Carlsbad Caverns USA

Kenilworth

New member
There is no power "between my finger and my thumb". The ninety-nine pages before this one are a palimpsest of mediocrity, of an inauthentic tongue unable even to strain against the problems of a long trip west. The amended and reamended and finally crossed out lines amount to eighty pages probably, meant to be called Carlsbad Caverns, USA. The nineteen left over...

My one obscene luxury on this trip has been a three-volume narrative history of the American civil war and I don't care if you don't know what that has to do with caving.

But what would it do, even if I could, to tell about my pain at the desert towns? What would it do to agree with Ansel Adams that Carlsbad is "as remote as the galaxy" even though it's right there? Or that it should not, at least cannot, exist in relation to myself, or the "public", whoever they are? I am sorry I ever saw it.

Listen! Riding fast over the big desert, I was watching us go past cacti and other sharp plants. My wife sat behind me, looking at her phone. My brother stopped in the road and she looked up for a moment, and back down. He got out and walked toward a single javalina, stood in the ditch. It looked at him. Then he ran, silently, leaping and flapping his arms, until he and the little hairy thing were face to face. He squatted low, lunged toward it one more time. Five feet apart, they waited, until the javalina growled or grunted, hair erect, and took one step forward. Millennia passed. My brother walked back to the car and drove on. My wife looked up again and back down. No one spoke. I did not look in the mirror at the javalina, the first one I ever saw. I looked at a cactus. I had seen millions of them.
 

The Old Ruminator

Well-known member
For the uninitiated -

The collared peccary (Tayassu tajacu), commonly known as the javelina, is found as far south as Argentina and as far north as Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Collared peccaries are in the even-toed, hoofed mammal order of Artiodactyla. Javelinas are mistaken for pigs, but they are in a different family than pigs. :yucky:
 
Top