About this blog (first post)

[Listen to this post read by its author.]

Opening my apartment's Venetian blinds reveals volcanoes, five small cinder cones lurking, like acne upon my adolescent face, 12 miles to the west. This is Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the American Southwest.

Picturesque Mount Fuji or Mount Etna they are not, but volcanic these five unimpressive mounds most definitely are. A first visitor to my new digs, Billy, pointed them out to me. Intrigued, I responded "... and extinct". After all, I had read about about local volcanoes in this area, ones last erupting 150 to 200 thousand years ago. "Dormant", he responded, politely correcting me. On a geological time scale, what is a few hundred thousand years? Just yesterday, perhaps. Or tomorrow. Here then was a first lesson for this Easterner who had recently moved to New Mexico: the earth beneath our feet is ceaselessly active, if only on time scales humanly imperceptible.

None of this I expected moving here from the Gulf Coast of Florida last July. Rather, I came for the cooler, arid climate of countless sunny days, the lower cost of living, and a fresh start. Standing at the corner of Wyoming and Lomas Boulevards last May, waiting for the traffic light to change, I looked east to looming scarp of the Sandia Mountains. "How sheer and how close by", I thought. "I ought to be able walk to its foothills in under 90 minutes." Indeed, I can, and I do. At that instant, I decided here would be my new home.

Having never owned,  or even driven,  a vehicle, I use my feet and public transit. Traveling at four miles per hour alters one's sense of time and distance. My trip last Monday to the five volcanoes consumed the entire day: walking some 19 or 20 miles, riding over an hour on the number 157 city bus, drinking three liters of water, and downing four ibuprofen tablets to soothe the aches and pains those miles put on my 58-year-old body.

Part of that walking took me up and through a road cut on Unser Boulevard. Cars zipped by, few I suspect, noticing the roadside rubble, from pebbles to boulders in size, of hard, black basalt. Call it lava or hardened magma, basalt is extrusive igneous silicate rock darkly colored from its abundant magnesium and iron. Albuquerque's West Mesa is built upon a blanket of the stuff, in places one hundred feet thick, the viscous ooze issuing forth from the last eruption of those dormant -- but not extinct -- volcanoes.

Geologists have a good explanation why our volcanoes run north-south parallel to the Sandia Mountains with the city of Albuquerque nested in between. We live in the Rio Grande Rift. For the last 20 million years, the crust of the earth has been pulling apart here and faulting. More about that will come in subsequent posts.

For me, basalt is more than a type of rock. It is also a metaphor for the desires and drives seething deep within each of us. Think, for example, not only of our various fears but also of our erotic drive to create art, or procreate children. Then too there is our anxiety over the finiteness of our lives, as well as our yearning to transcend all that is human. These too are "deep dark basalt".

This blog's header photograph (visible in the blog's desktop version) shows Vulcan Volcano, one of the five, now just two and a half miles to the south. I photographed it on Monday's long walk. The last miles of my approach followed an unmarked, rock-strewn dirt path. Overhead, high voltage power lines stretch, arching in catenary grace, testament to our human presence and imprint upon the land. "Rattlesnakes", I thought with dread. "Pay attention, watch and listen for them." Nonetheless, the volcanoes beckon. I must visit.

posted: 2019-11-09, last edited: 2019-11-30