zion/bryce canyon: day 1

Day 1

A hot day, in sun and wind whose gusts pull at my straw hat. Fragile sandy soil caves gently under my feet as I walk with a Park Service archaeology crew through sage and prickly-sharp black brush. With sketchy directions and photocopied topo maps, we search a bench of land for a few noted Anasazi sites, eyes honed for pottery shards and rock patterns that could indicate a room block. We find some, with a few standing flat rocks that once divided food storage bins for a people’s survival. We flag and pace the perimeters, map and photograph the features.

I look around and see what those other, ancient people saw: the river fork coursing below the bench, bright now with its oasis of cottonwoods in fall yellows and greens; the red dusty desert with its wind; scattered junipers and mountainous rock formations banded in orange and rose and white. There was no road for them, or hotel across it, or plastic water bottles or restaurants or graph paper. Seeing the broken pieces of their painted pottery, blue-grey and black and whitish, is a novelty and a fascination for me, a bridge to something distant and simpler and mysterious. For them, they were surviving, and the vessels they created and the walls they built were all toward that purpose. And I envy that kind of simplicity, where your task each day is to attend to the basic needs of your life, the seasons, your extended family, where you live outside and know that you are inseparable from the land, with no thought of bills and cell phones and unfulfilling jobs working for other people. And I am projecting, of course, for I cannot know the hearts and minds of these people, and the joys they found in their work or their sufferings in hard winters. What I do know from the imprints they left, and the energy that abides there still, is that I like them, and that they lived well.

As we drive out from the site, I see my first roadrunner speeding through a field on the left, and we all laugh about two wild turkeys who are still facing off in the same tree we saw them in this morning – as if the day’s hours, or centuries, had never happened.