Once upon a time in 2009, I selected a part (mainly rocks and sometimes mud) of each earthwork I visited and transferred it to the next: Spiral Jetty to Sun Tunnels, Sun Tunnels to Double Negative, Double Negative to the closest I could get to Roden Crater, Roden Crater to Lightning Field, and Lightning Field to Amarillo Ramp. This presented the anticipatory return to Spiral Jetty to deposit the rock from Amarillo Ramp at an unknown point in the future. Enter a myriad of other concerns that prevented me from taking the exact piece back to Spiral Jetty, or the Amarillo Ramp rain out last May which did not facilitate selecting a new one, and we come to 2016.
Somewhere around here in January while walking Amarillo Ramp, I chose a fragment of red sandstone and it resided....
... in my car's change drawer, bouncing and rattling around over the thousands of miles I trekked across the West since then.
I did not have any intention of visiting Spiral Jetty again this year, but when I discovered I was only 1.5 hours away from it last weekend, I had to make the trip. Note: never visit Spiral Jetty on a Sunday afternoon in the spring as the parking lot was overloaded, teenagers were complaining that their parents dragged them all the way out in the middle of nowhere to see this, and I witnessed a dog peeing on the earthwork (!). None of this qualified as a contemplative experience.
Amidst the hoards, I buried this at the very center. In doing so, I completed a task overdue, I said goodbye to a collaboration long over, and I marked the end of visiting earthworks until another potential school field trip in the future (or Roden Crater miraculously opens to the public for less than a $6500 ticket price before I am dead).
