Traces and Places — Hiking Fillmore Cañon Trail
"The traces of the ebb and flow of time are so evident that we do not doubt them; yet, though we do not doubt them, we ought not to conclude that we understand them."
— Dogen-zenji
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As we drive the dirt road, both boys in the back seat chant "ahhhhAHHHahhh" along with the bumps, their voices quavering in harmony with each tiny jolt. The simple pleasures of the backroads.
We arrive at the trailhead in Southern New Mexico’s Organ Mountains, a few miles east of Las Cruces. "Mountain, mountain," Riley – 20 months in this world – points, practicing his new words. Before us the yucca-spiked, boulder-bounced bajada slopes up to a sheer, cringing plummet of cliff, skyward lunge of granite. But no, we aren’t climbing up there, just staring, admiring.
The weather report: A warm January day, mid-60s. High clouds and lingering jet contrails signal a front approaching but not yet here. Only a little breeze.
I help the boys – Riley and his 5-year-old brother Cody – out of the car. We’re to stroll up Fillmore Cañon Trail to what passes for a waterfall in these parts. "Walk! Walk! Get down! Get down!" Riley hollers as I try to lift him into the backpack. So he totters up the first 100 yards of trail. Fortunately the trail is wide enough to keep some distance between him and the gauntlet of cacti – big prickly pear paddles, nopales with gleaming, multi-hued thorns – lining both sides of the trail. "Don’t touch! Don’t touch!" I repeat, down into the dry arroyo bed of Ice Cañon. He stops to gather stones. As we climb out of the arroyo, he changes his mind: "steep, steep, carry me, carry me!" So I plop him into the pack, click his straps, adjust his hat, and heft him onto my back. A rock in each hand, a compliant beast of burden to tote him, he’s happy.
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We hike towards a huge tufa formation, several hundred feet of hardened, weathered, and lichen-hued ash laid down 30 million years ago in the volcanic upheavals that formed these mountains. At the trail junction we don’t veer right to La Cueva, a cave tucked under the tufa, but to the left, up the Fillmore trail.
We move in fits and starts. Cody races ahead, then clambers about a boulder to throw stones into the bushes, dallying behind as I try but fail to keep a steady plodding pace. Hiking with small children, one goes slowly and perspective changes. The world, we hear, is infinitely complex in fractal detail, as richly textured through a telescope as through a microscope. This pace proves it. I used to pride myself on hiking 20 or 25 macho miles a day. Now I see as much, maybe more, on a two or three mile stroll. And kids don’t want ever-new trails to explore, just the same well worn familiar one. They are drawn down the trail by the anticipation of the familiar, not the pursuit of the novel. This boulder to climb, this arroyo sand to gather, this shady oak once more to sit beneath, again and again. Destination matters less than the stops along the way, the rhythm of strolling through a well known place, the joy of rediscovering a forgotten slippy rock to slide.
With a bit of cajoling from me, however, we do move along. As the trail nears the narrow Cañon that recedes into the mountains, we cross through the abandoned site of the town and mine of Modoc Mills. A trailside display shows photos of the scene in the late 19th century with assorted buildings and mine shafts. Looking quickly back and forth from the display photo to the scene ahead, a four-dimensional view comes into focus as time enters perception. The land is not static. Now, few traces of the once lively town and clanging mills remain: shrub-coverd and erosion-filled mine shafts, a dark rusty shard of tin can.
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The human hold on this place is tenuous. This arid region we call the Southwest is speckled with ruins and ghost towns. Some, like Modoc Mills, like all of our towns, like the planet itself some day – leaving hardly a trace. Cody wants to know what’s in the pictures, and I start to read him the accompanying text, but after a few sentences he’s bored and darts away.
In this part of the world, winter hikes are usually pleasant, with more folks on the trails than in the scorching summer. And hiking with kids is less stressful – snakes, scorpions, black widows, wasps, biting ants are all snoozing underground – so I needn’t worrisomely watch the boys’ every move. Of course the ever-awake thorns of cacti, acacia, and mesquite are as prickly as ever.
We loop through the traces of Modoc Mills, over the old tailing piles that are slowly blending back into the mountain. As we near the waterfall, the Cañon narrows, a "defile" it might have been called in an earlier time (a place where an army must walk single file) before "canyon" became an English word. Languages evolve to suit their places, and I’d like to keep that trace of origin in the word – Cañon, not canyon. The English language emerged in a place far wetter, greener, colder, foggier, smaller, lusher than this one. In English we struggle to describe this land, as we struggle to become at home here. The Spanish speakers have a head start, and their vocabulary enriches our own. We nod gratitude, if only token, by marking the passage of words through that language: arroyo, mesa, pinon, ocotillo, mesquite, bajada, playa. Ah, but what terms do the Apache use, the Manso, the Mogollon? Those are the languages most co-evolved with this land. What traces of their words inflect our speech?
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The waterfall at Fillmore flutters down the stone face. Several weeks back we had a decent snow, even in the valley below, and the high country melt trickles down here, a sheer 100-foot face, to a small, muddy, rock-filled splash pool. "Fountain," Riley says, thinking of the fountain in the mall, the sound of running water merging in his mind that disparate place with this.
The water disappears into the sand, with no surface creek run-off. Any flowing water in these mountains is a spectacle. After summer storms of 4-5 inches of rain, these falls must be spectacular. But the narrow Cañon up, too, too treacherous with flood threat to tempt a spectator.
A high wall to the south blocks the sun. A group of eight or nine other hikers got here first and snagged the sunny boulder seats. The boys toss shadow-cool stones into the pool. Cody lobs the biggest rock he can wield, the splash mud-freckling his brother’s face, who doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry so does a little of both. We snack in the chilly shade until, uncomfortably cold, we hike back out, warming our blood.
After retracing our trail around the tufa ridges, we climb down to ice creek. A rather ironic name, perhaps wistfully bestowed given the climate most of the year, but the upper reaches are heavily shadowed and frost lingers. Though the drainage climbs far into the mountains, the actual wet-flowing creek surfaces about 100 yards up the arroyo only to vanish into the sand another 50 yards below us. That’s the extent of its course above ground today. Much of the year even this stretch is dry. Still, plants reach roots through centuries of sand. Seep willows edge the arroyo, seedheads billowing skyward; evergreen oaks shadow the north-facing slope, leaves clacking softly in the breeze. Upstream from here, in the bed of the arroyo, long isolated from others of its genus, the endemic and endangered Organ Mountain Evening Primrose hangs on, growing where little else will, along the usually dry but at times chaotically flooded arroyo bottom.
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The south-facing slope behind us is home to barrel and prickly pear cactus. Numerous grasses nod past seeding; who bothers to learn their names, though, but nerdy range scientists and cowboys. Given the water flowing by, fewer birds than I expected flit about, but we’re hardly birdwatcher quiet. Today, only a crissal thrasher hops into view, flexing an acacia branch.
The bare rock slopes behind us are spotted with mortars, round depressions used by the earlier residents of this place to grind seeds. Above them are the tufa cliffs and La Cueva, a cave inhabited periodically for the last few thousand years, at least, by the Chihuahua Archaic and then the Mogollon. A fading red pictograph, a man with a spear, although sun-scorched, storm-worn, and lichen-stained, still guards the cave.
Sitting on these rocks, with my boys playing in the creek, it is easy to conjure in the mind an earlier domestic scene, ancient families chatting and lounging on these very rocks. I can sense an ancestry of place, a kinship with those who lived here before. But I must be careful, for it is largely a false sense, only a wish. True, my boys toss the same stones into the same creek as boys 1,000 years ago and longer did, and true I sit here on the rocks above them, near mortars, going about my work, but I’m scribbling these notes, not grinding mesquite pods or acorns or knapping arrowheads. And though the scents, sounds have changed little, the food we munch today we did not gather, grind, or kill. No blood stains our hands, no seedpod shards stick beneath our fingernails. Our myths don’t stride those ridgecrests. The mortars are intriguing, but they aren’t our tools; their pestles don’t fit our palms. We visit but don’t live in the cave, its dusty floor doesn’t perfume our dreams. Different notions inhabit our brains, different words image our lives, different syntaxes trace the synaptic flickerings of our minds. Our lineage of place is largely, if not quite entirely, frayed.
Walking about with heads bent intently down, we find numerous little deposits of seed-filled turds. "Poop, poop," Riley points. "Pooooop," Cody laughingly echoes. What, I wonder, do they signify, whose traces are they: coyote? javelina? packrat perhaps? Something else, like the names of the grasses, I need to learn.
Unconcerned with names, "poop" is good enough, Cody and Riley are barefoot happy, tossing stones – purple rhyolite shards or chips of granite pebbles forged in fire 30 million years ago – into the placid creek, doing their part to erode these peaks. Thirty million years ago: Compared to the age of these rocks, these hills, these cliffs, the Mogollon have just left. We’ve just missed them passing between ocotillo wands over the event horizon, their fire ash still warm. Some philosophies, physical and metaphysical both, hold time an illusion, a misperception, a trick of the mind, only a tracing of the real but not the real itself. Sitting here, I believe them, sitting here, I doubt.
Eyes closed, I hear the sifting of water across stone, the voices of kids playing. There is no big or little, no long or short, far or near, then or now. Look, whose footprint, there, in the creek bottom?
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