America, where are you now
Don't you care about your sons and daughters
Don't you know we need you now
We can't fight alone against the monster
– Monster, Steppenwolf, November, 1969
We all, I suspect, bumble through life with a sort of internal, unwritten rulebook tucked away in a dusty corner of our minds. Some of its tenets are hard-won, forged in the fiery crucible of some calamitous personal experience—like, for instance, learning that the precise moment a man is holding a wrench and staring grimly at a frustrated, cantankerous part of an engine is not the time to cheerfully ask if he "needs any help." Other rules are simply imposed upon us by a world that, on the whole, would prefer we not be complete fools.
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| Moon View Overlook, Near Hanksville, Utah. |
Now, I’m not about to climb a pulpit and start thumping it about morality. Goodness knows, some morals are as situational as a waterproof poncho in the Gobi Desert. But I am talking about the little list of "Things I Will Do" and "Things I Absolutely Won't" that I carry around, especially when I find myself out in the backcountry—or, as I think of it, 'in the field' with my rock hammer and camera.
My primary rule is to act like a visitor, because that’s precisely what I am. I’m a guest in a very, very old house. In some places, it’s more than that. It is, and I hesitate to use the word lest I sound like I’ve been communing with crystals, a spiritual experience. But it’s not about vibrations or energy vortexes. It's about the staggering, humbling presence of deep time. I'm talking about the feeling of standing in a canyon where the walls are a library, and every distinct layer is a page turned on a day 190 million years ago. You can feel the sheer, ponderous weight of all those yesterdays. It does something to your perspective. Suddenly, that worrying email from your financial advisor seems, well, a little less apocalyptic. Some people aren't wired for that feeling, I realize, but it’s how I roll.
And since I’ve mentioned the rock hammer, let's get a crucial bit of business out of the way. There is a sacred commandment among those of us who go about tapping on the planet’s stony bits: Thou shalt not use thy hammer to wantonly deface a rock in a State or National Park. It’s simply not done. Furthermore, if you are lucky enough to stumble upon a vertebrate fossil—a bit of bone, a tooth, the outline of something that swam or scurried when the world was young—you have a profound duty. You are to leave it. That’s right, leave it be. Take a picture, get a GPS reading, write down what you see. Then you call it in. Every fossil is a story, a chapter in the Earth’s immense biography. To pocket it for a paperweight is to be the kind of villain who tears a page from a priceless book. Give a specialist a chance to read that story. It belongs to all of us.
Right, that’s as preachy as I intend to get. But it all flows into a practical code for looking at rocks without being a total ass about it.
First, and it physically pains me that this even needs to be said, carry a garbage bag. And not just for your own apple cores and sandwich wrappers. Appoint yourself a mobile, voluntary sanitation engineer. If you see some other thoughtless soul’s discarded Ho-Ho wrapper, pick it up. If you stumble upon a full-blown crime scene of dumping—a whole tableau of tires and tattered furniture—too vast for your single bag, make a note of the location and report that, too. It is a curiously and deeply satisfying endeavor to leave a place a little tidier than you found it.
Then there is the delicate matter of the other people. The tourists. And let me be clear, I say this with no malice. We are all, after all, tourists somewhere. But there’s a certain choreography to a crowded viewpoint at a national park, say, on the rim of the Colorado National Monument on a sunny Saturday, that is a spectacle all its own.
You have the great, silent, profound abyss of geological time stretching out before you, and then you have the frantic, bustling, utterly human chaos pressed up against the guardrail. It's a ballet of selfie sticks, of parents trying to corral children who are dangerously fascinated by a chipmunk, and of people holding up iPads to take photos, which has always struck me as being like trying to film a wedding with a serving tray.
Now, I am often burdened with a tripod, a device which, when its legs are fully splayed, has the spatial footprint of a small lunar lander and an almost magnetic ability to attract unwary shins. To plonk this contraption down at the prime viewing spot at high noon is an act of profound territorial aggression. You might as well bring a deckchair and a cooler.
And you look at them—a family from, let's say, Ohio, who have saved up all year, driven for two days in a minivan filled with snack wrappers and simmering sibling rivalries, all for this one sublime moment of looking into the abyss. This might be it for them. Their one and only glimpse into this particular majesty. Who am I, in all good conscience, to be the lanky fellow with the complicated camera gear who photobombs their one precious holiday memory? You cannot, you simply must not, be the reason their photo album has a permanent, three-legged aluminum asterisk in the middle of the view.
So, I’ve learned to engage in a bit of strategic avoidance. It’s not just polite; it’s frankly a better experience. You let the great midday rush have its frantic, happy hour. Let them have their joy unimpeded. I find a quieter corner, or more often, I simply come back when the crowds have thinned. The best light, after all, is at the fringes of the day anyway, when the air is cooler, the shadows are long, and the only sound is the wind and the faint, satisfied sigh of the Earth settling in for the night. You get a better picture, and you don’t have to apologize to a stranger for tripping them. It is, in every way, a victory.
Then we have the matter of cairns. Please, for the love of all that is geologically stable, don’t build little towers of rocks. I know they seem harmless, a sort of rustic "Kilroy was here." But under every one of those rocks is a micro-environment, a tiny, bustling metropolis of lichens, microbes, and insects going about their important business. When you move that rock, you are, with all the subtlety of a wrecking ball, obliterating an entire city block. I’ve seen places where this foolishness starts with one tidy stack, and a year later it's spread like a rash, a veritable Stonehenge of bad ideas, each one a little monument to the human need to prove "I was here, and I was briefly bored."
This sensitivity extends to the very ground you walk on. Much of the desert is covered in something called biological soil crust, it’s the desert biome. It looks like dirt. It feels like dirt. But it is, in fact, a magnificent, living skin—a fragile condominium of bacteria, fungi, and lichen that holds the whole place together. Stomp across it and you leave a wound that can take a century—a hundred years—to properly heal. So I pay attention. If my goal is a particularly fetching fossil dune over yonder, I’ll pick my path with care, sticking to hard rock or the gravelly bottom of a flash arroyo—nature’s designated highways.
My courtesies even extend to the domestic beasts. If I drive past a herd of what I gently termed 'meat cows', I slow to a crawl and turn the music down. They don’t need my dust and racket. Frankly, they look miserable enough, trying to conjure a meal from a landscape that’s mostly brown. And though I don’t eat the stuff, I do wonder if a life of stress and grit affects the taste. I suspect it hardly matters by the time it's been processed into something that looks cheerfully red in the grocery cooler. And don’t even get me started on frozen burger patties. There’s a dark, industrial alchemy in that process that my frozen blueberries, bless their little antioxidant hearts, have never had to witness.
Wild things, of course, get an even wider berth. A pronghorn, or any of the herding ungulates out here, operates with a personal space bubble of about half a mile. They are creatures wound tight, perpetually ready to explode into a dead sprint. The last thing I want to be is the lumbering reason their cortisol levels spike. I want them to remain relaxed, to continue their important business of chewing and looking nervously at the horizon. And as for bears... well, I find I don’t need a rule for bears. They have their own, and they are notoriously strict about enforcement. The onus, as they say, is entirely on you to not be a furry, 600-pound enforcer’s problem.
And then there are the coyotes. They are the ghosts of the landscape, and you must assume they are always there, watching. This is why I rarely build fires. A fire is a lovely thing, but it’s a wall of light that blinds you to the world beyond its flicker. You miss the whole show. A coyote will sit just past the edge of your light, a silent observer. Peer out into the blackness, and if you’re lucky, you’ll catch the glint of their eyes, a pair of tiny, floating embers reflecting your intrusion. At night, they’ll entertain you, yipping and howling stories to one another across the vast, dark stage. It’s the best theater in the world.
Campground etiquette is a whole other chapter. I often keep strange hours for photography, so if I arrive late, I’ll pick a campe site near the entrance, or park near the entrance and quietly walk my gear in. When it’s truly quiet, the sound of a tent zipper can be as startlingly loud as a bugle call. As for the rolling apartment blocks that pass for RVs these days, with their generators humming through the night with all the gentle ambiance of a light industrial park... well, that is a sermon I shall save for another time, perhaps when my mood is fouler and my pen is sharper.
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| Colorado National Monument |
This brings me to technology and communication. I carry radios—CB, GMRS, UHF/VHF HAM. Your mobile phone out here is a fickle friend. It will either have no signal, or its battery will die at the precise moment you need it most. And while satellite communicators are all the rage, I have a deep-seated reluctance to have my lifeline depend on the whims of a billionaire’s orbital hobby. There’s an excellent concept called the Wilderness Protocol for radios, a sort of safety net of strangers listening for strangers. It’s a fine, old-fashioned thought.
And now, a confession. After all this talk of treading lightly, I will tell on myself. Every so often, when I am absolutely certain I am twenty miles from nowhere and haven’t seen another soul for hours, I will do a silly thing as the sun goes down and the stars come up. I’ll fire up an amplifier and speakers and subject the local geology to classic rock and roll. Iron Butterfly’s "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" echoing off sandstone walls that were laid down 200 million years ago is a glorious, surreal, and deeply satisfying experience. I like to think the coyotes sing along. It’s probably a fault of mine, but it helps keep me feeling both wild and, in a strange way, perfectly settled.
It occurs to me sometimes, usually when I'm in the middle of some absurdly specific personal task—arranging the toast on a plate in a particular way, for instance, or patting all my pockets in the correct sequence before leaving the house (wallet, keys, phone, nameless dread)—that we are all just hopeless slaves to ritual. And the truly baffling thing, the thing that stops you in your tracks if you give it more than a moment's thought, is that we humans have been doing this forever.
Honestly, we have. You can't seem to dig a hole anywhere on this planet without finding evidence of our ancient ancestors doing something profoundly and predictably odd. You find a 40,000-year-old skeleton, and it’s not just a pile of bones; it’s been carefully arranged, sprinkled with red ochre, and buried with a selection of perfectly good tools that you have to think the rest of the tribe could have desperately used. Why? Ritual.
It's all faintly bonkers, if you stop and think about it. Imagine Ug the Caveman and his brother Ga. Ug has just spent three days meticulously chipping a beautiful flint axe head. It's a masterpiece. But does he use it to fend off a sabre-toothed cat? No. He trudges ten miles to a special cave to bury their recently departed Uncle Grog with it, because that’s just what you do. Ga probably stood there, swatting flies, thinking, "You know, Grog is beyond the point of needing a sharp axe, but that bear that keeps sniffing around the camp decidedly is not." But he doesn't say anything, because it's the ritual.
And it has never, ever stopped. You go from sprinkling bones with pigment to building Stonehenge—a project of such back-breaking, multi-generational effort that it makes putting together an IKEA shelf look like a lazy Sunday afternoon, all apparently to find out when the days are about to get longer, something a reasonably observant badger could have told them for free. You get the Romans, a people of otherwise formidable practicality, who wouldn't dream of starting a war without first checking which way a chicken pecked at its corn. Think of it. The fate of an empire resting on the lunchtime whims of a hen.
We look back and chuckle at all this, of course, feeling terribly modern and sensible, right before we knock on a wooden table or refuse to walk under a ladder. A baseball player will step up to the plate and perform a series of tics, taps, and tugs so complex it looks less like a prelude to sport and more like a man trying to disarm a bomb only he can see. We have our lucky shirts, our special coffee mugs, the side of the bed we must sleep on.
Fundamentally, I don't think the urge has changed one bit. We are pattern-seeking creatures adrift in a universe of magnificent, terrifying chaos, and the little rituals are our way of trying to impose a sliver of order on it all. We are drawing a bison on the cave wall, tapping the bat on the plate, and sprinkling the ochre on the bones, all in the desperate, hopeful belief that if we just do the little things right, the big things might not eat us. It almost never works, of course, but the amazing thing is, we just keep on doing it. It’s the longest, strangest, and most deeply human tradition we have.
So, I suppose it’s all quite simple: Pay attention. Be aware. Give everything some space. And understand, fundamentally, that you are an interloper. It’s not your house. You’re just a visitor, lucky enough to be passing through.
Thanks for stopping by for a read!
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All images posted on the buzzshawphoto.blogspot.com 2025 are copyrighted. All rights reserve
All images posted on the buzzshawphoto.blogspot.com 2025 are copyrighted. All rights reserved
