Most times I find myself only after the cameras are gone, the crowds dispersed, and I'm left behind, walking, looking, touching.
Over a dozen gathered at the river crossing to snap photos, and were busy pointing to and discussing the petroglyphs and pictographs that ancient peoples had carved and painted on the rock walls, showing the old ones had been to the same spot long ago leaving sign of bear, deer, bighorn sheep, stick figures and rainbow like arches for hundreds of yards along the water cut bluff ... a crossing point, a meeting place forever.
I ran out of film, I think most had, but I couldn't stop wandering as the others turned back, leaving my consciousness. Something ... what was it ... not out of place, just not seen, kept me moving, searching.
The Purgatoire river meandered over mud flats and sand bars to the northeast. If one spent enough time they would discover far older fossilized tracks of creatures large and small crossing and gathering, hunting for water, vegetation, each other; what we have in common over the eons.
The images stopped but I had become as the intermittant breeze slowing, circling, moving along the the bluff and shore, intimate with sand and twig, fractured rock and seep.
Ahead, where before pinion and juniper scattered randomly on the terrain, a stand of pinion ran tall and straight against the bluff. Only for that unique line, everything else unordered, was I moved to push through their low interwoven branches into a rectangular box canyon deeper than the width of the half a dozen or so trees covering it's entrance.
There, on the flat back wall of the small canyon, were hands. Black, sprayed and painted, from child to adult, hands that were missing from the walls beyond.
I stood in awe a minute, two. Moving forward I raised my right hand and placed it against a perfect match. Stone turned glass and I stared into dark clear eyes, greeting me, the person who had placed the print long ago.
"Ho" I said, and kept my hand still untill the image faded to painted stone.
I'm not sure how long I stayed in this canyon, this chapel, there is no time to such things, but along the return path I recognized those who had placed the bear, deer, bighorn sheep, stick figures, rainbow like arches ... and hands ... as kin.
