Mono Basin Journal
A roundup of less political events at Mono Lake
by Geoff McQuilkin
During
Restoration Days, a cleanup project team chanced across
mysterious constructions on the old lakebed. Like the
walls of a sand castle, rings of moist sand were built
up, protecting burrows in the ground. None were larger
than a fingernail, and we crouched and wondered who lived
there, and then moved on.
Now, with a orange leaf here, a yellow cluster of leaves there, autumn is edging into the Mono Basin again. Up by the Lee Vining water tank, one branchlet of leaves stands out in relief against the green backdrop of its neighbors. Soon to be lost among the yellow foliage of full groves of aspen, the leaves capture, for today, that brief moment where summer resigns into fall.
Out on the granite moraines, across the flats, among the deep green junipers and dusty sagebrush, the season’s change is hardly as significant, another brief event in multi-thousand year time span. A boulder shifts, then sits as hundreds of autumn leaves and summer days and winter storms blow by. On the boulder, a raven perches. A deer leaps. Snow falls. Sun shines. A thousand years pass. In the intervening time are the events of our lives; brief, transient, and so full of meaning.
Return to Fall 1999
Newsletter
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