by James Dodson
Part of Chaco’s powerful allure was its mystery—archaeologists had mapped, photographed, and excavated the canyon extensively for more than a century but found themselves forever debating such unanswered riddles as why towns that were obviously wealthy and home to people of advanced engineering capabilities contained so few traces of the people themselves, including burial sites. Where had the people gone? The canyon’s remoteness was another part of its allure. Even today you reached it over arrow-straight dirt roads built on the remains of an extensive network of ancient highways radiating from the heart of the canyon. It might be biting off more than we cared to chew to try and see the canyon, but maybe not. The annual Indian Festival was going on in Santa Fe. That might be worth a look, too.
“Definitely,” Wendy said, when I mentioned all this. “Will you stay in touch?”
“Definitely,” Maggie answered for both of us.
A little while later, after following the Animas River out of Colorado into New Mexico, and passing the Aztec Ruins National Monument, I felt a small pang of regret as we crossed over the San Juan River and turned south toward Angel Peak. I spotted a lone fly angler working the river and briefly envied him but remembered the river wasn’t going anywhere soon and I could always come back. Amos hung his head out the window to let his jowls flap pleasantly in the wind.
The geology of the San Juan Basin, as it’s called, is harsh and generally forbidding to the green-loving eastern eye, a lonely place of spiny scrub brush and yellow limestone rock that abruptly buckles and dips and changes hues as the relentless sun moves over the earth. Out here, I realized as we drove, it’s easy to see why these ancient peoples based their secret religious rites on and set the rhythms of their lives to the movement of the sun. Among other things, they built ingenious spiral clocks in the face of rocks that dictated the best times for planting and harvesting, described animal migrations and the rising and falling river. The Southwest, according to one famous Indian song, was a House Made of Dawn.
Pueblo was the name given by the conquering Spanish to the various native peoples who descended from the prehistoric Anasazi and occupied more than eighty villages made of stone and adobe scattered around the Four Corners area of the American Southwest. They were perhaps the first people on earth to raise and cultivate corn, in fact, and 60 percent of the foods eaten all over the world today, it’s estimated, was first domesticated by Native Americans.
Corn was the staff of life and the Pueblo people knew where it came from—from the Corn Mothers who climbed up from their secret kivas to the surface of the earth at the dawn of time. At birth, every Indian child was given a corn fetish, a doll made of corn husks designed to remind them that every plant, animal, and human was sacred and came from the earth. Women did most of the planting and harvesting but also directed the agricultural rituals, often praying while irrigating crops, generally managing the direction of village life.
I told Maggie this story as we rumbled down a dirt road, throwing up an impressive fantail of dust behind Old Blue. It had taken us a couple hours to reach Nageezi and turn off onto an unpaved road to the Chaco Canyon reception center. “Mom would have been a nice Corn Mother,” she said, thoughtfully regarding the ancient landscape. “She’s an excellent boss.”
I smiled, unable to disagree. My wife was an excellent boss, a good worker, a nurturing mother, a natural-born organizer of life, a crack vegetable grower, a strong woman who would have survived nicely out here. She liked sun, thrived in warmth. Glancing around, I realized I probably wouldn’t have fared nearly as well here. My soul needed evergreens and running waters, changing weather, rain and snow, dark soil, growing flowers. Perhaps this explained a lot about what happened to our marriage—right people, wrong weather—or maybe I was just being sun-mused by the House of Dawn.
We reached a paved road and suddenly, almost before we noticed, began to see ancient stone structures. It was nearly lunchtime, and observing the structures with their finely dressed walls and beautifully intact curving stoneworks flooded me with a powerful feeling of this place’s remote antiquity. I’d had this feeling only one other time in my life—standing amid a prehistoric stone ring on a windswept ridge in the Orkney Islands. Ruins whisper. At its apogee of life around the mid-tenth century, the Chaco Canyon area was home to maybe five thousand people and was believed to serve as a trading center and commercial storehouse for the entire Southwest. Turquoise had been the principal coin of currency.
“Where did the people go?” Maggie asked as we slowly drove along the park’s eight-mile ring road past several impressive kivas and Great Houses.
“God only knows,” I said, but explained that according to my guide, archaeological evidence indicated the towns were evacuated in an orderly fashion. There was no warfare or evidence of physical destruction. There were no mass graves. The best theory was that a decade-long drought shriveled up the Chaco Canyon River and forced the inhabitants to simply pack up and move, disperse through the West. You couldn’t eat turquoise. Their civilization vanished with them.
At the reception center, a ranger on duty explained there were rudimentary camping facilities about a mile down the road, back on the unpaved road that led out the south end of Chaco. I was tempted to suggest that we camp and look at the stars from a mesa but it was still the heat of the day and the ranger said Santa Fe was only a few more hours away, steady driving. We decided to push on and try to catch a bit of the Indian Festival ending there. Seeing Chaco had eaten up nearly three hours but I was glad we’d seen this haunting place and Maggie seemed to agree, though she was already busy writing a postcard to her buddy Aileen.
We stopped in White Horse for gas and cold drinks. Amos got out and stretched, yawned, and stiffly approached a man gassing up his truck. The man had buckets of bright blue paint in his truck, the blue of a blind man’s eye. He scratched Amos’s head and asked where we were headed. I said Santa Fe and asked what he was painting. Whatever it was, it was sure going to be blue.
“My house. I bought way too much paint, though. Don’t have a clue what to do with it. Shame to dump it out.”
“If this was Maine,” I suggested helpfully, “you could just slap a coat on your truck, too.”
The man smiled. His face was brown as a saddle and deeply creased by the sun. The face of an aging Aztec prince or a Tuscan farmer.
“They do that here, too,” he said with a grin.
We pulled out and Maggie, tugging the plastic off a fresh Wild Blue Raspberry Gatorade, said: “Dad, let me ask you something. What did you mean by ‘God only knows’?”
I glanced at her, a little confused. I couldn’t remember when I’d said that.
“You said that God only knows where those Indian people went.”
“Oh.”
I explained that it was simply an expression, meaning that perhaps only God was capable of knowing what happened to the Anasazi people, why they vanished and where they went.
“Do you think God sees everything?”
“I had a Sunday school teacher who told me Jesus did. She said that’s why you had to watch everything you did. Jesus would tell God and then you’d be in hot water. She said Jesus knew your thoughts before you did, good and bad, and would show you the list someday. She made Jesus sound like a snitch and God a bit like Miss Wettington. I used to lie in bed composing secret lists of things Jesus couldn’t possibly know.”
She smiled. “Like what?”
“How many people in the world were yawning or farting right this instant. How many blades of grass were in our front yard. How much it would hurt if Randy Farmer beat me up. That sort of thing.”
“Is that true?”
“About Randy Farmer? Absolutely. He was this tough mill kid who terrorized every little kid in the neighborhood until I decided to go ahead and let him kill me and get it over with. One day he picked on us and I surprised myself by giving him a bloody nose. He left me alone after that. I kind of felt sorry for him. He was never quite the same. A luck
y punch ruined his life—at least that portion of it. My guess is he’s somewhere this very instant politely asking a customer if they prefer plastic or paper bags.”
“No. I mean about Jesus and God seeing everything you do?”
“I don’t know. But you see everything you do and I think God is in you.”
Touché, Dad, I thought; brilliant theological segue. Then my eagle-eyed daughter pointed out I’d just missed the turn to Santa Fe. I might see the Big Picture but I often failed to see what was right in front of me, including road signs.
We parked Old Blue between a dust-covered Cadillac and a swank green Land Rover in a lot near Santa Fe’s Plaza District and Palace of Governors, where hundreds of Indian vendors were selling their crafts under tents with fluttering white canopies. A thunderstorm had just swept through and the crowds appeared to be thinning a bit. The festival was about over and some of the vendors were packing up their wares. We paused to look at turquoise jewelry and at Hopi kachina dolls, which I thought were a steal at $7.50 apiece until I learned they were really $750, at which point we moved on to an early supper of blue corn burritos and sat down to eat them. Amos was not overjoyed to be back on the leash. Across the park, an overweight male Indian comic wearing a woman’s dress was explaining how you could tell the difference between a reservation dog and a Bureau of Indian Affairs dog. The reservation dog chased every junk car that came along and I couldn’t hear what he said the BIA dog did, but the crowd laughed and Amos looked slightly amused as well.
“Where do you think those Indian people went?” Maggie asked. Obviously the mystery of Chaco was still weighing on her mind.
I chewed my gourmet mesquite-smoked bean burrito, which was delicious, or maybe I was just reluctant to have to eat my own humble cooking again, and watched a beautifully dressed white couple with packages come strolling out of a pricey jewelry boutique called the Turquoise Trail. They paused and looked around as if trying to decide what to go buy next.
“I don’t know,” I reflected, “but by the looks of this place they came to Old Santa Fe. Much better foot traffic.”
“Why didn’t God want to help them? Like tell them what to do or something?”
“Maybe he did. Maybe he sent the drought to tell them it was time to move on. Everything has a cycle, a time to live, a time to die. A time to open a jewelry store elsewhere. My personal view is that’s why God made parents, for precisely this reason. It’s the parents’ job to protect their children and pass along stuff they’ve learned about life. Good stuff that will help later.”
“You and Mom never did that,” she said.
“Really?” I looked at my daughter and smiled, thinking how I’d tried to do nothing else but gently shape and protect her world since the moment on a snowy day in January I carried her pink and wriggling form in my hands from her mother’s birthing room to the weighing scale, marveling at the true mystery of the universe. Perhaps I’d not done my job well enough or perhaps I—we—had done it a bit too well. For all our differences I knew her mother felt exactly this way about both our children.
“Speaking of good stuff, are you planning to eat the rest of that splendid burrito?” I said, pointing with my plastic fork.
She shook her head and pushed her paper plate across to me. I explained I wasn’t thinking of myself but of our elderly dog-faced companion.
He’d been awfully patient this afternoon, I said, as we’d dawdled through New Mexican desert backcountry; he probably deserved a nice gourmet meal in Santa Fe before we hit the road again to God knows where, though it might give him the kind of gas we’d regret later.
“Can I get that doll?” Maggie asked.
My smile faded. I knew she would want the doll and tried to explain how insanely overpriced it was, pointing out that outside of town it probably really did sell for $7.50. I felt more like Randy Farmer than a wise parent firmly in control of the family purse strings, and wondered if she might settle for the $30 Navajo dream catcher instead. She nodded but you could see her disappointment.
“Do you think it really works?”
“I guess we’ll find out.”
“Can I get an ice cream, too?” Ever the skillful negotiator, she pointed to the Emack and Bolios across the square.
“Done.”
“Two scoops?”
“Fine.” Anything, Lord, but that kachina doll.
“Did you write me a letter yet?”
“Not yet. I’m still thinking what to say.”
—
We made camp on a small mesa in the darkness at a state park near the Pecos River. Stars were swimming overhead and I pointed out the snout of Sagittarius on the southern rim, kissed Maggie good night, and went back to the small fire I’d made. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a good pad of paper or even a decent piece of paper to write on, but I scrounged up the brown paper bag her dream catcher had come in, hoping that would suffice.
I sat for a while looking at the stars, trying to think what on earth to say. The brilliance of the stars reminded me of the night view from our hill in Maine, where light pollution is also at a minimum. It was funny, almost inexplicable really, to think I’d chosen to build the second part of my life on the thin soil of a rocky hill in Maine—a place you had to work like the dickens just to make things grow, a place where the growing season was so painfully brief you noticed how extraordinary your roses looked one day and covered them up for the winter the next. There were friends and even a few family members down South who, I suspected, thought I’d gone what my grandmother would have termed “funny in the head” to have such blind devotion to a forested hill in Maine.
But there was really nothing blind about it. I live among a population, extraordinary in our culture, New Hampshire poet Donald Hall wrote, that lives where it lives because it loves the place. We are self-selected place-lovers. There’s no reason to live here except for love. The older I got the more I was convinced the ancient hill I’d cleared for a house and was grooming for a garden had chosen me as much as I’d chosen it. The abbreviated growing season was a perpetual source of frustration, to be sure, a time of seemingly endless waiting for the faintest green shoots to appear while the rest of the world snipped April bouquets, followed by an intense and shortlived burst of summer blooms, followed by too-soon rituals of mulching and pruning and early frosts that often led to snow before Thanksgiving. Life on a hill has peculiar joys and hardships, fresh air but constant exposure to wind and weather, long views but vulnerability to drought or eroding rains. Paltry reward, as one of my elderly rose-rearing southern aunts once sniffed over her sherry, for all that work and bother. Curiously, though, I was as drawn to the idea of making my hill bloom, my garden in the woods flourish, as anything I could name save seeing my children grow. The brief days somehow deepened my awareness, made me see more, perhaps were an unexpected payback for all those years spent cursing and turning and coaxing this thin Yankee soil to accept more life. Was it simple coincidence that on the day Maggie was baptized by a rector friend, that same friend and his family came to the house afterward and blessed the grounds and occupants, the two-and four-legged residents alike, a consecration seldom done much these days but one that felt not only spiritually refreshing but almost like a covenant. Two baptisms, we joked, for the price of one.
The world, I suppose, no matter where you are, always looks better from a hill.
New Mexico calls itself the Land of Enchantment and this vast glittering view of the cosmos supported that claim. Navajo and Pueblo traditions say the stars were scattered about by a mischievous coyote called the Great Trickster who played pranks on peoples across the Americas. The Pawnee watched the stars for signs of swimming ducks that would indicate returning migrations of game birds, and the Pomo used the position of the Big Dipper, also known as the Bear, to schedule fishing expeditions. My Cherokee great-grandmother’s people believed the Milky Way was scattered flour, the bread of Heaven.
Enchanting stories all. No doubt true. What fool coul
d say they weren’t?
“Dad?” a small voice called from the tent.
“Yeah, babe?”
There was a pause. She was fighting sleep. Had the homesickness intensified? “What’s your favorite Beatle song?”
I smiled and poked a stick into our signal fire, sending a few sparks up to the old gods. I said I liked “All You Need Is Love” and “We Can Work It Out” but sometimes thought McCartney and Lennon had me in mind when they wrote “Fool on the Hill.” I thought she might laugh but she didn’t. At least a coyote was howling with laughter a few miles away every so often.
“Dad?”
“Yes ma’am?”
“Are there, like, any snakes out there?”
We’d been talking about desert creatures during supper and I’d explained how citizens of the desert usually came out at night to hunt and feed. That was nature’s way, I said, compensating for life in such a difficult place.
“Not anywhere around us, sweetheart. Besides, Amos and I are both keeping a sharp watch.” Well, at least I was; Amos was sound asleep by the fire. The air force could have detonated an atomic bomb nearby and he wouldn’t have noticed.
“Are you coming to bed?”
“Soon. Got something important to do first. Your job is to try out that new dream catcher.”
She was finally silent and I sat gazing at the desert sky, wondering what this fool on a hill could possibly write to his daughter that would mean something. Did it really have to mean something? In ancient times fools were believed to be compensated by the gods, granted immunity from divine retribution by roaming the earth to dispense harsh wisdom and plant seeds of revelation. Their job was to challenge faith in the visible and turn logic upside down. In medieval courts, the only person the king couldn’t kill for speaking his mind was the fool, and in many primitive cultures murdering a fool was tantamount to killing a holy man. Proverbs said a fool who had found peace was counted wise in the eyes of God. Napoleon said a fool had the advantage over ordinary men because he was always satisfied with himself.
