Adobe Mesa
A photo essay
by Brooke Williams
—September 21, 2020—
Since moving to Castle Valley in 1998, I’ve been taking pictures of the surrounding formations, especially at sunset. Recently, while looking through my files, I noticed two things: first, that the full spectrum of the color red may actually be infinite; and, second, most of my photos are of Adobe Mesa. Not the most prominent of the valley’s features—that would be Castleton Tower*—Adobe Mesa forms Castle Valley’s eastern barrier, a two-mile long wall separating our community from the rest of that world. At sunset, this Wingate wall becomes the screen on which each day celebrates its own end.
* A four-hundred foot tall tree trunk of Wingate sandstone, the scene of numerous television commercials, one of America’s “Fifty Classic Climbs,” summited by hundreds of rock climbers annually.
•
Stories have their own life. Occasionally, I write a story one day and, going back to edit it a week or a month later, I find that it has shifted or evolved. Stories, I’ve discovered, give us what we need, when we need it. Last week, I’d begun the story to accompany the photos I’ve taken of Adobe Mesa, when it blew itself wide open.
Recently, while showing these same Adobe Mesa photos to a friend, he said, “Do you know that movie, Smoke? Every day, at the same time, a guy goes across the street and takes a picture of his tobacco shop.”
I’d seen the movie ages ago and I knew what my friend was trying to tell me. As I remembered it, Harvey Keitel played Auggie who had stacks of photo albums filled with photos of the front of his tobacco shop. As he shows the photos, he tells the story of what happened the day each was taken. As I recall, those looking at his photos and hearing his stories think he’s a little nuts.
Auggie has his Smoke shop. I have Adobe Mesa.
I’d originally planned to tell the story of one photo, the most recent. Unlike Auggie, I don’t recall the events of the day I took each photo of Adobe Mesa. I do remember the last one.
The last photo is the poorest quality of the bunch, serving only to signal my memory, to taunt me. I took it at approximately 7 p.m. on September 9th. My wife Terry and I were sitting around our fire pit, watching the last embers fade while honoring one of our best friends, Terry Osborne, who had been cremated earlier that day. We knew that his family and close friends were gathered around a similar fire in Etna, New Hampshire, where he lived until he died on September 7th of the cancer he’d battled for a year. Terry and his family were a big reason I looked forward to uprooting each spring, for five years, and moving to Dartmouth.
We’d made our fire of pointed things: yucca, cactus, dried rabbit brush, driftwood from the river, and two perfect branches sharpened by beavers. We marveled as the setting sun turned Adobe Mesa a mysterious red, neither of us having ever seen that color before. As our fire burned down, purple smoke billowed from it like a graceful ghost. Its fragrance and hypnotic effect carrying us off to another world.
This was the full story I intended to tell about that recent Adobe Mesa photo.
Midway through my first draft, a clear but faint voice in my head said, “Why don’t you watch that film again?”
The film summary included what I remembered about Auggie’s smoke shop photographs. And much more that I’d forgotten.
I watched the trailer.
While William Hurt’s character, Paul Benjamin, is in the shop buying cigars, he gets into a conversation about Sir Walter Raleigh’s role in the history of smoking. Benjamin tells the story of how Sir Walter Raleigh bet the queen of England that he could weigh smoke. How first he weighed an unsmoked cigar. Then he smoked it, careful to catch all the ashes. When he finished, he weighed the butt with the ashes and subtracted the total from the weight of the unsmoked cigar, the difference being the weight of the smoke. “. . . Almost,” Paul Benjamin said, “like weighing someone’s soul.”
This did not change everything about my story—those perfect cliffs turned the otherworldly color for the first time, that fire—all constant. But my story grew in length, but also expanded in breadth and depth. Suddenly, Terry Osborne’s death no longer felt final.
Had we first weighed all we’d gathered—the yucca and cactus, the rabbitbrush, driftwood, the beaver sticks—and subtracted from that the weight of the ash left in the pit, we would have known the weight of that hypnotic and fragrant smoke. Terry Osborne’s cremains surely weighed only a fraction of the 200 pounds with which he had danced through life, and earlier that day I sensed that his huge soul had been released and spread throughout the cosmos.
While I’m not sure that by some ancient but real and heretofore unexplained process that the purple smoke from our fire was some of Terry Osborne’s soul that had come for us, rising up and engulfing us, I’m not sure that it wasn’t.
Regardless, this story is the one we needed, then. That night, Adobe Mesa turned a color we had never seen before.
Brooke Williams’ life has been one of adventure and wilderness exploration. His conservation career spans forty years, most recently with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. He has an MBA in Sustainable Business from the Bainbridge Graduate Institute. He’s a freelance journalist with four books, including Halflives: Reconciling Work and Wildness, and dozens of articles, including recent work at Torrey House Press and Orion Magazine. His is most recent book, Open Midnight, documents his exploration of places where the outer and inner wilderness meet. He and his wife, the writer Terry Tempest Williams, and their dog Winslow, split their time between Castle Valley, Utah, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.