Carrizo Wash

In the Anza Borrego desert of southern California there is a place called Carrizo Wash. It is a seemingly barren, yet beautiful place of nothingness. It is an ancient sea floor bed crusted with shells. Time has passed it by, but not mankind.

I was mesmerized by my visit there and spent the night feeling the cold of a summer night hit the hot ground and cool everything almost instantly. I was also disappointed in the tire tracks of off-road vehicles, dune buggies and manmade scars upon the land.

Carrizo Wash
©1995 Rolland G. Smith

Adesert vast to see and feel

what is true and what is real.

Streaks and scratches on the land,

no natural lode of thin fahlband.

Its tracks of man — tire scarred,

old bed of sea now wheel marred.

Barren dry, yet full of life,

Beneath the rocks of weather’s knife.

Granite grays and sandy stone

Black basalt and sun-bleached bone

Sages grow in pale hue

when green and cream rendezvous.

Fossil dunes from tranquil past

beneath a sea that didn’t last.

Old solitude with crusts of shell,

what ancient day felt your knell?

Thou sacred sweep, what is worse:

no ocean cover or man’s traverse?

Intruding sounds in paradise

make this silent place die twice.