The Pot Thief Who Studied Pythagoras

by J. Michael Orenduff

  Gran Quivera was founded around AD 800 and at its peak in the thirteen hundreds had thousands of inhabitants. Unfortunately for those thousands, Coronado came calling in 1539. With the Spanish came diseases against which the natives had no immunity, and most of them died in a series of epidemics. In the seventeenth century there was a severe drought, and the few remaining inhabitants abandoned the pueblo to the elements.

  The elements have not been good tenants; the place is pretty well beyond repair.

  One of the reasons I’m a good archaeologist is I can read the land. When we students were on our summer dig in Gran Quivera, we would start at dawn and knock off early because it got so hot. I didn’t mind the heat, so I walked for miles in every direction getting to know the land. Driving by, it looks like a dry featureless arid plain, but when you explore it on foot, you discover subtle elevation changes, varying rock strata, patterns of plant growth, and other aspects of a faceted landscape.

  I would try to imagine what life must have been like for the last few stragglers desperate to stay in their ancestral home. Where would they go for water? The small arroyos directly around the sprawling pueblo would have turned to powder during the drought. But I knew from growing up in the desert that after a rain, arroyos dry up in a pattern starting from the portions farthest from the mountains. So I knew the people of the Gran Quivera—the Spaniards called them los humanos but didn’t treat them like humans—would have walked toward the mountains. And they would have followed the largest arroyo. I already knew where that one was, so I pulled up a few hundred yards from it and walked the rest of the way guided by a moon so bright I could see my shadow in the sand.

  I remembered that in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, a legislator from some conservative state had attended a conference in San Francisco and had later declared, evidently with some pride, that he had worn shower caps over his shoes while he was in his hotel room out of a fear of catching AIDS. The reason I remembered this bizarre story was that I was walking along with two disposable shower caps over my shoes.

  I know I looked like an idiot, but what would have looked even more idiotic would be me in a mug shot. Tracking is a difficult skill, and the sandy soil in the wash would probably be unreadable within hours after the usual New Mexico spring wind blew over it, but I did not wish to take any chances that either my tires or my shoes would be identified.

  The ruins of Gran Quivera are protected by the National Park Service, but not very well. While they take seriously their mandate to make sure no kid from Iowa leaves the park with an arrowhead in his pocket, the exposed adobes continue to erode. There are about eight million arrowheads and pieces of worked flint in the ground around Gran Quivera, so it’s not like they are scarce. Given the low visitor rate, every kid who wants one could take a piece of flint, and the supply would last until Gran Quivera melts back into the earth from neglect or the sun is extinguished, whichever happens first.

  By looking at plant growth patterns and rock strata, you can tell where the course of an arroyo has changed in recent years and where it could be hundreds of years old, so it was not difficult for me to find the sort of place I was looking for. It was under an overhang on the inside of a curve in the arroyo and not close to the juncture with any tributary. I had to dig only three or four feet down until I began to find artifacts. I eventually found several small v-shaped shards of the kind I needed.

  I love the high desert at night. The air is cool, clear, and dry, and the only scents it carries waft from creosote bushes and blooming cactus. Because there is nothing in the air, not even moisture, moonbeams arrive unspoiled. On this particular night, they washed the sand in light because the moon was full. Thanks to that and good night vision, I could sort out the shards I found. I took one that looked just right for my purpose and a couple of spares just in case. Then I put the others back in the earth. Professional archaeologists would have been proud of me. I filled the hole I had made, smoothed the sand, and departed. Or to paraphrase Kahlil Gibran, the digging hand digs and, having dug, moves on.

  It’s difficult to describe the thrill of finding something a fellow human being made a thousand years ago. Suddenly you are in contact with the ancient past. Yet it remains a mystery; the artifact you have found is like the tip of the iceberg. Howard Carter put it more poetically when he talked about what it was like to dig up Tut and his treasures: “The shadows move, but the dark is never quite dispersed.”

  The unearthed pot connects me to its maker, one potter to another. It has nothing to do with ethnicity, an accident of birth that we use as an excuse to treat different people differently. For some reason I don’t understand, we seem obsessed by our minor differences and blind to our vast commonality.

  One of the commonest bonds is clay. Every civilization on every continent since the day we first started using our hands for something other than walking has made things of clay. And even though we have passed out of the agricultural age, through the industrial age, and into the information age, clay remains a staple in human life. From the tiles on our floors to the plates on our tables, we use clay every day. Some of us even make a good living selling clay pots.

  In 1996, a nine-thousand-year-old skeleton was discovered along the banks of the Columbia River in Washington. It is a striking find for two reasons: it is among the oldest ever found in North America, and it appears to be Caucasian.

  I’m Caucasian, but I feel no kinship with those ancient bones. As an archaeologist, however, I am fascinated by them. What was a Caucasian doing along the Columbia River almost nine thousand years before the Voyage of Columbus? Did the prehistoric Vikings sail to America and trek across the continent? Did Caucasian-like people, perhaps the Ainu of Japan, come across the land bridge that is now under the Bering Straight? Are the Mormons correct that there was a white race in America in prehistoric times? We may never find out because the Umatilla Tribe has sued to have the bones interred on their reservation under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Their view is that any human remains on their land must be of their ancestors.

  This is one reason why I flout NAGPRA without compunction. One of the few certainties in the uncertain world of archeology is that peoples in all places and all times have moved and migrated—SAP number three. The skeletal remains from Washington are absolutely not the ancestors of the Umatilla. The ancient peoples we call the Mogollon are probably not the ancestors of today’s pueblo Indians. And if a skeleton is dug up under my adobe in Old Town, it will certainly not be my ancestor.

  I walked back to my Bronco, took off my shower caps, took the canvas off my tires when I reached the pavement, and retraced my route back to Albuquerque, arriving in Old Town just as the sun peeked over the Sandia Mountains. I prepared a plate of huevos rancheros and served it to myself with Gruet Blanc De Noir. I was still hungry afterwards, so I fried up some sliced potatoes with bits of chorizo and finished those with the rest of the champagne. Wielding a shovel works up the appetite. After doing the dishes, I went out to my patio and climbed into the hammock strung between and in the shade of my two cottonwood trees on ground which I am fairly confident is skeleton-free. I fell instantly and deeply asleep.

  I awoke as nature intends; namely, without the aid of any mechanical contrivance. It was late afternoon, just in time to shower, shave, don a pair of chinos and a blue oxford cloth shirt, and arrive at Dos Hermanas by five sharp.

  29

  “How was your weekend?” Susannah asked after we had settled in to our

  little corner of Dos Hermanas.

  “Well, Thursday night after you left, Kaylee showed up.”

  “Let me guess. She was huddled on the ground in front of your door again, and you took her in.”

  I shrugged and said, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”

  “I told you she’d be back; you can’t keep taking her in.”

  “I didn’t. I turned her over to Tristan.”

  �
�Oh great. Even normal girls can’t keep their hands off him.”

  “He can take care of himself. Anyway, he got a neighbor of his, a girl, to take her in temporarily.”

  “So now what?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Can’t the police handle it?”

  “I’ve threatened her with the police, and it works somewhat because she doesn’t want the police involved, but in fact, I doubt there’s anything they could do. She’s twenty-one. It’s not against the law to travel around with no possessions and make passes at men.”

  “Hmm. You don’t think she’s a criminal, do you? Maybe that’s why she’s afraid of the police.”

  “If she’s a criminal, she’s very bad at it. She had a little over twelve dollars in her wallet. Can you try to think of something, Suze.”

  “Yeah, I’ll give it some thought, but I’m not very optimistic.”

  We got a refill and I told her I’d spent most of Saturday with Consuela and Emilio.

  “How is she?”

  “I don’t know. Her spirits are high.”

  “And Emilio?”

  “He’s a rock.”

  “That’s probably why her spirits are high.”

  I nodded.

  “Hubie,” she said, “I know she wasn’t married when you were growing up, and she lived with your parents, so how did she meet Emilio?”

  “It was an arranged marriage. He was the oldest son of a family her parents knew.”

  She shuddered slightly. “I can’t imagine marrying someone I didn’t know.”

  “It’s the most common type of marriage worldwide.”

  “I know, and I guess if you’re raised in a culture that does that, it seems like the right thing to do. Still…”

  “You’re a romantic, Suze. So am I, truth be told. And so are Consuela and Emilio. It was only semi arranged. She went back to Chihuahua to meet him with the idea they would marry, but if they hadn’t hit it off, she was free to back out.”

  “And obviously they hit it off.”

  “Yeah, and she wanted to marry someone from back home anyway.”

  “Albuquerque is half Hispanic, Hubert; she didn’t have to go back to Mexico to find a husband.”

  “She didn’t want an Hispanic husband, Suze; she wanted a Mexican husband. The Hispanics of northern New Mexico are mostly descended from the Spaniards who came here in the sixteen hundreds. They have no more ties to Mexico than you have to England even though the people there speak the same language.”

  “Sort of,” she said. “So she wanted to marry someone from Mexico.”

  “Yeah, but don’t get me started on that because the whole idea is ridiculous. Maybe if more people studied anthropology, we would...”

  “See that all cultures are basically the same.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Well, don’t try to tell my mom that. When I was growing up she never let a day go by without reminding me that my goal in life was to marry a nice Basque boy.”

  “Maybe you will.”

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter at this point. She gave up the idea of a Basque boy when I passed eighteen without being married, and she said she could settle for anyone who was Catholic. When I passed twenty-one, she opened it up to Christians of any denomination or nationality. When I passed twenty-five, she became panicky. I think she would settle at this point for a member of the human race.”

  The sun had dropped below the buildings across the street and the dry desert air was suddenly cooler. I retrieved my windbreaker from the back of the chair and as I was putting it on, I saw Martin Seepu come through the door.

  “Which one of you is buying?” he asked as he took a seat.

  “I just gave you twenty-five hundred dollars on Friday,” I reminded him.

  “That was for my Uncle.”

  “Then let him buy,” I retorted.

  “He don’t drink.”

  “So I have to buy because your Uncle who isn’t even here doesn’t drink?”

  “That makes sense to me,” said Susannah.

  I threw up my hands and caught Angie’s attention. “Bring this Indian a beer, but keep a close watch on him; he can’t hold his liquor.” She rolled her eyes, shook her head and walked away. My ethnic humor is sometimes too subtle for her.

  Martin asked me what I had done over the weekend, and instead of rehashing what I had already told Susannah, I told them both how I had spent most of the night before at Gran Quivera.

  “So you just walked out into the middle of unmarked desert and dug up what you needed?” asked Susanna.

  “You make it sound like a needle in a haystack,” I said. “The desert isn’t unmarked; you just have to know how to read the land.”

  “Like feng shui,” said Martin.

  “I suppose so,” I said. “What does that mean, anyway?”

  “‘Feng’ means wind and ‘shui’ means water. The two forces that shape the desert.”

  “But feng shui is an Asian idea,” I pointed out.

  “I’m Asian,” said Martin. “You’re supposed to be an anthropologist. You never hear about the land bridge across the Bering Straight?”

  Angie brought Martin his cold Tecate in a can; she knows what brand he likes. “What kind of shard you find,” he asked.

  I pulled one out of my pocket and showed it to him. He turned it around in his hand, and then gave it back to me.

  “Doesn’t this bother you?” Susannah asked him.

  “You think there’s bad magic in that shard?”

  “No, of course not, but it’s Native American. Isn’t it somehow, I don’t know, irreverent to dig it up and parade it around?”

  Martin put some salsa on a chip, some salt on the salsa, and popped it in his mouth. Then he took a slow sip of beer. “The lady who runs the herbal shop two doors north of here calls herself an Africanist. I saw it on her business card. On the back of the card was a word I didn’t know, so I asked her what it meant, and she said it was the African word for friendship.”

  We just stared at him waiting to see where this was going.

  He took another slow sip of beer. “There’s no Native American word for friendship. There’s no European word for friendship. There’s no Asian word for friendship. I don’t know much about Africa, but I don’t think the whole continent speaks one language.”

  More staring. Another slow sip of beer.

  “I’m a Native American because my people were here before the Europeans arrived. The people of Grand Quivera were Native American for the same reason. What we have in common is that we were on the same continent in the same time frame. The Basque and the Estonians have as much in common as we do because they’re both on the same continent at the same time.” Then he turned to me and said with a gleam in his eyes, “You want to make that one of your Premises, you have my permission.”

  “The Basque and the Estonians?” said Susannah, eyebrows raised..

  “You’re Basque. I try to pick examples that hit home.”

  “You think I’m Estonian?” I asked.

  “Probably not; you’re too short. I just thought the contrast between the two words was nice, sort of a haiku ring to them.”

  “Jeez,” said Susanna, “first feng shui and now haiku.”

  “It must be the land bridge thing,” I offered.

  “You guys think I should have a second round before class; there’s enough time.”

  “What class is it,” Martin and I asked in unison.

  “What difference does that make?”

  Martin and I looked each other, and he pointed to me, so I said, “Some classes call for less sobriety than others.”

  “It’s a seminar in surrealism.”

  “Have another round,” we said, again in unison.

  “Surrealism,” I said after Angie brought our drinks, “that’s like Dali’s painting of the limp clocks?”

  “Yeah. That one’s called The Persistence of Memory.”

  “I don’t get the title,” said
Martin.

  “I don’t either,” she said. “Seems like it should be called Loss of Memory because we don’t remember clocks as being soft. And that would also fit in with the philosophy of the surrealists.”

  “They had a philosophy?” I asked.

  She dropped her shoulders and looked at me like I should know better. “Of course they had a philosophy. We’re talking art history, Hube, not art appreciation.”

  “Sorry. So what was their philosophy?”

  “Something like wanting to escape reason and reality. They were fascinated with randomness, coincidence, the unexpected, the power of dreams, the marvelous and the irrational.”

  “Sounds like a mental hospital,” said Martin.

  She chuckled and said, “They might even agree with you. Dali claimed to use self-induced hallucinations when he painted.”

  “So do some Indian artists,” said Martin.

  “So the limp clocks are supposed to be an hallucination?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so. He might even say they are more real than normal clocks. He called them ‘the camembert of time’; isn’t that a great phrase? Anyway, the surrealists wanted to blur the line between reality and fantasy, like in Magritte’s L'Empire des Lumières where the scene is night and day at the same time. Everything in front of a house is dark and there’s a porch light reflecting in a dark pond, but behind the scene the sky is light blue with scattered white clouds?”

  “I’ve always liked that painting, I said, “I never looked at it as making a philosophical point; I just thought it was a neat piece of trick painting.”

  “Don’t say that around any art historians, Hubie.”

  “I won’t,” I promised. Then I thought for a moment and said, “The fact is, I’m going to engage in a little trickery myself, thanks to you.” Then I proceeded to tell them my plan for getting the pot from the Valle del Rio Museum and how Susannah’s illustration of an isomorphic drawing had inspired it. She was so excited that she volunteered to help.