Mancos shale, a rock that results from silt, suffocates the roots of plants. So few plants grew out here, and hardly any critters. Not even crypto-biotic soil. Only an occasional prairie dog or scavenger would try to make a living out here.
It's not like I'm complaining. Instead of standard, sappy, tourist scenery, I prefer scenery that has a strong flavor of any kind, even the horrific. I should say, especially the horrific. There is more drama in it. It is more evocative of life and death struggles. Maybe I've bought too many postcards from Nietzsche.
Well this was the place for it--the Badlands between Montrose, CO, and the Black Canyon of the Gunnison. The complexion of the ground was that of a corpse. Pallid hills rumpled up about 200 feet high. Imagine a woman with the comeliest curves, and the shabbiest skin complexion--say, Morticia, of the Addams Family.
A glutton for punishment, I pulled into the main staging area of the motor-crazed yahoos, intending to boondock for the night. (It was virtually in the shadow of a cell tower.) The BLM's sign named the trails: Dump Ridge (overlooking the town landfill), Skull X Bones, Monster Ditch, Moonlight Mesa, Nighthorse Trail.
What really attracted the gasoline-besotted yahoos was the "open" status of the Badlands: they didn't have to ride on trails. They could commit wanton destruction to their heart's content, except that there wasn't anything to destroy, which is why the BLM gave them permission to destroy everything.
The sterile ground was tensile-cracked and salt-encrusted. The landscape was harsh and lunar. The yahoos could erode the landscape, but the whole landscape was nothing but erosion anyway.
Readers of this blog know that I never pass up a chance to shoot at motor-crazed yahoos, but here in the Badlands I must admit that they actually contributed to what the author of "Tess", Thomas Hardy, would have called "a negative beauty of tragic tones."
The only animal life visible were the crows that patrolled the town dump by toying with the ridge-lift from the hills. (Badlands are always windy.) They were all that was alive, yet they cared only for morsels of fresh Death:
This was all becoming a little weird, like I was stuck in a BLM version of an Edgar Allen Poe story. Just then a pickup truck approached. Alongside it, a large Chocolate Lab ran his heart out. What a creature, so healthy and joyous! He came up to inspect my little dog, and then spirited off.
There could not have been a creature more out of harmony with its environment than this lab--what a beautiful thing it was to see! But there was another contrast with the grisly environment: at the foot of these hideous badlands, rich fields begin:
It was getting close to dusk when I winced at the screaming approach of six motorcyclists, about a half mile away. They were silhouetted on a sinuous ridgeline. One of the two-cycle engines would scream, and then the adjacent ghoul roared in response, and caught up with the other.
It was as if they were holding hands and doing le Danse Macabre on that darkling ridge, like the classic finale in Bergman's "The Seventh Seal", when black-shrouded Death finally wins the chess game and leads his victims off:
And Happy Halloween to my readers, a few days early!
