Time in the Desert

     It’s obvious that time, wind, and water cut through the landscape at different speeds. You can see it in the rocks.  As a society, we’ve decided in advance that time is constant.  That it ticks away at a constant rate just like a clock.  But clocks are the only thing that change at a constant rate, they were artificially contrived to do so after centuries of tinkering, and even the most perfect clocks are subject to the effects of relativity.  Time is a useful idea for science and capitalism, but not nearly as useful in the desert.  Things change.  Often in a predictable direction, but never at a constant rate out here.  The canyon bottom will barely change for two years, then the rains suddenly wash in, all the sand and rocks get moved around, and for years there will be a new log stuck in place across the canyon gap thirty feet above the stream bed.  Things don’t change at constant rate for people either.  Children grow at different rates, a new wrinkle shows up as a surprise. 

 

      But change never completely stops for us, and we can imagine that if there was a place where the wind never stopped people would find it useful to think of the wind as a constant.  They would design a sensitive windmill and count exactly how many revolutions it would take to push a sailboat a certain distance.  Their experiments with a sensitive and standardized windmill would be repeatable and useful, but would say nothing about the underlying assumption the society had made about the wind.  Only a traveller who visited a new place, a place where the wind was so weak as to be imperceptible could realize that their society’s assumption was just a useful illusion.  That traveller would see that the wind isn’t constant.  And as a desert traveller you can see that time is like the wind.  Time blows us around like chaff, while the stone stands still.

     Yes, the stone stands still from our perspective.  But if we could be the wind itself, moving the sand from place to place, scouring the stones with our energy, seeing them shrink, collapse and turn into sand dunes over the eons, we would know that the rocks are ever changing.  The wind is time to the stone. Time without the wind affects it not at all, and the wind has all the time in the world. Ann Zwinger said it best “The rock changes, the channel changes, the wind just carries air from one place to another, more constant than the rock.  The rock is ephemeral, the wind, eternal.”  We  are so ridiculously ephemeral in comparison to this landscape.  Ephemeral enough to see the boulders stand still, put up climbs on them, and watch another generation climb on them too.