![]() Sometimes I’d even use different colored inks, and just as the Green River and the Colorado at their confluence flow side by side in different stripes, so did my rivers on the page stay separate and suspended for almost half of a paragraph. Big loops and meanderings, streams not of consciousness, but of the pure desire to see enough rivers for a continent run down this one page. Black ink tributaries starting at the top and running down to the sea of the bottom margin, joining into greater thicknesses as they combined, their confluences occurring in the slight space between words, between “Pittsburgh” and “Landing,” “Civil” and “War,” “Dirty” and “Devil,” Or the stream would join in the word’s own landlocked interiors, the expansive intervale between the slopes of an o and the swayback ridge of an s-even in the cramped narrows between a double t or l. When I was a kid in school, I used to make rivers on the pages of my textbooks. Did I tell you that these letters rise up around you, hard to read in their jumble, though solid as stone? In fact, you twist and turn so much that you can almost see your own back, but not much of anything else. You can work yourself through–with some difficulty and no little time, but you will twist and turn. Shrink yourself down until you can walk between the letters of the page and you will see what I mean. Draw and coulee, arroyo and side-canyon, serif and italic. For all the talk about this being desert, it is water who is the writer. If this is a plateau tilted upwards to the north and east, it is one that has been scribbled upon over and over, the pen pushed down deep, water rather than ink, but still running and running. All around, the earth looks level, but it’s not. Zbyszek and I are above Horseshoe Canyon, southeastern Utah, just north of the Robber’s Roost area where Bu tch Cassi dy and the Sundance Kid holed up for a while, on the lip of one of the many gashes in the earth between the Henry Mountains to the west and south, the LaSal Mountains to the east, and the San Rafael Swell to the north. ![]()
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