Lesson from the Anasazi: Perhaps Less is More

 

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