So one morning you wake up in the canyon, look out of the tent and you are the first one up so you get up and piss in the river (that is what is recommended because the land is so sensitive) and make some coffee so that it will be ready for the others.
And a day later you are walking along the hiking path around Hovenweep, an ancient (for our country) ruin from 1300 or so...before the drought forced them to leave and to move in with the pueblos along the Rio Grande (whose headwaters are in a different range of mountains)...and you can not help but to be moved by their presence and also by their absence.
So then you spend the night at the Strater Hotel, built 1889. Such a comfortable place with a bar downstairs, the Diamond Belle Saloon, in which an long lost friend, Gary Smith, played honky-tonk piano music at a distant point in his life. It was the closest I had felt to him in a long time.
But I thought of all of these places as sites of communal gathering...we in our rafts, these folks in their rock canyons, and us again in the bar. All places where we can gather as a species. We like being together...if we did not, we would probably not have gotten anywhere as a species because we need one another for defense and for identity.
