Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West
“How about Alaska? I’d like to see that.”
I tell him he would like Alaska, with salmon as big as first-grade kids, a still-forming landscape, wonderfully wacky residents. Not too many horses, though. I dismount Sophie, and say goodbye to Brian. I’ve got one more stupid question: I ask Brian if he would ever want to leave Supai, maybe live somewhere else for a while, somewhere out of the canyon or in a bigger town. He gives me a big tobacco-teeth-stained smile.
“Nope.”
THE LANGUID pace of the village is contagious; what I feel like doing is taking a nap. Instead, I walk over to a little lunch counter and eat fry bread and a burrito, and down a cup of coffee. I lollygag my way around town, rousing a few dogs, but most of them don’t bother. The homes are basic government-issue prefab. Some are masoned and timbered; most seem relatively new. Water is stored up on higher ground, in a big tank, and some of the sewage runs through a ditch, to a containment area. There is surprisingly little horse shit on the ground, given that the transit system is constantly creating waste. Most of it ends up in gardens. At the school, which goes to fifth grade, I hear the Yuman dialect and see Anglo teachers among the Indians. Kids in Chicago Bulls jerseys play baseball during the afternoon recess.
Some visitors, expecting a Native American Eden, have been disappointed by the village. “Upon closer inspection, Supai’s charm wore painfully thin,” wrote Colin Fletcher in his 1960s account of walking through the Grand Canyon. “Everything was dirty and scraggly; dogs, houses, clothing.” Edward Abbey spent most of his time bathing nude in the pools below the village, coming close to death once when he was stranded between falls on a cliff; whiskey may have played a part. Wally Stegner was typically charitable. “There is something to be said for the policy that urges keeping barrier canyons around this tribe unbridged,” he wrote in “Packhorse Paradise,” an essay from the mid-1950s. “Inevitably there will be more and more intrusions on their isolation, and inevitably they must proceed through the phase of falling between two cultures, of being neither Indian nor white American.”
In a little back office not far from the school, I find Wayne Sinyella, the tribal chairman. He’s a Deadhead, as is obvious from the fetish objects in his office. On the wall are duplicates of two gold records by the Grateful Dead, one for the song “Sugar Magnolia,” the other for “Trucking.” Sinyella is still mourning the death of Jerry Garcia. “I love the Dead,” he says. “What are we going to do without Jerry?”
The Havasupai tribe, he says, has had a couple of rough years. They have been fighting various mining conglomerates which, for their five-dollar claims, have been able to dig up the ground that is part of the watershed for Supai, ground that drains ultimately into Havasu Creek. They are extracting uranium for nuclear weapons and power plants. All told, there are ninety-four thousand sites on the south side of the Grand Canyon on which people have made mining claims. Since 1984, the tribe has been battling one company from Denver that has drilled a deep shaft above the village. What has saved the Havasupai, of late, is a crash in the uranium market. Former Soviet republics are nearly giving it away, making it less profitable to scrape it out of the south rim of the Grand Canyon.
Still, all those holes in the ground on the plateau above Supai mean living with a certain trepidation. Not only does Havasu Creek provide the blue and green to the People of the Blue-Green Water, but it ends in a series of waterfalls, just below the village, that are a big tourist destination. “Uranium-rich” would not be a helpful brochure description, though in New Mexico the humorist Tom Lehrer has coined one such ditty:
Where the scenery’s attractive,
And the air is radioactive,
Oh, the Wild West is where I want to be.
One of the falls is higher than Niagara. People swim nude in the lower falls, with its pools and bracing water at a place in the canyon where the walls can make it like a convection oven. En route to the pools, hikers camp in the village, for a fee, or buy native crafts, or stay in one of the twenty-four rooms of Havasupai Lodge, recently remodeled.
But Havasu Creek can be destructive as well. Supai is not a benign eco-paradise. In 1910, the creek rose beyond its banks and tore up the village in a flood that changed its entire face. Before the surge, most people still lived in thatch houses made of cotton wood poles, sod, and tightly woven brush. Afterward, the town was rebuilt of wood and canvas. A few years ago, another flood came through, again destroying much of Supai. Using helicopters, the Bureau of Indian Affairs lowered sections of prefab, three-bedroom houses into the village. At first, the Havasupai didn’t know what to make of them; some were used for storage. Eventually, most of the village was rebuilt out of modular-home parts and common building material.
Stegner’s prediction—the dilemma of choosing between two worlds— has come true. A group of investors from outside the tribe has been persistent with plans to construct a long electric tram down into the village, allowing people to be whisked into Supai with minimal exposure to the sun or the charms of a horse named Sophie. Other proposals call for bulldozing a road through rock to replace the ancient path. As it is, not even motorbikes can get through.
“I guess we’d probably have to put up with a traffic light then,” says Sinyella. “And with a traffic light, you also get a traffic jam, don’t you?” The Havasupai, he says, have considered these offerings from the world above the canyon, and have chosen to stay with what has kept them going all these years, lying low inside the earth. It is not that they couldn’t use something better than a six-hundred-year-old irrigation ditch for watering crops, or a sewage system that backs up too often, or school walls that leak cold air in the winter and don’t cool down in the summer, or even a new village on higher ground, living with the kind of security from the whims of nature that other communities on the Colorado River have insisted that they need, with the help of monumental subsidies.
“What has kept us together, all these years, is pretty simple,” says Sinyella. “Isolation. And now that’s the big reason why people want to come here.”
ON MY WAY out of the village, hiking the slow, uphill miles back to the canyon rim, I pass about half a dozen parties, people giddy at the prospect of touring a place in America that seems to them somehow more authentic than anything above the canyon. I miss Sophie. And I pass Havasupai natives, speaking a hybrid dialect, carrying boxes of extra-large Domino’s Pizza in from Kingman. Their ancestors started out here eight hundred years ago, thinking the universe was little more than the side trail and the broad canyon. While nearly everything else changed on the river, on the plateau, in the land above the canyon, they stayed hunkered down in the smallest of towns, tucked into a fold in the deepest of clefts in the earth. They are not, as it turns out, The Only True People On Earth. But enough people think they are something close to that, and so the world has worn the only path to their door.
CHAPTER 5
Stone Stories
Escalante, Utah
For a long time I was obsessed with rock art. Men with tails. Women holding the sun. Flying children. Animals that talk. A whole front page of twelfth-century exclamations and exhortations on sandstone. I blew out a tire looking for the kind of thousand-year-old petroglyphs that are kept off maps for their own protection. I cut a knee trying to get closer to a ten-foot anthropomorph, an armless spook of red paint floating above a slickrock canyon. I spent days looking for six-toed foot images in the Painted Desert, wondering about the power held by the Clan of the Polydactylics. I even went looking for the eight-hundred-year-old spaceship glyphs on Navajo land that keep so many people up at night; to my disappointment, they looked more like turtles. I was most interested in Kokopelli, the hunchbacked flute player with the gravity-defying hair and erect penis. He first showed up about A.D. 200, and for the next thirteen hundred years was scratched onto hoodoos, boulders, and cave walls from Monument Valley to the northern part of Mexico. He was full of lust, life, and music at a time when much of the worlds great art was flat and Goth
ic. Was he a god of good times, a field fertility shaman, or just a horny little bastard who knew how to blow a few notes on a wooden nose chime?
Nobody knows. And that is what’s so stirring about the original art of the American West, and why a hike is never just a walk under open sky. There are no handy written summaries in five languages next to velvet rope, no self-serving notes from patrons corporate or Medici, no artists’ explanations of any kind. No signatures or authorial symbols, even. It is first-hand information, without spin, revision, or self-evident ego. And it reveals itself in a gallery of oversized geologic wonders, mounted on walls of stone where it can look grand or goofy, pedestrian or brilliant depending on the light, the weather, the mood of the sky. The people who descended from the Anasazi, the great rock artists, have some signs and symbols in their cultural traditions that seem to connect to the work of the ancients. They recognize patterns of ritual and repetition in the chiseled representations. But even the most knowledgeable of Hopi, Zuni, or Pueblo priests cannot say with any certainty what those snakes that stretch to geometric infinity really mean, for example. Much of the religion, oral history, and fetish bundles around at the time of the paintings and etchings were left behind in the big move. Nobody even knows what the Anasazi called themselves; they suffered the ultimate historical indignity, being named by a band of people who neither knew them nor liked them. “Anasazi” is a Navajo term, meaning “Ancient Enemy.” The Navajos, of course, arrived on the Colorado Plateau several hundred years after the Anasazi had disappeared. So you start with an initial mystery: who were these people with a peak population of perhaps a quarter-million throughout the Southwest, up to 100,000 of them in southern Utah alone?
The obvious explanation for most rock art is that it portrays hunting scenes. The artists drew or incised bison, sheep, coyotes, bears, antelopes, wolves, frogs, deer, or turkeys being chased by people shooting arrows or throwing spears. Hunting scenes. The modern equivalent would be an oil triptych of a family in the express checkout line at Safeway, on display at the Museum of Modern Art.
I want to believe that the best rock art of the eleventh- and twelfth-century Westerners is about something more than getting food or saying a prayer. In part, that has driven my obsession. When a row of people in a petroglyph are linked one to the other, as if in a line dance, and pointing skyward, is it a cultural highlight, a warning, or a diary entry from an intriguing night at the cliff dwelling? When frogs and fish appear in places where there are no amphibians today, does it mean that they screwed up, or we screwed up, or neither? Are the most animated of rock art panels narratives, prophecies, maps? Is there insight or knowledge, obvious to none of us, that we should know about? What of the glyphs in Chaco Canyon in northern New Mexico, where the ancients built a network of roads thirty feet wide, more than a hundred miles of them. For what? These people didn’t even have horses. That kind of infrastructure is not easily abandoned. Surely, the Chaco Canyon art is not silent on the local improvements. Any lessons? Final thoughts? Kokopelli, talk to me!
This is a huge hole in the history of the West. A population density greater than that existing on the Colorado Plateau today drained away without leaving a decipherable reason for their exodus. A civilization that had evolved over a millennium—first living in pithouses, then in aboveground pueblos up to four stories high, finally scrambling skyward to the cliffside apartments—just closed up shop in the late thirteenth century, leaving much of what they had created, even the portable stuff, behind. The conventional explanation for the departure, that a prolonged drought drove the Anasazi south, has been under assault for the last few years. Climate governed everything, by the old reasoning. The yearly growth rings of trees tell stories of trauma and health, fire and frost. They are high-precision natural calendars. Radiocarbon dating can trace a pottery piece to an approximate date. The Colorado Plateau is fortunate to have witnesses in bristlecone pines, among the oldest living things on earth. Combine a pine-tree ring count with radiocarbon dating of an artifact, and you have the basis for educated speculation. What the latest round of studies indicate is that the most perplexing question of Western archaeology remains just that. The Great Drought, according to recent studies of tree rings, actually began after the Anasazi had already started their move. And it came at a time when some cities had mastered irrigation and construction of earthen dams, allowing them to control their flow of water—not to mention the highway system at Chaco Canyon.
So the why-did-they-leave debate is in play again, open to rock art interpreters who roam the washes and canyons, the cliffs and roadless mesas, looking for clues.
I was going about my rock art visits, not really sleuthing but certainly speculating, in the wrong way. Like a journey to the Uffizi in Florence, or a stroll among Etruscan tombs in Tuscany, I was doing the Grand Tour, well-prepared. I saw most of the exceptional finds: the Sinaguan riffs at the cliff ruins near Sedona; a flank of stone crowded with information called Newspaper Rock in southeast Utah; the seventeen miles of vertical rock etched with six hundred to a thousand years of Rio Grande life just west of Albuquerque (now threatened by development); the big sites at Canyon de Chelly National Monument and Mesa Verde National Park. In all those places, I was consciously seeking out a specific panel or site, hoping it would match what I had read or seen in books. I had reduced the rock art of the West to Michelin Guide precision, where things were rated in one of three categories; worth a journey, worth a detour, or the lone-star status of being merely interesting.
The better approach, I came to believe, was to avoid advance spin, to merely let it happen, to experience discovery—an endangered thrill. The first pictograph I ever saw was on volcanic rock just above the Little Spokane River, in an old-growth ponderosa pine forest. I was ten years old, maybe eleven, stumbling through the woods with a friend in search of a fishing hole. We detoured away from the river because it was muddy along the bank and hard to walk. Somewhat lost, scratched by brush, and hot, we were ready to turn back when we saw it. It was magic—a red-paint sketch of two guys shooting arrows at something four-legged. We knew they were guys because they had penises. The pictograph was under an overhang that protected it from the weather. It was faded but clear. We thought it was cooler than catching fish or throwing rocks at raccoons. It meant that Indians had walked before us, on the ground where we played. It meant the presence of time and community at the northern fringes of a city barely a hundred years old, where the suburbs were named for long-vanquished tribes. It was a puzzle, a treasure in rock. Our find. Years later, I went back to the river, only to see a well-worn trail, marked with a roadside historical marker, to a pictograph behind a wire-mesh fence. No longer wild, it was as if it had been put in a zoo. Worse, the art had been defaced, much of it chipped away, which was why it was behind a wire-mesh fence. Somebody had written: “North Central Rules, Fuck G-Prep.”
Now, trying to duplicate the feelings of a ten-year-old in the woods, I set out on a primal rock-art expedition. The place to go, obviously, was somewhere on the Colorado Plateau, where glyphs and graphs are ubiquitous. (A pictograph is painted on rock; a petroglyph is chiseled or incised.) There is rock art all over America, but the best-preserved, the highest concentrations are in the arid lands where the ancients lived. Dinosaur fossils, some of them 145 million years old, are still around in Utah. With moisture rationed, things seem to last forever—a frightful thought when you ponder all the Wal-Marts covering Mesa Verde-sized pieces of real estate in Utah. Much of the Anasazi work looks as if it were created yesterday. I narrowed my focus further to southern Utah, north of Grand Canyon and east of the tourist haunts of Zion and Bryce canyons. There, within a five hundred-square-mile area on largely roadless country run by the Bureau of Land Management, is more rock art than any place in the country. A quarter of a million archaeological sites lie within one day’s drive of the Four Corners area, the only place in the country where the borders of four states intersect. Find a canyon, a wall of fine sandstone, a cave unm
arred by uranium miners, and you’re bound to bump into something intriguing.
But time was running out on the area I had chosen to visit. A Dutch-owned mining company had purchased claims to one of the biggest seams of coal anywhere in North America. It was planning to build paved roads and power lines, a mining complex twice the size of Manhattan, and then start trucking coal day and night for the next twenty-five years out of the heart of this wild country, west to Southern California for eventual shipment overseas. Every three minutes, a ninety-two-foot tractor trailer would rumble through a place whose main sound is the wind. The coal scheme had the blessing of the Utah congressional delegation, newly empowered by recent elections so that they ran the committees which oversee public land. At the same time, the state’s leading politicians announced plans to open up most of the largely unvisited red rock country to further development—air strips, some golf courses, off-road-vehicle trails, oil and gas drilling, and other “improvements,” as they call them.
“Nobody comes to Utah to see wilderness,” said Jim Hansen, the Utah congressmen in charge of the public lands and parks committee in the House. “They come for the major tourist sites, the parks.”
A realtor from Kane County echoed his representative. “I don’t think anyone wants to see it. Its not even second-class scenery; it’s third- or fourth-class.”
The Utah senators and congressmen had their maps drawn up, dividing the red rock country into sections where power lines and pavement, bulldozers and truck blasts would replace open space and the native ground of hope. Yikes! Of course, none of this would harm any known archaeological sites, they assured critics; that would be against the law. And the industrial intrusions would be limited to a few small areas that nobody really cared about anyway, Senator Orrin Hatch argued. It was jobs for small towns, roads for the counties, revenue for the state of Utah, coal for Asia. With a sense of urgency, I lit out for the last section of the country to be fully mapped—ironically, the heart of the first major American civilization—the red rock land of southern Utah. I wanted to see a piece of the unscreened West before it was gone.