Adamana Road Part Four: The Badlands have Something to Teach Us
“You think this is a game?”
I am shouting as Emmett stands on top of the truck, a massive black bull with horns faces off with the beast known as our black Chevy Avalanche. He’s gotten into the fence, apparently worried the truck might win over his mates. I will him to recognize the truck as a contraption and not a competitor, especially before Emmett goads him into a brawl. I think it was a combination of my witching and Emmett’s desert water bravado that did the trick.
Welcome to the last story of the Adamana Road Series, if you want, check out the horse and cow ones first or don’t, they can all stand alone!
I used to backpack with girl scouts many sweet little moons ago. I loved it, North Carolina camping is magical, woodsy, lush with rivers flowing through timelines.
Desert backpacking should just all together get a different name, for it is an entirely spatially spiritual experience. Nothing like what I grew up with.
We were blessed to live five minutes down the highway from the Petrified National Forest and Painted Desert. Forest ain’t quite right.
The forest existed forever ago, now it exists as rocks. Trees turned to beautiful crystals from mineralized water flowing through and catching in the material beings of trees and transmuting them into rainbow crystals. Fucking magic, and so was our overnight camping trip into the park.
“Do you all have any petrified wood in your vehicle?”
The park ranger is asking us at the gate to the Petrified National Forest. We look at each other and laugh.
“Ugh yea!”
The perks of living up the road on private property where we can collect our little contented hippie hearts out.
“Okay, well just a reminder that you cannot take specimens from the park.”
We nod in total understanding, which we do and we are so happy that every visitor before us respected this rule too, because holy glittering Elsewhere, the desert is one big rock pile. Think colorful ball pit for kids but shiny energy rich crystals for hippies.
A couple is exiting the “trail” as we are pulling up. We ask them how it was, they responded something like,
“beautiful, coyotes, you’ve got water? Have fun!”
And so we pack up and head into the great wide open. Trail is not a real thing in the desert, yes we followed the path down past the museum and into the badlands, but beyond that, things like worn paths or trail markers did not exist. Safety blankets of the east coast.
“I felt like if I lost it, total disorientation would occur and we would be dead and become petrified crystals too”
We focused on just heading away. I was obsessively keeping the museum at my back and still insight. I felt like if I lost it, total disorientation would occur and we would be dead and become petrified crystals too, after a few monsoon seasons of course.
We hiked out about two miles through ravines and over hills, full trees of petrified wood splayed in magician box chunks across the landscape. We paused for lunch in the shade of a white overhang. We decided to go one more mile and find a place to set up camp.
We came down a hill and upon a valley of tinkering petrified wood. Indescribable. Every step I took felt like glitter falling in a Disney movie, clinking against a rainbow windowpane. Awe and overwhelm. Like finding the treasure in the cave. Deep reds, opal white, yellow mustard, shiny candy rock clusters.
Earlier that week we spent an afternoon at the rock shop across the highway, I say afternoon because that’s how long it took me to pick out a petrified wood ring to adorn myself with. The owner is a black lady, which was also probably why we stayed so long. She shared a story about the ostrich outside almost eating Tori Spelling's yorkie. Had an autographed picture to prove it and everything.
I gaze at the lightning bolt ring now, glinting in the badland light, wind whipping across my bare chest. Emmett and Atlas, free as can be.
We packed water, but we also packed box wine. So we set up camp and after traipsing around, running down mountains of crystals, we laid out our mats. We sunbathed and day drank as the clouds rolled by and the sun struck up conversations with every element of nature around us. Including us.
When the night faded to navy, we ate MRE’s for dinner and snuggled up in a riverbed that actually wasn’t that dry. In hindsight, glad there were no storms...as it seems we could’ve been washed away by a flash flood. We were in the good graces of the desert apparently.
Gently, I would say the desert took us into her womb gently, flipping my preconceived notions of her on their head. The coyotes howled and Emmett’s the one who got a headache for a change, so I rubbed his shoulders.
The next day was gray and muted, less windy. We thanked the earth for holding us through the night and hiked out to the Petrified National Forest gift shop, where we found a cafe in the back.
We sat across from each other, eating fry bread and chili, changed people. Some transformations take millenia, like the transmutation of trees into rocks. Others take one overnight hike into a vast, seemingly unforgiving terrain that offered us gentleness and grace.