Waking Up Wild by H Raven Rose, Tofu Ink Arts Press, Spring 2021
From the first time that I saw Stewart’s Petrified Wood, I felt that it would be the perfect setting for a teen horror flick. A trading post and rock shop offering petrified wood along Route 66 in Arizona, I drove past and stopped at the place whenever traversing the country. Every so often, I used to drive from Florida to California or vice versa. Aside from enormous hand-constructed papier-mâché dinosaurs in garish greens, great teeth-filled mouths gaping, eyes bulging, I gander at female mannequins, some bleeding red paint, in the mouth of, and meant to appear wounded by one or more of the animate mechanized beasts. There is also an ostrich farm, though I only had eyes for the emus. I used to collect feathers. Then I learnt that the average American is not allowed to have certain types of feathers. Found blowing in the wind or not, possession of certain bird feathers is a punishable, fineable crime. Upon learning that, I burnt the collection, along with many other items. I did that as part of a severance ceremony before moving from the US to the UK.
I will not write a painting of my former feathers, creamy-peachy-pink, salmon, golden-brown, obsidian black, and more. The reader might guess my secrets, and the longing for those blessed living totems and talismans of spirit would grow too great. At the ostrich farm part of the roadside shop, I would see and pick up the uniquely double-plumed wispy, flexible, hairlike, soft yet prickly, blackish-brown silky emu feathers. The man who owned the Stewart’s Petrified Wood is Charles Stewart, and, though he is said to be retired now, I recall meeting him. The shop had a weathered yet jaunty sign, “Free Petrified Wood,” though the beguiling offering was meant for little children. Despite my being an adult, Mr. Stewart always let me have a piece of petrified wood when I stopped by. My former rock collection is long gone, like the feathers, and my life feels less vivid, real, and weighty for the loss. I have been a nomad for the last several years, and it is only now that the loss of things is becoming a thing. I love driving, miles before me, as many as I like, and, as Robert Frost wrote, “and miles to go before I sleep.” A journey with no timetable and no exact destination in mind has a weightless quality that is heady, seductive, and addictive. Traveling through the fallen forest of petrified wood, under skies that glitter silver-white-hot with shimmering stars like no other when night falls, sailing through the desert along the lesser-used roadways of America. On my many drifting journeys across the country, or winding my way from Southern California to New Mexico, via Arizona, I have, more than once, dallied at and been amazed by the confabulation of Stewart’s Petrified Wood. Apparently, I am not the only one. Someone on Yelp wrote that “The thing that’s so cool about Route 66 is the simple fact that places like Stewart’s Petrified Wood Shop exist there. I can’t think of any other major highway in the country where a combination ostrich farm, petrified wood and meteorite shop, and papier-mâché dinosaur emporium could exist, let alone thrive.” Driving or walking through the beige-brown-cream-sand-peach-pink-lavender dusted desert is a recipe for stepping out of time and into a different world of color, light, sound, and sensation. I have had entrancing experiences at Wild Spirit Wolf Sanctuary, where a wolf danced with me as a keeper watched, astounded, and whispered, “He’s never done that.” I could not tell him that the wolf felt far more kin to me than they did, their soul in a human meat sack, far more likely to injure me than the wild kin wolf-creature dancing before me.
In nearby southwest New Mexico, I gaped at and was changed by visiting the Arizona Meteor Crater. Something that burnt the ground there left a residue, a song of mystery, and my soul lit up in recognition, a time-traveling telephone call from this orifice in planet Earth. Ring, ring, ring, sang the extraterrestrial matter, “Hello?” answered my silver-thread-soul, listening through the ears of my earth-bound body. The enormous crater, previously known as the Canyon Diablo Crater, was formed some 50,000 years ago, when woolly mammoths and giant sloths roamed the once-verdant part of planet Earth. There is that which is magical and mythic in the painted desert of the American Southwest. Breathing in the dust and glitter of the Arizona skies and roads, and exhaling peace and joie de vivre, yet I had some misadventures there too. Then there were long, eerie moments, quite terrifying, driving through the shadow of night, in the pitch-black moments long past the midnight hour, in Arizona, specifically around the Superstition Mountains at night. But that tale is for another time. Despite the loss of my feathers and so much more, necessary severance of the past or not, I intend to continue waking up wild.
Tofu Ink Arts Press Spring 2021 Issue
Resources
Stewarts Petrified Wood Shop on Yelp
https://wildspiritwolfsanctuary.org
https://www.grunge.com/80931/mysteries-superstition-mountains
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42891/stopping-by-woods-on-a-snowy-evening
Slice of Petrified Wood Featured Image Photo Credit:
Photographer Michael Gäbler (26 January 2009), Photo Source Self-made Scan with “Epson Perfection 4490 Photo” from the middle part (size 15,34 × 18,04 cm) of a polished slice of petrified wood from Arizona. Photographer Michael Gäbler, Permission (Reusing this file) CC-by-3.0.