Dispatch XXII

Onto Canyonlands

Day 73-74 December 8, 2021

The morning was damp and gray.  We left Monticello’s Grist Mill and the Maverick Gas Station behind to drive to Canyonlands National Park. It was important to see the sights there. On the way we needed to track down the place where Thelma and Louise had met their fate in the movie named for them, the one that launched Brad Pitt’s career and memorialized the last ecstatic moments of Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis. Miles and miles of flat, rocky plains surrounded us when we pulled off the main highway and snaked canyonward.

The GPS eventually took us into low mountains and we turned onto a blasted asphalt road that quickly turned to dirt. We seemed to be getting nowhere and I was about to give up when we found the gulch where the climactic scene had been shot. I checked it against pictures from the movie, and there it was: the rim of rock that suddenly yawned into an immense and scarifying gorge. We got out of the rental car and walked to the edge. The wind and cold were picking up. Cyn and I stood there for awhile. No one ever died as joyously as Thelma and Louise, but I couldn’t help thinking about how dying like that might really feel; how dying period might feel: a death like that could only be exhilarating if you survived it, and there would be no surviving this. The idea gave me the willies, and we got back in the car to move on and find Canyonlands’ entrance.

At the gate I showed my National Parks Seniors Card to the guard, feeling for once that age had its benefits, and in we rolled.

The American West is vast and complex. The mountains and the flat power of the the plains and prairies can overwhelm you. No book or movie, no map or person can really capture it. I fretted about this as my mind tried to string together the proper words that could sum it all up, but then I thought the hell with it and decided to simply absorb it all, and abide in humility.

We stopped a couple of times at locations the park suggested, places where the eye met with acres and acres of mesas and arches. We hiked here and there as we had in Arches and Mt. Rushmore and Roosevelt National Park, and saw nothing but rock: rock above rock and below rock, so spread out my brain was beyond comprehending the distances. Crossing such a terrain could kill a man or woman before they made it by foot from one end to the other. I took pictures, but the sky was the gray color of steam and not kind to the camera until just before we departed. Then the sun broke through.

The many faces of Canyonland’s National Park. (Photos - Chip Walter)

Nevertheless, the wind had picked up and temperatures were dropping. We had heard a storm was coming across Utah. We got back into the protection of our car and headed again through sleepy Monticello, south and then east into southern Colorado to visit Mesa Verde, the land of the cliff-dwellers and what the Pueblo People called the Anasazi — the ancient ones.

Mesa Verde

In the town of Cortez, Colorado, you stand on the plateau of the Rocky Mountains and that ensures you are already at 6,000 feet above sea level. Though it was late afternoon by the time we got to the town, which seemed mostly to consist of strip malls, we rose 2000 feet higher into the national park entrance to get a glimpse of Cliff Palace and the land where the Anasazi once lived.

When I was working on the PBS series Planet Earth I had first heard of these ancestors of the Pueblo, and the best I could recall, they were an ancient people who had carved a city out of rock and sandstone and mortar beginning nearly 2000 years ago, just as the Western Roman Empire was falling apart. For 900 years the Cliff Palace and other cliff-dwelling villages in the region developed a vibrant and advanced culture linked by a great network of pathways that kept them in touch. The Cliff Palace may have been a particularly important administrative center, meeting and trading place, a lively hub for farming and commerce and ritual. It’s one of a handful of places in North America chosen as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

We walked the rim. Not many visitors were around, partly because it was getting late and partly because December was not the season for tourists, which was fine with us. The dwellings, when we got close enough to view them, looked so organized and planned.  It reminded me that civilizations from Crete, the Mayans of southern Mexico, the Incans of the Andes and the Khmer of Cambodia had also come and gone; risen to great heights, and departed, taking their insights and technology with them.

There is no clear explanation for why the Ancient Ones disappeared, but they did about 700 years ago. The best theory is that a series of droughts eventually did them in. Without food and a proper irrigation system, their social system would have disintegrated and migration would have been the only answer. Where they went is as mysterious as why they left, but left they did, with only these hard, un-eroded marvels of engineering to provide some clues about their existence.

The cultures of Earth are a rich and beautiful mystery.

Mesa Verde National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site. Images from the mesa and the Sun Temple created hundreds of years ago, probably as an important ritual site. Before the emergence of solid science, myth and religion were a people’s only way to make some sense of the world. Yet religion still plays an enormous role in societies today. (Photos - Chip Walter)

As the sun set, we snaked back into Cortez and found a hotel. The next morning we awoke to another damp day. The darkness and dampness was getting to me a little bit. I felt like we had so much to see and I had so much to write about. We needed to keep moving but how could I keep up with all the note-taking and research and writing? Well, there was nothing for it, except to look to the future, and head to those broad rocky prairies and the mountains so far off. I’d figure it out.

We were grabbing breakfast before hitting the road when we met Robert and Anita. Anita was a pretty woman, bird-like with a great smile and cheekbones - French, born in Alsace-Lorraine in the midst of World War II. Her mother was French and her father a German Nazi. That eventually led them to part ways, and her childhood on the border made for a harrowing story. I figured by now she was in her early 80s though she and Robert moved with the speed and agility of 20 year-olds. She had decided to write what she had gone through, she said, and pretty much had it in hand. Now she wanted to pull together the story of her father who gave her the diary that he had written beginning when he was 15 years old and had joined the Hitler youth. I thought what a remarkable story that would make. I couldn’t imagine there were many books that could reveal the insights of a teen just as he was being brainwashed as a Nazi. What was he taught? How did he deal with it? Where did it take him?

The couple had been together for decades and between the two of them had travelled everywhere. Robert told me about a fabulous train they had taken in Denali National Park in Alasks, and I said we’d add that to the list. I shared a bit about my trip to the Arctic and Barrow (now Utqiakvik), the northernmost city in the United States where I had been researching Immortality, Inc. and seen the Unupiat people hauling bowhead whales in for the fall harvest. We talked a bit about how Alaska was really one of the last truly wild places on Earth, and then Robert grabbed Anita by the hand and said it was time to go.

It was time for us to go too. As long as we stayed south, and made headway across Utah’s southern border, we could be skirt the massive storm people were talking about. We grabbed our bags and made our way into the chilly air and onto Four Corners, past the San Juan Mountains of Mesa Verde and headed across the scarred and blasted rock of the Colorado Plateau.

Four Corners was a place where if you stood just right, bits of you could be standing in New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Arizona at the same time. Long ago the Pueblan People lived in this land and then later the Dine and Ute people. Around 1848 Mormon settlers tried to create the State of Deseret, but the US government put a stop to that and in a compromise the territories of Utah, named for the Ute people, and New Mexico were created. Utah became a free state and New Mexico a slave state. (A compromise that would only be worked out 10 years later by the American Civil War.) Later Arizona was created bringing what would become the four states to this one location.

The Ute Reservation was nearby, but the Navajo controlled the monument we were visiting. It cost $5 to do the touristy thing of straddling four states, and we thought that was a bargain. The dirt parking lot had been rutted by rain and then baked like cement. There was a perimeter of shed-like clapboard shops and behind each stall were the Navajo owners of photos or magnets showing off the four-corners in various ways, t-shirts, drawings and paintings and hand-made jewelry, pottery, native headpieces and knives, jackets and sweaters. One young man was selling a book he had self-published about his life growing up on the Navajo nation’s enormous reservation. I had to buy that. We writers had to stick together.

At the center of the perimeter a large medallion had been planted in the ground. Cyndy and I exchanged pictures in the gray light with an elderly couple who had come clear from Israel to visit the wild west. The two of them were small, bundles of energy, clearly having a grand time.  As he handed me back my phone after snapping our picture, he rubbed his bald head and said with authority, “If you always act young, you will always BE young.”

Behind one of the stalls we found Robert Charley, a Navajo native who told us he was a medicine man. He showed us a selection of hand-made arrows. His face was as creased as a crumbled bag, but his strong, square face was absolutely serene. He told us about the “protection arrows” he made.  “Put them above a doorway,” he said, “and they will bring good luck. They represent guidance for our children, something that says they can shoot as high as they want.”

He personally fashioned  each one down to hafting the wood and setting the feathers and flint arrow heads, the real thing. He spoke quietly, clearly and wasted no words. There was an air of immense serenity in everything he did with none of the huckstering you see so often. We noticed this with all the Navajo people we spoke with. I wondered if as a people they had been through so much they couldn’t be rattled. Or if they drew on a cultural strength that gave them a natural authority and confidence. One Navajo gentleman told me that of all the Plains Indians, the Navajo never gave up any of their ancestral lands. Their territory was enormous sprawling 17,544,500 acres or 27,413 square miles across parts 10 states.

From my childhood I had had a fascination with anything having to do with Indians and so I bought the arrow and added it to a quiver and arrow set I had bought in Taos, New Mexico a couple of years earlier. The man expertly rolled it in cardboard and I later stowed it in one of my two bags. After our travels I would place it above the entrance of our doorway to mark the optimism and freedom of an arrow flying into the sky. We said good-bye to Robert and he quietly nodded and wished us a good day and safe travels.

The land continued its dusty, rugged ways as we followed State Route 163 to Monument Valley. It would be a few hours drive skirting mountains as we grew closer. This would be a highlight for me. I had wanted to visit Monument Valley for as long as I could remember. It was those iconic images I couldn’t get out of my head because I had never seen any place like it, not in the Brazilian Rain Forest, the Australian, not China or Turkey, and here it was right in my own country.

We stopped along the way for gas, passing through the Navajo Reservation’s ranches with its occasional wooden shacks and trailers among the scrub. But mostly there was just space and rock. At the gas station we filled up and got some coffee. A dog of no particular breed wandered the pumps looking whipped. When I walked toward him, he slunk away as if he’d be hit, yet clearly hoped for food. It made me think of people who are both desperate and scared at the same time, conflicted and paralyzed, and I felt powerless to help the poor thing. As we drove off, in my rearview mirror I watched him circle a pump nosing at a piece of paper, hoping for food.

Soon we would at last make it to Monument Valley.

Stay tuned, and in the meantime, crack on!

Your vagabonds …

C-Squared

This is a series about a Vagabond’s Adventures - author and National Geographic Explorer Chip Walter and his wife Cyndy’s personal journey to explore all seven continents, all seven seas and 100+ countries, never traveling by jet.