Parsing petroglyphs

Often on a trip small things make the biggest and most lasting impression. Simple, human things that need no explanation. You come upon them, consider and absorb them, and leave with a gentle, satisfied fullness.

Petroglyphs are such things -- bare, spare expressions of life's joys and challenges carved into a stone face a thousand-plus years ago by someone who needed to document his year, his month, his day.

I love petropglyphs. I've seen them where I'd expected to, in places like Petroglyph National Monument in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And I've seen them where I didn't know they'd be: Bronze Age depictions of Viking ships carved into rocks in a field in Norway near the Swedish border; a riot of figures etched into a wall at Sand Island, a no-frills campground on the San Juan River near Bluff, Utah, where the kids and I spread-eagled ourselves across our tent to keep it from blowing away in a sandstorm; and in White Tank Mountain Regional Park in Arizona where Dana and I went for a day hike during a family visit to see Phoenix relatives.

Simple, silent voices that say, We were here.

This post was inspired by a poem I read today in The Atlantic by Michael Chitwood, who teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill:

THE LADDER

He worked for years on the tablet,
deciphering the pictographs. He knew
it was a kind of language, those images.
An eye. A bird, maybe a crow.
A basket of wheat. A ladder.
Did the order of the images matter?
He cross-referenced similar texts.
He studied the history of the region
and satisfied many hours in the tablet's service.
In a cousin language, a ladder
was the word for happiness, to rise up,
to be lifted above the ordinary.
After years of work, he sorted it out.
It was poetry, bad poetry, adolescent.
It read: "Today I am happy,
happy, all this day, today."


www.LoriHein.com

Dry as bone: Excerpt from Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America

"Entering the Homeland of Jicarilla Apache." The homeland was dry as bone, and Dulce, the reservation’s main town, held no sweetness. Dulce Lake, behind Dulce Dam, was grass and dust. Adopt-a-Highway stretches remembered tribal members like Assegra Luccero, Sea Willow. The Jicarilla Vietnam vets had adopted another piece of this lonely up-and-down road. From here on, for many days and many hundreds of miles, I kept the headlights on. These roads numbed the brain, and I wanted a fair chance of waking the eyes and reflexes of anyone coming at us on these thin strips of sizzling blacktop.

We’d been climbing on Route 64, and when we plateaued, the natural gas industry took over. On high ground, where I got some Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd on Big Dog 96.9, KDAG out of Durango, compressors, tanks, wells, pipes, and holding containers sat unmanned in the desert wilderness. Bright white gas worker pickups populated the road, and when we crested one long rise in the highway at noon, we faced a wall of the white trucks, many from Williams Company, parked at a lone, low building marked "Café," twenty-three miles from Bloomfield, in the middle of nowhere. Lunchtime out in the gas fields.

We came to the green San Juan River, which I will always remember and love. The liquid lifeline hosted a valley and basin that would run green and fertile all the way to Farmington. We first met the San Juan at Blanco, the town a wonderful green relief from the yellow desolation, with fertile fields and trees nurtured by the sweet water. The San Juan and its valley formed a long lush strip that my eyes followed to the horizon for hours, and I missed it when it no longer ran beside us.

We’d entered the Navajo Nation. A sign on the Navajo Missions Communication Center asked people to "Pray For Rain." My fire danger radar had been up in earnest for nearly two hundred miles now, and I sensed things were about to heat up for real. I’d checked the maps for alternate routes, should fire close the roads I’d planned to take, the roads that lived within the lines of the Route Narrative. Parts of the Route Narrative might need to be rewritten. KDAG 96.9, "serving the whole Four Corners area," had thanked firefighters for saving homes and urged them to "stay sane and brave." Not a good sign. Out of the frying pan.

Bloomfield and Farmington oozed into each other, like the natural gas industry that holds them together and keeps them alive. With little else around to please the tourist, Bloomfield’s Dairy Queen, which we would have jumped at anyway, looked like traveler’s heaven behind the heat waves that danced on the blacktop. The vanilla soft-serves made our hours of desert driving feel like a race run once the medal’s around your neck. We got larges this time, and Adam lucked out because Dana couldn’t finish hers.

Shiprock was the reason we were here in this burning hot Bloomfield-Farmington sprawl. My brother-in-law, Jim, once hiked near Shiprock, a dramatic monolith that rises nearly eight thousand feet and dominates the Navajo Nation visually and spiritually. He spoke of its monumental profile, its remoteness, its deep meaning. I value Jim’s opinion on any subject and put Shiprock on my list of things to see if I ever had the chance.

As we drove through the Navajo Nation, we looked on bright blue meat markets selling mutton and lamb to families eating outside on aluminum tables; satellite dishes painted with Indian motifs; a few mud hogans; stores selling two dollar a pack cigarettes; penned sheep; tightly-packed green and gold hay bricks sold from pickups for five dollars apiece; billboards urging teens to practice sexual abstinence; power lines; houses selling "Frye Bread, Sweet Corn, Roast Mutton." And always, there was Shiprock. To the Navajo, Tse Bit` A`i. Rock With Wings.

We drove out of Navajo land on Route 666, the Trail of the Ancients. The road was arrow-straight, and when the colossal monolith was no longer in front of or beside us, it sat in the rearview mirror and remained there, gradually filling less and less of it as we neared Colorado. Dana had been reading for a long time. She looked up and out the window. "Shiprock is still there," she said quietly. Like Acoma, a place that always was. A great ship of stone riding the earth, giving the people a link to the past, a grip on the present, and hope for the future.

Click in the right sidebar to buy Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America

LoriHein.com

Shiprock from Route 666

Blogger's photo uploading capability has been restored, but rather than tempt fate (probably not a great idea on 6/6/06) and risk losing this morning's post (see below) by trying to edit this photo in, I give you Shiprock on its own. Tse Bit' A'i to the Navajo: Rock With Wings.

The end of the road for Route 666

It had been Route 666 -- the 6th offshoot of Route 66, the Mother Road -- since the 1920s. But when folks along its New Mexico stretch complained to governor Bill Richardson that they were getting tired of devil jokes and beastly wisecracks and stolen street signs, Richardson and transportation officials in Colorado, Utah and Arizona, which had their own segments of the route, had it renumbered. In May 2003 it became US 491.

When the kids and I drove it in on our post-9/11 American journey, it was still Route 666, the Trail of the Ancients:


We’d entered the Navajo Nation. A sign on the Navajo Missions Communication Center asked people to "Pray For Rain." My fire danger radar had been up in earnest for nearly two hundred miles now, and I sensed things were about to heat up for real. I’d checked the maps for alternate routes, should fire close the roads I’d planned to take, the roads that lived within the lines of the Route Narrative. Parts of the Route Narrative might need to be rewritten. KDAG 96.9, "serving the whole Four Corners area," had thanked firefighters for saving homes and urged them to "stay sane and brave." Not a good sign. Out of the frying pan.

Bloomfield and Farmington oozed into each other, like the natural gas industry that holds them together and keeps them alive. With little else around to please the tourist, Bloomfield’s Dairy Queen, which we would have jumped at anyway, looked like traveler’s heaven behind the heat waves that danced on the blacktop. The vanilla soft-serves made our hours of desert driving feel like a race run once the medal’s around your neck. We got larges this time, and Adam lucked out because Dana couldn’t finish hers.

Shiprock was the reason we were here in this burning hot Bloomfield-Farmington sprawl. My brother-in-law, Jim, once hiked near Shiprock, a dramatic monolith that rises nearly eight thousand feet and dominates the Navajo Nation visually and spiritually. He spoke of its monumental profile, its remoteness, its deep meaning. I value Jim’s opinion on any subject and put Shiprock on my list of things to see if I ever had the chance.

As we drove through the Navajo Nation, we looked on bright blue meat markets selling mutton and lamb to families eating outside on aluminum tables; satellite dishes painted with Indian motifs; a few mud hogans; stores selling two dollar a pack cigarettes; penned sheep; tightly-packed green and gold hay bricks sold from pickups for five dollars apiece; billboards urging teens to practice sexual abstinence; power lines; houses selling "Frye Bread, Sweet Corn, Roast Mutton." And always, there was Shiprock. To the Navajo, Tse Bit` A`i. Rock With Wings.

We drove out of Navajo land on Route 666, the Trail of the Ancients. The road was arrow-straight, and when the colossal monolith was no longer in front of or beside us, it sat in the rearview mirror and remained there, gradually filling less and less of it as we neared Colorado. Dana had been reading for a long time. She looked up and out the window. "Shiprock is still there," she said quietly. Like Acoma, a place that always was. A great ship of stone riding the earth, giving the people a link to the past, a grip on the present, and hope for the future.

(Blogger's photo functionality has been down for a few days. When it's fixed, I'll edit in the Shiprock photo I had planned for this post. )

excerpt from Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America, Lori Hein, 2004

LoriHein.com

Free camping day at family-friendly KOAs

May 12 was Come Camp With Us Day at KOA . If you missed the campground chain’s giveaway day this year, you’ll get another shot at a free site next year. Come Camp With Us Day, when KOA gives away some 25,000 campsites for a night in May, is an annual event (2006 is number three). KOA locations start accepting reservations in February, so mark your calendar.

The kids and I got hooked on KOAs on our trans-America trek. Backcountry types will scoff and say staying at a KOA isn’t camping. By their definition, they're right. Nobody’s roughing it at a KOA. These are tidy, well-lit, family-friendly enterprises with pools and WiFi and microwaves to heat the pizza and Chef Boyardee ravioli that you buy at the camp store. They're located close to civilization -- and often close to go-kart tracks, burger joints, gas stations and Dairy Queens. If you want remote, pitch your tent elsewhere. At a KOA, you'll have plenty of company.

As a woman alone on a 12,000-mile road trip with two kids, these places were just the ticket after 300 miles of hot, dusty driving. They had activities, movies and video games for the kids, and electricity for me, so I could pull out the laptop and get some writing done.

We tent-camped quite a few times – and it’s the tent and RV sites that KOA offers as freebies on Come Camp With Us Day – but we fell in love with the Kamping Kabins. For less than 50 bucks, we got our own little bunkhouse with four beds, a desk, lights and outlets, a porch – sometimes with a swing – and a little patch of front lawn. Water pumps were steps away. KOA offers ritzier cabins with bathrooms, separate bedrooms, heat, AC, and even kitchens, but the economy models suited us fine.

We had some great KOA moments: eating canned chili by the fire in Santa Rosa, New Mexico while the long, sweet whistle of a hundred-car Burlington Northern Santa Fe filled the desert night; sitting poolside and swapping road stories with other traveling families in Cedar City, Utah; gathering under a purple High Plains sky in Belvedere, South Dakota to sing "You Were Always on my Mind" along with Almost Willie Nelson, whose braided pigtails hung to his waist; watching Dana, who'd signed on as a volunteer mucker, grin big as she shoveled clots of haystuck manure from the Mount Rushmore KOA's horse stables.

I made sure she washed her sneakers under our water pump before letting her back inside our cozy Kamping Kabin.

www.LoriHein.com

Simple gifts: Acoma Pueblo

This is St. Esteban del Rey, the mission church that sits 400 feet above the New Mexican desert and crowns thousand-year-old Acoma Sky City, sacred heart and spiritual epicenter of Acoma Pueblo.

Scroll to the post below (Oct. 7) and listen to an excerpt from Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America. We learn about the Acoma people's deep faith and rich culture from Dale Sanchez, great grandmother, family matriarch and tribal leader. Enjoy the journey.

Santa Rosa, New Mexico: Eyeball to eyeball on Route 66

A friendly town on New Mexico's Route 66 was the setting for an important family moment in this Ribbons excerpt that recently ran as a front page feature in the Traveling Today department of iparenting.com. Enjoy, and feel free to pass this post along to others who had, have, will have or are glad they don't have teenagers...

Where shall we go next?

Albuquerque sprawl threatens petroglyphs

The November 2004 issue of National Geographic contains a short item about the Albuquerque, New Mexico city council’s plans to run two four-lane roads through Petroglyph National Monument. Albuquerque’s sprawl has reached such a level that new roads are needed to relieve traffic pressure.

On our journey across America in 2002 (Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America), my kids and I spent a searingly hot afternoon wandering the ancient lava field that is Petroglyph National Monument, looking for the etchings – some possibly thousands of years old but most carved between the 14th and 17th centuries – created by ancestors of the Pueblo and other native peoples. We stopped at Petroglyph on our way to Acoma Sky City, where we would be hosted by Dale Sanchez, an Acoma tribal matriarch. She’d lead us up to and through her people’s sacred pueblo, and we’d feel something of the deep ties New Mexico’s native peoples have to their land, their ancestors and their sacred places.

When you stand on the spine of Petroglyph National Monument’s dormant volcanic hillsides and outcroppings, the tentacles of Albuquerque sprawl nearly seize you. Indeed, as you drive up Paradise Boulevard to reach the monument entrance, you see nothing but endless housing developments on your right. Joggers pant up the wide, white-hot sidewalks of newly-minted neighborhoods. Can there be a sacred, pristine, protected place here? It doesn’t seem likely. And then the high rocks of the monument appear, and you enter an oasis, a small relief from the super-sized, adobe-colored estates and cul-de-sacs that stretch as far as the eye can see.

I remember feeling thankful the monument was there. It was a barrier to the sprawl, I thought. Developers couldn’t build any more than they’d already built. There was nowhere to go, unless they cut into the monument itself. And they couldn’t do that, right? That’s what a national monument is all about, right? In 1990, Congress designated Petroglyph a national monument specifically to protect the rock etchings. So they're protected, right?

Adam, Dana and I walked the trails at Boca Negra Canyon, being careful not to tear our shoes on the sometimes sharp pieces of black basalt and ancient lava exploded from the earth 130,000 years ago. We saw a quail mother lead her babies into the brush. A cottontail bounced across the path, and we compared our foot sizes to the many millipedes that sat in the sun in the dirt. A ranger had advised us to leave the millipedes where they lay as they were an important food source for local birds. (The ranger must have had a sixth sense about the travelers in our trio. I don’t think most carloads of tourists need be advised not to pick up long, squirmy, slimy creatures. Not touching them comes naturally. But Dana would pick them up. She would love them and pet them and talk to them. Somehow the ranger knew that. A sure telepathy exists between animal people. As we crossed the country, I’d see it at work often between Dana and others.)

When we introduced ourselves to the ranger, he’d said, “Thanks for thinking of us.” Many people bypass Petroglyph on their way to somewhere else, and he thought it wonderful that three travelers from Massachusetts would take back tales of this sacred place. His love of the monument was evident, as was his respect for the people who created the etchings. As we walked through Boca Negra Canyon, we felt the magic, too. We delighted in finding an etching – perhaps a bird, a face, a mouse, a leaf, a human figure – then searching for another.

Now, two four-lane roads may slice this sacred place in half. In 1998, Congress gave its support to the Albuquerque city council’s road-building plan. Should this not sadden and indeed, alarm us? Just eight years earlier, Congress had protected the place. What gives? What’s next? And where?

The National Geographic article quotes Laurie Weahkee, a Pueblo activist: “’Indians regard this land as a holy place. Why should its desecration be any different from that of a church?’” Some people’s justification for cutting into Petroglyph National Monument may be related to a chronic, seemingly communicable disease our society suffers from. I found it sadly ironic that, six pages after the Petroglyph article, National Geographic ran a two-page car company ad spread. The product touted was a mammoth SUV (its name means an entire fleet of ships). The behemoth car was pulling an even bigger boat out of a suburban driveway. The ad’s tagline: “My dad’s towing capacity is bigger than your dad’s towing capacity.” The ad copy seduced with the words, “It’s fair to say your kids will have plenty to brag about.” What is next?

Explore many of America's sacred, quiet places in "Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America"