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Texas Blood

Page 36

by Roger D. Hodge


  Julius Froebel described this stretch of the Devils River valley in ecstatic terms:

  Here, where the road again approaches the river, this valley displays the truly classic beauty of the wilderness. The river now a broad crystal stream, flowing over flat, polished, yellowish-white limestone slabs, is here surrounded by noble trees, wreathed by vines, above which the enclosing rocks lift their towering heights. The river-bed is very remarkable, and the transparency of the water such as to make every line and crevice in its marble floor visible. Here and there, where a flaw has occurred, mud has collected, in which high reeds have taken root. The contrasts in these particulars are uncommon, and the harmony in which they are composed is equally rare. Luxuriant vegetation in the valley surmounted by naked rocks, lofty trees shading a brilliant water surface, islands of reeds on the flatbed of a rapid stream, a feature seldom united in one picture. A picture truly of wild and brilliant beauty.

  We turned from the riverbed and climbed through a jumble of boulders and faulted caprock to the upland, where we encountered a ranch road and signs of a more contemporary economy: a small shed, several deer blinds, and dozens of spent shells. Resurrection plants, dormant until the recent rains, were sprouting up along our trail. Prickly pear and strawberry cactus blooms vied for my attention with delicate yellow, red, and blue wildflowers. We picked our way down the canyon rim and entered the shelter in silence as the roar of a passing military jet drowned out the melodic calls of wrens and sparrows in the thick brush nearby.

  As the sound of the jet faded into the distance, I began to discern the patterns of imagery on the wall. Small delicate depictions of felines and humans and deer—often with exquisitely drawn antlers, sometimes with puckered lips—were intertwined with a thick fabric of somewhat larger figures, men carrying atlatls and spears, a mountain lion spitting blood or speech or medicine, ghostly outlines of humans or gods, strange ambiguous designs resembling something from Klee or Kandinsky or Miró. Almost all the larger images bristled with hairlike protrusions. Many were impaled with spears. Carolyn told us that the paintings here had been dated to thirty-eight hundred years before the present, and she zeroed in on one particular image that shows up repeatedly across the landscape. Tall, painted in red, yellow, black, and white, and heavily incised, it was a vaguely triangular figure with arms protruding from the upper corners and a small head with an open mouth resting on the line between them. A pair of deer antlers emerged from the head, and two long, serpentine lines projected from the shoulders encompassing an enigmatic black square and linking up to a yellow circle. A field of radiating lines filled the space between the circle and the square. Almost everything in the panel, in one way or another, seemed to be connected to this figure. This, Carolyn said, was “the point of intersection between this world and the other world,” the axis mundi, the mouth of the gateway serpent.

  Sacred Deer Person

  Years ago, Carolyn was camping out here one summer with students from A&M, recording this site, when a fast-moving thunderstorm blew in. They had been swimming down by the river and had to run for cover, just making it to the shelter when the skies opened and sheets of water poured over the edge of the cliff. “It was like being behind a waterfall, the thunder was rolling, and the bedrock was just shaking,” she recalled. “You could feel it through your entire body.” Sitting there, behind that sudden wall of water, protected from the rain and the wind and the lightning, in a place that had been sacred to the people of this desert for thousands of years, Carolyn and her students simply drifted off to sleep. When they awoke, the ancient basin below the paintings was full, holding water just as it evidently had done thousands of years before. Desert sunlight reflected off the precious water onto the walls, and the paintings came alive with a motion of limbs.

  No one knows exactly what happened to the great artists of the ancient world who left us these pictographs. It remains unknown why or even when exactly they left the area. Their tradition persisted for more than a thousand years, and then one day they put down their brushes, gathered their children, and left. That mystery was on my mind as we hiked down into White Shaman, a few miles above the mouth of the Pecos. The site lies in a steep gorge that feeds into the main channel of the river among massive limestone cliffs. We picked our way up and down a steep trail and eventually arrived at the shelter, surrounded by a very high fence topped with three strands of barbed wire to discourage vandals. Days of clambering up and down limestone cliffs had begun to take a toll on my knees, but all my exhaustion fell away when I saw the paintings.

  All the main characters from the Huichol creation stories were there: impaled deer covered with black peyote dots; five black ancestor figures spread across the panel, carrying ten candles as offerings; a headless white moon goddess, sometimes known as Mother West Water, facing due west; an antlered figure emerging from Dawn Mountain; and Grandmother Growth, an earth monster who appears as a combination of serpent and catfish. There was even a figure of the first man, who was saved by the moon goddess from a great flood, a tiny human figure, directly below the great white goddess (the so-called white shaman), suspended above a tiny canoe. Peyote buttons, which grow close to the ground along these canyons, were ritually impaled in the pictographs, just as the Huichol continue to do on their pilgrimage today. It wasn’t hard to imagine that the artists who painted this panel, like today’s Huichol pilgrims, believed that their own sacrifices—of precious deer marrow as well as energy and time that might otherwise have been invested in gathering food—were necessary to guide the sun through the underworld each night, riding on the back of a deer to be reborn in the east, so that the rains might follow and bring forth the desert’s fruits, among them the sacred peyote.

  But perhaps one spring the painting failed. Perhaps the rains did not come for several years or more. And if, like the Huichol today, the Pecos River people believed that the existence of the world depended on their actions, perhaps they came to see a long drought as a sign to move on, to the south, where Grandmother Growth was more generous, where the Sacred Deer Person was more reliable. We don’t know exactly what happened. “What we’re learning from studying the rock art,” Carolyn said, “is that they followed the rain, they followed the water.” Nothing was more important to these people than water. In that sense, the experience of the Pecos River people was probably really not so different from our own. Like us, they faced violent weather and climate change and drought. They felt hunger and thirst. “Everything follows the rain,” Carolyn said. “Everything follows the water.”

  Some things don’t change. Thousands of years after the paint dried on the rock art of the Pecos River people, restless souls like my Wilson ancestors grazed their livestock along the Devils River, because the land was open and the water was good. Eventually, some of them settled and raised their families. They were neither the first nor the last to arrive, and soon a town appeared nearby, with saloons and hotels, a post office and a school. Time passed and most people moved away. Little remains of that brief episode but a handful of scattered ranches that haven’t been sold to tobacco lawyers or oil tycoons. Compared with the long tenure of the Indians, the European presence here has been as brief as a cloud of dust.

  Painted Shelter

  At Painted Shelter, on a ranch owned by Missy and Jack Harrington, who donated land for the Shumla campus, a stream flows along the base of walls on which I could see the faint remnants of Pecos River–style pictographs, ancient and faded and almost illegible, underneath large red monochrome-style paintings, younger but still old. Graffiti from 1911 looked as if it were painted yesterday. Just up the hill lay the ruins of a small house constructed from native flagstones that was already present when Missy’s great-grandfather settled there. Inside that old structure, near the floor, Frank Greenwood carved his name and his family’s brand in 1891, possibly while working as a U.S. marshal, waiting for smugglers to pass through the canyon on their way to Mexico. Greenwood’s granddaughter Frankie Lee was one of my grandmoth
er’s oldest friends. Missy Harrington told me that she used to picnic along the bank and swim in that stream when she was a child. For uncountable generations, people have been drawn by the water to the cool shadows of this place. They came, rested, and passed on, leaving their marks, their signs and symbols, on the shelter walls.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book began long ago as an essay in Harper’s, and I am grateful to Lewis Lapham, Ben Metcalf, and Jennifer Szalai for helping me craft that first attempt to reckon with the landscape and history of the southwest borderlands. Over the years, many others have provided help and editorial guidance, including Jake Silverstein, Christian Lorentzen, and Luke Mitchell. I am especially grateful to Jin Auh, who first saw the germ of this book, and to Jonathan Segal for giving me the opportunity to write it. Eliza Borné, Maxwell George, Caitlin Love, and my other colleagues at the Oxford American cheered me on when the writing was hard, and John Jeremiah Sullivan’s friendship, example, and encouragement helped me through the dark times. A special thanks to Jamie Quatro, whose suggestions improved the manuscript immeasurably.

  I am deeply grateful to Rudy Garcia, Art Garcia, and the other members of the Mount Cristo Rey Restoration Committee. Jack Skiles, Carolyn Boyd, and Elton Prewitt were extraordinarily generous with their time and knowledge.

  To my family I owe more than I can ever express. My grandmother Anale Hodge and my father, Byron Hodge, both sat with me for untold hours as I pestered them with questions. Patricia and Grant Clothier welcomed me into their home and generously shared their genealogical research. They gave me invaluable insights into our family’s history. Merily and Tom Keller, Luralee and Tom Wallace, Ann Hodge, Shay Scruggs, Jessica Hodge, and my mother, Joanna Heller, all gave aid and comfort and encouragement. I am grateful for the love and support of my sons, Sebastian and Wriley, who rode shotgun on more than one long journey through West Texas. And, finally, my darling Deborah, who listened patiently as I read hundreds of pages aloud, who read multiple drafts of the manuscript, without you this book would not exist.

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