Dox Formation

M.E. Bredimus

We dutifully patch the bathtub floor, inhaling fumes before these evaporate in the shimmering blue heat beneath Apollo’s Temple. You work the brayer as I rub my ravaged feet, admire the sharp red waves imprinted here in mudstone.

My hands suffer more from dishwashing with bleach than any fondling of stromatolites. We wear sunglasses vertically so the corners of our eyes trap mica grains, glitter from floodplains of a Precambrian delta.

Here the sediments in a shallow sea were sorted, cross-bedded, singed by lava flows. I think of Oreo’s and cold milk, slurp warm water from a bottle hanging from a d-ring as we take turns at the loathsome hand pump.

We cross the river at Tanner, wrap ourselves in the gold of a lowering sun before navigating the Camelthorn. You sit for a photograph on the boulder throne; I kneel, a supplicant, at your Chaco-ed feet.

 


Main Location:

Dox Formation, Grand Canyon, Arizona


Other locations:

The Dox Formation in the Grand Canyon near the Tanner Graben, Arizona

Image by Doc Searls, licensed under Creative Commons.