Thursday 9 December 2010

Moments in Chaco Time: Me and My Shadow

I think of him as masculine, inflated with ego, ecological superiority as he can annoyingly be. Yet gregarious, and genial company, never arguing or answering back. Early in the morning, he is an elongated stick-like mortal with piston like lower appendages, who’s glorying in the cool light breeze. Yet his nemesis is also his creator, which bifurcates his personality, forcing it into a symbiotic relationship, which out on these level lands, is repeated Ground Hog day after Ground Hog day. A rerun of the same scenario, reiterated as long as he and his omnipotent opponent Sol have has a visual on the land.

Our shadows shrink in inverse proportion to the thermometer’s expansion. Our shadows are laid out before us, two exaggerated leaders that merge and jumble only to be extricated, disentangled a few moments further down the road. Now as Sol climbs, near vertically into his climax, so our followers hide, taking refuge between our wheels, under the pedal cranks. Shrunken and shrivelled specimens of their morning selves. Yet Sol’s scrutiny wavers, as it does everyday, the celestials attention drawn to the western horizon where he’s required for a new noonday on his spiralling track along an invisible Capricornian line. So shadow, like a whipped cur, creeps back out from his imagined sanctuary, tail between his legs, beaten and frazzled by the infernal heat hammering down and the radiating glare pulsing in waves back out of the road.