by Kurt Caswell
“Have you been up to the panel above?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “I didn’t know there was a panel above. I didn’t know there was an above above.”
She was dressed in her BLM uniform, a small government-issue day pack on her back, hair about shoulder length, curly, sandy blonde, lovely muscular legs, and a lovely shapeliness to her from walking the canyon. She was young, maybe midtwenties. I was young too, maybe late twenties.
“Let me show you something not many people have seen,” she said.
“That’s very generous of you.”
“Go right up that slick rock there,” she said. “It doesn’t look like you can make it, but you can. Take your pack up if you like. Nice campsite up there too. Go right up the side of it all the way to the top.”
“What will I find?”
“How about I show you?”
“That’s very generous of you.”
I dropped my pack and up we went, up the side of the slick rock at an impossible gradient. It really was an impossible gradient, and I said so.
“This is an impossible gradient,” I told her.
“It looks that way,” she said. “But see how easy it is.”
At the top, she led me along a faint trail to the canyon wall, the nose of another great tower that rose to the rim and made an outline against the sky. You could see where a great slab of the canyon had come away; pieces of it were scattered about.
“Here,” she said. “Come closer. Have a look at this.”
I thought I was playing a role in a movie. Now we would stand in awe at the panel, see the figures and animals pecked into the stone, notice two figures making the beast with two backs, and feel a sudden rush of adrenaline and lust, at which point we’d exchange glances, ask the other what books, what coffees, what movies we liked, and inquire “Do you like to travel?” She would turn to me and say something like, “Oh, God, how beautiful,” and I would say nothing, the strong silent type, then take her by the wrist, wrest her pack from her, drop it on the ground, and strip her of her desire there on the bare rock under the warm sun as clouds wheeled overhead like my darkened loneliness.
We stood there staring at the panel together. Kokopelli skipped lightly over the face of it with his long flute. Kokopelli the trickster, the spirit of agriculture, the music man, the fertility god. Between his legs, his cock like a long snake, unfolded far below his feet and extended off the face of the rock.
“Well,” she said. “Have fun.”
And then she walked out of my life forever.
Up Bullet Canyon, I descended the ladder into Perfect Kiva with my friends from California and the woman I married. The kiva is a round room the Anasazi used for community events and for ceremony. Most villages had at least one. Inside, we crouched in a circle, our eyes adjusting to the darkness. How evenly the sun angled in through the door in the roof, even on an overcast day like this one, a straight shaft of light. I wanted to locate the sipapu, the little hole in the floor symbolic of the gateway where the Anasazi, at the direction of Grandmother Spider Woman, the creator, ascended from the underworld into this world. Every kiva has one. And the door of the kiva itself, as the people climbed in and out of it, is a reenactment of this original moment of emergence.
In Roads to Center Place, Kathryn Gabriel suggests that Spider Woman also urged the people to find the center place, and then she gave it to them. She lay down on the earth, her long legs extending outward to the four directions, thereby making her heart the center place. For Gabriel, this is Chaco Canyon, a great Anasazi complex in northwestern New Mexico, from which a series of roads radiate outward to the villages, like these at Grand Gulch. The roads tend not to skirt around mesas and mountains but to cut through them, or over them. Seasonally, the people made a pilgrimage to Chaco Canyon to worship, following these roads back to the center place, back to the original sipapu, grandmother’s heart. “The ultimate duty is to walk the straight road,” Gabriel writes, “and the ultimate blessing is to finish one’s own road, or to attain an equilibrium in old age, and to return to the underworld through the sipapu.”
But nothing is this simple, this straightforward. The straight road is not always straight. Gabriel explains:
Just as the emergence became a metaphor for migration and leaving one’s ancestral home, taking the straight road became a metaphor for a centering process. One follows the straight road without deviation throughout a life of service to one’s pueblo. Migration is symbolized by a coiled snake, the sign for water. . . . Ultimately, the straight road takes one back to the place of emergence. Thus the straight road becomes a circle, a snake swallowing its tail for all eternity.
Walking out of Bullet Canyon in 1999, the sky fell in on top of us. It rained, soft and light, then a cold wind blew in and the rain turned to snow. We took shelter for the night under the juniper and pinyon, sat under the branches with cups of hot tea. It rained much of the night. In the gray morning, we loaded our packs. Patches of snow melted over the sandstone in the finicky air. The desert varnish showed jet black against the white. As we ascended the narrow canyon, the woman I had married spotted a lovely little pool in the rock, the water black and cold. She was just the sort who would do that kind of thing. We told her, yes, we would wait for her. She made her way through the towers of stone down to the pool’s edge, stripped off her clothes, and dove in.
At first we could see the white form of her body beneath the black water, and then (maybe it was the shifting light on that gray day) we could not. She seemed to be down for a long time, longer than a person might hold their breath. Had she found the way through? Bubbles rose to the surface just as one of us might have said something, and her head appeared and then her astonished face. A breeze kicked up, rustling the juniper and pine as the woman emerged from the water, cold, wet, and alive.
CROSSING OVER THE MOUNTAIN
Idaho, 2006
But all the waters of the world find one another again, and the Arctic seas and the Nile gather together in the moist flight of clouds. The old beautiful image makes my hour holy. Every road leads us wanderers too back home.
— Herman Hesse, Wandering
Dawn. A few rain drops on Lookout Peak. I woke to the sound of the plink, plink of the rain against the rain fly, and the bloodstain on the mesh wall of my tent from the border collie pup that now slept in my vestibule. The night before, I had only just crawled into my tent in the dark when I heard Rambo, a border collie/heeler mix as fierce and violent as his name, savage this little pup that had dared approach the food bowl. Rambo had little interest in the sheep, and little interest in people, as he had warned me away several times when I approached him to remove the ticks that ringed him like a necklace of grapes. But he was hell on coyotes. His only mission, it seemed, was to chase coyotes, or kill them if he could. And the pup, savaged in the night, his ear a torn and bloody rag, came sadly to my tent. I knew that Hector and the other sheep herders, Edwin and Freddy, would laugh at me if they knew, as a dog that can’t make it on its own out here isn’t a dog at all.
We packed and loaded and left without coffee or breakfast as storm clouds came careening in and the rain came down with thunder and lightning. Today we had to cross over the mountain, Lookout Peak, and descend onto the west side of Cascade Lake, near Cascade, Idaho. I’d become used to this routine: an early, fast wake-up, heavy labor for an hour, and a hasty departure on a hard stomach. It was cold, colder than any morning I’d been out with the sheep, and the air was wild and high. As thunderheads settled in over the top of us, Hector mounted his horse—the horse with no name—and rode ahead pushing the band of sheep up over the mountain. He sang an old Peruvian song as he went:
Hoy estoy aqui
Mañana ya no
Pasado mañana por donde estaré
[I am here today
I won’t be tomorrow
Who knows where I’ll be the day after tomorrow.]
Hector Artica is one of about twenty Peruvian sheep herders w
orking for the Soulen Livestock Company, a third-generation Idaho sheep and cattle outfit. I was traveling with him this summer, as I had last summer, for three reasons: to see wolves, which had recently been reintroduced to the mountain West after about one hundred years following eradication; to get a story; and to live out my romantic vision of the shepherd’s life.
The Soulen ranch consists of about fifty thousand deeded acres, with another sixty thousand acres of grazing allotments with the BLM, and other allotments with the Forest Service and the state of Idaho. These allotments have dwindled in recent years due to a number of pressures, especially concern for bighorn sheep, which contract a deadly pneumonia-like disease carried by domestic sheep. Phil Soulen; his daughter, Margaret; and his son, Harry, share management of the ranch. Margaret focuses her efforts on the sheep operation (between 10,000 and 14,000 sheep divided into five to seven bands, depending on the time of year), while Harry mostly works the cows (about 1,000 head). Each sheep band is assigned a herder, charged with the safety and health of the sheep; and a camp tender, charged with the safety and health of the herder. The camp tender takes on the tasks of cooking, camp setup and takedown, and moving camp on a mule and horse pack string. The sheep graze a vast expanse of country, making a long loop from their winter range on the Snake River south of Nampa, Idaho, to their summer range in the mountains near McCall, Idaho. As spring turns to summer, the sheep follow the grass into the high country. Every mile between these distant points, the sheep must walk. The lambs are born on that range, the ewes live and die out there with the guard dogs and the herding dogs, and the shepherds, too, live on the range year-round with the eagles and trout, the coyotes and bears.
Hector’s Idaho driver’s license claims he is five feet tall, but I wager he is sub four-eleven. He comes from Lima, the capital city of Peru, but has spent much of his adult life with his wife and young son in a village on the Altiplano, the high plains of the Andes, which average about 12,000 feet elevation. His family is there still, and he has not seen them in a couple years. Working through the Western Range Association, the herders contract with the ranch for three-year work visas, with an option to renew after returning home for a few months. Hector is near the end of his second contract cycle.
The herders are compensated with a salary of $750 per month, with all other expenses paid—food, shelter, supplies, transportation, health care. This may not sound like much to Americans who love, above all things, to consume, but living a modest life without expenses, the herders are able to send most of their money home, where the per capita gross domestic product (GDP) is $5,600 per year. Compare that to the per capita GDP in United States: $40,100.
The pattern here, the relationship between herder and sheep and dogs, is as old as the hills, even those hills rooted in the mythic past and first grazed by Abel’s sheep, born out of Eden with his brother Cain, who slew him. The story goes that Abel was beloved of God, and in his jealousy, Cain rose up against him. Imagine, though, the tension between these two men, one a bondsman to the land, devoted to it, imprisoned by it, unable to live a single day that the land did not need him. The other, a man as free as the bully winds that blew in over the fallen world, who roamed from place to place with his sheep and dogs, from good grass to good grass, from good water to good water. First there is the tension between bondage and freedom, and then, would not Cain defend his fields from the insatiable hunger of his brother’s sheep? When Cain says to God, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” he means that he is not, and he means that in fact his brother is a keeper of sheep, and he is the keeper of his fields, which must be kept even at the expense of his brother.
The tension between Cain and Abel, and the deed that was inevitably to come, is seeded in the men’s names, too. “Cain” is rooted in the Hebrew word kanah, meaning “to possess or acquire,” and koneh, which means “to create, shape, or form.” Cain is the created man, having taken shape in his mother’s womb. He commands space and identity. He acquires and possesses the material world. This is precisely what he does in his occupation as farmer: he owns and controls the land, takes dominion over it. “Abel” is from the Hebrew word hebel, which means “vapor, breath, or breath that vanishes.” As a shepherd, he is a creature who roams, drifts, floats, and may be nowhere and anywhere at any time. He is a wanderer, a transient, a vagabond, which mirrors the fleetness of his very life, taken from him by Cain, the possessor.
After Cain murders Abel, God issues his punishment. He is to be “cursed from the earth,” which opens “her mouth to receive [his] brother’s blood from [his] hand.” Now when Cain tills the earth, it will not yield “her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt [he] be in the earth.” The earth is explicitly female here, so that among Cain’s crimes (murder, betrayal, lying) is the violation of the feminine, of the creative power of procreation, even the violation of Eve, Cain’s mother. God commands that the source of Cain’s identity and power (his ability to bring forth fruit from the feminine ground) will be denied him. The strength of the earth, and so the strength of the feminine, will not be known to Cain again. It will be known to Abel, however, who is accepted by the feminine earth as she opens her mouth to receive him. The fertile soil accepts Abel and rejects Cain. In effect, the two brothers exchange roles: Abel as farmer (or, more literally, he becomes the farmed land), and Cain as wanderer. Yet Cain will be a different wanderer than his brother, for Abel was at home with his flocks in the wild lands, and Cain will remain a drifter, always out of place wherever and whenever he is. To compound this eternal state of exile, Cain will be forever pursued by the guilt of his crimes, and only a state of continual wandering will allow him to atone for his brother’s murder.
Cain departs the only home he has known, traveling “out from the presence of the Lord” and dwelling “in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden.” The name “Nod” corresponds with the Hebrew word for “wanderer,” so Cain dwells in the land of wandering, which is to say that he lives everywhere and nowhere, where Abel once roamed free before him. Cain is truly alone, lost, without support or anchorage of any kind, and what he does next is remarkable.
Cain fathers a son, Enoch, which begins the ages of humankind. The story continues as a genealogy of who begat whom, alongside the construction of civilization, a civilization based on an economy in agriculture, which will prove intolerant to a nomadic way of life, to Abel’s way of life. Later, along Cain’s line is born “Tubal-cain, the master of all coppersmiths and blacksmiths.” As metallurgist, Tubal-cain possesses the power to fashion the tools that drive the agricultural machine and shape the weapons of war against nomadic raiders. Metallurgy is a dark art, a sacred art, one which, during the Iron Age, was both honored and feared. The metallurgist does not perform his art alone, however; he requires the miner and the blacksmith.
In his three-volume series A History of Religious Ideas, Mircea Eliade writes, “Mines [were] assimilated to the womb of Mother Earth,” where metals were thought to grow and change. Mining metals from the womb of the earth is a process of interrupting the gestation period. The immense spans of time required to transform metals and make them perfect, it was believed, could be hastened in the forge. This is why miners practice “rites involving a state of purity, fasting, meditation, prayers, and cult acts,” writes Eliade. Together, the miner, blacksmith, and the metallurgist—three parts of one process—assume “responsibility for changing nature,” by taking “the place of time.” What would have taken Mother Nature “eons to ripen in the subterranean depths,” writes Eliade, “the artisan believes he can obtain in a few weeks; for the furnace replaces the telluric womb.” Such powers were considered both “sacred and demonic.” Metallurgists and smiths “[were] highly esteemed but [were] also feared, segregated, or even scorned.” Like Adam and Eve before him, Cain’s desire to master nature and so master time will play out in a cycle of violence and subjugation of those peoples who live by the will of nature and time, the nomads and pastoral nomads, whom Abel himself embodies. It is the fa
rmer, and the civilization built on that economy, who seeks mastery of the weathers and seasons, who amasses wealth to fill a spiritual emptiness that comes with the subjugation of nature, who is obsessed with youth and immortality and so disgusted by the limitations, humors, and pleasures of the body. Ironically, it is Cain, not Abel, who is a slave to time, who falls prey to the very thing he wishes to control.
I hurried along on foot behind Hector’s horse, as lightning gave us the tree-lined horizon in flashes. Hector, I knew, hated lightning. He feared it. I’d heard it told that during a storm, Hector would not go near his rifle, and sometimes he would leave it a long way out of camp, thinking it would attract lightning. He has good reason to fear. A few years ago, a bolt struck the stovepipe of a herder’s tent and blew him out of his shoes. Hector once visited a Forest Service fire lookout and noticed the glass insulators on the legs of the chairs and the bed. Later, he happened across such an insulator lying derelict on the forest floor. He wore the insulator around his neck as a talisman against a blue bolt from the heavens. Under the flash and boom of this storm, he looked possessed, driving those sheep on, hard and fast, to get over the top of the mountain before God struck him down.
“Lightning no no good for me,” Hector said.
We came upon a bag of dog food in the trail that must have fallen off one of the mules in the pack string ahead of us. Freddy, the camp tender, had gone on ahead with the camp hoping to set up near Cascade Lake on the other side before we arrived with the sheep. Edwin pushed his band out ahead of us, and Hector and I followed up the rear with his band. Our camp, a tidy kit packed on five horses and mules, consisted of one canvas wall tent, a wood-burning cookstove, four wooden boxes for storing the kitchen and food, four five-gallon water jugs, and various bundles of other gear: bedding for the men, their clothes and personal items, a rifle and a shepherd’s crook for each herder, the dog food, a couple small folding stools on which to sit. Food was resupplied by the foreman, Cesar Ayllon, when the camp’s location allowed road access. Everything we needed to live comfortably was here, and not much else. The herder’s kit has changed very little since Abel’s time.
