💾 Archived View for soviet.circumlunar.space › oreamnos › log › river-of-january.gmi captured on 2023-12-28 at 15:25:00. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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River of January

On New Year's Day, 1502, a Portuguese fleet sailed into the bay of a strange land that would later be named after the navigator on the expedition, Amerigo Vespucci. The bay itself they called Rio de Janeiro, a name that never clicked for me until the preceding story was told to me, along with the name's Spanish equivalent, "Río de Enero". It has always seemed to me a strangely poetic gesture from a lot whose nomenclature seems to have been restricted to monarchs, saints, and themselves.

Five hundred and nineteen years later I went with some relatives and family friends out on our own minor voyage of discovery, to a supposedly nice hiking and picnicking area called Seven Springs. We drove out about 45 minutes nad were almost at the site but decided not to go further because the road became unpaved and our car didn't seem up to the task. Instead we turned back and found a decent spot just a mile or two back down the road. It was a short hike up to the top of a ridge, where stood the remains of a 900-year-old Hohokam village, surrounded by a defensive wall that was evidently built to protect them during conflicts whose origins and history have long since been lost to time. All that was up there now were knee-height walls made of flat stones stacked on top of each other sans mortar. A sign off to the side discreetly noted that these remnants too were embellished.

A little ways down the hillside was one of those precariously perched freestanding boulders towering over its surroundings. I clambered over to the base and then shuffled onto the ground below where I took a picture of the rock rising above me, from that side angular and faceted like some kind of Brutalist sculpture, the sky behind it the only other thing in frame. It was a simple shot that required basically no composition, but for some reason I'm proud of it. It conveys a feeling, something that most of my pictures do not.

From the rock we went down along the side of the hill, well off the trail. The ground consisted of this weird slippery, gravelly soil, which in places sank underfoot. Not for the first time I thought about how I disliked the hiking here because of the ground, which is too unfirm and covered in small, annoying rocks. I can deal with fields of larger scree without a problem, but this smaller stuff gets me, makes me long for the solid dirt and granite of the place where I got my username. I was on a field trip for a geology summer class that my high school offered, ten days of camping in the Black Hills. One of the teachers brought along her husband and daughter, only a few years younger than us, who saw the way I liked to run across the jutting rocks, leaping from one to another, and started calling me "mountain goat". She's the only one who ever used it and it was only for those few days, but among the many nicknames I've been given it remains my favorite. There are probably millions of people whom it would fit better, who can hike and climb better than me, but this tenuous connection to those white figures who bound up sheer mountain faces so easily makes me feel like I have some measure of their grace. All of which is to say that I don't quite feel at home among all this sandstone and gravel; I can't *fly* without the sturdy earth beneath me.

We kept going down along the side of the hill, stopping by another big rock and then some pylons, the high voltage lines buzzing overhead. I hadn't noticed on the way up, but the shrubs that sparsely dotted the landscape here were all completely burnt up, even the ground around each one scorched black. I later learned that a wildfire had come through here in September. Small holes that I hoped didn't contain rattlesnakes pockmarked the ground, the green blades of grass poking out from some just about the only trace of life amid the wasted hills. The words "fire and brimstone" came to mind, and it made me wonder why the Apollo astronauts had to go all the way to the Icelandic highlands to train when this desolation was right at their doorstep.

Finally we got back to the trailhead and had lunch. No one felt like leaving just yet, so I went along with the family friends, whose car was more suited to tackle the unpaved road, to go check out the place we had originally planned to go to. The road wound around the sides of the hills, which soon enough were covered in far more vegetation than the ones back at the ruins. The valley below grew thick with tall trees, and I stared at one with the brilliant yellow colors of fall that I had just missed this year; I was last home in September, in between the waves of COVID and shortly before the colors started turning. Being there after so many months, what stood out to me the most was the sheer overflowing foliage of what I used to think was just another bland Midwestern suburb. The Japanese word "ryouran" popped into my head at the time, a side effect of doing too many Anki flashcards. It's usually translated as "profusely", but is specifically used in the sense of a great number of flowers blooming. That's what it felt like being back home again, all this vivid green life flowering before me.

We reached the spot the GPS said was Seven Springs, but it was just a dry, mostly empty parking lot with a few trails leading out from it. The map at the trailhead had been shot by some asshat with a shotgun and was useless. We took one trail up a ways, passing a well-equipped man carrying a hunting bow and climbing up onto a ridge that overlooked the road. To the side was a decomposing cactus, the exposed innards a three-dimensional analogue of the veins that you see in normal leaves. Evidently the trail just kept following the road that we'd just come by so the others decided we should go back, wanting to find the actual springs. As we drove on, I noticed that a lot of the signs in the area had also been shot. Better a stop sign than those historical markers about Emmett Till, I thought, but of course that was a false dichotomy: people would keep on shooting both random road signs *and* anything that shed an unflattering light on their racist heritage.

B., our driver, sped along the twisty roads, paying no attention to the lane divider. He's been decent enough to me, but I've been wary of him ever since I heard him talk about election irregularities in Wisconsin and say that he didn't trust Democrats because they "brought LGBT rights". After several miles we descended into the valley, the trees above us now providing some shade. We came by a place where a slow stream spilled over the road before going on its way, clear sign that we'd reached the springs. Further down the stream crossed the road again, and B. sped up to make a big splash. Much of the streambed was dry and it was never more than a few meters wide at most, but it was still the largest body of water I'd seen in months. We continued on to the campgrounds, which were closed, and anyway we had to meet back up with everyone else at the ruins so we turned around and went back.

It was one of those jarring days that takes you out of yourself for a while. There's the rush of climbing to a new vista and the feeling of connection with the land around you, but then those needling reminders that this place is not your place, that these people are not your people. But that's nothing new. After all, it's not like the Portuguese were the first to discover that bay, and it's not like a pretty name prevented the rape of a continent.