Day 5: Holbrook, AZ to Las Cruces, NM
Permineralization, the Conscience Pile, Lightning Field Disclaimer, Pie Town and Hatch and Truth or Consequences, a heretofore capricious and somewhat worthless river
From Holbrook we turn south, down the I-180 East, skirting the lower border of Petrified Forest National Park. The park is a sprawling abundance of petrified wood which, to be clear, is not wood at all but rather a copy of wood - a fossil.
Technically a fossil is any trace of life that has been preserved for our discovery from a a prior geological age. We are currently in the Holocene Age, which began about eleven-thousand and seven-hundred years in the past, so roughly speaking if you were a bird or a dust mite or a mammoth and you died over twelve millennia ago, congratulations, you might be a fossil now. Even your footprint, or a single eyelash that fell and became trapped in amber, would be considered a fossil.
But the fossils that we get excited about, the big bone-shaped ones, are generally the result of a process called permineralization - the transformation of a deceased animal or vegetable into mineral. This switch from the once-animate to the never-animate is vital for preservation because organic matter, basically, does not want to exist. It is too complex and tenuous. Even in the absence of bacteria and other decomposers, the soft parts of the body wear away, and eventually even bones and teeth decay. Even animals trapped in amber, which appear so kodak-exact in their preservation, are susceptible - their exteriors remain but they lose their internal, microscopic complexity. The idea of extracting DNA from amber fossils is so far only a fiction.
For permineralization to happen, first a dead animal or plant must quickly be covered up, to protect it from scavengers and oxygen (oxygen means microorganisms, which mean swift decomposition). Drifting sand can do the trick, as can silt, or even volcanic ash. Then, mineral-laden water must slowly pass through the corpse, wearing away organic structures and replacing them with mineral replicas - usually made of silica. If this happens slowly enough an incredible level of detail can be preserved, down to the interior workings of cells. Sometimes a degree of organic matter is preserved as well; others, the entire structure is turned to rock - becomes petrified in other words.
And so the petrified forest here is largely rocks. Nor do these tree-shaped rocks come from a single coherent forest - there is so much petrified wood here because there were rivers here, and trees fell into the rivers and got tangled together and covered by silt. What is preserved here is evidence of ancient logjams.
Regardless of origins the petrified wood that scatters the ground within the park is beautiful. So beautiful in fact that there existed a long-standing worry among park officials that visitors, driven mad by geological lust, would steal all of it, leaving the park stripped bare and without any justification for continuing to exist. This was not an idle worry - it actually happened to Fossil Cycad National Monument in South Dakota, another location known for its petrified wood, established in 1922 but decommissioned in 1957 after it was picked clean.
Determined to preserve the park, officials set up inspection stations to search for contraband fossils. They put up signs warning visitors. For a time, the park’s orientation video for tourists showed footage of a man being arrested for fossil-theft. Whether or not these activities reduced pilfering, they do seem to have created a lot of pent-up guilt. Over the years hundreds of former visitors have mailed the park hunks of petrified wood, along with letters apologizing for their theft. Because park rangers have no way of verifying where the returned fossils actually came from, they keep them in a pile outside the park’s boundaries - the Conscience Pile, it is called.
The letters are also kept on file, and in 2019 photographer Ryan Thompson published a selection of them in his book with Phil Orr, Bad Luck, Hot Rocks. Dear Manager, reads one example, I am sorry I took this. I am only 5 years old and made a bad mistake.
More recently however evidence has emerged that concerns over fossil theft were overblown. The Fossil Cycad National Monument appears to have been denuded mainly by a single person, a Yale University scientist named George Wieland, who discovered the site and subsequently became obsessed by it. As for Petrified Forest National Park, by comparing historical photos of the park with its present day condition, rangers were able to discover that the scale of any theft had been quite limited. Perhaps the whole thing had gotten blown out of proportion. Today the park takes a gentler tone with its visitors.
After checking to make sure that we have not, after an unaccountable lapse in conscience, loaded our trunk with petrified wood, we continue south to St. Johns, where we take the US-191 to Springerville. At Springerville we join the US-60 East and then cross the border to New Mexico. A note in passing: the state of New Mexico is named after the former Spanish territory of Nuevo México, which was established in 1581 and which in turn took its name from the Valley of Mexico. The country of Mexico, named after the same valley, declared independence from Spain in 1813. Thus etymologically New Mexico predates Mexico, and both are predated by the Valley of Mexico - the origin of whose name is somewhat mysterious and controversial.
Controversy also dogged the the naming of the state. As George R. Stewart records in Names on the Land:
Local sentiment was always strongly for the ancient name, but objections were raised elsewhere that the words suggested a part of Mexico rather than of the United States. Lincoln was urged at various time. Others advocated the romantic Montezuma. Senator Beveridge presented Hamilton. Acoma, from the ancient pueblo, was suggested for the shoddy reason that it would displace Alabama, and let the new state head the alphabetical list.
But New Mexico was chosen, and now we are in New Mexico.
Past the border we arrive in Quemado, a town of around two-hundred people. On Main Street is a small white small-windowed building. If you have made reservations and paid the necessary fee ($600 per group low season, $1,000 high), a van will pick you up here and drive you thirty minutes out into the flat wilderness to a simple cabin on the edges of Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field.
The Lightning Field is perhaps the most famous example of land art in the world (not being an expert in the famousness of various pieces of land art, I would guess it vies with Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty for the title). Land art is a movement begun in the 1960s, with an admirably straightforward label: it is art made out of the land. Here, De Maria erected four-hundred stainless steel poles, each pole two-hundred and twenty feet apart from its neighbors. The poles average around twenty feet in height, varying according to their elevation, so that despite the uneven terrain the tip of each pole is level with the others.
De Maria scouted extensively for a site on which to erect The Lightning Field, and one of his explicit criteria was for there to be frequent lightning storms. And there are lightning storms here - there is an iconic photo of the poles being struck by lightning, one that appears on the cover of Robert Hughes’ American Visions. But, such strikes are rare enough that few visitors will see it happen. This has led, to my mind, to a certain amount of hedging. The website on which visitors can make reservations to see the artwork notes: “A full experience of The Lightning Field does not depend upon the occurrence of lightning…”
This under-supply of celestial static has also lead to the development of a journalistic micro-genre, the Lightning Field Disclaimer. Here is Cornelia Dean in the New York Times:
Lightning must occur within about 200 feet of the installation, Mr. De Maria says in his notebook, before it can ''feel'' the poles and come down to earth there, something he says happens about 60 times a year, most often in August and September, when storms are most common. We visited in late September, on a calm almost cloudless night. So we did not experience the violent beauty of lighting crashing down in front of us. Instead, we had the moon. We were not disappointed.
Here is Christian L. Frock for KQED:
No lightning struck during our visit, but I was not disappointed. If lightning had struck, we would have been confined to the cabin as spectators, probably jammed together on the porch. Because it hadn't, we were at liberty to roam and to discover the work in broad swaths and fine details.
Here is Blake Gopnik for the Washington Post, with a close call:
I admit that I lucked out. There were evening thunderstorms the first day I went, and the mountains all around were bright with lightning. (De Maria chose the area partly for its electrical storms: They occur on something like 60 days each year.) Although no strikes hit the rods while I was looking -- you're not supposed to be out among them, anyway, when a storm's right overhead -- that could have been for the best.
And finally here is Geoff Dyer in the New Yorker:
Everyone sees the same picture of “The Lightning Field”—the one on the cover of Robert Hughes’s “American Visions,” of a lightning storm dancing around the poles. But present-day visitors tend not to know—or are reluctant to accept—that it is naïve, even a little vulgar, to expect lightning.
Continuing on the I-60 and then down the S-25 South, we pass a trio of very small towns that each have their own claim to fame. Pie Town, aside from being called Pie Town, is where photographer Russell Lee captured some of the most famous images of life during the Great Depression. Hatch is home to the world-conquering Hatch green chile. And Truth or Consequences, formerly Hot Springs, is named after a once-popular radio quiz show. The switch was made as part of a promotional campaign: the show pledged to record their tenth anniversary episode in whichever locale was first to adopt the name. Truth or Consequences was first, the anniversary show was duly recorded. There have been attempts over the years to return the town name to Hot Springs, but none have succeeded.
To the east of Truth or Consequences is the Elephant Butte Dam, the second largest dam in the world when it was completed in 1916. The dam was built to pen in the fickle Rio Grande, and its completion occasioned a certain amount of bragging and spitting in the eye of Mother Earth. Under the headline “Triumph of man over forces of nature to be celebrated today,” The El Paso Morning Times announced that:
Over 200,000 acres of extra-ordinarily fertile land will now be intensively cultivated instead of the approximately 60,000 acres, which heretofore have been cultivated. All of this section of the southwest will profit because of the countless acres which have been redeemed by the capture and taming of a heretofore capricious and somewhat worthless river.
And furthermore, describing the dam’s dedication ceremony:
Looking toward the south those who attended these exercises could see the arid land soon to be irrigated and made to bloom like another Eden; looking toward the north they could see the great artificial lake of right blue water twinkling in the sunlight, being conserved for the thirsty land below.
Today the dam’s reservoir has been depleted by drought and increasing demand; it is less than ten percent full, and is silting up. In another seventy-five years or so it is projected to become unusable.
Past the dam we continue south into the Chihuahuan desert until we reach Las Cruces.
Sources
National park rethinks its message about theft, by Jonathan Romeo
Bad Luck, Hot Rocks, by Ryan Thompson and Phil Orr
A South Dakota mystery: Who stole the fossils from Fossil Cycad National Monument?, by Lance Nixon
What Does Mexico Mean?, by David Bowles
Names on the Land, by George R. Stewart