It’s been a crazy wonderful day—suspended between the experience of rock, wind, and water and the stillness that pervades this desert, and, on the other hand, the work we about to engage in, which is of a more mental, social, and frenetic sort. Canyon de Chelley (’de shay’) is a deep canyon less than a mile across with vertical walls that reach from seven hundred to a thousand feet into the sky. Except that impression, from deep in the canyon, is mysteriously unlike what you experience from above. On the mesa, if you walk 200 yards away from the canyon, the entire thing disappears, becomes lost in the eons of time, like a dream. The rock plateau of pinyon, juniper, and sage runs away from you for hundreds of unbroken miles. There is nothing to disrupt the view. You have to walk right up to the edge of the abyss to believe that it is really there. You could drive by it all your life and never find it. Only by going back and forth can you reconcile them into one world.
This canyon is unusual in that it holds important Anasazi ruins that date from 700-1300 AD and it was inhabited when the Spaniards arrived by the Navajo peoples who still live here. (Most of the Anasazi settlements were disserted by 1300 AD for reasons that have not been firmly established.)
We sat for awhile on the cliff edge overlooking Spider Rock where two enormous, cathedral-like spires stand in the middle of Canyon de Chelley encirled by vertical walls of red sandstone. These spires are holy to the Navaho people, as they would be to anyone living with them. The bright sun made the entire space glow, and the spires themselves gave the scene more depth and dimension than your would see in an empty canyon. You did not see it as a “view”, but were drawn into the scene. The brown water of the river, filled to overflowing from last evening’s deluge, sluiced and roiled across the sandy valley bottom.
Two dozen buzzards soared in the afternoon updraft on the very brink of the canyon lip, their black sheen creating moving heiroglyphs. Swallows darted and dive-bombed us with no concern for proximity to our heads.
The canyon itself was suspended in time. A few fields had been recently cultivated, a small hogan stood ownership over a corn patch. It could have been any summer afternoon in the last two thousand years, but for the two-track path that meandered up the canyon floor.
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The national monument is a joint activity between the US government, the Navaho Nation, and the 84 families that “own” property in the canyon. The parcels of farmland have been passed down through generations. Most of the families “live” up on the mesa (above and adjacent (in a vertical sense) to their parcels in the canyon) where they are connected by paved roads to the town of Chinle, Arizona. Everyone who works in the monument is tied through birth or marriage to the original families. Most of them live here in the monument itself.
It was wonderful getting to know a little bit about them: our guide on the four-wheel-drive tour—it turned out to really be a four-wheeled event due to the aforementioned deluge, including being stuck in the river and winching both other trucks and ourselves lose—who grew up on his grandmother’s parcel and now lives across the canyon with his wife’s family; a flute maker and musician (how does Jim find these people?) who is Pima but lives here with his wife’s family and makes and sells an array of traditional flutes.
The society here is suspended between the land, their traditional culture, and the 21st century. They seem to be working to formulate a bridge between them. Watching the men rustle large 4-wheel drive vehicles through the canyon instead of horses and cattle felt like a fitting shift between the old and the new—a similar and relevant kind of work. It is a culture in suspension working to feel its way to the next thing. It’s a good thing. Suspension implies the quality of not-knowing exactly what should happen and thereby enabling the creation of that thing you can not quite imagine, but discover that you can create. Sometimes the challenge in our culture is that we already know exactly who we are, which does not leave a lot of freedom for creating something new.
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The rain storm that has been flustering off to the east all afternoon is approaching and I must fold camp here—that is, fold up the computer and start a late dinner. Jim is over under a tree playing his baritone sax as promised. (It is interesting to think about how he is, with his warmups, introducing the camping world to classical Philip Glass music.) The drips are starting to fly and my computer is more sensitve than his music. The thunder is rolling closer, and though the air is quiet here, the deep purple of the storm is stark against the green cottonwoods. Oops, another rumble even closer. Time to quit.
Postscript.
After dinner we took at short drive to the top of the mesa in the midst of the storm. What a scene! In the far west, where the sky was clear and pale blue, the sun skirted its light under the shelf of the storm to create rainbows that spanned the canyon. The storm sky was a menacing dark violet in sharp contrast to the gleaming straw colored grass lit with sunlight. The lightening bolted and flashed, thunder rumbling through the canyon and across the mesa. It was beautiful and exciting, and we returned home only a little wet.