Die Every Day

It was a prehistoric, emptied fish tank.

There was no official entrance to our destination. My three-legged dog Tuco in his superman sweater and I left my 1988 Wrangler at a nearby church, stopped by an abandoned house decorated with white magick symbols, followed a quaint stone and grass road, and stood some four meters away from a train track as a two-century old steel colossus moved with confident pace, blowing my hair more out of sheer weight than blazing speed.

Beyond the tracks, there it was: the abandoned quarry.

The ramp into the main esplanade was only about a quarter mile long, but it took us over half an hour to cover it. I lost track of time looking at the walls of stone, labyrinths of line and texture carved out of dynamite, their layers whispering the passage of time through a monochromatic scheme of beiges, browns, and ochers. It was both the openness and its fractals that turned the descent into a trance.

Yet, in that peaceful vastness, violent seismic events of the past left permanent marks on the bedrock. One of them, a deep gash where the rocks were vibrant red behaved like a Rothko, a focal point of shattering simplicity.

After an hour or so, the passage of time was observable from multiple points of view. In the recent past, a ten-day downpour had descended through the main ramp, eating the ground away and leaving knee-high fragile channels as its signature before coming to a rest as a puddle—no, a pale green pond four feet deep. A dozen trees with large, thin, yellowish leaves stood partially submerged in the deluge aftermath.

Through the distant past, millennia of storms left the ground comprised of pebbles only a few thousand years away from being sand. Beyond the pond, more than ten meters away, a boulder larger than a foot in all three dimensions demanded closer inspection. Not more than four or five steps were all it took for the highlights and shadows on its surface to reveal the fossil of a spiral mollusk close to half a meter wide.

The mollusk wasn’t the only ghost.

Tuco and I began climbing a trench of rocks taller than me, stopping periodically to either regain our balance or to admire the traces of life long gone: webs of algae and coral, collages of shells, and the occasional fish.We rested at the top of the largest limestone boulder around, watched three vultures circle the solid white sky, and listened to the wailing echoes of this undead leviathan.