A Zone of Identity

Last night, the smoke from wildfires as far away as Arizona turned the sun into an apocalyptic omen. You could stare directly into the weird red orb without blinking -- it was like confronting a ferocious beast that had suddenly been stripped of its fangs and claws.

Months before we bought the A-frame and moved to Blanca Flats, I read J.G. Ballard's novel The Drought. I was mesmerized not only by the imagery of a drought-stricken terrain, but by the main character's growing association with the barren landscape. As all bodies of water recede in this slow apocalypse, a desert of random isolates takes shape, freed from the narratives of water. For Dr. Charles Ransom, the loss is liberating. He recognizes a reflection of himself in the parched riverbed, and the recognition heals the wounds created by his broken marriage:

. . . the failure of Ransom's marriage was less a personal one than that of its urban context, in fact a failure of landscape, and . . . with his discovery of the river Ransom had at last found an environment in which he felt completely at home, a zone of identity in space and time.

-- J.G. Ballard, The Drought, copyright 1965

I know exactly how it feels to find the "zone of identity"; for me, that zone is here, in a landscape that resembles a parched seabed.

Yesterday morning when I went out to take some pictures, I found a small clump of my own matted hair caught in the weeds. Thanks to our Blue Heeler's tireless campaign to overturn our garbage cans and scatter wads of tissue and empty cans everywhere, my hair made a circuitous journey from my hairbrush to the bathroom trash to the front yard.

I usually pick up the debris I find around here. It feels like a custodial duty, like my small contribution to the well-being of this spiky ecosystem. But it seemed appropriate that my hair had snagged on the weeds, as if the dead dirt and gray vegetation had officially claimed me. So I left it there, thinking a crow might use my hair to accessorize its nest.