Venture 2 | Nancy Grisel

The crimson peaks mount toward the sky as if built by giant red ants. Notched with trees, pitted by absent boulders, their surfaces would make billion-black-diamond ski slopes if only it were winter. Elsewhere, the slopes are gentler, masked by haze and distance, colors muted as if seen through a screen door. Have their surfaces ever felt the pressure of human foot? The trees blend into one another, creating a swash of navy green over any land that is not completely vertical. Eons ago, some cataclysmic landslide sheared off the gentle slope, leaving sandstone cliffs like gaping wounds from accidental amputations. But nature has started to heal herself with piney scabs.

The river gushes forth cascading near my feet into a clay-brown pool twelve or twenty feet below. The rushing sound of the water sounds somehow like the static that remained after the late-night TV national anthem. But in these days of cable and eight hundred channels (and still nothing to watch), that river reminder is no longer available. The water in the pool drifts down, sieved through rocks and bigger rocks. Goldenrod and pre-tumbling tumbleweed flank the path that itself cascades to the waterfall pool.

Shadows from the reeds behind me fall on dust and ants. They think the sun has disappeared and that it is twilight. The shadow from the quarter-pebble creates a haven for mites and the smallest of beings. Twigs, micro-mini logs, would provide barriers to the smallest of creatures. Is this why their feet and legs were engineered to propel them up straight surfaces?