Down The Creek

Enough water in the second ford to drive back and forth a few times and clean my wheel-wells. Had to come to a complete stop and let the fighting cocks cross the road. Dozens of them, going across for a morning drink from Upper Twin Creek. Attractive but dangerous looking birds, with exaggerated spurs. I was attacked by one of these once, in Mississippi, but fortunately had a shovel in my hand and was able to knock it into the next county. The State Patrolman that lives on Rt.52 stopped me this morning and asked about other places to look for fossils, and I told him about the new road-cuts over in Kentucky, where they extended the 'Double A' highway. It's all limestone over there, sandstone over here; don't know if that makes any difference, but the girls and I once found 30 or 40 trilobites in an hour or less in one of those cuts. Reminds me of one time hiking in Utah, Kate had told me about a place, within an area the Utes leased as grazing rights, but the BLM had fenced off certain canyons because they were such rich Anasazi sites and not much disturbed. In one of my favorite places in the world, the San Rafael Swell. The place I wanted to see was a day's hike in, required an overnight, so I had a pack with a pad and a space blanket, some food, water, a few little nip bottles of Wild Turkey. Found a ledge, where an extended family had lived, but I couldn't access it, it looked impossible. I know there's a huge debate about why these people left that area, probably climate or whatever, but I can tell you they were paranoid. The only access was by climbing bored holes in the rock and you could defend it with a stick. The granary still held corn. Made my peace for the night, grilled a steak, drank too much and howled back at the coyotes. I don't know the nature of chert, it must be metamorphic, and there is a great tongue of it there, a field of flakes that defies imagination. Generations. So many failed points you realize how fast this process was. I've learned to pressure-flake, I'm not good at it, but I can make an arrow head if the core is decent. If I only knew where to find a bow and where to find the shaft for an arrow. Boiled water on a stick fire and made coffee the next morning. Ten thousand flakes and a hundred failed points before lunch, I end up spending another night, dining on peanuts and dried fruit, boiling slimy water I find in a deep shaded hole. Everything is compressed. Time is suspended. Evidently, around the salt-licks in northern Kentucky, there was a free-fly zone (I don't know where this information came from) and it wasn't proper to kill each other there, you could hunt game and gather salt without fear of ambush. The story of salt is an interesting history, look at the place-names, the salt-licks in your local geography. They're always special places. Unlike almost everyone I know, I don't use much salt, I tend toward the bitter, as a matter of choice; the less sweet, as opposed to the sweet. I'll suck the nectar from an occasional honey-suckle blossom, but I don't make it a habit. You drive a new route, times enough, it becomes familiar. The nature of the game.