For
years I had known of a certain side canyon of the San Juan that was
supposed to be particularly lovely, a place resonant with power and
almost untrodden. The woman who told me about it was a beautiful
desert rat, sunburnt dark, with quick, clear eyes; she knew the
canyon country like the lines in
her
hard hands. She drew me a map on a paper napkin in a cafe in El Paso
and made me promise not to tell anyone else about it.
Somehow
I didn't go there for a long, long time; it was one of those trips
you save up—like a lump of pemmican or a last gold coin—against
hard times. I kept the map, folded into a tiny square, with a bundle
of old photographs, letters, chips of nacre from Mexican beaches, a
zigzagged shard from Keet Seel, the long-deserted pueblo city north
of Black Mesa, beyond Skeleton Canyon. That scrawled scrap of a map
was something like a talisman, evoking the luminous energy of the
woman who had drawn it (I never saw her again) and the mystery, the
promise, of her canyon.
And
then one autumn, suddenly it was time to go. Fall is a good season to
go into the San Juan desert. In the summer, temperatures rise above
110 degrees, the sun batters all color and shadow out of the land,
and springs, seeps and
waterholes
dry up. Water is the great mystery out here: you see why the Indians
made rain a sacrament, the wet mountains the abode of gods, and
springs into shrines. All water—brackish, saline, stale—is holy
water.
The
whole land is shaped like water—combers of slick rock, tumbled
surfs of tumulus, whirlpools of dust and sand—but the stuff itself
is elusive, lost. There is rainfall and runoff and the spring
snowmelt, but these are rare, scant things. Somewhere far, far below
in the knotted depths of stone, the San Juan rolls
down
its subterranean gorge, deep with the rains and snows of the Rockies;
but up in the side canyons it is bone dry. The air is burnt, sharp as
a steel knife laid on the tongue. You feel as though you could sniff
out a glass of water blindfolded at a hundred yards. Walking, your
fingers swell and turn a bruised yellow in a couple of hours. Your
mind wanders to chimeras, gauzy things of the imagination. No wonder
so many religions began in the desert! Even with a couple of full
canteens gurgling in your pack, the thought of thirst is never really
absent.
And
yet, you can just as easily drown or freeze to death in these same
canyons. Sometimes it seems that the San Juan is imbued with a sly,
native sense of humor, the soul of a coyote. It turns you into jerky
one day and freeze-dries you the next; dries you out, then drowns
you. I once got caught by a March blizzard down there, with a wind
chill factor somewhere way below zero, snowflakes thick and wet.
whipping like tiny daggers up canyon. I hiked on, went into extreme
hypothermia and survived only by hunching in a cave out of the wind,
building
a fire
out of damp sticks and driftwood and standing over it while the steam
poured off my soaked clothing. The next day the snow melted and the
canyon ran waist-deep with icy water; you could have drowned in some
of the big pools. Two days later the sky was hot and clear, the
snowmelt had vanished and I trudged through dry sand looking for
drinking water in the shadow of boulders in the lee of the cliffs. It
is a maddening and wondrous place, the San Juan.
But
now it was autumn—a sweet, easy season in the desert—and it was
time to go, to follow that old fragment of map, to see where it led.
I had
a friend at the time, a tiny woman named Susan, who lived alone in a
cabin in the hills and worked silver for a living. She was a tough
little person: she had banged the cabin together herself out of scrap
lumber, and every year she shot an elk, out of season, and lived on
the meat through the winter. She also had an ancient Chevy pickup
truck that seemed as if it might make it to Utah and back. One part
of me wanted to go walk the canyon alone: a kind of walking
vision-seeking, like the traditional Plains Indians used to do. (It
is interesting that
in
both Japanese Zen and Plains Indian animism, there are walking and
sitting forms of contemplation.) Alone, I would be meeting the canyon
solely on its own terms. But I was more than a little in love with
Susan; and she would be a good person to walk the canyon with: she
was spare with her words, and a hard walker. Like all real hunters,
she fit into the country with no false notes, unobtrusive. She would
be a good companion, I thought.
One
colorless, drizzling dawn, we loaded up her truck with gear. We drove
west, feeling like escaping prisoners. The autumn colors were
delicate, like those of a
Sung
scroll. The Japanese have a word, "aware," which means a
kind of beauty made more intense, poignant, by its very impermanence:
beauty catalyzed by time into something almost unbearable. It was one
of those autumn days in the
mountains.
We
drove west into Utah, skirting the southern edge of the La Sal
Mountains, aspens gold, a thin frost of snow on the tops of the
peaks. At La Sal Junction we turned south into the sandstone country.
I drove south, past the hogans of the northernmost Navajos and
through the Ute town of White Rock; and then, somewhere south of the
Abajo, or Blue Mountains, we turned west again.
To the
east Sleeping Ute Mountain peered over the horizon, opal blue. Far,
far to the southwest, Navajo Mountain was jade, in a black plume of
rain. To the south the Lukachukai and Chuskai mountains and the rusty
turrets and minarets of Monument Valley were dim in the haze; to the
west, ferrous cliffs. The sky had broken and it was a cool, lucid
afternoon; cumulus clouds sailed like a fleet of giant luminous
cauliflowers across the sky.
We
turned off the highway onto a dirt road that cut away across the
flats, through sagebrush and scrub juniper. If it hadn't been for the
map, we never would have seen it. The road forked and forked again,
and got worse; we bumped down into a dry wash and out again. Feral
cattle spooked and trotted away through the chaparral in whirlwinds
of dust. The road petered out, became a track. Before us, all was
stony flatlands, brush; our canyon had hidden itself well.
We
parked the truck in the shade of a lone Cottonwood, shouldered our
packs and started walking, wandering across the featureless terrain.
Anyone following us would have thought we were lost; but after about
half an hour, trusting to the vague markings on the map, we came to
the beginnings of an arroyo cutting south across the plain. This was
it: the way down, the door to the underworld. We descended.
There
was the remnant of a cattle trail, and we followed it down, through
cattails, past pools of green, rotten water. The water vanished into
the earth; we were left with sand and tumbled stones We crossed the
skittery, neurotic tracks of mice and the paw prints of a lone coyote
coming up the canyon to drink and then going down again.
The
cliffs closed in on either side. Slick-rock chutes dropped in. We
sloshed through deep sand, then crossed a floor of cracked bedrock.
And then suddenly the canyon dropped off in a two-hundred-foot
overhang: suddenly there was no place to go, no water in sight, and
evening was coming on fast.
We
consulted our map. It was unclear, but there was a suggestion of
another side canyon entering the main canyon; perhaps we were in the
wrong one. Mentally flipping a coin, we climbed out over the rimrock
to the south and wandered across
the
naked sandstone, looking for another way down into the earth. The sun
was falling fast, casting long shadows.We were both getting a little
worried, and a little cross. Danger on a quest is all right;
discomfort, inconvenience, are not.
Finally
we found another side canyon, a narrow notch dropping down almost
like a trapdoor. We climbed down into another time, where it was easy
to believe that an owl's cry meant death, that coyotes were
tricksters, that weird bent mannikins called Mudmen lived at the
bottom of the great rivers. Across the fire Susan combed the sand out
of her hair and smiled that ancient, woman's smile at me. A different
time, the past, where, they say, we must go to be reborn, to find our
future, whatever it may be.
The
next morning we packed up, broke camp and headed down canyon. It was
a lukewarm sunny day. Just as the El Paso stranger had said, there
were Indian
ruins
everywhere in ledges and caves in the cliffs. About 9,000 years ago,
paleo-Indian hunters and gatherers had filtered down into this canyon
country and somehow learned to live hereabouts. Anything that was
edible, they ate. That is how you survive in the desert—you become
an extreme omnivore. These early desert people snared and netted
rabbits and birds, and gathered and ground seeds, roots, berries.
Insects and larvae were important sources of protein, as they are in
all arid pre-agricultural societies. (The Australian aborigines
treasure the wichetty grub, a fat, buttery larva they dig out of the
ground and eat like a wriggling ice cream cone.) What few artifacts
these desperate people had were breathtakingly beautiful in their
craftsmanship: grinding stones, nets, basketry.
Thousands
of years later, agriculture came north from Mexico, as did sorcery.
Life was transformed: corn, beans, and squash, the holy trinity of
meso-America, gave the desert people a tighter, surer grasp on life.
Crude pit houses and cave camps grew into towns, pueblos.
Anasazi
is a Navajo word meaning the old, or original, people; these Anasazis
lived in the canyons of the San Juan until about 1200 AD, when they
migrated south to New Mexico and northern Arizona, where their
descendants, the Pueblo Indians, still live. This canyon country is
just too friable, too fragile for long-term, intensive habitations.
The Anasazis cut too much timber for roof beams, cleared too much
brush for fields and just plain overbred. A cyclical drought may or
may not have been the final disaster: archeologists, who reconstruct
whole empires and civilizations out of the glaze on potsherds and
discern the pattern of flakings on a spearpoint, disagree. It is too
esoteric a point to do more than dream on: the Anasazis moved south,
and that is that.
Hiking
the canyon, we still felt the presence of those Old Ones. At one
place on the cliff, we found hundreds of handprints in reddish paint,
eerily like dried blood. You could still see the whorls in the
fingerprints. Some of the handprints were tiny, the hands of small
children or infants. Below, in the ruins of a room, was a human
pelvis, gleaming in the dust. On the Nile the fellahin place
handprints on their walls to ward off the evil eye, djinns, and
demons. Was this cliff wall of hands a barrier against outsiders,
spiritual or otherwise? Or was it a kind of simple codification of
census, a symbolic counting up of the souls of a community?
We
trekked down canyon; the gods of the place were painted, scratched on
the rocks. There was a feeling of being watched, a prickling at the
back of the neck. The gods, demigods, spirits or whatever they were,
were like the drawings of
children
or of the mad and they had that same inexplicable divinity to
them—doodles, but fairly hissing with an arcane energy. Snakes,
lightning, circles in circles in circles, arrows.
That
god from the far south of Mexico, a new-world Orpheus hunched over,
playing a flute. And those tall, threatening isosceles figures with
horns. Climbing up into the ruins of a kiva or a storehouse full of
cobs of mummy corn, we felt like trespassers, invaders, ashamed.
Evening:
miles down, the canyon walls went gray to delicate gold to roan to
gray again. A wind came up the canyon, rippling the sand, jingling
the yellow cottonwood leaves. We had come a long way that day: the
canyon had turned and turned and turned again, till the map, with its
side canyons and its springs
and
ruins, had lost all congruence with the country. It was a maze with
canyon after canyon, ravine after ravine winding away into the rock.
There
was not another human being for forty, fifty miles. Far above, over
the canyon rim, across the desolate mesa tops, a Piute rancheria, a
Navajo sheep camp, a Mormon cowpoke reading by kerosene in a beat-up
trailer. It was a precious feeling to be so alone: worth the sore
feet, the sun-stung eyes, the muddy water we had to drink that looked
like coffee and tasted like stone. The fire burned down; and in the
last red light of the coals, I found myself looking at Susan and
thinking of Deer Woman, the sensuous spirit in North American Indian
tales
who lures men off into the back country and steals their souls.
I
found myself thinking more and more about the Anasazi, the Old Ones,
who had lived here and then moved on. It seemed to me that there was
a secret, a message, wrapped up in their lives. They scratched farms
out of the valley floor; built their aeries of riprap and mud;
incised their gods and dreams on the cliffs; hunted deer, rabbit,
desert bighorn; made baskets and pottery, lots of it, decorated with
cord relief and colors of a smoldering barbaric beauty. Nothing
special in that, perhaps: neolithic farmers living in tiny, simple
communities that were little more than bands of a few extended
families.
They
were poor, if wealth can be measured in a society's energy and
material available per capita. The garbage cans of any suburban
American household probably hold more calories than the average
Anasazi family got in a week. There was a kind of Taoist austerity to
their lives; and yet, if their modern Pueblo descendants are any
evidence of how they lived, they somehow squeezed a rich,
sophisticated culture out of these fields of dust. Pueblo
metaphysics—we would call it animism or magic—carried the theory
of relativity into every corner and
crevice
of existence. You danced thunder out of the sky, rain out of the
clouds, crops out of the earth. The bitter lightning in the
rattlesnake speaks to the rain that gathers around the dark
mountains. You bury your ancestors and they rise again as corn;
turquoise embodies sky, abalone shell thunderhead, feathers wind and
storm . . .
However
it worked, it propelled the Anasazi way of life through drought, the
raids of the Utes, Navajos and Comanches, and the imperial flexings
of Spain and Anglo-America. It was a sinewy, enduring kind of
poverty, indeed: it will probably outlast our petrochemical bubble of
a republic by aeons.
We
have contrived a technology so abstruse that it takes us 3,000
calories of energy to produce a 300-calorie can of corn. The waters
rise on Lake Powell, and silt drifts slowly against the dam at Page.
The cities burn bright, stoked on the flesh of mountains and mesas
and on the blood of rivers. Some say that our complex systems contain
the seeds of their own destruction; that like rapidly growing crystal
lattices, they are brittle, unstable in proportion to their very size
and
rate of growth. They point out that those tiny gold-crazed gangs of
Spaniards destroyed the urban Inca and Aztec empires in a matter of
months, but that life in the tribal villages goes on undisturbed even
today. And they claim that the
Pueblo
Indians will still be dancing their green-corn dances, and 'dobing
their kiva walls, long after the last light in Los Angeles has gone
out. Who knows?
Perhaps
they are right, Lao-tze and Mao Tse-tung and Crazy Horse and all the
rest. Perhaps less is more. Perhaps all that matters, all that lasts,
is life close to the ground, down to the bedrock: village, pueblo,
ejidos, sun-dance encampment; and all of our cities, our grand operas
and coups, our fads and
inventions,
are just chaff in the wind.
excerpted
from The Hidden West by Rob Schultheis, pp 29-41
