I was helping Aunt June to prepare dinner and looked up and kidded him. “Let’s hope no one is going to get shot at this time.”
Hidalgo who had just walked into the kitchen picked up on the conversation, looked at me, and added, “Or kidnapped.” Our last encounter with the two characters that were antiquity thieves was still a sensitive memory. The kidnappers were spending time in the New Mexico State Penitentiary and by the time the thieves were released from prison, they would be too old to care.
Everyone was building up the ranch we lived on but we still had plenty of time to explore our new passions; being river runners and historical detectives had been a lucrative hobby but now it was becoming so much more, opening up new and exciting pursuits.
Corey sat down beside me and pretended he was holding me to protect me while Hidalgo grabbed at me, which brought a giggle out of me followed with, “Well, let’s hear it.” Everyone settled down to hear Corey’s story.
Corey pulled out a thick letter he had received and began to explain. “It all has to do with my Aunt Alice and her family that lives in Albuquerque. Oral history is very much alive in the family. Aunt Alice is the repository of all of the oral history. She is the person who in the Holliday family was always the historian as well as the executor of the family wills. As you may guess, the family has been keeping up with our adventures as historical detectives and volunteered a family secret to us. Aunt Alice thought that maybe we could get to the bottom of a mystery that she had encountered.”
Hidalgo said, “So this is not really your mystery but one of your relatives?”
“Yes,” replied Corey, “However, Aunt Alice would never have written to me about it unless there was something to it. Let me set the stage for you. There are actually two letters here, one from Alice about family stuff and one from her son Richard who wrote down the details of the mystery.” With that he began an explanation of the locality of the mystery as he read from segments of the letter.
“The Rio Gallina, located between Cuba and Lindrith, is a tiny desert stream draining a large canyon after summer downpours. Usually there is just enough seep water in it to get your toes muddy or your jeep struck. But in times of flash floods, as with all drainage systems, this tiny stream can become a roaring hematite red torrent of water as it carries everything down its channel to be deposited down river. The Rio Gallina is a tributary of the Rio Chama, a popular whitewater canoe river, with the confluence occurring across the river from Christ in the Desert Monastery.” Corey added on his own, “Much of the letter is also about an Indian culture that existed there between the seventh and the tenth centuries A.D. They were a strange people who apparently kept to themselves. According to what Richard was able to discover about them, they did not engage in trade, no Chacoan or any other pottery is found in their villages, and none of their pottery is found anywhere else. Apparently at one time or another, the people who lived there long ago were all massacred, anyway that is what the archeological literature claims.”
I jumped into the conversation with, “Does all this mean we are going on another canoe trip, maybe down the Rio Gallina River?”
“Well,” said Corey, “the river there is only a few inches deep, however we might run the Chama River.”
“Well, we could drag the canoes down the river,” Hidalgo sheepishly replied in a tease.
We had taken up river running as a way of exploring the back country. What started as a simple raft trip down the whitewater section of the Rio Grande River, being coached by Dr. Wayne Douglas, who was a passionate river runner and professor at the University of Colorado, had developed into our passion. I loved it. Corey and I had rented a tandem canoe but now we were purchasing our own solo canoes and equipment from a store in Albuquerque. I had insisted upon having my own solo canoe after our adventures in White Rock Canyon.
Referring back to the letter but not reading from it Corey continued, “Aunt Alice and Uncle Boone were deer hunting in Gallina canyon when this mystery occurred. You all know how it is with families like that; deer hunting was a vacation for them. They never went anywhere unless they were fishing, deer hunting, or rabbit hunting. It was what they worked for. Anyway this part of the letter was written by their son, Richard. He is the one who really wants information about what happened to them.”
Aunt June and Uncle Ken joined them, all bent on hearing the mystery. The letter read as follows:
“Dear Corey,
I hope things are going well with you and your adopted family. Say hello to everyone for me. Things are fine with us but I can’t get this hunting trip we took out of my head and I was hoping you and Penny and that Navajo fellow might shed a little light on this subject for me.”
I again started to giggle and poked Hidalgo in the ribs. “I wonder if he means this Navajo fellow or some other Navajo.”
“Cut it out.” growled Hidalgo who wanted to hear the story.”
“If you take the dirt road between Regina and El Vado, New Mexico, you can find, after some exploration, a road over to the Gallinas Canyon. We have deer hunted there a couple of times and every time we go there I have the time of my life exploring the place. This last time we went hunting, I had a schoolmate, Butch Roberts and his parents go hunting deer with us. Where we camped, which is where the jeep road drops down into the bottom of the canyon; there are on top of almost every small hillside, pits dug out of the ground with circular edges lined with stones that suffice for walls. Timbers made from the surrounding ponderosa pines provide rafters. Finally, small branches with mats of grass and dirt make up the roofs. Sometimes rocks cover the entire home so that the unwary person might be totally unaware of the kiva - like home under their feet. Like much of New Mexico, this area has been isolated long enough so that many of the remains of the ancient Indians are still in place, undisturbed after thousands of years.”
“My mother, Alice reminisces about her days as a little girl, when the family would go down from Estancia and explore the Gran Quivera Ruins just south of Mountainair. It was a lot of fun for a little girl to run and play on the maze of walls that remained at the site.”
“She would get arrested for doing that now.” responded Aunt June.
Corey continued reading the letter, “In Gallina Canyon I really wanted to dig into as many ruins as possible. Who knows what marvelous things my friend Butch and I might uncover? Fortunately, as you know, Grand Quivera Ruins and most other ruins are now protected under the Antiquities Act to protect them from little grave robbers such as I was then. Tell your Navajo friend and June that I am sorry for my trespasses but I didn’t know any better back then.”
Hidalgo said grudgingly, “Well I suppose I can forgive him if he has a good enough story to tell us. Besides he was just like many other kids out there that don’t know any better.”
Corey continued reading the letter, “This was the place my family decided to go deer hunting again that year. Everyone achieved adulthood or so I thought, through the ritual of deer hunting. At least, that was the way I imagined the world worked, as a boy. Like many other families in the South Valley of Albuquerque, my folks would work all year long in order to take a week off and go deer hunting; our vacation.”
“When we arrived the air temperature was moderate, not cold at all. But after setting up camp and spending the morning exploring the local countryside, the temperature immediately dropped. Huge six sided snow crystals persisted in the air throughout the afternoon, covering up any sign of ancient mystery and turning my mind back to what we had come up here for, deer hunting. Slowly, after dark, the sky cleared and the stars came out in the most amazing clarity that memory affords me. It was spectacular! After a heavy snow the night sky is cleansed by each and every snowflake with the tiniest particle of soot or dust in its center. The snow literally cleanses the air.”
“And so it was that I found myself camped out with my folks and the parents of my friend Butch, sitting around a campfire one snowy October evening, when the most amazing thing hap
pened. My mother Alice was talking to a captive audience of Butch and me. Lois, Butch’s mother, was there as well as my little brother who couldn’t remember anything because of his tender age. Dad and everyone else were back in Cuba, New Mexico, trying to get a broken differential repaired on Mr. Roberts’ jeep, which was the only way to avoid walking for miles up and down the river when hunting. My mother, Alice was sitting there with the rest of us, looking into the campfire while we were sipping mugs filled with brews of hot cocoa or coffee.”
“We had big problems to contend with; first there was the broken jeep, then there was the snow which made travel difficult if not impossible. We weren’t really prepared for this drastic weather change, yet we were all having a ball just contending with it. I don’t remember exactly what she was talking about, but suddenly, in the middle of a sentence; my mother stopped, looked off to the hillside north of us, and said, what’s that?”
“Vision and perception on a crisp, cold, fall evening after a snow can really be acute. This was the kind of atmosphere that astronomers prefer when photographing the stars. You can see for miles with the naked eye, and we all saw the same thing. At first we could see what appeared to be a small orange explosion. A mushroom shaped ball of what appeared to be brilliant fire that got bigger and redder as it rose from the earth. It took a few seconds for us to figure out how far away it was. On the side of the hill this apparition rose through the clear sky.”
“Did an airplane crash? My mother slowly asked, as we stared in amazement.”
“Probably an atomic bomb, Butch blurted out.”
“No, it isn’t that far away”, I said, thinking out loud, based upon what I knew about bomb testing, which was next to nothing. It was about then that we realized that there was no sound.”
“Looks like a jet crash or a gas-well fire,” I volunteered. The more we looked, however, the more we became convinced that it was just up the hill from our camp, only a few hundred yards away. It was really close! No sound, no explosion, just a brilliant ball of colors in the general shape of a thunderhead superimposed and reflecting off the snow. The apparition appeared to be boiling with colors emanating from the inside out. I had just walked down that same hill a few hours before while returning from a hike and couldn’t remember anything strange about the place.”
“The apparition started to change. Deep reds and purples appeared yet not a sound. It didn’t expand exactly like a fireball. Reflecting back upon it, I have the impression that it had a high density; it was much heavier than the surrounding air. It was an entity. It was heavy, metallic and sparkly despite its gaseous appearance. Soon, it began billowing out. Within a few minutes it began to flow toward us, with colorful tendrils cascading over rocks and through the trees toward our camp. Phosphorescence, psychedelics, whatever it was, it had lost its brilliant colors after the initial fireball and began to show subtle shades of pinks and lavenders. This shimmering, cascading, no longer metallic fog still seemed unearthly with glowing points of light in it. Perhaps ten minutes passed, which seemed like a lifetime as the mist swirled around us on its way to lower grounds. Little puffs of it jetted up as it passed over the fire. Once at the riverbed it lasted perhaps another twenty minutes or so before disappearing altogether. There just seemed to be a glowing in the moonlight over the riverbed the rest of the evening. No sound or smell, no sensation of heat at all and apparently no after effects except to forever make us skeptical about what we understood as science.”
“At least, I am spared the responsibility of defining what it was that I saw. I simply can’t.” My mother and I discussed the incident many times. I am often reminded of it when seeing high school chemistry experiments, which produce colorful clouds, or even in tiny rainbows of color in the prisms of early dew and water, yet, never with all the same brilliant characteristics of that fateful evening. I never thought that deer hunting could be such a metaphysical experience.”
“Last year we returned to the canyon and stopped to talk to a sheepherder who was in front of Unzueta’s near the small village of Gallina, who knew what I was talking about. He explained that his grandfather, who also was a sheepherder, experienced the same mystery many times while tending his sheep in Gallinas, but the fellow stopped talking and left as soon as Alice and Boone came out to join us.”
“According to a friend of mine, this sort of stuff occurs all over the southwest. He claims to have seen the same sort of stuff while floating down the San Juan River and in a minor way, in Aspen Colorado. Do you have any idea what it was? Hope to hear from you soon, Richard”
“What do you suppose it was,” volunteered Uncle Ken?”
I answered, “It sounds like what people see in North Carolina at a place called Linville Falls. There, many people camp out or sit in their cars at an overlook to see lights that appear in the canyon. Scientists speculate that they are plasma balls generated by earthquake activity. In the laboratory, when granite is crushed it can generate tiny balls of colorful plasma. They hypothesize that the entire area is under tectonic stress and the stress creates the ball plasmas. It might be something else though; ball plasma tends to disappear as soon as it comes into contact with anything.”
Hidalgo then entered the conversation, “All over the Four Corners region people have experienced strange lights in the sky. My people, the Navajo, have beliefs about them. They call them Skin Walkers, some call them Shape Shifters. They believe that they are witches or brujas who can change their form from one creature or another or simply show themselves as balls of light.”
Corey asked, “Is that what you believe?”
Hidalgo answered cautiously, “Well I don’t really know. Most sane people simply say that beliefs such as those are really superstitions. You realize that I have never actually seen anything like that and I have lived in that area for years. I do know that when I worked for the police department in Durango, occasionally someone would report seeing lights in the sky but they were usually dismissed as nuts. The majority of those reports came from around the San Juan River area which forms the northern boundary of the Navajo Indian Reservation. No one really pays any attention to those reports because most of the people who are floating down that river are partying. One fellow claimed to have seen two moons one evening but then he had drunk several shots of whisky beforehand. Everyone just laughed at him.”
I interjected, “Yes but they can’t all be crazy or under the influence. Besides, researching the subject would be a great excuse to explore another river.” I looked over at Corey who didn’t give me any indication at all, which disappointed me, but Hidalgo was curiously excited about the prospect.
Hidalgo said, “I think it would be a great idea if Ken and June would volunteer to provide us with a shuttle and if I could go into Durango for a short while, there is a bilagaana I would like to visit.” Everyone looked a little puzzled for a moment but he continued his point. “It has been a long time since I have seen this person and I have some unfinished business to take care of.”
With that everyone started the practical business of planning a trip to Durango where we would drop off Hidalgo. Then, if all went as expected and we got a required permit from the Bureau of Land Management for the lower San Juan, we would drive down the Animas River toward Farmington where we would find a good put-in, meet Hidalgo, and launch our canoe trip.
The Bilaganna
I did my research. The creation of many classic southwestern desert rivers begins high on the volcanic slopes of the mountains of Colorado where winter snow accumulates following cycles as old as time. Near Wolf Creek Pass, melting snow slowly turns into rivulets. The major contributor to the San Juan River is the Animas, becoming a river from thousands of rivulets near the tourist town of Silverton, Colorado. The river there is not considered navigable because the water actually flows through and under talus rock piles. People have tried it but many of the bodies have yet to be found.
Other tributaries which can produce amazing amounts of sudden runoff below Farmi
ngton are the La Plata River, Blanco Canyon, Gallegos Canyon, Chaco Canyon, Montezuma Creek, Recapture Creek, Cottonwood Wash, Comb Wash, Chinle Creek, Grand Gulch, and Oljeto Wash, the watershed is enormous. With such an extremely large drainage area, unpredictable floods can occur at any time. The high water that carries away your icebox on a hot summer day may have come from a thunderstorm hundreds of miles away. A party of canoes only one canyon up stream may not notice the change. Down river, the source of the flood may often be deduced by the color of the river water. The river here is reminiscent of all wise and beautiful women, she returns a gentility and playfulness when approached with preparation, flattery and care; but can be cruel when not properly appreciated.
The river runner must be willing to invest tremendous amounts of time and resources for the opportunity to visit and become intimate with this most unique and grandest of rivers. A visit requires the river runner to come to grips with profound psychological, physical, and logistical challenges. The rapids are relatively easy class I - III at normal water levels. The scenery is spectacular, providing a paradise for the student of geology and there are few places in the United States where the stratum is so vividly exposed. Many great western movies have been filmed there.
This canyon, along with many others in the area, like the Grand Canyon, was formed when the Colorado plateau began to rise some seven to nine million years ago, trapping a much older meandering river. As the land rose, the ancient entrenched river simply kept its original course cutting down through 2000 feet of much older Permian rocks. During its course across the Four Corners area the San Juan traverses a series of geologic formations representing an enormous period of time, from the base of the Cretaceous formations down to exposed rocks from the middle of the Pennsylvanian age. Fossils can be found everywhere often as a beautifully agatized red matrix in gray limestone. Volcanic intrusions further complicate the geology adding to the mystery and beauty of the area such as in the Mule Ear Diatreme area. A volcanic vent pipe, similar to the Kimberlite pipes of South Africa that is mined for the world’s best diamonds. It forms a prominent feature of the area as well as a marker into the deep canyons.
The Family at Serpiente Page 30
