W. F. Lantry

W .   F .   L a n t r y

next

Sleeping Circles

        If you drive east from the shoreline, up the canyons, through Alpine, Descanso, and Cuyamaca, you get to Julian and the Sunrise Highway. From there the road drops off, down into the beginning of an almost endless desert: Borrego, Ocotillo Wells. And if you step into a hot air balloon near dawn, and float a few hundred feet above the desert floor, condors and curious redtails your only companions, you can look down, and with your eyes follow tire tracks across the landscape.

        You're surprised to see sand willow, creosote and manzanita growing up between the two wheel ruts of a single track, and realize the jeep that made them passed through decades ago. Whatever happens in the desert lasts forever.

        You land wherever you happen to touch down, and discover the desert is not lined with loose sand, but gravely dry soil, topped with flat stones, a kind of pavement between the sparse shrubs and the occasional jumping cactus. If you know what to look for, you will see them: long ago, someone stopped in this place for the night. Think of the emptiness, the wall of dark sky filled with stars, the featureless landscape stretching forever.

        Once you find one, they’re everywhere, small circles of those desert pavement stones, gathered to afford a ring of protection against the emptiness, by someone very much like you, but ten thousand years ago. We can’t know the incantations that protected them while they slept; all we have are these small low rings of stones, a dozen feet wide, always in perfect circles, untouched by the wind.