dispatchesfromkansas

Koyaanisqatsi

We have learned nothing (Part 1)

Mistakes were made. 

In that we were merely human, trapped in our own consequential foibles and passions, blind only to what was important or necessary. Or mostly so: there was a moment at the bottom of Hobbs Wash where I forced myself to sit on a boulder to take stock of my rubbery legs, broken tooth and bloodied hand, the empty water bottle, an increasing panic that robbed what little air remained in my gasping lungs and the unforgiving rock face that seemed an indecipherable puzzle if not a prison. That I’d been in the same predicament before only made it more inexcusable. That other time had been a close call, fleeing from a winter storm high in the Rockies, snow knee-deep, cold seeping through my layered clothing, the wind a howling monster at my back. The basic steps needed to ensure survival I stupidly refused to follow even as the first traces of hypothermia dulled my senses. Though Hobbs Wash was a different animal the situation was identical: time was running out, and every step no matter how forced had to count. Above all, there could be no more mistakes.

There were, of course. What’s left now is to reconnoiter, to review our passage from Kansas prairie to Colorado Plateau and back, and, if possible, to find a way out of the box canyon we’ve descended into. At our age it’s not a matter of learning from mistakes—redundancy makes them mere objects of derision—but something much more difficult. We need to learn forgiveness.

***

Day one was something of a shakedown, familiarizing ourselves with one another and the way we travel. 

A friend compared our jaunt to the trio of past-their-prime buffoons in the movie “Wild Hogs.” Hollywood infects reality like a toxic virus creating cardboard settings against which our actions are unduly portrayed. I argued that the comparison was invalid if not insulting. A more apt movie might be “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” though as always it’s impossible to distinguish the inmates from the keepers.

And who, another asked, are the codgernauts? Certainly more difficult to answer without a hefty dose of levity. We are, I replied, three unruly, curmudgeonly, irascible, gross, crude, obscene, petty, mean-spirited, opinionated, caring, passionate, intense and creative old fools. One is a stubborn meat-and-potatoes authoritarian figure, another a shaman of great insight (and compassion, when warranted) into human character. And then there’s me. It should, I promised, be interesting.

We departed Abilene on a drizzly Saturday morning, heading west. The Chevy Trailblazer was loaded with luggage and various bags containing camera equipment. Indeed, we laughed at the amount we’d brought, remembering our first such trip when we owned point-and-shoot cameras. Since our inaugural voyage to Chaco Canyon four years ago, we’ve grown paunchier, grayer, more set in our ways. It’s not just our belts that have expanded. 

We quickly settled down to a routine. Birds were shouted out and logged. Braking was allowed for interesting abandoned buildings and requisite for shallow playas or ponds filled with waterfowl. Lunch was a democratic process with a majority vote deciding. Stopping at Dairy Queen, mandatory.

***

Near Lamar we left the pavement and the present and traveled back to the morning of November 29, 1864. 

It wasn’t far, 20 miles at most of sand and sage under a glowering sky. When we arrived at a little wooded spot clustered around a few outbuildings a ranger was telling of the events to a couple from Trinidad. We listened for a few minutes until boredom and impatience crept in—standard protocol—and then marched off down a two-track that meandered up a short rise to an overlook above Sand Creek. Beyond a split-rail fence lay foreign soil, and sacred. Cottonwoods lined the creekbed, their leaves rustling in the endless breeze. The air was misty with rain. 

Not much has changed since a ragtag rabble out of Denver, whipped into a frenzy by demagoguery and chicanery from the city’s early leaders—and in particular Col. John Chivington, one of those vainglorious popinjays the military seems to attract with stunning regularity—attacked a peaceful camp of Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians on a sandy wash in the middle of nowhere. It didn’t matter that an American flag flew over Black Kettle’s camp, or that shortly after firing commenced a white flag was raised, or that the camp consisted mostly women, children and old men. What followed was sheer butchery and savagery, for which Denver was “saved” from the godless heathens and Chivington got a town named after him. 

The parallels between how the war frenzy built to a fever pitch for Sand Creek and Iraq are obvious though most flag-waving Americans would probably disagree. The reasons for going to war were the same: the defense of loved ones and homeland from imaginary enemies, alleged weapons of mass destruction, intractable foes who refused to abide by treaties (disregarding our own congenital failure to do the same) and, at the root of the conflict though seldom mentioned, Manifest Destiny. Taking America’s role as leader of the free world, God bless the USA, blah blah blah. Bush, Cheney and Chivington were like peas in a pod, and far more lethal.

Standing there in a light drizzle it all seemed so clear, and so utterly depressing. We have still not learned to question our leaders or to demand accountability. Nothing has changed, not the bodies piling up, not the lies or the manipulated justifications, not the ceaseless wind nor the sorrow brooding over a sandy wash in southern Colorado. Sand Creek will forever inhabit the juncture of then and now. 

The beginning of the West (Part 2)

To answer the question of where the West begins is as much a matter of idealism as it is of geography, and fluid from speaker to speaker unless one hews to the 100th Meridian theory. A rancher in northeast Kansas once looked stricken after I mentioned my initial hesitation toward trading mountains for tallgrass prairie—the West for the Midwest—leading to a few uncomfortable moments where he sputtered his indignation at my apparent ignorance. “This is the West,” he spat, in a tone caustic with implications that only a fool would think otherwise. To which I replied, “No, it’s not.”

At least two cities, Mandan, N.D., and Ft. Worth, Texas, bill themselves as “where the West begins,” understandable perhaps from a marketing standpoint but patently absurd. The terrain is much more encompassing than the few square miles of concrete and glass. If I say the famous Gateway Arch in St. Louis almost got it right by calling itself the Gateway to the West it’s because of an inherent weakness toward soaring architecture and fabled sentiment more than anything else. For the pioneers embarking on the Oregon Trail, St. Louis definitely was the gateway, and back then the West indeed began on the banks of the Mississippi. We can’t take that from them.

The actual delineation is probably subjective, though Powell got closer to nailing it down to a cartographical line in the sand. The 100th Meridian, which bisects the northern hemisphere from Canada to Mexico, was designated as the western border not because of a neat round number but because east of that invisible line lies outside of the rain shadow cast by the Rocky Mountains. More precipitation equals less reliance on irrigation. 

The characterization is as good as any. I haven’t always agreed with it, nor would I care to view it as an undisputed actuality, but it’s far superior to Arthur Chapman’s infamous poem, “Out where the West begins.” Written in 1917 to instant acclaim (and by an Easterner, no less), today it invokes a gag reflex with its sappy sentiments. One stanza will suffice: “Out where the skies are a trifle bluer/out where the friendship’s a little truer/that’s where the West begins.” I think not.

By the time we codgernauts departed Sand Creek and, shortly thereafter, the ruins of Chivington—not completely dead but in advanced terminal stage—we were indisputably beyond the boundaries of the Midwest. By Lamar, where we spent the first evening, the menu in the truck stop was enough to hammer the geography lesson home. I staggered away after consuming a half-pound open-faced hamburger smothered in melted cheese and pork green chile sauce, a big bubbly gooey mess that left me rhapsodic if not delirious. Nevertheless, in the deepest recesses of my being I didn’t consider ourselves to have crossed that demarcation. 

I wanted mountains. Specifically, I wanted the twin snowy Spanish Peaks and the pyramidal Mt. Mestas flanking La Veta Pass, by any standard the true gateway to the West. Reaching that point involved crossing a huge expanse of sagebrush desert which we called the Big Empty, and not with much affection.

I have no idea what non-birders do to keep themselves occupied while traversing the seemingly limitless shortgrass prairies of eastern Colorado other than lapsing into a dazed stupor, but we looked for birds and shouted them out: Kingfisher! White-faced ibis! Avocet! Bullock’s oriole! Rough wing swallow! As the miles thrummed beneath the tires and receded in the rear view mirror the official road checklist fleshed out into an evermore western orientation. Yellow-headed blackbirds in the cattails of a small marsh; black-billed magpie on a fencepost; cinnamon teal in a shallow playa; burrowing owl in the cratered moonscape of a prairie dog colony. The sky utterly without clouds, an uncluttered field of turquoise pressing down on us as we watched and waited for the mountains to hove into view.

This anticipatory drudgery coupled with the inhospitable expanse of the Great American Desert surely imbued the American psyche with its Wordsworthian romance toward the West. Separated from the populous East by a broad divide splitting the nation into three defined segments, the West was where the cowboy roamed, iconic for his grit, determination and can-do attitude. That the same never applied to the farmers who broke the land into submission seems all the more puzzling. Theirs surely was a harder existence but then they never had the luxury of the penny-dreadfuls of the 19th century that forever mythologized (and caricatured) the exploits of those who packed heat. For all its utilitarian value a plow could never hope to compete against a Colt .45.

So, too, the prairie takes second place to the mountains. For most of my life I was felt the West began at the upsweep of the foothills and not an inch to the east, though in later days I grudgingly moved the boundary to the opposite side of the Colorado-Kansas line. Perhaps I was simply settling for the conventional designation over a personal perspective, an act both generous and disloyal. Since moving to Kansas I sometimes prefer the 100th Meridian concept because it gets me closer to my destination when I’m on the road. Expediency always trumps conviction.

As I wrestled with these thoughts, I kept an eye peeled for a long-billed curlew. I hadn’t seen one in well over a decade and felt for this trip at least it would stand as the harbinger of the western lands. Hearing one would be even better but nearly impossible at 65 miles per.

About the time the mountains lifted above the horizon like pale mirages, Jim pointed to a large black bird circling above the road. “Raven!” he yelled. “We’re in the West now.”

He said it with such relish that I didn’t bother to refute him. After all, his description was as good as any. We were in the West.

Resurrection of ghosts (Part 3)

Not long ago a friend tried to photograph a Kansas sunset. As the western sky flared into a thousands shades of scarlet, frame after frame was fruitlessly squandered from blown-out highlights and underexposed shadows. The end result was an image taken straight out of Dante’s inferno, the sun an enflamed orb beating down mercilessly on a scorched and cindered plain. “I guess,” he said, “you had to be there.”

Some things just have to be experienced. For a hundred miles I had thought of little else than capturing the quintessential essence of the Spanish Peaks, a pair of rugged mountains jutting up near the little town of La Veta, Colorado. Named by the Utes “Wahatoya,” or Breasts of the Earth, the appellation was organic for the succeeding Spanish noted the same form, or forms, which probably explains the natural state of mind for the average male of the species. The twin mounds lift 7,000 feet from the valley floor with long serrated dikes radiating outward from their base like the spokes of a wheel. These dikes, formed by molten rock forced through seams in the underlying sedimentary rock, attract geologists from around the world. Over 400 separate dikes have been mapped, some of which can be seen from Highway 160, a two-lane stitching Walsenburg, a prairie town, to the broad San Luis Valley on the far side of La Veta Pass. 

As we began our slow ascent toward the pass, the peaks unfolded to the south. We watched for a likely vista and found it on a narrow dirt road branching off to dip into a narrow valley before climbing to a grassy rise. Adding to the scene was a maroon wooden barn, not ancient but old enough, and a shattered cross-tie fence. Every element was perfectly in place, a halo of clouds spreading above the snowy summits, the crystalline mountain air, the jaw-dropping beauty, the rustic barn—just as every element conspired against us. Frame after frame went down in defeat. I guess you just had to be there.

***

Every mile another memory. If a particular patch of ground could be considered sacred to my family, it would be triangulated between the hulking dome of San Antonio Mountain to the south, Cumbres Pass to the west and the Great Sand Dunes to the east. The lower San Luis Valley was a second home for three generations of Parkers, so that as the miles thrummed under our wheels scenes of the past flickered by like an old grainy slideshow. 

It’s hard to remain impassive under the onslaught of memories. Memories should be doled out judiciously, in small helpings, and for the most part are until one crosses into a space saturated with personal history. For long stretches I wanted to scream or sob or stumble from the vehicle to sink to my knees and kiss the ground, or to reach with trembling fingers through the membrane of time and touch my young sons, my wife, my parents and brothers and the innocent boy I once was, to not revisit the past but to relive it, though it would change nothing. Through it all a river runs through it, or rivers—the Conejos, the Rio de los Piños—whose very dualities formed the basis of life, one swift and powerful,  at times treacherous, the other sedate with long placid stretches and a subdued choral accompaniment, pianissimo to the other’s crescendo. The Conejos was a big brawling river foaming down from the high country to forever pulse through our veins, its undammed, freeflowing waters threading the fabric of our lives into a seamless tapestry silvered under a setting sun. And not just waters but sand, sand as tides ebbing and flowing, sand ceaselessly shifting and drifting, sand sculpted and shadowed by light into its own angular geometry, an improbable ocean of sand lapping at the base of the towering Sangre de Christos. We left our mark on this land visible only to ourselves and then more felt than witnessed, and yet time and the wind swept away our footprints and erased us as if we had never existed. The sands of Medano Creek claimed whatever toys we brought, the little plastic soldiers and tanks and cannons, the colorful dinosaurs and monsters with their perpetual grimaces and razored fangs, the buckets and shovels, the graders and bulldozers, and those of our children and grandchildren as well, as it buried entire forests leaving behind desiccated skeletons like twisted matchsticks impaling the dunes. Never to be reclaimed nor resurrected. The rivers at least were understandable, their erasure assured. And yet we thought our tracks across the wet sands permanent, our entombed toys the symbols of our entitlement, our laughter inscribed in the singing wind. And we were wrong.

But not altogether, for as we traversed the broad valley under the shadow of Mount Blanca the ghosts stirred in their sandy haunts and clawed to the surface, or lifted above the faceted currents like clouds of mayflies, delicate and ephemeral as my sudden appearance. We were still here, we will always be here, young and old and in between, unchanging, enduring, our resurrection contingent merely upon our second coming, or third, or thousandth, a temporary reprieve from the silence of forgetfulness, but only temporary before the long slow years of longing and nothingness return like an inexhaustible and unfading autumn.

At Monte Vista we continued westward, rising toward the distant summit of Wolf Creek Pass. After a while the ghosts relented and slipped away.

Best laid plans (Part 4)

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive. – Robert Louis Stevenson

The difference between a traveler and a tourist, according to historian Daniel Boorstin, is that the former is active and the latter passive. The traveler pursues people, adventure or new experiences while the tourist expects interesting things to happen with minimal effort expended. I’m reminded of a cartoon where two vultures are sitting on a fence and one says, “Screw this, I’m going to kill something.” Aggression generates momentum to propel the traveler forward. The tourist, on the other hand, “goes sightseeing,” and waits almost vicariously for others to feed him.

Determining which camp you belong to can be humbling depending upon your personality and destination. (Admitting that the two overlap only fuels the angst.) As we three avowed travelers navigated the steep grade into Mesa Verde National Park it was nearly impossible to separate our elevated view of ourselves from the masses cloying the place. After all, Mesa Verde is all about sightseeing, with most of its ruins restricted to ranger-led tours. While we weren’t necessarily averse to being participants, it certainly crimped our guerilla style. Our ace in the hole was Wetherill Mesa, an offshoot of the park with hiking trails leading deep into the rocky canyons. We were sure to leave behind the majority of the polyester-and-poodle crowd and focus on the less-traveled areas.

Or such, at least, were our plans. We had others, brilliant we felt, such as being first into the ruins to beat the tour bus groups. “They’ll get a late start while everybody is still ordering their bagels and lattes,” we crowed. 

We couldn’t have been more wrong. As we waited for the visitor center to open, a string of tour buses hove into view, followed by a long convoy of cars. What had been an empty parking lot suddenly looked like a swarm of ants erupting from a disturbed mound. Our solitary perch on the balcony became standing-room only. I tried ignoring the others by concentrating on warblers flitting around in a thicket below us. Jim, looking surlier than usual, joined me. Chod, easily the more voluble member of our trio, pointed out a wild horse on a hillside and identified birds for those who asked. He was in his element, a one-man tour guide, glad to share his knowledge of local fauna and flora. Jim muttered imprecations under his breath. 

When the doors finally opened we were herded inside like cattle to a slaughter house. Traveler and tourist alike—whatever the designation—we were all the same to the National Park Service. We were meat to be processed. We were the fuel that kept the fires of commerce stoked.

Which was all the most disturbing when the ranger, already looking harried by the throngs, many of whom could barely speak English, announced that the road to Wetherill Mesa was closed until Memorial Day. “We don’t have enough staff to open it,” she said. 

Aghast, we looked at the electronic billboard listing tours to the three main sites and the number of participants enrolled. Some, with 60 already signed up, were full. We settled on a tour of Cliff Palace with a paltry 14 listed, reasoning that it must fall between tour bus operating times. 

After a leisurely two hours spent birding practically undisturbed, we arrived at the trailhead to find dozens of vehicles already lined up. More appeared almost magically. They came in RVs and rental campers, motorcycles and cars, trucks and buses, they came singly and doubly and quadruply. A dozen languages filled the air with a Babel-like dissonance. 

“And this isn’t even tourist season,” Jim spat.

“I suspect,” I said, “there are more than 14 signed up for the tour.”

One of the biggest drawbacks to being a traveler, and in particular a codgernaut (a subcategory known for its latent crankiness and elitist posturing), is that it’s nearly impossible to amalgamate into any sort of cohesion with tourists. Occasionally the codgernaut is forced by dint of necessity to put aside, however temporary, any distaste at being coerced into mingling with the rabble—certainly the case at Mesa Verde—though that does not mean he must act as if he were enjoying himself. In fact, so ingrained is the curmudgeon persona that rendering enjoyment is nearly impossible. The effect can be crippling.

As a long ragged line formed leading down to a platform overlooking the canyon, we lagged behind, and not merely in an attempt at jockeying for position. For his part, Jim decided he’d had enough: he would remain behind, happily chasing black-throated gray warblers around the deserted parking lot. 

Chod and I had one last plan. In retrospect it was pathetically hopeless. From an initial observation of earlier tours, it was clear that the last photographers in line had the most opportunities for getting shots of ruins without people. The few moments separating groups might be fleeting but they held the most potential, indeed, the only potential.

That position, unfortunately, was claimed by an elderly woman dragging an oxygen tank. Since we clearly couldn’t trump her excuse nor toss her over the cliff, we made sure we were directly in front of her. 

From there it went downhill, literally. When the tour bunched up to wait its turn, we noted with some disgust that the forward position was actually the better deal. And when the group finally made its way into the ruin, our ranger gathered us in a circle around the kiva to regale us at length about the history of the palace, the Anasazi, the Pueblo people of the southwest, the role of the park service, the sun and moon and stars and just about everything else she could think of, so that another tour began trickling in to make space for yet another that was waiting, and every square inch of trail was packed like sardines. So much for our plan.

We tried one last trailhead. It was even more crowded. 

“I’ve seen all I need to see,” Jim said. 

He pulled out a map and charted a course into the wilds of Utah. If we hurried we could make it by mid-afternoon. I cruised through the mob and kicked up the speed. From the back seat I heard Jim utter a few choice words, followed bitterly by the codgernauts’ mantra: “I hate #$@*^! tourists.”

The deserted valley (Part 5)

An unrelenting sniffle, sinus drainage resistant to allergy medication, a dry cough. With each mile it became more apparent that it wasn’t hay fever affecting me, but a cold. 

The news did not bode well. The previous night my incessant coughing had no doubt kept the others awake, and I hated to be an imposition. When I wasn’t coughing I was trying to stifle a cough, which only prolonged the ordeal. My nose dripped like a faucet. A quick stop at a grocer garnered a box of tissue and cold medicine sure to make me loopy. How loopy, and under what circumstances, remained to be seen. 

***

After the limitless restrictions of the national park, the open road was a dream of flight and freedom. 

We cut through Cortez and veered toward the airport on a small two-lane blacktop that shot like an arrow toward Sleeping Ute Mountain. Past the airport the road descended into a narrow serpentine canyon, marked by a fringe of verdant growth, irrigated brome fields and homes that ran the gamut from well-tended ranchos to tumbledown shacks. Several crumbled adobe ruins marked the antiquity of man’s reign on that increasingly arid notch, for as the miles dropped away the land turned brown and dry and sterile, stunted trees and withered shrubs succumbing to stones and towering bluffs and a desolate moonscape. The speed limit was 45 to which I kept the gauge locked. Ours was a rollercoaster ride down that sinuous path, screaming around the curves, zigging and zagging while my codgernautical companions uneasily gripped their seats. I was in my element, though. I knew that type of road well.

Our running joke about time and distances—”But it was only a few inches on the map!”—was born from a native Kansan perspective where the vast majority of the state was laid out in true Jeffersonian order. As a Westerner I knew that terrain dictates route, and the terrain on the far side of Sleeping Ute Mountain was a maze of sunblasted stone, endless barrancas and ethereal glimpses of a tortured land unfolding into the crystalline distance. It was a dry, dusty, inhospitable place. It was beautiful beyond words. 

After what seemed an interminable distance, the canyon opened and the road straightened. I punched the gas and we rocketed forward. A few miles farther and a side road branched off to the north, with a small bullet-pocked sign announcing our destination: Hovenweep.

The place is the antithesis of Mesa Verde. Where the latter is almost impossible to miss, the former is almost impossible to find. Visitors to Mesa Verde hear dozens of languages and a steady hum of traffic and voices, while visitors to Hovenweep are privy to the chitter of cliff swallows, the melodic waterfall notes of a canyon wren and the sigh of wind through junipers. The National Park Service has stabilized, improved, reworked and enhanced most of the ruins at Mesa Verde while leaving those at Hovenweep to the wind and the rain. The primary dwellings of Mesa Verde are hidden in alcoves and overhangs scooped from sheer cliffs while those of Hovenweep are prominently arrayed in the towers flanking the canyons. Mesa Verde is where you go with thousands of others to see the cliff-dwellings of the Anasazi. Hovenweep is where you go to hear their ghosts.

Even their names are decidedly different. Mesa Verde—green table in Spanish—seems a curious appellation for the realm of a vanished Native American civilization. Hovenweep, named by pioneer photographer William Henry Jackson, is taken from a Paiute/Ute word meaning deserted valley. The name has a redolence that fits the character of the land, for deserted it most assuredly is.

And changed, too, since I was last there with my wife and two young sons. A new visitor center anchors one end of the canyon sheltering the Square Tower complex, a low squat building blending into the terrain as if sprung from the soil. Inside we found a very helpful ranger who invited us to watch a  short video. We politely declined and set off on the trail.

Curiously, there were no signs advising visitors to watch for rattlesnakes. I mentioned this as a comical warning, for on our last trip along the Oregon Trail through Nebraska and Wyoming we’d been cautioned by such a sign at every stop, only to run into a rattler at the one place lacking a sign. The implications were amusing if not questionable.  

There was nothing amusing nor questionable about Hovenweep. The solitude crept in before the visitor center was lost behind a screen of junipers, so that we wandered a meandering trail bridging then and now, suspended somewhere in the middle between the aftermath of one civilization and the rise of another, three solitary figures moving in tandem along a sheer precipice dotted with stone towers of varying sizes and shapes, some round, others square, while the sky grew partially overcast and the sun slanted lower in the west casting our shadows behind us. It was sacred ground, ringed with sacred mountains, silent as a cathedral. We circled the head of the canyon and followed the trail into the abyss, Chod disappearing ahead and me wary of Jim’s unsteadiness on the steep decline, hearing his sharp intakes of pain and the tap-tap of his hiking stick as we made our laborious way to the canyon floor where the air grew heavy and still. Without speaking we passed through waist-high grass where we listened for the telltale buzz of rattlesnakes, stepped across a small clear trickle of water and struggled up into the boulders, pausing for a moment in the shade of an odd tree whose name we did not know. “Whoever designed this trail was a sadistic bastard,” Jim spat between breaths. We were suddenly conscious of the lateness of the afternoon, and perhaps even of our years, and sat there for a short spell before I lumbered to my feet and took his photograph. He laughed and swore and commanded me to hold still for my own impromptu portrait, and together we started climbing toward Chod and the road back to Cortez.

Into the Colorado Plateau (Part 6)

Up early to write, dopey from lack of sleep, I stagger from bed and careen headfirst into the wall. A little commotion but not enough to wake the codgernauts. Later, as we head down to breakfast, I seem unable to traverse a straight line. I feel unbalanced, as if my head was an unhinged gyroscope spinning madly out of control. “Whatever you do today,” I tell my companions, “keep me away from cliffs.”

In retrospect, it seemed the obvious thing to ask considering my odd discombobulation, and all the more laughable in light of our destination. 

***

Our foibles are rarely a match for our infantile fantasies. Our vision of ourselves has little bearing on reality except for when we’re waylaid by full-length mirrors and the truth bares itself in merciless Technicolor. Of course Technicolor is as dead as Kodachrome but the abstraction persists at least for another generation, after which our glorious language will devolve into chaos without punctuation, capitalization, hyphenation or even rudimentary spelling. Mirrors are another matter. Within our humble home I no longer harbor mirrors of any kind except for the small medicine chest in the bathroom. There might be another under the sink but it’s a no-man’s-land I eschew at all costs, left to my significant other. Admittedly the lack of reflective surfaces is more denial than panacea but at my age I take whatever measures I can to forestall the inevitable, sensing an ever-tightening noose of strangled options. I’ve tried adopting a gruff what-you-see-is-what-you-get but there’s that unrelenting matter of how I envision myself, thirty pounds lighter around the waist, fit and trim and smarter than I think I am. Recently I came across an old photo of me taken by a hiking friend in the Never Summer Range, my flat stomach and muscled legs reminders  of a former self. I almost wept with self-pity.

When we’re faced with so many conflicting images it’s damnably difficult figuring out who we really are. Nor does it help that in our minds we’ve barely aged past our twenties, with a voice and an outlook to match. There’s also that on-again, off-again forgetfulness that stymies me at every turn. I long for unforgetfulness even as I long for its opposite and the disremembrance of dreams. 

What bothers me the most about the next leg of our journey was that forgetfulness had nothing to do with what happened beneath Comb Ridge. We set out from the vehicle with only a rough idea of where we were going, with almost no idea how to get there, and with barely enough supplies for a very brief sojourn under optimal conditions. But this wasn’t a stroll in the manicured park—it was a trek across ankle-deep sand with the consistency of flour and the remainder stark stone, most of it vertical, with a storm brewing to the north where the jagged spine of the ridge sawed at the clouds. We downplayed the danger as if we were oblivious to the potential cost associated from one slip, one turned ankle, one drop. There were secondary costs debited to our unwitting enterprise, pocket change perhaps but expensive nonetheless. Branded into my soul is the memory of clinging to a cliff while bitterly castigating myself for breaking every rule in the book, and knowing with implacable certainty that I would die because of it.

Every trip has a defining moment. Comb Ridge set the stage for all that would follow, perhaps in ways we’ll never decipher but forever guess at. We went in as a group and exited as something else, disjointed and in some ways broken. That inner reflection of a fit, trim man who knew the desert and its ways was painstakingly deconstructed on the sandy floor of Butler Wash, reduced to splintered shards trailing behind like breadcrumbs or the crimson splashes of blood dripping from my hand. 

***

It wasn’t planned. Nor was it part of the itinerary, but merely something casually tossed out beforehand to fill our overactive minds with visions of possibilities. 

Jim was the instigator, forwarding a website about Anasazi ruins tucked away in the crevices below a 50-mile-long ridge just west of Bluff, Utah. The images were stunning, not merely for the ruins themselves but for the sweeping soot-streaked overhangs. A photograph taken from the opposite side of the canyon showed a “shortcut” to the ruins, dubious at best in that it required an almost perpendicular descent. For days I pored over the picture looking for other routes. If we hugged the rim of a branching canyon it looked like a more gradual decline, and there was another to the west that might be even more feasible.

Let’s go, I wrote to Jim.

No, he replied. 

He was adamant: Butler Wash was out of the question. Mesa Verde was where we needed to focus our attention. And when that fell through, and morning came and we were adrift with only a vague idea of what could fill the vacuum, Butler Wash again reared its head. It was a familiar area to Chod for he’d backpacked near there years before, and only an hour’s drive away. We could pack up and leave Cortez, spend the day around Bluff and be in Farmington by nightfall. There was the added bonus of it being new territory for Jim and I, and we were almost guaranteed to have the place to ourselves.

We ate huddled over the map. Within minutes we had a route selected. Thirty minutes later we were on the road heading into the Colorado Plateau.

 Comb Ridge the easy way (Part 7)

Throughout our meanderings in the Four Corners region, we filled the long empty miles with bird identification exclamations (Lewis’ woodpecker! Burrowing owl!), observations about photography, artistic vision and gear, critical analyses of the pathetic treatment afforded Native Americans on their various reservations, and, perhaps most telling, personal ratings of the cities and small towns we observed. Livability obviously was a major criterion though the nebulousness of the idea provoked three distinctly differing reactions. 

The low end of the scale was relegated to the forlorn, terminal towns such as Chivington, Colo., whose very name was a curse. Most habitable enclaves existed in the middle ground, generating neither interest nor disinterest but something in between. It’s not that they were dull, only that we found them too mundane, too unimaginative. A step up were those that sparked lively debate, such as Cortez, Colo., with its near-perfect location and climate. A tad too populous for my tastes, plus lacking quality Mexican eateries, though Jim promised a return engagement with his wife in tow. For several days he brooded, wondering aloud if he could shake her loose from Kansas, usually followed by deep sighs of doubt. And then there were rare cases that made us want to speed-dial our real estate agents. 

Bluff, Utah, didn’t just interest us, it enchanted us. We drove each street slackjawed, picking out the houses we wanted to buy and then finding another, and another, until we made our way to the museum where we talked property prices, history and Anasazi ruins. By the time we departed Chod had made plans to overwinter with his fifth-wheel, Jim was drafting a relocation proposal to his wife, and I was constructing elaborate fantasies of opening an art gallery and living in a small turquoise-trimmed adobe in the shade of the towering sandstone bluffs for which the town was named. We also had a detailed BLM map of Butler Wash and handwritten directions to several lower ruins.

What struck me then—and more so now—was the frequent use of the word “easy” when describing  trails and routes. The trail to Hobbs Wash Ruins was easy, several websites claimed. One image showed two young children with their parents standing in the ruin, their clothes ironed and clean, not a whisper of exertion marring their cherubic smiles. The road hooking into the wash off the main highway was easy, the museum’s proprietor said. And it was, until we got stuck.

It was less a road than a series of hardpacked tracks braiding the width of the canyon floor. The narrow path we’d taken snaked for about a half mile before it intersected the main channel with a two-foot drop carved out by erosion. Besides the obvious impassability it heightened concern over flash flooding as it appeared to be raining higher up the ridge. As we reversed course from the ledge Jim’s Trailblazer rolled into a patch of sand that looked like any other patch of sand, only this one had no bottom. In the space of a heartbeat the tires sank to the axles.

After an initial explosion of blue language we got out to assess the situation. It didn’t look good. 

“Got a shovel?”

“No.”

Using feet and fingers we carved out a trench and began alternately shoving and rocking the vehicle. The slightest touch of gas seemed to plunge the Trailblazer deeper. I thought of old Tarzan movies where the bad guys fall into quicksand and thrash about in terror as they slowly disappear from view, and wondered if I should retrieve the camera before a similar fate befell the vehicle. I could vividly envision three dispirited men staggering back to Bluff, one of them on a cell phone trying to explain to his wife how he lost the SUV. And then the wheels hit traction and the vehicle lurched onto the roadway.

As we caught our breath a Toyota 4Runner with an enviable amount of clearance pulled up.

“You guys okay?” the driver asked.

We explained what happened and pointed to the drop. He grinned wolfishly.

“No problem,” he said.

His passenger looked dubious. “My partner scares me sometimes,” he confided. He might have said more but the driver gunned the engine, sailed over the edge and jounced alarmingly around a stand of salt cedars.

Other tracks showed the same insurmountable impediment. Clearly the road, or roads, were easy if one were driving a Humvee or an Abrams tank, but we had neither. 

Our final option was one we’d started with: finding a way into the canyon with only the memory of that one image we’d seen on the Internet. A few miles backtracking brought us to a small marker designating a parking area for the trailhead. Not that there was an actual trail—we had left behind dirt or soil of any kind and now traversed a hard and stony land dotted with stunted wildflowers and desert shrubs. After some scouting we navigated the Trailblazer over a deep rut and onto a level shelf nearer to the canyon rim. A rising wind buffeted the vehicle, seething out of a dark cloud bearing down from the north.

Everything depended on finding a safe route down, and from here we knew that easy wasn’t in the lexicon. Chod ditched “Bigma,” his massive telephoto lens, from his backpack to save weight. I switched to my belt system, carrying only a spare lens, a small pouch with extra cards and batteries and a pouch for a water bottle. After another look at the menacing sky I decided to include my camera holster in case of rain. 

In the consummate wisdom conveyed to hindsight, it was the one intelligent move I made. The second was to quaff an entire bottle of water. The rest of it—downing cold medication, packing the spare lens instead of a second water bottle, the absence of snacks or hiking sticks—briefly crossed my mind in a nagging voice-over that I refused to indulge. According to the image it was only a mile or less, and the weather might force us back anyway. Within 15 minutes we would have our answer. We wouldn’t be long.

So I lied to myself. 

Beneath Comb Ridge (Part 8)

There was no trail only bare ocherous rock and soft pools of sand deposited where the ceaseless wind eddied. A few stunted wildflowers and flowering cactuses drew the eye with their intensity, bright splashes of yellows and scarlets interspersed with the purplish-ivory seedpods of yucca, their roots scrabbling for whatever foothold they could find. Without the sand there would be nothing but stone. Sand was the nursery. Sand was the giver of life. 

I turned and saw the Trailblazer reflecting the sun and the blue ribbon of highway curving away toward the gigantic sunbleached vertebrae of Comb Ridge, and thinking of extra water bottles knew there was time to change the course I seemed resolutely determined to follow despite my lies and half-hearted deception. We are given choices, I thought, and followed my companions into a shallow arroyo where all signs of civilization fell away. We walked a land freshly created from the raw elements and raw still. In all that tortured expanse there was no even terrain but a thousand angles of verticality amplifying the sibilant wind and the slight toc-toc of hiking sticks. The arroyo twisted and writhed to the memory of waters, narrow in places and broader in others, until it opened onto the lip of Butler Wash and a three hundred foot vertical drop.

This was the unnamed box canyon we’d noted on the Internet image. To our left along a narrow shelf lay the “shortcut”—what looked to be a sheer cliff—while to our right the rock wall supposedly sloped more gradually to the canyon floor. As it was impossible to ascertain from our location, we set off along the shelf only to find our initial suspicions verified: the rock face plunged dizzyingly down to a small stagnant stream and silvery stands of Russian olives. 

“I’m not going down that,” Chod said. 

“Hell, I’m not even getting near it,” Jim cursed. “I’ll stay up here and watch the fort.”

We backtracked to the arroyo and began our descent on the opposite flank. At first it was gradual, as I’d expected, but as we neared the precipice the gradient became evermore perpendicular. Rather than leisurely walking we were forced to chart a route, connecting ledges that led to more ledges or snaked around to form narrow shelves slanting downward. And so we zigged and we zagged, keeping our body mass tilted inward toward the escarpment and our eyes peeled for loose rocks or rattlesnakes. The dizziness I’d felt earlier seemed to recede though I bitterly regretted not bringing my hiking sticks for their added stability. Where Chod appeared to float down the cliff my own passage was more ponderous, slower and less confident. The belt provided equilibrium for my gear but the camera dangling on its shoulder strap constantly threw me off balance. Plus I was altogether too hesitant and mistrustful of my abilities and felt a loss that nothing could fill. A part of me deeper than my youth was missing. 

The final ledge deposited us next to the stream. Its shoreline was clumped with spindly olives and carpeted with waist-deep marsh grasses the color and hue of the scummy water. Following the stream proved impossible, however. It was deep, for one—we estimated its depth at six feet or more—with undercut banks that could easily collapse under our weight. Whenever possible we scrambled onto rock ledges and crabwalked toward the head of the wash, otherwise we forced our way through the brush, wary of the olive thorns that promised to rake and tear our flesh.

We hadn’t gone a hundred feet when we spotted the ruin. It was a small structure tucked under a massive overhang whose roof was black with desert patina. Seeing it there made me feel like an explorer from another century discovering some lost civilization. That there were hundreds of other such ruins studded throughout Comb Ridge made me want to explore the length and breadth of it. None are elaborate as Cliff Palace or Balcony House in Mesa Verde, nor even Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon, but then again no visitor to Mesa Verde or Chaco Canyon could ever hope to replicate that thrill of discovery.

Seeing it gave us the impetus to hurry. We forced our way through dense shrubbery and clambered up a steep incline to the mouth of the recess. It was humbling, almost sacrilegious, as if we were trespassers of the first order. Others had been here before, their bootprints crisscrossing the sandy floor, even as hundreds of years before families had lived here. As Chod shucked his backpack to get to his camera I began composing the shot I wanted. It would encompass the entirety of the recess and highlight the fractured surface of the rock as well as the adobe bricks of the ruin. Clouds blocking the sun provided an even light that was more gift than I’d expected or deserved. After nailing the shot I withdrew to give Chod unfettered access.

Taking a short pull of water but not nearly as much as I desired was almost painful. Surely there are more ruins, I thought. And then I saw a faint trail crossing the entrance to the box canyon. If we could follow it all the way to the road we could spare ourselves the vertical ascent and possibly find even better sites. I hadn’t brought binoculars but from what I could see it looked feasible. When I pointed it out to Chod, he agreed it was worth a chance.

I popped a piece of gum into my mouth to offset the dryness. The trail, more an impression than a path, skirted the cliff before dropping into a deep gulch. Had anyone watched us from the canyon rim they would have seen two small figures struggle up a sharp incline and disappear into a wall of vegetation. The real adventure had begun.

 How you die (Part 9)

Onward. We alternated the leading position as paths revealed themselves or chimerically dissolved into quicksand, barbed thickets or vertical ascents. The stagnant stream curling toward our side of Butler Wash forced us into an ever-constricting tightrope balanced between implacable stone and impassable water. It seemed as if by crossing the entrance to the box canyon we’d trespassed into an area whose secrets could be unearthed only grudgingly and through hard labor and small victories won at great cost under the reluctant benediction of an unslumbering spirit. 

Before us mystery lurked in every shadowed overhang beyond which beckoned the asphalt ribbon of the highway. A half mile separated us from escape but each step became more difficult, our every act unfolding in slow motion through air gone gelid and viscous. There was no trail except for that which we forged ourselves, erratic meanderings laced with frequent backtracking, more experimentation than determination.

If not for a glimpse of a second ruin we might have turned back. It was higher, tucked away in a shadowed nook accessible only by a scramble along a skewed slickrock ramp. Chod had the benefit of his hiking sticks while I had nothing but my own willpower and balance, both of which were fading. My attempt to follow him failed when a sudden case of vertigo spun the ground like a child’s top, leaving me breathless and dizzy.

Descending to the stream bed I pushed through an olive to a small clearing and emerged bloody for it. The rock wall was replaced by towering mounds of hardpacked dirt pebbled like an alligator hide and a central gully bisecting the halves. Beneath was a sandy waterfall that immediately claimed me to my lower shins. Each step upward subtracted two. A sensible man would have tried to circumnavigate the obstacle but the distance separating sand from dirt wasn’t great, and anyway whatever sensibility I’d possessed had long since fled.

I redoubled my efforts, feet pumping, thighs burning, until I’d clawed, crawled and swam to a lower shelf of more substantial firmament. Pulling myself to another ridge revealed a deep crevasse opening into a fathomless pit spanned by a yard-thick bridge of dried mud.

Don’t, the voice said. 

I had no intentions of doing so. The bridge might support my weight and might not, and if not I’d likely be entombed. Nevertheless I studied the bridge with deep intent and longing before turning back.

Another angle of attack brought me almost to the top before the slope began crumbling. Chod’s face loomed over the ridge followed by the tip of a hiking stick, which I grasped and held onto as he hauled me up like a fish. 

Muttering thanks, I dusted off, took a sip of water and returned to furiously chewing gum to extract the last molecule of moisture when a tooth shattered.

Since my first job at a candy warehouse my ivories have been held together by pins, prayers and professional reconstruction. That one chose this instant to disintegrate wasn’t a surprise as much as an annoyance, but the mental hit was debilitating. I cursed and swore and spat out chunks of amalgam and enamel and probed with my tongue the broken stub. First a cold and now this, I thought, and wondered not for the first time which god I had offended and how.

From our vantage it was evident that our path to the road was impossible. After photographing the ruin we turned back, but first I slipped my camera into its holster and slung it behind me. Doing so not only freed up one hand but declared my intent to leave without distraction.

But distraction would be the least of my worries. The “shortcut” from above as seen on the Internet looked promising from the base of the cliff, though the routes Chod and I picked were separated by a wide margin. Mine took me through a tangled thicket to a series of outthrust knobs that I clung to as I climbed. Chod fared better by clambering up like a mountain goat and soon was lost to sight. His absence left me feeling vulnerable and exposed and conscious again of the mistakes I’d made, compounded now by our splitting up. And then the knobs petered out leaving me an expanse of featureless rock.

Retracing my route only accentuated my vertigo. At the bottom I looked for Chod’s invisible path but finding nothing but featureless stone tried anyway and found myself once more fifty feet up and paralyzed. The second descent was worse than the first after which I sat on a rock and drank the last of my water and felt the first stab of fear. My brain felt smothered with cobwebs and sluggish with stupidity and my limbs followed suit but I knew there was no time to dally. My thirst would only grow and with it a lessening of abilities.

But I was so weary. I sat there hunched over in exhaustion watching blood trickling down my arm and hand and dripping into the thirsty sand, the inner voice haranguing and accusatory with a litany of mistakes I’d made whose compounding brought me to this desolate place. It wasn’t so much the predicament I was in but that I’d steadfastly refused to listen to my own reasoning, starting of course with my admonition to keep me away from cliffs. Alone, fatigued, dehydrated, giddy, surrounded by those selfsame cliffs, I teetered on the verge of hopelessness. The voice stilled and then, so faintly that it barely registered above the ringing in my ears, whispered, This is how you die.

I knew then that I had to find our initial route.  Lumbering to my feet, I set off through the thickets and sandpits to find it. I passed the entrance to the box canyon and the first ruin and found the narrow shelf and began scaling the cliff without much thought other than to climb without hesitation and did so until I reached a dead end. Working my way over to a small projection I worked my way up another hundred feet or so until reaching a ledge that split to the right and left. Deciding between the two made me dizzy and I flattened against the stone and closed my eyes. I was unutterably weary. 

When I opened my eyes Chod was above me waving to my left. By then I didn’t care whether I lived or died only that I got off the face of the cliff. Seeing him gave me a burst of energy that sent me scrambling without hesitation, a journey largely forgotten if indeed ever imprinted upon a mind gone blank, so that my next memorable impression was of him handing me a bottle of water which I greedily drank.  I could barely stand but followed him as he led me speechless and mute back to the vehicle.

Shadows gather (Part 10)

Something changed in Butler Wash though I did not know it then nor even shortly after we set out when I croaked out an invitation for free malts at the little mom-and-pop cafe on the outskirts of Bluff. I sat in the back seat nursing a bottle of water and watched the jaundiced stony ground whip past and fulvous tendrils of virga falling in long diaphanous veils to burn away before making landfall. Bluff appeared ahead but the vehicle turned onto another road whose sign directed us to Mexican Water and I knew something was amiss. Maybe they hadn’t heard me, I thought. Maybe I only thought I said something.

For a long time we drove through level featureless terrain bordered on every side by flat-topped buttes hazy in the dusty air, and the storm which had held off now bore down with wind and faint spatterings of rain that only collected the dust and clotted it into small brown specks like freckles. The air turned sulfurous and lightning forked the air but it was mostly behind us as we fled without dialogue. Uppermost in my mind was the remembrance of how we wished for adventure and found perhaps too much of it and here then was the price. But whatever cost I associated with the canyon was merely guesswork, preemptive and dulled with pain. The bill would come due in short order.

Slowly the soil reddened and spires jutted heavenward though still we moved blind to the greater horizons. After what seemed an eternity one such spire pronounced itself with its singularity to rise above the lesser buttes and dominate the eye and I knew then where we were. It seemed forged from altogether different materials and had the appearance of the prow of a ship cresting the waters. Its name was Shiprock.

We entered Farmington and immediately clogged in traffic. At the first chance we turned off into a Dairy Queen as was our wont but the place was packed with Navajos and a few roundeyes of which we stood in stark contrast for our filthy clothing. I tried wiping the dried blood from my hands without success and as we entered eyes swiveled toward us and never relinquished their curious gaze. The bathrooms were closed for cleaning so we ordered and washed as best as possible with a little vial of antiseptic gel left on the counter for that purpose.

Jim kept staring at me and shaking his head. “At least you’ll get your green chile burger at Bubba’s,” he said, meaning of course Blake’s Lotaburger which we comically missed during our last foray two years ago. We passed several Blake’s but we wanted clean clothes first and so found the hotel and showered and emerged almost human again.

But Blake’s wasn’t on the agenda. Jim broke the news that we were walking across the street to a cafe recommended by the clerk. 

“We’re having comfort food,” Chod said, and I did not believe the edge in his voice was my imagination.

According to the map we were three blocks from a Blake’s but I was in no condition to walk that far. I stared at the two of them and knew I was outvoted and said simply that I was eating there tomorrow or somebody was going to get murdered. 

The food at the cafe was terrible except for the small bowl of green chile cheese soup that had to be the finest ever to pass my lips. I almost wept with joy at being in New Mexico again where chile is the mainstay of all culinary repasts, but whatever delight summoned forth by that dish was shortlived for a cloud had settled upon us. Jim seemed his usual banterous self but between Chod and I a gulf loomed. He had rescued me twice for which I owed him but he had also split up and left me behind and the thought nagged me like my sore tooth. As we settled into the hotel he distanced himself from us and I wiped down my camera and inspected the sensor chamber and downloaded the images taken that day. Jim came over to watch and we talked quietly and then he tried engaging Chod. Shaman as dutiful peacekeeper.

Our last western expedition had ended rancorously and I hoped this would not be a repeat. But as dawn lightened the east ours was a silent trio. Jim and Chod ate a free continental breakfast while I waited for a green chile fix which came in the guise of a massive stuffed burrito at Blake’s. In between rhapsodic bites I navigated as Chod drove. We headed south to an abandoned trading post and turned off into a warren of dirt tracks only sparsely numbered. Trying to find our way in the DeLorme was like reading tea leaves at the bottom of a saucer or the indecipherable scribblings of a child. All we knew was that a certain road took us across a wide expanse of sand and sage to a small wilderness known as the De-Na-Zin and beyond to the Bisti, and that if we departed that road unwittingly our chances of finding either were in the low percentages. The horizon on all cardinal points was flat and void of notable feature other than the distant blue bulwark of the Chuska Mountains but even it proved elusive as the sun burned the sky white and distant marks shimmered like mirages. 

We came at last to a crossroads whose skewed signs were bewildering and halted while discussing the merits of either path. Both were equally wide and meandered in the proper direction but deciding between them was an act of prophecy. As navigator I had the last word but my word was ignored and we charged off until doubt crept in and still we drove until we came to a Y whose signs had none of the proper numbering. I wasn’t expecting an apology and didn’t get one but a silence descended that had the hard edge of stone or ice or implacable distrust or something else I could not then nor even now put name to.

 Koyaanisqatsi (Part 11)

Everything about the morning was wrong for our stated purpose of photographing the hoodooed De-Na-Zin and Bisti wildernesses. The incandent sun mounted ever higher as shadows withdrew like turtles’ heads into their carapaced shells and the unfolding land flattened into a two-dimensional tapestry. Our Trailblazer dragged a plume of dust that rose fast and settled slowly in the unmoving air as we advanced westward hemmed by ragged barbed wire fences and few signs of civilization other than the rare mudwalled hogan. Dust-devils spawned in the distance and died away. Drivers we encountered seemed incurious of our lot and refused all method of greeting but stared stonily forward through streaked and begrimed windshields. Jim said it was due to their culture. I said it was because we were biligaana.

It was impossible not to feel our alienness. We were interlopers in a sovereign nation not our own and everything surrounding us hammered home the fact. The stunted trees, the brittle grasses, the reddish sandy soil, the turquoise sky, the birds—Cassin’s kingbird! Say’s phoebe! black-chinned sparrow!—only accentuated the distances separating us from our homelands. 

The trailhead for De-Na-Zin was a barren scrape with a single path cutting away to the north. We got out and stretched away the kinks and began festooning ourselves with our accoutrements only to stop and gape at a pair of elderly Navajos ambling down the road. They moved eastward without glance to the right or left, seemingly oblivious to the miles of nothingness on all sides, their transit almost regal as if they alone were lords of this land. They appeared fashioned from the earth itself, their raiment an admixture of modern and traditional and all of it tattered and frayed. We watched in stunned silence and never thought to lift camera for what we witnessed was a sacrament and holy. Neither spoke but moved in stately unison into the rising sun until the sun took them and they were no more. 

The trail when we set out was crisscrossed with the tracks of reptiles and rodents and all manner of birds and the booted soles of hikers. Each imprint scored deeply the sand to endure until subsumed into another or erased by the wind. A hundred yards from the vehicle we came across a broad pad the size of a saucer with no other tracks to embellish it. Jim stooped over in study and announced that we were no longer at the top of the food chain. Our eyes swiveled to the sage and junipers and roved for tawny shapes with golden feline eyes and found them only in our imagination, but it was enough to inject a new wariness. It was fitting in that otherwordly place to believe our every move was monitored.

And for all that, De-Na-Zin was a disappointment. Reaching the hoodoos would require much more time that we’d allotted so after a short period where we again split up with Jim and Chod disappearing over a short bluff and me tracking what turned out to be a mockingbird with a distinctly Navajo dialect we reunited and continued westward across the dusty miles to the ribbon of asphalt where we rejoined the world.

The greater world, we discovered, had descended on the Bisti and lay encamped at the top of the bluff overlooking the main arroyo like some silvered army glittering in the sun. On the opposite side of the wash was a smaller camp with tents billowing in the soft breeze and semi trailers and miles of heavy electrical cables snaking across the ground and arc lamps and a host of workers bustling about. A flagman waved us to a halt and asked our destination and we replied but he appeared altogether dubious as if none in their right mind would wander this sunbaked desert willingly or without adequate salary. To our own query he said they were filming a television segment and did not want to be disturbed but after a while waved us on with an admonition to go at a snail’s pace but to go without gawking.

We were without question a source of curiosity among the workers and gofers zipping past on their four-wheelers but after a few hundred yards we faded into the bleached light and after a mile we entered a land riven with gullies and cañoncitos and disappeared altogether. On either side rose spires and crenellated towers and mushroom-capped mounds of cracked mud and hillocks of fine pebbles each another hue, some scarlet and others stygian purple. Nor did we walk together but struggled after Chod who took off alone as if wanting no more to do with us. After searching through a labyrinth of alluvial fans we came upon him sitting on a stone and Jim asked that we stay together or at least within eyesight. 

“Fine,” he said, but it was anything but fine and we knew it.

I felt poisoned somehow and had no way of understanding the part I was to play among them. Jim tried refereeing but Chod and I clashed again and again and always over minor trivialities that seemed at the time of major import. Our bickering carried with us to a distant row of hoodoos and back the long miles to the vehicle and into Farmington and beyond to Aztec where the ultimate break came in a squabble over a map. I’ve never been one to back down from a fight and was not about to start at this juncture and yet I still held our a glimmer of hope that Shaman could magick a truce or at least defuse the situation, but he could not. The best he could do was announce with finality that the trip was finished. 

“We’re going home,” he said. “It’s been a good trip, but we wore out our welcome.”

State of being, state of place (Part 12)

Two days out and east with the dawn. Not a leave-taking but a rout, three men striving to coexist in a compact encapsulated space bounded by thin metal walls and bug-splattered safety glass, rising junipered hills and a narrow green valley winding serpentine for miles without end. The road hugged one side or the other and leapfrogged the quicksilver stream running cold and clear from the highlands and dew sparkling on the lush meadows. As the road ever climbed toward the continental divide and the rarified air of Cumbres Pass the junipers gave way to spruces and ponderosas and sheer rocky outcrops a thousand feet high. Some normality intruded into an otherwise somber voyage, mostly new birds of note that had me tapdancing the brakes and whipping U-turns on nearly deserted highways. During such times it was easy to forget that we were no longer a team but individual and disparate members of a failed enterprise whose unity had collapsed into unanswerable questions and a simmering resentment of unknowable origins. Birds brought us together, but the cohesion could not hold. 

The scenery was a respite filling the otherwise empty spaces, and unutterably beautiful. And, once past the railroad town of Chama, as familiar to me as the back of my hand.

If not for having to concentrate on the road I would have slipped into a reverie of memories so depthless I would have drifted away from my corporeal state to become one with the ghosts that rose to greet me from the skunkweed and open meadows and the shining twin rail of the narrow gauge track and the pines with their gray jays and juncos and the rivulets winding down to join and conjoin and foam into the glittering surge of the Conejos River. Here were the meadows where we once encamped, as a child and a boy and a teenager and an adult and father and husband and now lost and alone and not alone. In limbo. There was the meadow where I almost had to shoot a bull with the .45-70 to protect our son, and a narrow side road winding toward a flat plateau where I photographed my father walking through fields of wildflowers and the distant cone of San Antonio Mountain marking one of the four corners of our own hallowed geography. We topped the divide where the waters also divide and descended and far below crossed the river and followed it toward the distant sagebrush flats. And for all our hurry to escape the present I turned into Aspen Glade campground and sojourned with the ghosts and listened for a short spell to the river’s haunting music. 

And on and on and every mile another living memory, through Antonito and Mogote and Romeo and across the empty quarter into San Luis with the serrated spine of the Blood of Christ range our final hurdle before the leaving the mountainous West. At Fort Garland we stopped to eat but the broken snag of a tooth had steadily carved a groove in my cheek and the pain held me in check and stitched me to this time and none other. 

Beyond La Veta Pass it was an anticlimactic retracing of our former path with little to hold our interest other than a desire to reach our homelands. We reached Lamar early and though I would have pushed on through the night had it been left to me we pulled into the hotel and unloaded and the codgernauts collapsed onto their beds and slept while I downloaded images and at last took out my Leatherman and filed down the broken tooth with the metal rasp. After that experience I downed the last of the beer wishing all the while for something much stronger.

The next morning brought an insistence to the miles as if we were tugged forward by an unseen presence. In the navigator’s seat I pored over the map and counted the miles and thought not for the first time about the arbitrariness of borders and their meanings whose dependency lies buried within our past. I wondered if I would sense on some subliminal level the crossing of the border from Colorado into Kansas and in so doing tried staring out the side window to prevent seeing any signs proclaiming the end of one and the beginning of the other. We were close and I knew it but wanted no contagion to spoil my experiment. And yet without askance the signs hove into view invalidating anything I might have gleaned and so we crossed into Kansas skies. 

I tried imbuing the fields with a symbolic presence altogether beyond their power and could not and  in defeat resigned myself to watching the empty lands slide past in their own ranked order. Entering Kansas wasn’t the same as entering New Mexico with its ethereal turquoise sky so unlike any other, but less defined, almost lacking in recordable detail as if the terrain had adopted a stoic Midwestern attitude and shunned any outward form of showiness including mountains or mesas or glittering trout streams running cold from the snowy peaks. And yet dawn’s slanted sun burned golden in our eyes and glowed in the mist rising from the fields and glimmered on the elevators of Coolidge, a tiny town here one moment and gone the next leaving barely an imprint on our retinas but at once familiar as all prairie towns are familiar. 

Wanting to write something evocative about our return, I picked up the little spiral journal scribbled with bird sightings and truncated reports of our peregrinations. But what was there to say? Our journey ended in disharmony. “We’re home and that’s all that matters,” I finally penned, knowing even as I did that it was only half true, that friendships mattered, that broken friendships needed mending. I wanted to write, “Are we up to the task?” but knowing that time alone would provide the answer, I put away the journal and settled back for the long miles home.