Kiva – Datura

COUNTRY:
Kiva

DESIGN:
The Datura is a plant you find frequently in the Grand Canyon.  This one is from a river rafting trip my son and I took down the Canyon.  It is poisonous and causes hallucinations.  There was a parallel trip rafting at the same time as ours that featured chamber music –they would stop, pull out their instruments and play in little rocky coves where the acoustics were good.  We pulled right into a concert of theirs after coming around a bend one afternoon.  I don’t generally like classical music but there it seemed perfect and our group lingered until the concert ended.  It was said that their conductor, a man with thick wild black hair, had chewed Datura leaves one time to get inspired.  He looked inspired to me !  Wonderful trip. I treasure the memory.  An artistic note :  the delicate lines that marked the leaves got rubbed off in the mail — probably in the leather saddles bags on the mule carrying it out of the canyon.  You can also see the primitive perforations — I had not yet got my machinist punch nor my perforator.

Here is a photo of a Datura in the Canyon:

MAILED:
by me at Phantom Ranch in 2004.