As we walk on soft black earth - About a specific experience on the Camino - Just written this morning
As we walk on soft black earth, our feet are soft-cushioned
from
sedimentary and igneous hardnesses beneath,
and these hardnesses, because they are all young brittle rock,
they could in an active reaction lacerate the soles
of your feet as they actively resist the flesh of your
sole as it slides across the serrated sharp edge of young
rock still hot deep in its heart—or you can descend from
some
high desolate mountain pass frozen in colorless grey
light and deep snow, and, once below the snow, you find
yourself—
through painful half-steps—having struggled down for a
couple
hundred meters or more in height—where you can encounter
the older, much older, a geologic aeon or
more, generation of young hard brittle rock higher up
beneath soft black earth still hot deep in its stone heart, but this
is rounded, harder, more dura-ble, different in hue
from the younger generation of stone —perhaps iron
oxidized—and the older stone is shaped in wavy, step-
like steep terraces, some serration still sharp on the stone
to the side that hasn’t been trod over by millions of
millions of feet unshod or shod with coarse cloth with even
coarser twine like rough burlap or shod in leather, wood, or
long grass-like weeds growing on the side of the way, the
way-
side, or shod in newly concocted composites from labs
that form its slip-proof, cushioning, orthotic sole— but
stone,
shaped in wavy, step-like terraces of stone that descend
across the trail rather than down the trail—so on that in
whatever your soles are shod you descend over sometimes
sharp and serrated, but dull and rounded most of the time,
narrow edges (dull or sharp and serrated) exposed as
tops of ridges on wind-, rain-carved ancient, aeons-old,
stone gullies that gush water down-trail in a warm night,
two,
three degrees Celsius, only to freeze up early at
minus-five. The climb sometimes screams death—the descent, always.
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