Doty and Coyote in Wonderland

Rambling through the desert, Coyote and I wander into Wonderland, miles and miles worth of a maze of giant granite boulders held together by sandy washes that twist and turn and tumble through the landscape.

"It looks like someone built a stage set of some strange planet and dropped it into the desert," I say.

"I've been here before," says Coyote. "Follow me and I'll show you someplace wonderful."

We walk past the broken stone of an old homestead, Wall Street Well with its worn-out windmill, the rubble of an abandoned mine. We scramble through a pass below the craggy peak of Queen Mountain and into the heart of Wonderland.

"It might have been easier for Alice," I pant. "She just fell down a rabbit hole and there was Wonderland."

"I think it's better," muses Coyote, "to come here for Wonderland and down rabbit holes for dinner."

We walk past old man cactus, prickly pear, beavertail ... cones fallen from pinon pines, acorns from scrub oaks. We clamor over dry waterfalls, up and down washes, winding and winding through this Wonderland of Rocks.

Now Coyote stops in front of a turtle-shaped boulder.

"Here we are."

"Where?" I ask. "This boulder looks like a thousand we've passed."

"Follow me."

I turn to see Coyote crawl down a hole that leads into a hollow in the rock.

"Yeow!" shouts Coyote. "Watch that cactus!"

"And you watch the ticks," I say. "I've been brushing them off me for an hour."

Soon we are both inside and I am amazed at what I see: a domed room in the heart of the rock, the ceiling brilliant with red paintings of ancient symbols ... sun, moon, human hands. The sandy floor is strewn with reddish pottery shards, and there is a stone mortar and pestle for grinding nuts and seeds. Here indeed is "someplace wonderful."

Coyote and I sit in the shadows until time matters for nothing. The paintings glow like they are new. Then we crawl out the hole and start our long walk back.

For several days, Coyote pulls tiny cactus spines from his paws and I scan my trousers and shirt for ticks. But neither complain. Not much to pay, we think, for the wonder of Wonderland.