The Alluvial Fan

Dunes in Death Valley National Park. Photo by me. Of the desert rides a bird of flesh and bone “Don’t think of her alone, but far from home.” Out from the roiling currents she is carried to the parched Earth “Tell her oh Dunes of these effervescent mountains in their vivacious youth!” In the sand the flesh of washed-out youth “But LOOK, look up and see the mountains.” black and beady eyes stare upward, as feet crane as feathers are ruffled, and what is seen is stark cliff slapped against pale cheeks and brow of old and elemental mountains “Ah, but once they were green and sculpting creeks ran through sculpted meadows, basic units of beauty petrified in those moments when youth’s thundering holler was scattered by the scions of Natures brood that roamed these precious crests of the Sierra.” Reaching out, the bird gathers the arid breaths of these thirsty, weeping denizens whose anatomy has ground down the grottoes like the stone that turns and turns until it has ground itself to nothing and sees what once was the Funeral Mountains under seas of green and gracious trees, isles of twisting and dropping rivers, and corridors of broad and snaking valleys “That which appears everlastingly is as transitory as man, as malleable by the drifting years, as measured as her quartered seasons, as day is to night, the waning moon to tides, we are all one day driven down the canyons, shattered rock ground to sand, and spread outwardly, an alluvial fan beneath the sky of the Mojave desert.” ***Definition of Alluvial Fan: the alluvial deposit of a stream where it issues from a gorge upon a plain or of a tributary stream at its junction with the main stream.