Don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone.

The words something like from an old 60’s song by Joni Mitchell, Big Yellow Taxi. In the photo at top, you’re looking at Muley Point. The place I’m standing on, from which I took this photo, was declared a National Monument. Others are trying to reduce or eliminate it. It would be the Bears Ears NM, and I’m on Cedar Mesa, a few hundred square miles of slickrock and P/J smattered with Ancestral Puebloan ruins.  I’m standing somewhere west of Muley Point, overlooking a vast stretch of semi-desert that includes the San Juan River Gorge. You’re looking down into that gorge in the picture above.

Don’t know what you got until it’s gone.

I mean that collectively, of course.  For all of us.  The Southwest doesn’t contain the deepest canyon in the world.  That honor would go to China. It can’t boast the longest canyon on earth. That’s probably someplace deep in our oceans.

Yet the Colorado Plateau probably contains the most extensive and dramatic canyon system on the planet. You’re looking right at it in the top photo. Some geologists theorize that a microplate carved out of the larger North American tectonic plate began corkscrewing up several million years ago. Rivers are ancient things. It’s hard for me to believe that a body of water like a river can preexist geological forces like plate movement, but it can. As the earth’s surface rose here, rivers like the San Juan and the Colorado which the San Juan joins west of this spot began to cut down into the soft, sedimentary strata which makes up these vast surfaces. Just east of this photo, the Goosenecks of the San Juan create incised meanders where the river takes five miles to snake its way through a chasm that has a straight-line distance of just three miles.

From here, you can see Monument Valley, Navajo Mountain, and Black Mesa. Most prominent of these features in the midground is Monument Valley. Its monolithic formations seem like building blocks. The vastness of the landscape disguises their scale.

Don’t know what you got until it’s gone.

I decided to come up here, where I encountered just one other vehicle, because I’m dying. Everyone is. Some of us are just dying faster than others. A man I knew was living in a rest home. I want you to run to the edge and jump off the cliff. Really live your life. I want you to make it. You’ll make it. I expect you to make it. That’s what Jim told me. He died a few weeks later. He’d packed five lifetimes into 82 years. Me? Not nearly so many. Maybe a half-life.

We’re all dying. You just don’t realize it until you hit 55, and then it starts to hit you: all you really ever have to do with what you want while you’re here is time. I can do anything with that time, but I can’t do everything. Life forces me to choose, and I’ll know what’s important to me by how I choose to use my time. That’s why I drove up to Muley Point today and hiked along the rim of Cedar Mesa.

Collectively, we make the same choice with space. Because the space we have is limited. In that picture at the top of this post; it could be filled with housing tracts, or it could look just like this, in 30 years.

© 2022 by Michael C. Just

Mike’s novel, The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy, is available in softcover or eBook formats through Amazon.

You can purchase the book through this website. Or go straight to amazon at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+dirt+journey+of+a+mystic+cowboy&crid=1S40Q4BXSUWJ6&sprefix=the+dirt%3A+journey+of+a+m%2Caps%2C180&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_23

Mike’s other titles, including The Crippy, The Mind Altar, and Canyon Calls, are available through this website or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002

Four of his short stories have recently been published online:

Lies, Ltd. has been published by The Mystery Tribune @ Lies, Ltd.: Literary Short Fiction by Michael C. Just (mysterytribune.com)

The Obligate Carnivore has been published by the Scarlet Leaf Review @ Category: MICHAEL JUST – SCARLET LEAF REVIEW

I See You, Too has been published by the 96th of October @ I See You, Too – 96th of October

Offload, a short story about a man who can heal any disease, is now live and can be read at The Worlds Within at Offload – The Worlds Within

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