I am not a man of subtleties.

I know that the desert is alive, that the cryptobiotic soil is teeming with bacteria beside the path, but unless life is wriggling around, I’m hardly aware of it. In these southwest national parks, lizards are usually my only friends. And by friends I mean those other beings in our lives who keep us tethered to this earth, that we don’t go floating off the precipice not because we’ve lost our footing, but because we’ve lost an awareness of our feet. Without others, we don’t know where we stand.

But in Canyonlands National Park, in southern Utah, our reality collects in pools. Desert potholes hold the world within a few inches of water across a few feet of space. In these shallow sandstone depressions, filled for a few weeks in the spring and late summer, life quickly plays its game: Eggs hatch, fairy shrimp scurry and dance beneath the surface, tadpoles hatch and become toads – and then everything dies as the potholes dry up. Not before laying their eggs however, ensuring that at the next rain, or maybe the next, the tiny cycle continues.

Tiny cycle? Out here it seems vast and encompassing. I sit at the edge of a pool and marvel that of all the weeks of the year when I might have come here, I have come when the pools are alive: I had no idea they existed, did not time my arrival with the rains, and yet here I am and here they are – no less a joke on the indifferent universe than the potholes themselves. 

A few other tourists mill about, taking pictures, and I worry that they will break the rules and touch the water. Lotions and oils from human fingers are said to be toxic, and so for a few minutes I become the secret and self-appointed lifeguard of the little pools. It is the job I would want if I were to be a park ranger here: Zinced nose. Whistle around my neck. On a little stand between the water and the edge of the cliff beyond. “Hey, you! Stay out of the pool! I don’t care how long it’s been since you’ve eaten.”

As I crawl around the edge of the water and watch the archaic tadpole shrimp, red-tailed and silver-helmeted like something from the Devonian Age, I realize that the surface of the pool is littered with the ghostly carcasses of the shrimp that have already lived and died here. They float like gathering clouds above their own progeny, casting shadows below.

It’s tempting, of course, to make too much of this pothole phenomenon. To muse on the fragility of life, on the vanity of a world rim-rocked on all sides, and to wonder if this is all finally inspiring or infinitely sad. It is a poetic platitude to observe that our lives are no different encased within these canyon walls or in our own cities.

Still, it seems wiser to think that the potholes are just the way things are, and the word that comes to mind is “adequate.” They are no less and no more than what life needs to be: Simply up to the task at hand.