03/2016
Geoglyphs
Blythe, CA
Outside of Blythe, CA there are geoglyphs that I have read about but never seen. Both Ellen Meloy and Barry Lopez wrote about them in such a way that I felt like a fool not to exit whenever I passed Blythe on I 10. The trick seemed to go there upon leaving California, at the onset of a journey. And since I didn’t leave the city until 3pm, by nightfall I was at the edge of Blythe. I decided to check in at the Red Roof Inn and go looking for the glyphs in the morning.
At dawn I woke up, made a cup of black tea, stumbled into my truck and went looking for the site with only a vague notion about where it was. The clerk at the motel (who had never actually been to the glyphs) gave me directions that seemed simple enough the night before. By the time I had driven few miles outside of the city limits, past the green pastures that the Colorado river provided for this otherwise dry desert center, I was heading North and had not checked by odometer. Ruefully aware of my lack of survival skills, it suddenly hit me that I ought to be paying closer attention to what I was doing. The desert can make you delirious, see things, lose your bearing…Very quickly I found myself on the edge of the Mojave.
Geoglyphs, or intaglios, are different than petroglyphs. They are carved onto the face of the Earth, from the horizontal pebble-scape instead of on a perpendicular rock face. As I crept along the road and the sun started to rise I felt a rush of fear course through my veins--just a few miles out of town. I wanted a sign that I was heading in the right direction. I was suddenly aware of how little I think about where I am going these days. I just follow my GPS blindly around Los Angeles. I was mostly alone on the road, except for a single semi that was pulled off on the slim shoulder. I did not detect hostility as the root of my fear, but rather a dull feeling of being far away from others, of being close to the limits of what I understand. The feeling plays tricks on my ambitions. Opposing desires began to battle within me. I could return to my hotel room where is it dark and cool and known and get back on the highway heading for Gallup, or push further along this road and seek the unknown.
I have not brought any sort of map, nor thought to program this location into my phone, but I glanced down at a post card of the glyphs that I bought last night in the motel lobby. On the card it said that the glyphs were 15 miles North of Blythe. Surely I had driven at least this far. I turned my truck around and headed back towards a bend in the road that looked like there was a turn off. As I pulled a u-turn in the middle of the highway I saw the mile marker, 14 miles to Blythe. I immediately knew that I had not gone far enough. So I pulled around again, passing the trucker parked on the side of the road for a third time. I waved sheepishly. Sure enough there was a historical marker and BLM land sign just past where I had been before and I caught a glimpse of the Colorado River. It was almost 7:30 AM now and I could feel the heat of the day rising with the sun.
My friend Leslie Ryan says, “The desert is like a museum.” And there is a sense of preservation here, a sense of stasis. The BLM sign welcomes me at the same time it warns me against driving off the road or disturbing the landscape in any way. There is a wooden fence that funnels me through a somewhat lunar terrain. The sun pierces my eyes, and rests on my shoulders. I forget my hat on the seat of the truck. I don’t wear sunscreen. I blindly stumble up to a chain link fence and gaze across the low “relief” of intaglio scraped from the desert floor.
The light is gold and brown. The ground is corrugated and parched, covered with pebbles. The shadows of the fence posts are long and bend away from the low relief of the glyphs. They are crisp and black and they fascinate me. The shadows makes a kind of hypercube shape on the ground and counter the 95 ft. span of intaglio, measuring it, clocking it. Like a veil, the shadow of the chain link gently covers the round pebbles. Without form or substance, light perseveres or it is blocked. I feel as if I’ve walked into another dimension, a place where time is being marked. I am merely passing through and mistaken about my significance. Not so far from the road I hear a few more trucks passing. My thoughts wander to the contrast of man now and before.
The shadows of the posts project across the pebbly ground making their Cartesian mark over this older mysterious scape. These two inches of depth are enough to set an idea in motion, whatever needs to be set here. I sense it, but I do not understand it. The length if the glyph speaks to the length of the shadow of the fence, to the time of day, to the direction I am facing. But I am certainly turned around and barely know which direction I am headed. I am a spectator at this event, of this system. A few beetles make their morning trek for food in front of my shoe. Again I am compelled to leave and stay simultaneously. 'Man and coyote' is the glyph. I quickly decide this. I make up my own story as I travel up the BLM road to the other site. I stand in front of glyph of what looks like a woman to me. Creation myths are told here. I am standing beneath her crotch. Looking into the shape of my own body, into the mountains. I feel reborn.
