Elvis Saltwater

The last three stops on our unplanned but ardently embraced Ancestral Puebloan tour, before we turned north to Utah's unexpected challenges, were Aztec Ruins National Monument, Chaco Culture National Historical Park, and Canyon de Chelly National Monument. At Aztec Ruins we rolled in playing Dylan's "Romance in Durango," just as we had in Durango, CO, although the song is about Mexico ("Santa Fe" was our soundtrack for dear, dear, dear, dear, dear, dear Santa Fe ,of course). "By the Aztec ruins and the ghosts of our people/hoofbeats like castanets on stone," Dylan sings, in a Mexican fantasia that incorporates pretty much every Spanish word a gringo can think of—cantina, querida, corrida, torero, tequila. The line invokes the very trope of the vanishing, spectral ancients that current Park historiography is revising (and which I wrote about in my previous post). The Native park ranger at Aztec Ruins, herself a Puebloan, talked about the change in recent years in naming practices, noting that while "Anasazi" is no longer in use, there has been no move to correct the historically inaccurate "Aztec" first applied by Spanish explorers traveling north from Mexico, who called any old ruins they saw Aztec. The face of God will appear with his serpent eyes of obsidian.

Aztec Ruins

Characteristic dark stone band—not decorative, possibly representing water

The Aztec Ruins are of a very large Great House, part of the broader "Chaco Phenomenon" of 850-1250 CE, a period of collaborative trade, cultural unity, and artistic flourishing across many hundreds of miles of the Four Corners region. It took us about 3-4 hours to drive from each of these sites to another; 1000 years ago these pueblos were all considered neighbors. The work of repointing the old stones to preserve them happens constantly, and is considered sacred work. Some of the wooden ceiling beams in Aztec Ruins are original, dating from 850. While we visited Aztec, a group of restorers from Ácoma Pueblo worked on one room in the site, listening to a boom box.

Ácoma Pueblo restorers at Aztec Ruins

Our friends Robert and Don and the artist we had talked with at Taos Pueblo, Sam Romero, had all separately spoken reverently about Chaco Canyon, which I had not visited in my childhood travels. Don said "it is remote…amazing and most worth it if you camp." This was our plan. We have been hauling our tent, oversized sleeping bags, camping unfriendly air mattresses, and cooler for our entire trip; I'd say we haven't touched them, but we have to pull them out of the trunk and back seat every time we stop in order to access our clothes and book bags and our kid's bags of books and art and weaving and crocheting supplies. We are not super experienced campers. Our grand plans to stay in campgrounds at Zion, Arches, and other national parks had been thwarted by our misrecognition of the impact of the centenary of the National Park service this summer: popular parks have been booked for many, many months, and the first-come, first-served sites have recommended arrival times of 6am, which kind of defeats the purpose of camping in a place for the night. But Chaco Canyon had a spot for us.

Driving in to Chaco Canyon

About 10 miles in on the 23-mile dirt road that forms the final half of the 40-mile access road to Chaco we became impatient with the pace of the cautious cars ahead of us. The "dirt" road was more like a wash post-flash flood, and the other vehicles were taking it very slow. We swung out around two or three cars and almost immediately hit a huge ditch hard and blew out our tire, 50 or 60 miles from the nearest service station and at least 45 miles from cellular reception. The park ranger we later consulted looked at us coolly in our slight panic, informed us that our neighboring tentsite companions also got a flat on their way in, and asked "have you really never had to change a tire before?" (Not since a tire had been slashed on Christmas Day in Philadelphia, and even then, I think my brother-in-law mostly handled it.) She said that a different ranger had blown out a tire on another road two days earlier, had driven into a ditch, found herself caught in a flash flood, and ended up with a truck filled with three inches of mud. That is a better story than receiving a punitive flat for itchy touristic driving.

Still, not a bad spot to have to change a flat

Oral history reports that the great buildings of Chaco were built by command of the Great Gambler, who came from the south and enslaved the Puebloan people before they outwitted and expelled him. Perhaps a signal of the Gambler's character can be seen in the location of the Great House: beneath a 140 foot, 30,000 ton rock known as "Threatening Rock." Chacoan builders recognized the danger of the rock, according to the park service's guide: they placed

pahos (prayer sticks) in the crevice between the rock and the cliff. They built a supporting masonry terrace below the base of the rock sometime between CE 1040 and 1050. . . . The traditional Navajo name for Pueblo Bonito is Tsé biyahnii'a'ah, which means "rock that braces and supports the structure from below," and refers to the masonry that supported Threatening Rock.

In 1941 Threatening Rock finally fell and destroyed 30 rooms in the pueblo.

The remains of Threatening Rock

Another threatening rock, 1/3 the size of the one that flattened 30 rooms in Pueblo Bonito

We put up our tent and roasted burgers and marshmallows under less threatening red rocks in the platonic ideal of campsites. We heard coyotes in the wash. We borrowed electricity from a park ranger when our car cigarette lighter adaptor didn't work on the air mattress pump in this primitive campsite. Lightning was constant over the mesa, but the sky above us was clear and we lay on our backs on the picnic table and watched the beginning of the Perseid meteor shower. J and I pulled from a whiskey bottle and our daughter sniffed our clothing to take in the campfire scent. Even if we never again used the camping equipment that had taken up 70% of our car storage space on this trip, we assured each other, this evening had been worth it. In the morning we drove on our spare donut tire very very slowly out of the park, and then very very slowly to the nearest town, well over an hour away, and had a matching used tire put on the car at Kachina Tire Shop. It took five minutes.

I had been looking forward to Canyon de Chelly the most on this trip; I have the strongest childhood memories of riding through the wash to the cliff dwellings on horses led by Navajo guides (as I wrote about here). The only access to the canyon's interior, which is on Navajo Nation land, is via tribal guides (whether on foot, via jeep, or on horseback); the U.S. National Park service operates only a scenic rim drive. In this canyon beginning in 1864 Kit Carson had starved out 8000 Navajo, precipitating the Long Walk that removed the Navajo from their ancestral lands. We arranged for a three-hour horseback tour with Justin's Horse Rental, and as we pulled up to the small wooden building its rectangular frames clicked into the place that my memory had held for them for 32 years: it was the same outfitter we had used when I was 11 or 12. Justin confirmed that yes, his family's business was over 35 years in operation, and the building was at least that old. He asked what my guide's name had been; perhaps it was then-teenaged Patrick? Possibly. His cousin Dennis would be our guide, and we mounted our horses, Big Red for me, Blondie for J, and Happy for our daughter. In childhood summers we had frequently done horse tours, but I had not been in a saddle since I was probably 13, when a ranch owner in the Badlands had asked me to come back the following summer to serve as a trail guide. (I had been thrilled by this offer until my father pointed out that all the girls on the ranch were about 14 or 15, and the ranch owner was a lone older man.) It was the first time riding for J and our girl.

Justin's Horse Rental, Canyon de Chelly

Dennis was a manager of Indian rodeos, and was a former bronco himself. He was working on setting up international Indian rodeos with Canadian contacts, and talked about visiting Edmonton and noticing language similarities between Navajo or Diné and First Nations tribes, much as he said was the case with the neighboring Apache reservation in the Four Corners region. Of the Hopi, whose reservation was enclosed by a section of the Navajo reservation, Dennis had little to say. "They don't understand us and I have nothing to say to them," he told us. Afterward I read up a bit on the 100+ year Hopi-Navajo land dispute, which seems to be the source of this division, and similar talk I remembered from 30 years ago.

Happy the horse had been nuzzling a colt at the headquarters, and spent our ride out whinnying loudly. "She misses her baby," Dennis told us. "When we turn back home she will know and will take off." This delighted our girl, who was thrilled with Happy's brisk pace and desire to trot. When we made the final turn the call and response of Happy and her foal and then their ecstatic reunion started tears to my eyes.

Happy and baby

I texted my parents a picture of Justin's Horse Rental and asked my mom if she could go through the photo albums of our 1970s and 80s travels and find the picture of me sitting atop the sweating horse post-ride, 1984 or so.

Me and Cricket, 1984ish

Here my memory diverged: I had repressed from the mind picture both my painfully preteen posturing and the enormous white Converse hightops. The black striped polo I did recall. Later that night I emailed the picture to Justin Tso, the owner of the riding service, who is also a well-known painter, and asked him if he recognized any of the figures in the photo, despite the passage of decades and the turned backs of the men. I checked my email as often as northern Arizona's indifferent cellular coverage permitted. It was two days before Justin responded to my whinnying appeal for recognition and connection over the years: "Sure, Eddie Draper (orange pull-over), the late Jerry Skinner and you are on Cricket!"

Flush from our camping triumph in Chaco Canyon, and intoxicated by our hours moseying along the floor of Canyon de Chelly, we thought we would double down and pitch our tent in the park's campground near the ranger station on the bypass road, under the cottonwood trees that had been planted in Canyon de Chelly by the Civilian Conservation Corps. There were few other occupants in the campground, and when we emerged from our car into great clouds of mosquitos we understood why. J and I exchanged a long look and then drove across the bypass to the Holiday Inn Express, Chinle. There were no mosquitos on the unexpectedly posh—for a Holiday Inn—pool deck, which was lined with sunbathing women with sleek seal bodies wearing ambitious bikinis. J and I exchanged another long look: where were we? I was waiting for Van Halen's "Beautiful Girls" to start playing. When the kids splashing in the pool started shouting to each other in French, Italian, German, with the occasional mild reproof from a lounging parent ("suave"), we understood why the Holiday Inn pool scene had seemed so foreign.

As we turned toward southern Utah's superb cluster of national parks, the original ultimate goal of our road trip, we took a detour to drive through the iconic Monument Valley. After having the various sites of the Ancestral Puebloans more or less to ourselves in the previous week, we were startled to arrive at a traffic jam: a long line of cars at a standstill, occupants standing at the side of the road. They were awaiting admission to the 17-mile scenic loop through Monument Valley, which is a Navajo Tribal Park requiring admission. Where we came to a stop was near a dirt-floored shop selling jewelry and crafts, so we broke free of the line and stopped. Pinup girls from the "Women of the Navajo" calendar smiled at us from the walls. The proprietor was a jeweler with the greatest name ever: Elvis Saltwater. He is part Zuni, he told us, which explains his unusual last name. Our fiber-arts-loving daughter asked him about the woven pieces for sale (which we loved and one of which we bought), and asked how different patterns were made. Elvis Saltwater gave her a mini clinic on Navajo weaving techniques, showing her pictures of looms, explaining techniques, discussing patterns. He invited her to email him with any questions. The piece we bought was woven by Elvis's 22-year-old daughter Shanythia Saltwater; our 10-year-old glowed with pleasure to hold the fruit of a fellow girl's loom. We are now on our return drive, and our girl has spent the last two days with a small craft loom, weaving with Navajo wool she picked up in Chinle outside of Canyon de Chelly, experimenting with the patterns and techniques to which she was introduced by Elvis Saltwater. We did not rejoin the line of cars appealing for entry to Monument Valley.

Next: driven from Zion.

"The Warchief Takes Care of Things like Ecology."

We have spent the last three or four days traveling among sites of the Ancestral Puebloan communities: the major cities and trading and travel network nodes of the Southwest between 800-1300 CE. Until this trip I had known these cliff dwellings, kivas, residual walls and communities under the name of Anasazi ruins. The word Anasazi is no longer in use, though, except on roadside motels and the occasional peeling informational placard. "Anasazi" is derived from a term in Navajo meaning ancient people or ancient enemies (the Navajo arrived in the region from Canada around 1400 CE). But the Puebloan people have never left, as we have learned from Native tour leaders, National Park rangers, and our travel reading. Today's Native Puebloan communities of New Mexico and Arizona include Conchiti Pueblo, Jémez Pueblo, Pecos Pueblo, and Taos Pueblo (occupied continuously for over 1000 years), among others, all independent sovereign nations, all with their own language. Their members are the descendants of those who built the large multi-story, 100+ room structures that are now known as Bandelier National Monument; Chaco Culture National Park; Mesa Verde National Park; Canyon de Chelly National Park; and many others throughout the Four Corners region.

Taos Pueblo, continuously occupied for over 1000 years

The idea of the Anasazi as out of time and absent lines up with the ideologies of the "vanishing" Native of long nineteenth-century U.S. practices of Indian Removal, which I had also been taught as an 11 year old, traveling this region over 30 years ago. Imagining ancient peoples who mysteriously disappeared—because of drought? enemy combat? migration by choice?—is far more palatable for white Americans than confronting either a genocidal past or a present of neglect, mistreatment, and economic and educational inequality. The narrative of today's Ancestral Puebloan history in National Parks and Monuments is "Puebloans are still here."

The last three days of our National Park visits, that is, have been either on or accessed through Native sovereign lands. I am keenly aware that our roadtrip is taking place during the hyper U.S. nationalism of the Olympic broadcast, which we see in the breakfast areas at the motels at which we have been generally staying. None of us has been interested in watching the Games in our various motel rooms, which may be because of NBC's execrably gendered coverage and "human interest"-oriented narrative obliteration of the events. I'd like to imagine, though, that it is because we have not been in the U.S. in these past few days while on the lands of the Ancestral Puebloans and their contemporary Native descendants, and feel no connection to such affiliations. (The truth, no less pretentious, is that our kid was ripping through the latter two Hunger Games books and wanted to have family reading parties at night rather than watch TV.)

On our way to Taos Pueblo we passed a sign for a Nambé silver outlet, and J and I calculated that we were a decade or two past the age of monthly wedding registry notifications that included the popular brand of silver ceremonial candlesticks, bowls, trays. Did anyone buy anything by Nambé that was not a wedding gift, J asked? A mile or so later we saw a sign for Nambé Pueblo and felt chastened. We were in silver mining country. Of course. The wedding registry staple took on a different cast in the context of the Puebloans who either produced the expensive goods, or lent their tribal name. [Internet research update when cellular signal permitted: Nambé ware is made of a proprietary 8-metal alloy that does *not* include silver; the company was founded in the town of Nambé Pueblo but claims no Native affiliation; message board users are really pissed that Nambé products are now made in China and India and not New Mexico.]

New church at Taos Pueblo

In Taos Pueblo tours are given by college students, volunteers who work for tips, and who walk tourists by the ruined bell tower that is all that remains of the Catholic church built by the Spanish, a replacement for one torn down in the successful Pueblo Revolt of 1680. This latter church, San Geronimo, was destroyed in 1847 by U.S. soldiers targeting revolutionary Taos Puebloans after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. It is now used by the Puebloans as a cemetery. The tourist public is granted access to the Pueblo via a fee during certain hours of the day; several of the pueblo's familial homes are occupied and off-limits to visitors. Most members of Taos Pueblo live nearby and visit or live in the 1000-year-old great pueblo on various occasions throughout their lives. Our guide explained that the term of Governor of Taos Pueblo was one year; also annual was the position of Warchief. "The Warchief takes care of things like ecology," she said. She had just finished a story about how her people had, in the Nixon administration, successfully reclaimed land seized from Taos Puebloans in Theodore Roosevelt's administration. It was the first time Natives had won back lands taken from them by the U.S. The land included a mountain lake sacred to them; it feeds the stream that runs through Taos Pueblo, which has no electricity and no running water and which uses the stream for all drinking and cooking water to this day. The Warchief takes care of things like ecology.

San Geronimo de Taos, destroyed in 1847 by U.S. troops

In a small whitewashed room in the main pueblo we bought berry pies and a shirt from an artist named Sam Romero; the shirt's small logo read "Can't Fail," and Sam explained that it was designed by his son, Rudy Romero. Every time Rudy entered a room his father would bellow out the Clash song "Rudie Can't Fail," which the boy loved. "My wife Valentina Romero was born in this room on February 14," Sam Romero told us; "her mother had miscarried her first baby, also on Valentine's Day, and her last child was born on the same day. She said the baby had been returned to her." Our daughter bought a beaded necklace with her allowance. Sam said his son Rudy made the necklaces, too. "My son gets discouraged about the necklaces not selling, but I tell him the making of them is a blessing. If they sell it is a double blessing."

We were driving across one of those unscrolling Western plains from Taos to Durango, CO, en route to Mesa Verde, when a terrible gash appeared in the ground: the Rio Grande canyon. I had no idea the Rio Grande extended this direction. The canyon was immense and terrifying and there was iced coffee for sale along the road. My daughter and I walked carefully in the wind out onto the bridge over which we had driven; J stayed behind and reaffirmed his refusal to visit the Grand Canyon. One side of the bridge had crisis hotline phone numbers; the other, black ribbons with the names of what I presume were suicides.

Along the road we passed a store called Vapor Maven, then a business called Gasco across the street from Envirotech. One stretch of highway outside of Mesa Verde National Park was kept clean by "Lady of the Woods (Wiccan)." We took note of a folk art stand to which to return. Arriving at Mesa Verde at 11am, we found that the next available tickets to see the three largest cliff dwellings were not until 5pm—August at a blockbuster park during the centennial of the National Park service. These were the first crowds we had encountered on our travels. We found alternative ways to see the gut-punchingly stupendous reconstructed ruins, and took in a dioramarama at which I read that the Puebloans of 550-750 CE are known as the "Modified Basketmakers," perhaps the limpest of all ethnographic descriptors.

There have been a lot of fires in Mesa Verde in the last 20 years, and the scars are everywhere in blasted, seemingly dead piñon pines and junipers. I asked a Ranger if they would ever grow back, or if they planned to replant. "Too soon to tell!" she said cheerily. "The maturity cycle for piñon pines is 200-300 years." Deep in the park there was a post office, where we stopped to get our girl's National Park Passport stamped. The postal worker said she sells 10,000 international stamps annually between May and October. Most of her work, though, is sorting mail for the 100 or so Rangers who live in the park in the summer. There was a beautiful bank of old brass post boxes, which I admired. She said they stuck and failed all the time, as they were built in the 1930s, but because of the park's national historical designation they could not be updated.

Cliff Palace, Mesa Verde

On our way out of Mesa Verde we stopped at the folk artist's studio that we had marked on our entry. He was a wild-haired oxford-wearing eccentric out of central casting. In talking with him our jobs as teachers of literature came up. He told us that he had lots of ideas for stories, novels, science fiction. One idea he shared with us if we promised we wouldn't steal it, given its new relevance: it was a Y2K novel, an idea he came up with 17 years ago. The protagonists were millenialists who had gone underground before the Y2K bug brought havoc to the world. When one family emerges from underground, 16 years later, they discover that Hillary Clinton is president. ("I called it!" said the artist.) All the men in the world have been castrated, the millenialists discover. The only potent males in the world are the teenaged sons of the millenialist family.

Next: meeting Elvis Saltwater. 

This drink is called a "Backyard BBQ," Durango

Cliff Dwelling

Bandelier National Monument

I don't have an original or especially personal vocabulary to talk about spirits or the sacred. We spent yesterday in communion thrice over with communities of the dead, in different forms and expressions, and here I am grasping for the forms and expressions adequate even to name them. A midday encounter with Vietnamese paper votives at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe gives fugitive shape to my thoughts. Tacked to the wall in the "Sacred Realm" exhibition was a flat paper simulacrum of a man's business suit, including undershirt and drawers. "Everyday objects and luxury goods made of paper are burned on special occasions, usually marking a death anniversary," I read. In a case to the right, a flash of gold: a gold foil baby's bottle, tipped with a golden nipple, a silver paper spoon, a paper can of A+ Enfamil formula: "For the spirit of a deceased infant, Kihn culture, 2015, Hanoi." How fared the baby's spirit, now that the paper votive was preserved in the sere heights of New Mexico, airless and still, untouched by flame?

"Man's ensemble (undergarments included)"

"Baby formula, spoon, and bottle for the spirit of a deceased infant"

We had come to Santa Fe's famous Museum Hill from a morning spent at the relatively obscure La Cieneguilla Petroglyph Site outside of the city, rising above the ancient El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro. The hundreds of petroglyphs in the basalt cliff were made by Puebloan people between the 13th and 17th centuries. A sign at the entrance to the trail banned camping and guns but permitted kokopelli activities.

The proscriptions against making rubbings of petroglyphs were not in place during my childhood motorhome travels, and I remember my resourceful and artistic mom shaving a pencil and taking impressions of images at Petroglyph National Monument. She later made a batik t-shirt of the images (exemplary 70s mom!), or she planned to do so, or I bought one for sale somewhere, I don't recall; either way I had a brown t-shirt with a golden impression of a large mammal that I wore well beyond its decent sizing. My daughter yesterday took her sketchbook and made only images of the petroglyphs to which she was drawn, labeling them emphatically. She sat in concentration in the sun while her parents took iPhone photos of the superb density of images. We felt rage at the few thin scratchings of recent visitors who had attempted to indite their initials in the basalt. I imagined that the skull head and the razor mouth and the Cthulhu-head-looking petroglyphs would conspire to burn off the initials of "R.L.," like the power of the Ark of the Covenant did to the Nazi swastikas on the crate in Raiders of the Lost Ark. But that is my version of a kind of sentimental, romantic racism talking, I guess, and another reason I don't have the language to talk about spiritualism. Either way it was a desecration. 

J and I think often and with great agitation about preservation: historic preservation, ecological preservation, institutional preservation, textual and artistic preservation. Standing on the edge of the mesa, on an unmonitored trail, I did not feel anxious about the exposure of the petroglyphs in and of themselves, however: they were in and of their place, as a hack nature writer might say. I worried only, as I do about every other form of preservation on the list just above, about what people will do. People are terrible, and I'm not exempt—it's probable that at some point I inadvertently brushed a glyph with my hand in steadying myself or my kid on the narrow trail along the rock face, performing infinitesimal and still undeniable damage to the art. (And I haven't even mentioned yet the horrible older couple who gleefully violated all Bandelier rules and went into off-limits cliff dwellings to get out of the rain.)

At the Cieneguilla petroglyphs I was having strong sense memories of the smell of trails from hikes in my childhood southwestern travels. It wasn't sage, on this occasion. J couldn't quite identify the small trees--he's an east coast gardener. As we walked I had the Elvis Costello song "The World and His Wife" in my head:

The kissing cousins slip outside to cuddle and confess
She says sweet nothing at all it's much more of a mess
The conversation melts like chocolate down their open jaws
As the juniper berry slips down just like last night's drawers

…they were juniper bushes. Thanks, Elvis-saturated, gin-soaked unconscious. It was time for hydration.

Our folk museum interval was remarkable not just for the paper votives, but for the outsider dizziness of the Girard Collection, a vast room of 10,000 objects arranged in obsessive curatorial tableaux. Its terrain was the categorical obverse of the vast ringed horizons through which we had been driving, the empty Big West prospects: the Girard Collection permitted no open space, massing its contents in terraces, levels, jewelboxes, interlocked frames, proscenia. I didn't know that my ranging eye needed an hour of manic focus.

On to Bandelier—did we really do this all in one day? This is a national park I had never visited before, and had never heard of, and I was therefore surprised when it was one of the first spots recommended to me by many people when I mentioned that I was traveling to the southwest with my family. Cliff dwellings, was all they needed to say. That incantatory phrase orients my most powerful memories of childhood travel: Canyon de Chelly, Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde. When you are a small person raised in dense suburbs you thrill to the idea a snug retreat, scarcely discernible amid the pitted volcanic tuff that forms the cliffs, accessible only by ladder. Or maybe this appeal comes from spending claustrophobic summers in an RV with your parents and younger brother. The narrative of vague vanishing perpetrated on me—or accepted by me—in the late 70s and early 80s is no longer the story of the Puebloan people told at the parks where cliff dwellings can be found, we are finding. I am learning for the first time in any detail of the Pueblo Revolt or Popé's Rebellion of 1680, in which the Puebloan people of Taos and Santa Fe and the surrounding pueblos overthrew and expelled the Spanish occupiers. This is a story to pass on.

Every day we have skated through cells of thunderstorms. As we walked through Bandelier's canyon (still heavy with the detritus of recent flash floods) as another gathered, it was sublime to imagine that we might have to shelter in one of the cliff dwellings open to public entry. I did take shelter in a tiny accessible room, as it happened, and watched the rain fall on the remnants of the walls of the Tyuonyi pueblo, which had stood on the canyon floor below the canyon houses. There I tried to "Be Here Now," even as I nursed some distracting fury at a couple who had taken shelter in a dwelling that was emphatically OFF LIMITS to all entry, and then had joked about it to us. It was a tonic to speculate with my girl that the animal I had seen high in the cliffs was a hybrid lemur-kitty-squirrel, as it had the face of a kitten and the tail of a squirrel with lemur coloring (and a touch of lemur around the eyes and ears, too). If the park could feature a creature called, officially, a "Pleasing Fungus Beetle" there is no reason why "Lemur-Kitty-Squirrel" is unimaginable.

Toward the end of a line of cliff dwellings a series of petroglyphs became visible, including one of a macaw, which indicates that the Puebloans had been trading with Mesoamericans. Then a flash of red in the sandy tuff: a rectangular abstract design, seemingly of a different hand and mode than the surrounding work, made with paint instead of carved from the tuff or shaped from adobe. It had been uncovered during archaeological work, we read, and was now under glass to protect it. It was the only element so protected we had seen in Cieneguilla or Bandelier.

Tomorrow we visit Taos Pueblo, 1000 years old.

Toot'n Totum

Lake Lure, NC: Dirty Dancing!!

We began our trip West by going South, in an annual floating camp with core friends. This year we were in the mountains around Asheville, North Carolina. I was standing in Lake Lure chatting agreeably with an older area woman on a pink raft about the area's beauty when she told me "you know they filmed Dirty Dancing right here." I nearly upended her in my haste to run through the shallows to share this delectable news (and practice The Lift) with my friends. We learned the next day in adjacent Chimney Rock State Park—a newish park whose titular rock looks exactly like a circumcised penis, to the delight of all local vendors—that Last of the Mohicans was filmed there, too. I stood in the spray at the foot of Hickory Nut Falls, 404 feet below where Chingachgook and Magua had their final clinch, and tried to feel some spark of Americanist communion with this Appalachian stand-in for the Catskills. Later it recurred to me that the Kaaterskill Mountains were part of the same ridge system as the Smoky Mountains or Appalachians where we vacationed, and the Alleghenies where we live in central Pennsylvania. It has been my own northeast corridor for the last thirty-plus years of car trips; on Wednesday this week, we shifted the axis.

Chimney Rock, NC

I have been telling my daughter about the moment when the land falls away and the horizon becomes all sky; this first happened in Oklahoma, on 40W. East coast child, she didn't she quite understand what this meant, I don't think, until we were rolling toward Amarillo. Until then she had passed the long hours in the car reading Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, or drawing as we listened to an audiobook of Jane Eyre. She wasn't looking up, is what I am saying—Tennessee and Arkansas have their charms but could not hold her eye. This changed in the two hours outside of Amarillo, when we were ringed by a series of superb Texas storms. At one point she counted eight separate columns of blackness descending from the low, sullen overcloud, punctuating the orange horizon level in panoramic fullness. In the columns lightning flashed. We drove through actual rain for only a minute or two. The black columns of rain tilted and reshaped themselves; they swept around the great bowl of the sky. A particularly vivid lightning bolt struck before us on the Texas highway (the old Route 66), just as the chestnut tree was riven by lightning in Jane Eyre by Jane's acceptance of Mr. Rochester's proposal. We turned off the audiobook for a moment to appreciate this doubly pathetic fallacy.

We drove past signs advertising an RV Park that featured "Cable TV and Storm Shelter." Amarillo smelled of dirty diapers, I thought, until the sight of spurs on everyone at the gas station made me realize I was smelling the stockyards. We had dinner of cheerios from the Toot'n Totum. Tomorrow: New Mexico.

"I don't know how to braid"

3. Another southwest story. We return many times to Canyon de Chelley in Arizona, in which Pueblo cliff dwellings can be seen halfway up the variegated walls of the canyon. I am aware even as a kid that the Hopi and Navajo residents of the area have a long-standing dispute over whose Puebloan ancestors had built the "White House" kivas, as they are named. In the early 80s the only way to visit the canyon is with a backcountry permit, or by contracting with a horseback guide company. The National Park Rangers warn us away from the Navajo trail guides, but we use them anyway (more from romantic racism about Natives, probably, than from any kind of principled choice). Riding a horse through the canyon feeds everything that my own romantic racist reading of Indian-themed tales has stirred throughout my childhood. But that mood is broken when a group of Navajo teenagers come cruising through the canyon in a blue pickup truck, kicking up dirt and laughing as they fishtail. At the end of our horseback ride, I want to feel what it was like to ride bareback--to try to recapture the ethnographic fantasy that was disrupted in the canyon by the pickup. When my rented horse is unsaddled I climb back on its back and pose for a picture. What I do not realize is that the horse is sweaty under the saddle, and when I stand up the inner thighs of my jeans and my arms are soaked from the perspiration. When we return to our motorhome I put my jeans in the laundry basket and shower off the smell of the horse.

4. My mom and I walk through a campground; my father and brother are elsewhere. There are some motorcyclists putting up tents nearby. A very large man with very long red hair and a long red beard has just emerged from a shower stall and approaches us. "Can I ask you something weird?" he asks. We brace ourselves. "Could you braid my hair for me?" My mom very calmly gestures to my Ralph Macchio haircut and her own pixie cut and says "as you can see, we are short-haired people; I don't know how to braid." The biker shrugs and said "it was worth a try."

Grasshoppers and Kangaroo Rats

1. My dad shuts his headhunter/recruiting business down when we travel, but he still checks his phone messages obsessively. In these days before mobile phones or voicemail, this means calling the cassette tape-driven answering machine at our home and then playing into the phone receiver a series of beeps from a small transmitter. This theoretically activates playback, but it is an unreliable system. My dad is always hunting for payphones from which to enact this doomed ritual, sometimes forcing us all back on the road after we settle somewhere for the night so that he can find a Ma Bell receiver.

One late, long search for a gas station with a phone delivers us to that old, weird America before box stores. A single pump station with a small store emerges in the night. The boxes and cans of food on the shop's shelves are covered with dust, whether from a lack of stock turnover or from the desert itself. The proprietors are a very old, stooped couple with brown skin and white hair who watch as my brother and I draw in the dust to kill time while my dad stands at the payphone. The old man speaks to me: "Do you want to see Grasshopper City?" I don't know what he means and answer only by moving closer to my mom. "Come, come," he gestures, shuffling to the back door of the store. When he opens it I see that the building backs up to a hill compressed from the red dirt common to the southwest. There are lights strung up around a small patio. The wall of red dirt is not smooth, though; I can see small hollows and bits of wood and textiles in the earth. I step closer and see that the wall presents an exquisite, extensive, small-scale replica of the ancient cliff dwellings of the Pueblo peoples found throughout Arizona and New Mexico: small recesses or cavities in the wall in which tiny adobe buildings are packed, secure in their defensive remove from ground or sky access. "This is where the grasshoppers live," the old man says. We stand in silence listening to the unseen grasshoppers. My father finishes his call and we drive back into the night.

2. We are parked in the desert another evening, under stars whose density of visibility is in inverse relationship to the region's density of population. My parents are awakened by a strange scuttling sound. Following the sound to the RV's tiny bathroom, they are terrified to see tiny fingers emerging from the closed lid of the toilet. The dry, frantic sounds continue. It is probably my mom (the tough farm girl, still today a sworn foe to all rodents) who lifts the lid to see an enormous kangaroo rat, which had climbed up through the septic hose and is now skittering to emerge from the horrible interspace into our traveling home. We drive (flee) from the scene that night. Huge, hopping kangaroo rats pace us along the road.

Carl's Baby

I have been to 49 of the 50 United States. My father was self-employed and my mother didn't work outside the home until my brother and I were ourselves outside the home, and so during nearly every summer of my youth and early adolescence we drove west from New Jersey and spent July or August traveling in our family's motorhome. We put so many miles on each RV that we replaced it every few years. The first motorhome we owned was a Coachman model that my dad called his "baby"; my mom commissioned a decorative cover for the spare tire that read "Carl's Baby" in looping magenta and silver script that matched the trim. My dad, however, confessed that he found this embarrassing--he thought of our motorhome's position on the road as more akin to that of a tractor trailer than a novelty vehicle. From that point on he referred to our various RVs as "the truck." 

We visited nearly every state--even driving to Alaska in 1986 on the 1500-mile unpaved Al-Can Highway--but spent most of our time in the West, between Wyoming and New Mexico. There were places we were drawn to again and again: southern Utah, with its concentration of superb national parks (Bryce, Zion, Capitol Reef, Canyonlands); the Badlands of the Dakotas, with their sere, inky reaches; Cody, Wyoming, where the Buffalo Bill Historical Center kept alive the myth of the "vanishing Indian"; the Oregon coast in its stoniness, memorably the seastack Battle Rock off Port Orford. We never went to cities and stayed in national parks wherever possible. That I am an Americanist now in my professional career (teaching US literature and culture) is because of these trips.

Like most childhood memories, my accounts of those times are shaped in part by the photos and recollections of others. But I still carry exceptionally durable impressions of specific incidents on those travels along the blue highways of the U.S., before Home Depot and Walmart and Cracker Barrel made every town in the country look the same from the road. Here are some fragments of memories of these trips that have accreted to form my consciousness of my place in America, my place in the world.