwheels. I have to drive my Crudmobile for one more year.

Sigh.

Segues And Roadcuts

One life ended, another was beginning, and the best way to start it was with a roadtrip. So one Sunday in January, We drove East on Arizona Hwy 60, past the Superstitions, toward Globe and Miami. We couldn't see the Superstitions very clearly, because the morning mist obscured them like Shangri-La, but once we got near Superior we entered some of the most interesting highway scenery I’ve ever seen. We zoomed past the Boyce Thompson Arboretum before I could think about it -- otherwise we would have stopped there. But it’s so close to Phoenix, we made a mental note to visit it soon, and often.

The road cuts and terrain near Hwy 60 reveal the same fascinating and complicated geologic history you can observe in the Superstitions: millions of years of ocean, lake, river and stream, and/or swamp sediment, volcanic activity (including pyroclastic flows and clouds of ash), magma that cooled slowly underground before it was exposed, magma that cooled quickly while it still had gas bubbles in it. Many of these layers have been pushed vertical by magma chambers that formed beneath them as our part of the continent moved slowly over a super-hot spot in the mantle. As the older stuff fractured and faulted, more molten stuff was forced up into the cracks, forming the veins, rich with copper, that attracted the mining companies in the first place.

Erosion from snow, rain, sun, running water, and wind-blown sand have eroded fractured columns along that highway into a fantastical, mad-tea-party sort of landscape. Hwy 60 winds straight into a hoodoo-paradise called Devil’s Canyon. There are no scenic pullouts on that stretch of the road, or I would have taken at least 100 pictures of that canyon (I promise, ultimately I WILL find a way, hopefully one that doesn’t get me splattered like a bug on the grill of a big rig).

The gorgeous display continues until you suddenly see the gigantic open pit mine on the North side of the Hwy, near Globe/Miami. My husband Ernie says it's like driving through Middle Earth and suddenly finding Mordor. The mine isn’t pretty, but it is fascinating -- I'd love to tour it some day. You can definitely see the decline of the mining industry when you enter Miami and Globe -- they’re boom towns gone bust, though they still have some interesting corners. I contemplated renting a place in Globe, possibly even settling there some day -- though it might be like settling at the edge of the world the day before Armageddon. (Armageddon would be a great name for a ghost town . . .)

From Globe, Hwy 60 turns North and merges with Hwy 77, continuing to wind through spectacular geological terrain. I give the roadcuts on this leg of the journey an A+, and I became a bit of a hazard. Geologists are notoriously distracted when roads wind through interesting cuts. It’s a very good thing the speed limit declines to 35mph, or we might have gone over a cliff. The highway descends into the beautiful Salt River Canyon, called the “Little Grand Canyon” because the salt river has eroded it 2000 feet down, exposing layers that formed millions of years ago. This area of the highway has plenty of scenic pullouts, and I used just about every one of them. We crossed the salt river and began to climb again. At one point we encountered a roadcut that exposed a huge, thick layer of limestone. All of these layers have been bent and twisted, and the roadcuts reveal just how much valley fill has settled over the deeper spots.

Eventually our highway climbed up onto the Mogollon Rim at Show Low, a nifty little town that, happily, featured a JB’s coffee shop that served a good omelette with smokey tabasco sauce. In Show Low, Hwy 60 continues East toward New Mexico, Hwy 77 marches North, through geologically unspectacular terrain (except for the roadcuts, which reveal that wonderful stuff is hiding beneath the surface). North was our destination. This is a short drive, through Taylor and Snowflake, to Holbrook, where we checked into the BEST WESTERN ADOBE INN, a comfortable, inexpensive motel. Our room was big and attractive, and the hotel sits next door to a great restaurant, The Butterfield Stage Company. The food is good and the decor gets an A+. We also visited Jim Gray’s Petrified Wood Co., a big rock shop that also sells fossils. It’s a treasure house on the inside, and is surrounded by a giant yard where rocks of all kind are sold by the pound.

Holbrook seems to have a rock shop on every corner -- and they all feature dinosaurs. Why not? Up the road is the Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona's postcard from the Triassic.

MONDAY we headed to Petrified Forest from the South, HWY 180. We stopped at the Park Gift shop and watched the informational video, which quickly traces the history of the park from the Triassic Period to the present.

The impact of early tourists makes me wince -- it was a free-for-all, with rockhounds doing terrible damage. Rockhounds are still doing damage. Hard to believe people can call themselves good, honest, will stand up in church and sing with the choir, but they steal rocks from the park, in staggering numbers. One thing I didn’t know -- Park personnel receive numerous packages from remorseful bandits, stolen rocks enclosed, with letters of apology.

While eavesdropping in the gift shop I learned that Jim Gray, whose spectacular rock shop sits on the corners of Hwy 77 and Hwy 180, is not beloved to the park rangers. He has plundered adjoining lands with a backhoe, rendering them useless as natural settings. The Petrified Forest National Park recently acquired new lands, but declined to buy the ones he has stripped. It occurs to me that scientists require the same “chain of custody” for artifacts and samples that police investigators do. If an object’s context can’t be reliably documented, it becomes irrelevant.

I hate to think about the damage that has been done. But I love the park without reservation. Tons of petrified wood have “migrated,” but a lot of specimens are still buried in the mudstone and sandstone. And, despite its beauty, the petrified wood is just a part of the attraction. I love the melting mounds of mudstone, sandstone, siltstone, clay, and conglomerate, colored by iron, manganese, and carbon. You can also see chunks of basalt in the mix. The vistas seem to go on forever, and it’s almost completely silent.

We couldn’t do the Blue Mesa hike because of ice on the trail, but we’ll try to come back in the spring or fall to try it again. I REALLY want to walk down there.

We were lucky to have photo-gray lenses on our glasses -- the sunlight on the snow was dazzlingly bright, more blinding than the brightest light in summer. This is something warm-climate people can’t know until they experience it.

We saw more wildlife than I’ve ever seen before, friendly ravens (as big as cats) who seemed to be at every turnout, a fearless bunny who was determined to finish breakfast, despite the presence of tourists, and some deer with really big ears. Ernie is the one who spotted the four-footed creatures -- he’s got an eye for that kind of thing.

It’s actually pretty easy to believe this area was a giant swamp/floodplain at one time. It’s a bit harder to imagine the giant conifers that grew to 200 feet in height, and the tropical climate that created them. Bought cool, nerdy t-shirts at the gift shops and posters depicting geology, petroglyphs, and the Geologic Timeline.

We stopped at every site, then returned to the hotel at 4:00p.m. and ate once again at the Butterfield Stage Company restaurant, this time trying the steaks, which were perfect.

Sometimes, you just need to wallow in an experience. Ernie is the guy I can do that with. That’s why I married him.

Two days into our trip -- and it just got better from there . . .

Visit Your State Parks!

I'm sending this plea to everyone, but especially to my fellow Arizonans (because we're probably the only ones who can get out of our houses this time of year). My husband and I just got back from our second honeymoon, a wonderful roadtrip to The Petrified Forest, Meteor Crater, Walnut Canyon, the lava fields of Sunset Crater, the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, Oak Creek Canyon, and Red Rock State Park. And now I have a soap box to climb, I need to shout this and I need you to pass it on.

Visit your state parks! Buy a year pass and use it! And if you have a year pass (or even if you don't), put some dollars into the donation box in the visitor's center!

Many of the state parks in Arizona are about to close because of our crummy economy. Once they do that, it could take a while to get them up and running again. I'm afraid some of them may be sold off to hungry developers, who will turn around and build their Schmuck Manors on them. This is so unnecessary, because it wouldn't take that much moolah from each of us to keep them going. The year pass currently costs $50 ($80 for the National Parks -- buy one of those, too). In March it's going up to $75, still a bargain. You'll spend that much on a night out with your family, and you get way more bang for your bucks at the State Parks, because you can visit them over and over, all year long.

I've lived in Arizona 46 years, and I'm sorry to say that until recently I haven't spent much time at the State or National Parks. This January we visited many places I've been meaning to visit for years, and some I'd never heard of. My two favorites were Walnut Canyon National Park (if the Grand Canyon is too big for you, visit this wonderful little gem) and Red Rock State Park. Red Rock is on Hwy 89, up the road from Slide Rock State Park (one of the few that's earning money), it's on the desert side of Sedona. Turkey Creek and Oak Creek pass through it, plus it has dozens of seasonal creeks and washes. There are several hiking paths that radiate from the visitor's center. These paths are easy to moderate in terms of physical challenge, and the scenery is gorgeous. Like Sedona and Oak Creek Canyon, Red Rock is magical. If you have a spiritual bone in your body, you will pause often to contemplate and commune.

They conduct regular Nature Encounter Walks from the visitor's center too, you can walk with a ranger and learn to see all the stuff you didn't notice on your own. You can take a picnic lunch, make a day of it.

Most people don't think of visiting State Parks in the Winter, but in Arizona it's a great time to go. You don't face the crowds of summer, the temperatures are between 45 degrees F and 70 degrees F. You get to see more wildlife, too. At Slide Rock State Park, Ernie and I were able to walk along the creek much farther, because the water was lower. We encountered only about 20 people on the way (as apposed to the summer mob), and often we were alone for several minutes at a time. Take cash with you this time of year, because the booths at the entrance to the parks often aren't occupied in the off-season months, and they depend on the honor system of payment. Envelopes are provided for cash payments (usually $7 to $10 per car). If you've got a year pass, you can tuck a small donation into the envelope, instead.

Those of you who live in or around Phoenix, you can start by taking Hwy 60 to the Boyce Thompson Arboretum. You'll drive past the Superstition Mountains, one of my favorite hiking spots. Hwy 60 passes some amazingly beautiful territory.

I spent the first half of my life being too busy to see what was under my nose. Don't make my mistake. Get our there and visit! Save our State Parks! I'm counting on you!

Strange Ripples

Twelve years ago, on Sept 11, my coworker at Barry School was murdered along with most of her family, including her five-year-old son. The act was committed by one person, for the most petty of reasons, and it generated destructive ripples that slammed into friends, family, co-workers, and the community.

But not all ripples are destructive. You keep working, keep trooping, try to pick up the pieces. Eventually efforts start to pay off. Right after my friend was killed, I received the editing suggestions for my third book, and though my dazed brain could hardly make sense of them, I noticed one thing right off the bat. The main character in the book loses a friend to murder, just like I did, and her reaction was unrealistic. I rewrote that part. And once I had done that, strange ripples began to emanate from those changed places.

I had been re-reading Octavia Butler's book, Mind Of My Mind, one of my favorites. This time around, I saw new things in the story and felt affected on much deeper levels. One night I put down the book, went to sleep, and had a nightmare. When I woke up, I re-thought the nightmare into the premise for my fifth book, The Kronos Condition.

In the nightmare, I was a young girl, on a bus with several other kids my age. We knew we were riding to our deaths. The three adults who accompanied us were planning to send the bus over a cliff with us in it. They were telepaths, and we had to find some way to save ourselves without actually thinking about it.

Yeah, I know, it sounds ridiculous and impossible, but I couldn't help wondering just how you could plan your escape without thinking about it. Turns out the idea isn't as nutty as it sounds. For inspiration, I referred to a book that is much more straight-forward in concept than its complicated title implies: The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind, by Julian Jaynes.

Okay, I can see your eyes are crossing, but don't freak out on me. This is a book that I understood pretty well, and I don't have a degree in neurology or psychology. I got several interesting ideas from this book, like the idea that consciousness is actually a model of reality that you build in your head. Consciousness is not perception, it's not the mental state of being awake, it's not even awareness. It's that imaginary model, always under construction, constantly being referred to in decision-making efforts. The more rigid that model is, the more easily shattered. The more flexible it is, the better chance you have of surviving the emotional fallout that occurs after an unexpected event.

And I surmised one other interesting thing after reading the book. Language was not invented by the brain so people could talk to each other, that was just a (mostly) happy side-effect. The brain invented language so it could talk to itself. This makes sense when you remember that the human brain has two hemispheres, and they're not connected at every point. The corpus collosum is the largest area of connection. But the area that may be responsible for the development of language is a little crossroads called the anterior commissure. This structure relays visual information. To do so more efficiently, it translates that information into code.

Code is language.

By this time you can probably tell that my friend's murder really threw me for a loop, and I engaged in way too much thinking, afterward. Too much thinking is a side-effect of grief, as you compulsively engage in the mental version of probing a sore tooth. You shouldn't do it, but you just can't help it. If you're a writer, this excessive thinking can prod you into writing a book. (It can also cause writer's block, but that's another essay altogether). My book was The Kronos Condition, and my main character had to find some way to save herself and her siblings from a trio of evil thugs who called themselves The Three.

All of these characters, the children and The Three, had telekinetic and telepathic abilities. The Three believed they controlled every aspect of the children's abilities, but the heart of the story is that they are wrong.

One way to synopsize any novel ever written is to say things are not what they seem. My way of interpreting this is to say, this character has a problem -- how is he/she going to solve it? This interpretation isn't elegant, but it gets the job done. Sally, the main character of The Kronos Condition, had to find some way to plan her escape without thinking about it. How could she possibly do that?

The answer lies in the fact that we know things we don't know that we know. Yes, that sentence is a tangle, but it's true. For example, when I look for books in the brick-and-mortar bookstore where I work, sometimes I think I can't find them, and then the customer standing next to me says, "You've got your hand on it."

And it's always my left hand. The left hand is controlled by the right side of the brain, the one that doesn't have language centers, the one from which dreams (and nightmares) and poetry spring. That side of my brain knew the answer to the question, Where is that %$#&* book? But it doesn't have a language center, so it simply directed my left hand to the book. The part of me that was in the driver's seat of my consciousness wasn't aware of this until someone else pointed it out.

This is the realization that pointed me to the solution to Sally's problem.

So I wrote a book in which some children face terrible foes and fight their way to a happy ending. For many readers, it was too rough a ride (reminding some of terrors they faced in their own childhood). Others were simply unaware that it existed, since it languished in midlist territory. But I'm glad I wrote it. Writing this book taught me far more than how to write this kind of story. It took me into strange territory, and I emerged whole (if somewhat bruised).

I never did find good answers for what happened to my friend and her family. Senseless acts remain senseless, viewed from any angle. Eventually you accept what's happened, and you hope it will never happen again.

Twelve years ago. So far, so good.

Bloggus Interuptus

I'd love to say I didn't blog for two weeks because I was on vacation (especially this time of year, when the anxious, shopping hordes are tugging at my sleeve at work), but what really happened is that my old computer was gummed up by a program that was supposed to protect it, probably because I kept delaying when they wanted me to pay them for another year. So bah and humbug on that old system, I've got a Mac now. It should help me do my audio books and create spiffy audio-visual presentations when I set up my fiction websites.

I'll be posting new stuff (other than this status report) this weekend. Just pardon my dust while I figure out the new gizmo . . .

P.S. The rock photo was taken with my new Canon.

Audio Books For Gardeners

Several years ago my day job was actually a night job, working as a sweeper at a grade school. It wasn’t a bad job for a writer, because I did it alone, with no customers clamoring for my attention and no tasks that required serious thought, so I could think about books I was working on and do sketchy plotting and character development while erasing chalkboards and emptying trash. I actually looked forward to doing this job, but not because it made me happy to restore order to chaos. I liked the fact that for the last 2 hours every night, after all the teaching staff had gone home, my supervisor would play audio books on the P.A. system.

Prior to that time, I had foolishly scorned audio books. I thought they were for lazy people who didn’t want to read. And that’s partially true, we still get plenty of kids at the book store where I work who don’t want to read an assigned book, who think they’ll be able to pay attention to an audio version (and who probably don’t have the attention span to do so). But once I began to listen to audio books myself, I realized my scorn had been mostly unfair. Good audio books are as entertaining as a good radio show, something most Americans are too young to have heard. I have become an devoted fan of them.

Now I tend to listen to audio books under three different circumstances. I like to listen while I’m gardening, because the books divert my attention away from the fact that I’ve got such a huge amount of work to do. When I’m listening to a book, I can pull grass and weeds for hours. I can prune roses until it’s too dark outside to see (and my hands are clawed all to heck). I can lug stones back and forth, and fertilize annuals, and rake leaves, and still feel like I’m having a good time.

I listen to books while I’m cleaning too, everything except vacuuming. And while I’m cooking and baking, except for when I’m running the power mixer. Audio books have actually helped make me more attentive in the kitchen, instead of letting me wander off to let something burn. So they actually get credit for improving my domestic skills (even if accidentally).

I have some favorites that I’ve listened to many times. Dean Koontz probably tops the list with the audio versions of Fear Nothing, Seize The Night, One Door Away From Heaven, Life Expectancy, By The Light Of The Moon, Intensity, the (brilliantly performed by B.D. Wong) abridged version of Tick-Tock, and, last but not least, Dragon Tears.

Stephen King also has some audio goodies to offer: The Green Mile, The Cell, Lisey's Story, Duma Key, and all of his short story collections. I also really enjoyed the books recorded of the Gunslinger series.

Any audio book you can get by Agatha Christie is a treat. Likewise the audio versions of books by Elisabeth Peters and Ellis Peters. Elmore Leonard’s audios are even more entertaining than movies that have been made out of his books. Diana Gabaldon’s Voyager books are fun, and Elisabeth Kostova’s wonderful Dracula book, The Historian, is worth listening too over and over. Anything by Ray Bradbury is great, especially if he’s performing it himself.

By now you may have noticed a pattern in my preferences: thrillers, mystery, horror, sci-fi. But I listen to non-fiction too. Probably my favorite non-fiction author in audio is Sara Vowell. Assassination Vacation is as funny and entertaining as it is informative (very!).

The main problem with audio books has always been cost. Some of them are $50 or $60, sometimes more. Even the more moderately-priced audio books can run $25, and that’s too much for me. I look for inexpensive pre-owned copies, or remaindered (“sale”) stuff. But I suspect the audio book will decrease in price just as much as the hard copy will, once it becomes an electronic download. I would even be willing to get an ipod for audio books, something I’ve resisted doing for music so far.

I plan to record audio versions of my own books, probably starting in spring of 2010, and sell them as audio files online. I’m thinking $2.99 to $4.99 will be a fair price in this new millennium of depressed incomes. Ideally, I’ll be able to feature audio samples on my website, maybe even make commercials for you-tube. I suspect I’ll be a bit clunky at first, but this is the sort of thing you can only learn by doing. After all, Stephen King and Ray Bradbury are good at performing their own work – it’s not unheard of.

And in the meantime, I’ve got all these great books to listen to, setting the best example. Try them if you like audio. Check them out of your local library if you have to. Maybe, like me, you’ll become a fan too.

Heiroglyphic Trail

Ernie and I went hiking up the Heiroglyphic Trail in the Superstitions yesterday (there are actually petroglyphs at the end of the trail). Rain had parked itself over those mountains (disdaining Phoenix and surrounding cities) so when we arrived we crossed paths with a number of happy wet people on their way down. The trail was beautiful, and the mist gave it a Shangri-La quality. We sat at the top, studying the petroglyphs, for at least half an hour (we may have experienced some time dilation). That place is sacred. I gazed up at the crumbling mountains and realized again how much I love the Southwest. I've made a pledge to Ernie -- from now on, we work as little as possible to make a living and as much as possible to visit these places we love.

My camera was on the fritz, so I'm using an old photo from Peralta Canyon Trail. But I'll be getting a new camera soon, and when that happens -- look out, blogspot!

The Piestewa Peak Mystery

When you’ve hiked in a place several times, and you love that place, and maybe even have made up your own names for features you always see along the trail in that place, you can actually get the idea that you’ve really seen that place. Then you’ll notice something you didn’t see before, and you realize you’ve only seen bits and pieces.

Take Piestewa Peak. You can make some assumptions about that mountain and its close neighbors based on the rocks you see, many of which are metamorphic. They have been squeezed and fractured, melted and re-crystalized, weathered and then colonized by plant and animal life. At some point, tons and tons of weight rested on them, they are the remnants of a mountain range. It has slowly crumbled and created some of the “valley fill” that hides the grabens (“pull-apart” faults) and low spots in the Basin & Range areas of Arizona.

And you can tell the area was under water for many millions of years, prior to and after the mountain-building stages. Fossils all over Arizona testify to that fact, as does the presence of limestone and other sedimentary rocks.

If you look at the entire Western United States you can see the train-wreck mountain ranges that run from Alaska to Mexico, the result of the counter-clockwise, Northwest shifting of North America after it broke away from the last supercontinent and plowed into Island chains, making them part of the continent. During that shift, Arizona overrode some very hot spots in the mantle, and melted stuff was forced up into cracks in fractured rocks to give us copper, quartz, and lots of other interesting metals and gems.

Those hot spots also generated lots of volcanic activity, so you see all kinds of magma, both light and dark, in fractured “necks” that cooled below the ground and then were exposed by erosion, and in collapsed craters that exploded and hurled rocky projectiles hundred of miles around. You can see the remnants of pyroclastic flows made of ash and melted stuff that scooped up rock debris as it flowed at top speeds across the landscape. And you can see that flowing water, blowing winds, human construction, and even plants and animals have moved rocks and sand far from their place or origin.

When Ernie and I first hiked Piestewa Peak last year, I observed the tilted stratification and wondered if it may have been the result of the Laramide Orogeny (“mountain-building period”), which is thought to have begun around 75 million years ago, and is also thought to have lasted up to 25 million years. And yes, that may have created the old mountain range that squished those metamorphic rocks in the first place. But now I wonder if something else pushed those layers up and out. Some of them seem to go almost vertical. Could super-hot stuff boiling up underneath have shoved those layers up? This is one of the questions with which I plan to pester the geology gurus when I pursue my degree in 2010.

But, mysterious as the geological history of Arizona may be, it’s not even the mystery that caught my attention last Friday, when Ernie and I took advantage of the cool weather to go hiking on our favorite Phoenix trail. We were headed for a spot we think of as The Secret Canyon, where a higher group of rocks sticking out of the mountains looks out over a wider, deeper spot in an arroyo. It’s no Grand Canyon, it’s not even an Oak Creek Canyon. But it’s a magical spot, where the wind blows and on some lucky days you can’t hear the sounds of town at all.

Hikers like to pause at that spot and nibble trail food, sip water, talk about their dreams. There’s a memorial bench up there that will bring tears to your eyes if you pause to read the dedication plaque. I think of it as the heart of Piestewa Peak, though many others believe the Summit Trail is that spot. I brought my camera up there this time, hoping to capture even a fraction of the spirit of the place.

I paused all along the trail to snap photos of interesting stuff. At one point I stopped to take a picture of a saguaro, and that’s when Ernie noticed something that’s been there all along. “There’s a rock stuck in that hole in the saguaro, over twelve feet up!”

Someone or something jammed a rock into that hole. And when we stopped to really look, we could see that several of the saguaros had similar rocks stuck in them. All of these were high off the ground, all stuck firmly into their holes. Many were the same size as the hole, but there were even a few big rocks, maybe the size (though not the shape) of oranges, that were also stuck fast.

I remembered the photo I had taken of the Zombie Saguaro a few months back, and he had a rock in his mouth that looked like a tongue. I had assumed some wise guy hiker had put it there. But these other rocks were too high up for a human to stick them in the holes, and if they had been thrown, they would probably just have bounced off. You’d have to stay there a long time, patiently throwing rocks at those tiny holes in order to get one to stick, and that’s not why people are on that path in the first place– they’re just out getting exercise and enjoying the view! Plus many of the saguaros weren’t even accessible to foot traffic.

So – birds? They might account for the small rocks, but what about the big ones? Are eagles stuffing rocks in saguaro holes? Or buzzards? Hawks? Pterodactyls? Muscular chipmunks? Why are they doing that? Do they think the holes look untidy? Are they trying to make the saguaro a more secure place to build a nest by closing off “back doors?”

Once we noticed the rocks, we realized dozens of the saguaros had them. Some of those rocks may have been there a hundred years. Unless gravity and wind and rain dislodge them, they may be there a hundred more.

So the next time you’re out hiking and you see a saguaro, look for the rocks. Yeah, it’s not the biggest mystery out there, but it made me stop and wonder what else I’m not seeing. That, alone, makes it worth pondering.

And please – let me know if you spot the saguaro gremlin that’s responsible.

Spoink!

I’ve been gardening in Phoenix for about 10 years now, and I’ve learned that if I want the seeds I sow to sprout, I have to use the blitz approach. If I want 3 or 4 sweet pea vines to sprout, I have to sow 10 to 15 seeds. If I want a tub full of zinnias, I need to sow 50 zinnia seeds. If I want larkspur to tower above the scene, I need to take the dried-up old stalks in June and shake them over the area where I want them to grow the following year, a hundred little seeds or so.

After that, I need to shred old, dead matter from expired plants and gently sift it over the spot where I sowed the seeds. I need to water that area 2 to 3 times a week. Over the next several weeks, sprouts will appear. I call them spoinkers. This is because I imagine spoink! is the sound the sprouts make when their leaves pop out of the seed casing. All over the garden, it’s spoink! Spoink! Spoink! And those casings go flying.

I’ve tried a lot of flower varieties for my Phoenix garden, and I’ve settled on a few stellar performers. Sweet peas, zinnias, stocks, larkspur, celosia, snapdragons, and nasturtiums. If I’m lucky, one or two of the dozens of sunflower seeds I sowed will grow big enough to open a giant head.

But Nature is way better at sowing seeds than I am. Every year, several of the flowers that grow in my garden were sown by wind, and rain, and pooping birds. They don’t need to scatter shredded mulch over the seeds, they don’t need to fuss over them at all. Wild sunflowers bloom in several places, and I try to leave 1 or 2 of them where they are, because the birds and bees love them so much. I figure I owe them at least that much. Because no one has perfected the blitz approach half as well as Nature.

And thank goodness for that!

Ragnarok And Striped Socks

I don’t believe in the End of the World. Call it Ragnarok, The Apocalypse, Armageddon, The Rapture, 2012, whatever. It’s not going to happen.

Though admittedly, sometimes it almost happens. The climate changes, a comet slams into us, ice ages and volcanoes occur. There’s even evidence that the sun may have partially fried us with a really massive solar flare a few-hundred million years ago. Yet life persisted and flourished.

I don’t even believe in World War III. The damned thing would just be too expensive. Any super-virus would burn itself out before it could pass itself on, any toxic agent would not spread far, any bomb would do limited damage. Our current world-wide depression is little more than an annoyance for most people, even as it provokes wide-reaching changes.

Losing a loved one can seem like the end of the world. Or losing your home. Lots of people experience figurative ends-of-the world. But even when we die, it’s not over. We’ve had an effect, we dented the universe with our own, particular gravity well, and even if no one remembered us, we still existed – nothing can change that. Time and space wove together to create our existence, and even as the arrow of time moves past our lives, the cosmic garment it knitted is still there. I like to picture it as a colossal sock. Maybe with stripes. Or polka dots.

Nope, there’s no end of the world. Though some day, maybe 4 or 5 billion years from now, the sun will lose its current balance of hydrogen-into-helium and it will expand to swallow the inner planets. But I wonder if the shock wave of its expansion might nudge us farther out, rather than swallowing us. Not that we would be in good shape, even if it did. Anyway, at that point we’ll have a different solar system. Some surviving planets might even evolve a hospitable habitat. After all, didn’t Superman come from a planet that had a red sun?

Okay, I’m reaching with that one, but in 4 or 5 billion years, if we still exist, we’ll probably be smarter and have better gizmos. We’ll have colonized space. We could actually outlive our world, though no species from Earth has managed to do that so far. I’m just saying it’s possible. In fact, what seems kind of impossible is the fact that we exist in the first place.

Think about it: we had to have just the right kind of sun: not too big, not too small, not too heavy, not too gas giant-y. Our solar system had to have enough of the right elements present when the planets coalesced to make minerals and amino-acids and all that good stuff. And collisions had to take place; several planetoids collided to form the earth, and one of those collisions had to produce our moon. Enough nickel-iron had to be present by then to form that nice, spinning, electromagnetic-field-producing core that keeps radiation from frying us, but that field also needs to let enough radiation in to allow for mutation. Our moon has to be large enough and orbiting at the right distance to stabilize our axis of rotation and provoke regular tides.

During an early period of heavy bombardment, comets crashed into us and brought water. Little comets still do. We have currents in our mantle that move the continental and oceanic crust around, volcanoes blow up or ooze various types of lava so we can have minerals beneficial to crop-bearing soils. We have the right ratio of land to water to generate storms that drop rain.

Hooray for volcanoes! Hooray for weather! Hooray for cake! We’re here, and that’s amazing. We can wonder how it all came to be. We can dream about what’s possible in the future.

But the end of the world? Not gonna happen. Not as long as we keep thinking and dreaming and planning. That’s what we evolved to do. Somewhere between all those bombardments, volcanic explosions, ice ages, and hurricanes, we got up on our feet and peeked over the next hill to see what might be there. We survived the Almost End Of The World. We could do it again.

So stick around. You won’t witness the End Of The World, but who knows what other strange stuff might happen? After all, that’s what makes life worthwhile in the first place. That and striped socks.

Or maybe polka dots. Whatever.