Fossilized in Time: Petrified Forest National Park
July 26th, 2022
A tea towel embroidered with the words “Just Married” hangs from the pile of gear crammed into the back seat of our truck as we drive hour upon hour into the desert. I am content in your company, pressing my forehead against the glass and watching this strange new world pass us by. We are in a span of flat, dry land of pale buttercup yellow pocked with squatting bush trees that alternate between brown and green. In the distance, a line of windmills rotates slowly against a backdrop of moody clouds, from which pour beams of light in contrast with watercolor washes of steel blue rain. A vein of lightning strikes in the sunlight.
As we cross the Continental Divide, we race a train through rusty mesas and jagged cliffs of countless colored layers, ditches like meteorite craters with softened sides of blood red sand, and spores of sage shrubbery scattered upon the orange dunes. The background blurs as we match the train’s speed and it appears to stand still beside us.
When we stop, it is to behold fallen trees fossilized 225 million years ago: Petrified Forest National Park. When we exit the car, the Arizona air is incredibly dry. A spiky lizard dashes across the desert sand between tufts of crispy grass as a chorus of frogs or birds of some kind wheeze from the valley below the overlook on which I stand. Along the edge is a collapse of impressionist-painted stones, crumbling in all directions and marked with ancient petroglyphs. Pressing my eye to the sight of my camera, I zoom in on “Newspaper Rock” to see square-shaped warriors etched into blackened stone. In the distance, our train inches across the landscape like a minuscule caterpillar, announcing its presence in a bellow of monotone whistles.
My hair flutters through the open car window as we drive from stop to stop, taking in the Jurassic scene of painted desert, and giant ant hills striped with red and gray: “The Teepees.” As we park, shiny-feathered ravens soar in and out of the badlands, belching their drawling, guttural squawks, and hobbling along the stone wall between us and the canyon. We hike a jet black trail into “Blue Mesa,” eroded hills layered in shades of muted mulberry and maroon, lined with vein-like cracks. Now, surrounded by dunes, all is quiet. You take my hand as we wind down switchbacks between the smooth-sided slopes, whose creases hold glittering fragments of petrified wood that wink at us like jewels in a mine.
The so-called “Forests” are lumberyards of scattered rough-edged logs, deceptively normal when seen at a distance. When approached, however, their rings are patched with every color imaginable. When touched, they are cold as granite and dense as cast iron. It is a funeral frozen in time, and nature has paid her respects to the fallen by fusing them in vibrant colors that will never fade.
