(Transferred from my 55 mph blog)
2009 6-12 The Ancients
A little fly dances to my nose
and out of reach.
My arm follows up and out.
I return to my sitting.
I was tired and slow that day. I poked around camp until noon, knowing I’d be staying over. When I went out I followed a portion of the Falls Trail, my body aching. The trail took me by gray ant nests, huge ones. Walking toward me, a woman grinned. I puzzled over her smile as I hiked until I realized why. It was my tee shirt. I was wearing one of my favorites, black with white petroglyphs all over. Mixed with the usual petroglyphs of goats and thunderbirds were a space saucer and Mickey Mouse and a jackalope and who knows what else.
When I got back I sat in the shade to write. A fly pestered me. He piggybacked on my hand as I wrote, then danced around my shirt. After a while I lay down my journal and straightened my back to meditate. The fly returned.
I went up to the Visitor’s Center--I was at Bandelier National Monument--and sat in an outdoor courtyard. Ravens were talking, herk, herk, awp. I saw a feather or twig drop from them, but when I went over, it wasn't there. Raven trick.
My doctor had told me about Bandelier, said it was his favorite place to go. He and I share an interest in American Indian art and ancient sites, so I thought I’d give it a try. I understood why he liked it when I went out to the cliff houses that afternoon. From the trail I could see many dark openings, some natural, some clearly made by people carving out the tuff (volcanic ash solidified into soft rock). I saw one cave with a rectangular shape inside. Depressions, marks, and tiny caves scarred the cliffside. Higher on the path I could see bigger caves and people climbing into them.
It was hard on my knees, but I climbed the many steps to join them. I was glad when I looked into a room. It had a fire-blackened, gouged-out ceiling. I wondered what it would be like to live in the tiny space and to look out into the flood plain below.
At the next cave house, bigger and higher on the cliff, I plucked up my courage and climbed to go in. The ladder was roughly constructed out of logs of cottonwood or pine, steps tied on, and the hands of visitors had polished the wood shiny. I have a fear of falling and went up fast, not giving myself time to look down.
Holes riddled the wall in the house, some perhaps for drainage, higher ones to let out smoke. The room was round, blackened above with soot, cream-colored near the floor. A pictograph covered a part of the wall, almost obscured by flaking and smoke. Its dark zigzag circled an arc of the room in a fluid and messy movement, as if it had been applied with a large brush. The zigzag ended in a more complex painting, perhaps the face of a man with a headband and stylized feather. It had been painted more thickly and precisely in a colored plaster. The feather image was white, and where hair might be, black. The “face” was red and a side bar red, and the features or interior details black and white.
The space was appealing. It was bigger than the earlier room, with a window, an alcove depression where things could be set, and a ledge for a fire. I stuck my hand up where the smoke would go, and found a flue. I wondered how far the flue would have to reach to let the smoke escape. Logs with hook-shaped stubs had been plunged into the wall, places to hang baskets and things like clothing (I read the people at Bandelier wove cloaks of turkey feathers). It was very satisfying to stand there, to imagine living there. It probably was the size of my camper-bus inside, slightly bigger, and round, of course. All the stuff you needed to live would be near to hand--food and blankets and weapons and your place to cook. And you could look out at the landscape. Not so different than the bus.
My breath tightened as I looked down the ladder polished by so many hands and feet. The ground seemed far below. But others were waiting to come up, so I turned and fumbled with my foot for the first log. A step, a step, I told myself, and moved methodically down, holding my terror at bay.
I lingered at two grottos where sunlight filtered between the cliffs down into slender cottonwoods, and a soft moisture filled the air. The path didn’t enter the small refuges; too many feet would destroy the , I imagine. They seemed cool and leafy and mysterious.
Below the cliffs, I walked among the adobe-brick houses, some built in front of cave houses, apparently to extend their space. Lower yet were partially fallen houses and nearer the stream, the ruins of others. A circle of ruined rooms surrounded a kiva.
Before I left Bandelier I walked a long way down Fry Trail and felt the landscape. The walk was hard on my back and legs, but I was strengthening. I saw two mule deer and a black beetle being eaten by red beetles.
I wonder what the appeal is for me of American Indian ruins and petroglyphs. Despite some family stories of Creek or Cherokee blood, I have no kin ties. I did enjoy my time teaching the Kiowa tribe and learning about them, and I have friends from several tribes. Really, though, I think the draw is something else. The art that I see on the stones and walls, the simpler lifestyle, living in the land, those are things I want in my own life--art, simplification, oneness with the world around me. They are all things that come from my traveling too. Not the community the cliff dwellers had, though.
When I traveled to Ireland and Scotland, it was the ancients who intrigued me--the carvings of spirals and rings and cups, the barrows, the stone circles. And when I taught linguistics I would have spent weeks if I could have on the roots of Indo-European. What were the words that revealed their lives? Spirit was shining, bear was taboo to name, no original word for wheel but words for salmon and beech and apple. And the earliest words yet, before Indoeuropean, 13,000 years or more--I and nose, father and mother, sun and moon.
When I go on the road to lead a simpler life, I’m not looking for austerity or self denial. Simplifying is not wanting things and not getting them; it’s turning to what is most essential.
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