Not a thousand tongues singing this morning,

but enough to fill up the little space,

Main Post Chapel of the Presidio,

lovely, if only temporary home

for the gathered, this young body of Christ,

new church which soon will need someplace bigger.

Attending with friends, themselves becoming

members this service, I want to follow

like one who has relinquished everything,

but struggle just to get the hymns right, or

understand the passage from Luke’s gospel.

How to preach with so much that’s beautiful

around us? Sunlight heating the sandstone,

red brick of the military buildings

stately and from another century,

Golden Gate in the distance, those orange altars,

the bay beyond with its long, silver wings

and perfect bursts of plant life everywhere—  

I saw these things just walking from the car.

The pastor is a man of faith indeed,

attempting exegesis in the midst of this.

I try to resist as they go forward,

focus on the chancel rail they walk toward.

But as they raise their hands to take the pledge,

my eyes seize the motion just below

the sanctuary beams. Shadows of eucalyptus

or transplanted cypress pass over                                                                       

a lone panel of stained glass like river

water across smooth, prismatic rock,

dimpling with light an androgynous saint,

animate, zealous for the cause, hungry

to cheer the tired ones, heal the invalids,

and the standing lead hobbling to the kingdom.

            This is an interesting trick, imagining connective lines traced with straight perfection, disregarding the rumpled surface of the actual earth.  It means calling on the familiar concepts of latitude and longitude, and, in my case, the decades of looking at maps that began early in grade school with roll-down charts of dusty-smelling paper bolted above the blackboard and metal globes with minuscule lettering across the slight texture of continents.  Greenland, I remember, was an oxymoronic white like a slightly-raised blob of Elmer’s glue.  One year, on a vacation camping trip with my father and brother, I was appointed the official navigator, while my father drove the car, and I felt the responsibility of choosing for us–yes, that is our exit.  Yes, I am sure; turn here.  I sat in the passenger seat, the atlas open on my knees, the landscape streaming past the windows.  In the long, boring stretches across Pennsylvania, I’d turn pages, skipping ahead until called back to task–there’s another exit coming up.  For today’s children, map literacy probably begins, if it does, with computer software and purely virtual models. The voice of the GPS unit, “turn right,” with the iconic car facing straight ahead. In any case, there is Abstraction, casting its net, or its hook-and-line of direction, into the invisible distance.  I once heard a former surveyor describing the summers in college when he worked for the US Geological Survey near Salt Lake.  “Running Line,” was what the crew called their work, and Line became a force independent of their command.  Line stuck tightly to the contours of topography; when Line pitched over a cliff edge, they had no choice but to follow any way they could, and catch up with its conceptual advent at the bottom where they would then pause, drive in a survey marker, and take a breather before moving on.

***

Pueblo Alto is one of the high points in the Ancestral Puebloan world, on the north rim of Chaco Canyon where for three hundred years culture bloomed and went to seed in the sandy dirt.  It’s not one of the earliest buildings constructed during what archaeologists call “the Chaco Phenomenon,” nor is it the last.  It’s not the most remote from the central cluster of ruins on the canyon floor.  But it is a spectacularly lofted place, 350 feet above the canyon floor, and it affords direct sight-connection with Huerfano Mesa, which in turn connects with Chimney Rock Mesa in Colorado, a far northern outlier of the Chacoan array of great houses.  Several years ago a young woman tested this in a project either for a science fair.  Together with some friends who helpfully climbed onto the mesas in question, she found that it worked: they could flash signals to each other through intervening miles of clear, western air. So we can infer that, centuries ago, the imaginary lines radiating from the canyon would have had visible points along their trajectories, line guides to straighten the conceptual filament’s release, and cast, and set.  The people who raised these now-ruined buildings from the stone and mud of the Colorado Plateau–call them Ancestral Puebloans, Anasazi, or, with the clannish specificity of location, Chacoans–established many of these sightline connections with which to signal other houses miles away. Fire, or mirrors of mica or obsidian; the lights they wielded could speed through the distance, like the nano-moments when intention flashes its neuronal pulse within the landscape of the brain.

            Then there are the ancient roadbeds, visible from the air, or, when I was here in a wet May a year ago, from the mesa itself, as a subtle indentation in the prevailing orange bloom of wildflowers.  These roads connect several sites within and outside the canyon.  Sometimes they scale the cliff walls with impressive, precarious staircases carved into the cap rock, easily visible–particularly so now, I think, since a recent snowfall has coated the horizontal lines with white while the vertical rises lift bare sandstone in a corrugated pattern that steps off into sudden air.  Once, there must have been ramps or wooden ladders to complete the descent, but in the austerity of ruin only carved stone is left in place. At Pueblo Alto a number of these stairways converged, connecting the high point with different locations on the canyon floor.  From the mesa top, a major roadway struck off to the north: first, it led northeasterly to cross Escavada Wash, a mile and a half away, but then it straightened out and for ten miles ran within ½ degree of true north.  Here it reached an archaeological site called Pierre’s Complex, a scattering of small structures built on the land’s highest places, rocky knobs and pinnacles.  From the complex, the road continued for nearly another twenty miles, always within 2% of north, arriving at a badlands punctuated by precipitous mounds and slopes that researchers have called “nearly impassibly steep.”

            This was the Great North Road, a massive structure that archaeologists have been puzzling over for a generation.  It is roughly thirty feet wide–broader, that is, than many modern two-lane roads–and it plunges determinedly over the topography, without the kindness of curves or switchbacks to soften the traveler’s journey.  The builders lived and worked without draft animals, without the wheel, so it’s difficult to imagine why they needed a straight, flat road in which two modern SUV’s might comfortably pass (or two pickups stop, windows down, for conversation).  “Overbuilt” is the term scholars repeatedly resort to, and many argue the system was nonutilitarian, with, most likely, only “ephemeral practical use.”

            “The road appears to be its own reason for development–an end in itself,” Anna Sofaer and her colleagues conclude.  They point to artifacts of language and tradition among the descendants of the Chacoans, the modern Pueblo people of Arizona and New Mexico.  Words aren’t immutable, of course, but language whispers history, tracing storied connections that ripple outward through both mind and world.  In Tewa, spoken in half a dozen historic Pueblos, the word for “road” connotes, etymologically, “channel for the life’s breath,” and the cycle of a human life, birth to death, is called “path.”  These are traces of metaphors so familiar in English they have nearly shaken the dust from their feet and stepped free from gravity, free from mud or dirt, to enter the realm of disembodied abstraction.

            All this archetypal emphasis on journeying seems to be stirring something in my inner web of neurons and hormones, calling me to attention.  Migration, journey, voyage–this has been one of the fundamental aspects of  human experience for hundreds of thousands of years, and even though it’s a far cry from modernity’s daily commute from suburb to work or the employee relocation determined by the corporate office, we’re still a species in motion and the voyage remains potent in our mythology and symbolism.  We love echoes of Homer and his tale of Odysseus, whether he’s transformed into George Clooney’s Everett and breaking into song, or Charles Frazier’s Inman, in love with a woman and a mountain, trying to get home.  (It’s a lot harder with Finnegan’s Wake, I think, but of course, it’s there, too.)  When, several years ago, I sat in a therapist’s office, studying the shards and chips of identity at my feet, trying to lift my imagination toward any metaphoric horizon, it was the motif of migration he turned to.  “You’re on a hell of a journey,” he told me, and I decided to believe it was true.  After all, I already owned three different pairs of boots.

            Here, in the warm-hued canyon, even in the single-digit grip of cold, consider the imagery of the journey presented through centuries of Southwestern art.  In legend, Puebloan people speak of “straight” roads that call to mind those “overbuilt” roads leading straight out of Chaco and into the surrounding world, the Great North Road being the iconic exemplar.  But I’ve also stumbled across suggestions that the spiral shape implies “journey,” as well, particularly in the many images carved in sandstone where the spiral seems to move out from its central point and terminate in something like a bubble, or the open eye of a needle, holding both potential and presence in that inscribed, enclosed space.

            The ranger, G.B., is a private man, his psyche curled around the emergent point where his life changed and he left his work in the city to move forever between sun and shadow, mesa and ruin.   He’s lived in the canyon for two decades now.  “I’ve had my best and worst experiences here,” he says.  He tells stories, but guardedly, leaving me guessing at some of the fractures he’s witnessed; fragments or shrapnel he’s caught with his heart.  In a cleft where a building-sized boulder was cleft by time into two toppled halves, I peeked where he pointed.  The sedimentary surface, darkened into rock rind, desert varnish, was pocked and scabbed; only a hip-wide passage opened in the stone, and I stepped inside, my shoulders nearly brushing each sandstone surface.  The sky–that desert sky, clear as flute- or wren-song–was just a narrow band of late-afternoon light directly overhead.  In the shadow of geologic time, petroglyphs hung like silence between one song and another.

            We guess at the images.  One figure, nearly centered in the corridor, could have been any number of things: two sandals, G.B. suggested, with their toes curving slightly towards each other.  Or a sunrise, cleaved by a conical landform or maybe a stylized tower.  He wondered: might moonlight, casting through the opening above, paint the rock art with its white-silver sheen for the brief slice of the night when the moon moved overhead?  It is, he said, a place that’s important for women, according to a Puebloan woman whom he accompanied here once, but if he knew anything more about the signifying nature of the artwork, he kept it to himself.  I followed a  deeply-pecked line that began at the eastern end of the miniature slot canyon with that same eye-of-the-needle, bubble-in-oil, loop-in-the-cordage shape, then traveled westward in a varying craze of meanders and back-loops, surely twelve or fifteen of it stretched across the desert varnish, maybe waist-high on the average. As I stood still, taking it all in, the line suggested wide-ranging, irregular motion.  It reminded me of a stream I looked down on from above, nearly twenty years ago, now, when I stood on a mountain in Maine and surveyed a cold, wet mountain meadow, the stream channel making slow, restrained switchbacks through the boggy grass while a red-eyed vireo sang an incessant accompaniment to the season. 

            It called to mind the drunk driver who careened off the snowy road at the campground one night and then wandered from the car as the temperature dropped toward single digits and the park police hunted for him in the dark.  Or the young woman checking into the cheap motel where I stayed on the long drive out, who objected when the desk clerk gave her room assignment. 

            “When I made the reservation, you told me room 105,” she said, setting a baby carrier on the floor at her feet.  “I have to report to Corrections, they want to know exactly where I am.  You can’t give me 106.”  Her voice crept upward, louder.  “I could get more prison time; I have to be where I said would be, in case they check.” An older women whom I took to be her mother came in carrying a plastic shopping bag of early Christmas presents and stood nearby, a listless pillar of resignation.  The desk clerk blinked and looked ineffectually at the paperwork he’d just printed out.  The baby began to cry, adding urgency to the little scene, and the manager arrived to sort things out, her eyes full of questions behind enormous glasses.  I wondered at the path those lives had taken, where each participant would place herself along its linear bend and curve, and did it feel, there in the cold night along Highway 160, that any of those turns was already carved in stone, no turning back.

***

But those were other days, other moments.  Today I’m in the middle of a ruined plaza atop West Mesa.  The great house, Peñasco Blanco, lies a couple of miles beyond trailhead near Casa Chiquita. It’s one of the three oldest buildings in the park, with some of its initial structure dating to the early 900s A.D.  On the hike here, I thrashed around in the brush along the canyon’s mostly-frozen wash, trying to scare up deer or elk or anything besides the juncos that have been my most numerous companions–their gray-and-white plumpness touched with rose in their breasts, marking them western birds, unlike their somber cousins I know must be pitting and trampling the snow back home.  But nothing much flushed from cover and mostly I just managed to get overheated and scratch my face a little, and I seem to have lost an earring as well, somewhere along the way.  Now, 150 feet up on the mesa, it’s much colder, exposed to the wind.  The sky is completely featureless and gray, and I’m getting chilly while I fiddle with my plastic compass.

            Any compass is a compelling little tool.  Three hundred and sixty degrees around, it invites the user to be mindful of the encircling horizon, the observable sense that always, anywhere, you are in the center of things, encircled by a perfect ring of possibility in the phenomenal world. Azimuth, we call the locations around that ring, a term borrowed from the Arabic-speaking astronomers who sought to systemize understanding of the night sky, both before and into the so-called “dark ages” of Europe.  As-sumūt, “the way,” linguistically pointing to each summit pass I’ve ever climbed, stopping at the top to drop the pack and turn in all directions, gasping at the surrounding, snow-capped view.  But with the needle’s thin shaft seeking magnetic north, and the need to correct for declination (the difference between geographic north and magnetic north), that self-centering moment is quickly complicated.  Here, in northwest New Mexico, declination is ten or eleven degrees east (there seems to be some uncertainty among the more knowledgeable folks in the canyon) which means that each horizon reading requires a quick arithmetical correction, adding the local declination figure.  Since my math skills are atrocious, I’m sticking with ten because the arithmetic is easier.

            Despite the fact that I’m mediating between myself and the horizon with a palm-sized tool that I don’t fully understand, I like the way concepts of location invoke the concrete world.  True north is geographic north, derived from the whole planet’s shape and spin upon that un-engineered and unseen axis, discernible once you have established east and west by observing the sun’s apparent motion through the year.  Even magnetic north, which isn’t “true,” is also Earth-based, generated by internal workings in the planet’s molten core. And although the magnetic poles aren’t fixed, moving several miles each year as the tectonic interior shifts and churns, magnetic north is neither purely arbitrary nor abstract.  The so-called “main field” wields an invisible shield in space, deflecting solar wind along the geomagnetic field lines toward the poles to ripple the skies with aurora light far into the northern night.

            According to a research team that investigated the alignment of the great houses in the canyon, Peñasco Blanco is one of two buildings I can hike to in the park whose architecture reproduces the angles between the cardinal directions east or west and the azimuths of the major lunar standstills.  They describe how the ruins on the mesa contain interior angles of 33 and 35.5 degrees, both correlating roughly with the 35.7 degree angle that separates the major standstill from due east.   To get these figures, they surveyed a straight line linking the outside corners of the ruin’s curved wall of room blocks, and then another, perpendicular to the first.  Where that perpendicular line intersected the curved back wall, they surveyed (in a less frozen season, I’m betting) two more straight lines connecting the intersection with the two outside corners. All this geometry is reproduced in neat, convincing diagrams and figures in a library book I’ve toted along in my backpack and I pull it out to help me situate myself in the schematic.  In a clumsy gait, I also pace the snow, trying to follow Line, stepping over dry shrubs and stiff, scrubby weeds: a little over 300 feet across the plaza. The midpoint must be roughly here. 

            I turn and look to the southeast, and find I’m facing one of the tallest remnants of the single-story arc that was added sometime late in the 12th century.  It blocks my view of the canyon, so I pace forward again and then detour out in front of the masonry.  All this is the crudest sort of orienteering but for the moment I am satisfied.  Out of the wind in the remaining shelter of a room’s side wall on the arc, I can prop open the book, eat a little peanut butter and banana sandwich to coax back some body heat, and imagine the line I just paced off extending over the lip of the mesa, into the wintry wind that fills the canyon. The temperature must be hovering somewhere near freezing but the wind makes my eyes water a little as I lift the compass and sight along its quivering needle, 54 degrees from north.

            That perpendicular line, cutting roughly through the center of the enclosed plaza (and which I hope I’m close to straddling now), should point directly to the spot on the horizon where the major standstill moon will rise. Not only that, the researchers argue, the same line projected down the canyon, past the trail I hiked to get here, past my muddy Chevy Tracker parked in the lot, old cassette tapes scattered on the back seat, past the other ancient buildings clustered visibly in the wash; past porcupines gnawing high in the cottonwoods to turn tree bark to mammal fat; on towards the southeastern end of the canyon–  That invisible, insistent line will hit another of the three oldest great houses, Una Vida.  And here’s the final detail I can draw from their analysis: Una Vida’s interior orientation, defined by a line perpendicular to the high back wall facing the cliff, also inscribes an angle of the standstill moon, 54.8 degrees. It is a house of the rising moon, preserving in its architecture the memory of the recurrent lunar maximum, that point of farthest cyclical travel south and north, beyond even the sun’s solstitial extremities.  Geo-metric, yes, but we’re measuring the heavens here, too–at least, I’m trying to.

            Since this cycle’s last full moonrise in the major standstill position is only days away, just after the solstice, I think it’s a good time to be here, pondering the bond of moon and self.  I like to think of myself as a woman in the very middle of my life, but that’s true only if I live to be ninety, a prospect likely given my father’s family longevity, but far less so if I take after my (late) mother’s people.  And we do tend to inherit the proclivities for aging from our mothers.  So the sense of time left actually matters for me, as it never did when I was younger; the sense of what I’ve accomplished–or not–; of chances taken–or not; these stand out like late-day shadows at the year’s end.  Here in the shadowless gray of overcast afternoon, I consider the pull of the moon on the body, and so as well the body’s emotional life. 

            I think of the body’s own emotional life as something separate from the mind’s emotions, though this can’t be strictly accurate.  The former include the reptilian brain’s responses, from some chamber curled near the brainstem, and above that, maybe, tail wrapped across its nose, a hibernating mammal waiting out bad times.  When he came to live in the desert Southwest, D.H. Lawrence had plenty to say about these aspects of humanity, but he could never stand free from the carved fruitwood chair of his British empire perspective when he watched Pueblo people, some most likely the distant descendants of Chacoan builders. For him, the otherness of Southwestern symbolism, the dark-faced dancers and their plumed serpents, conflated the exotic with the erotic, intoxicating (although, of course, when he arrived in Taos, hoping to breathe healing air into his tuberculosis-riddled lungs, he was the exotic one, the traveler-from-afar). Right now, I’m alone, my skin ripplingly awake in the desert air.  I know there’s another hiker somewhere behind me–I can even see him through binoculars, off near the trailhead–but for the time being there’s no need to be social or even audible in the pervasive quiet.  And that’s what I want: for a while, at least, here at mid-day, I want to train all levels of alertness inward.

            The emotional life of the mind is the delight in knowing and understanding.  Tyler, an astronomer taking a three-week sabbatical stay in the park, is an excellent conversational companion on the trail; he often seems nearly flushed with the pleasure of explaining, of offering knowledge to interested listeners.  I’m one of these, learning from his gestures to the sky.  We’ve chatted about the nature of scientific understanding, and his own frustration with imprecision in English concerning “knowledge” and “belief”–we agree, it would be helpful to have a greater variety of nouns delineating different kinds of belief, since it’s particularly unhelpful to use the same term for both tightly-held religious conviction and cautious, methodical reasoning.  “Consilience,” I think, is a helpful term here, though I learned it through biology and E.O. Wilson’s work.  A single explanation that follows induction from different sorts of data, was the best definition I could offer him on the spot.  And as I did, I called up the mental picture of those ancient roads converging on the central place.

            Later, though, poking through etymology listed in the dictionary, I found that the very precision I was hunting for disappears.  “Consilience” may sound in the voice as though it’s related to reconcile or conciliate, calling together like a deliberative council with hemming and hawing and debate–and, if applied to the workings of Washington–lots of pizza deliveries to fuel committee meetings late into the night.  But it’s not.  The Latin verb stem is my old friend salīre, to jump, and so the word suggests impulsive action rather than step-by-step reasoning.  The body’s emotional leap, both feet off the ground, to the immediate future.  For a brief time, just when I was turning forty, I couldn’t stop jumping.  Creosote bushes, fallen logs across the trail; bunch grasses lifting from the perennial prairie: they all presented themselves like second chances at becoming a hurdler, when, instead, I had always been a distance runner.  Short running start; then the leap–the suspension of self for seconds that stretched, uncounted, while endorphins celebrated all the doors that still seemed open.  Short-term delight, though: the knees won’t take this kind of fantasy forever, and then the long, horizontal view clicks into view, and you settle back in to the sustained walk.

            No more than half a mile away, over the precipitous lip of the mesa and sheltered in a protective sandstone overhang, the much-discussed pictograph that may record the Crab Nebula supernova faces east.  I remember first seeing it nearly two decades ago, after a hot, early-June hike through the canyon and a clumsy jump across the wash, which was running fast then from a recent rain.  I stood before the mesa’s flank, skin prickling with sweat, and looked up, thrilled by the red-paint composition, tucked beneath the protective overhang.  A crescent moon, a pointed star, a perfect human hand. 

            Two decades later, the pictograph has pulled me back–the me who both is, and is not, the woman I (then) was.  If the researchers are right, the artwork has been there, painted in confident, red pigment on the flattest, cleanest plane of rock, for nearly a thousand years.  Calculating backwards, astronomers have determined that the exploding star would have first been visible on July 5, 1054, in the pre-dawn skies with the crescent moon still rising. Anyone sitting outside, awaiting sunrise in mild, mid-summer weather, would have seen a sudden, brilliant addition to the familiar stars.  (Chinese astronomers did just that, and recorded the date precisely.)  Modern researchers figure that the apparent conjunction of star and moon was actually much closer here in the Colorado Plateau than it would have been in Asia; half a world away, the degree of separation between the two would have tripled by the time anyone saw their bright bodies near the horizon.  Here, recorded in paint, was an accurate cluster: the horns of the moon, the luminous star, the hand of the artist raised in witness and presence.

            I want to imagine the moment: the sudden flare of new light, the indrawn breath, the sensual rush of amazement and–perhaps–alarm.  Then surely a shout, rousing the sleepers nearby within the great house walls: Hey! Come see!  But this wasn’t a one-off apparition, leaving the sleepers grumpy and skeptical, and the viewer(s) noisily defensive.  For twenty-three days it was visible in daylight.  Expanding remnants still drape that part of space with the color and light of the Crab Nebula, where a pulsar spins its neutron heart, still flashing spectra into the cold, dark distance.  Another probable depiction of the exploding star has been found painted on a piece of Mimbres pottery, a plate carbon-dated to within fifteen years of the event: the star is carefully drawn with twenty-three rays, perhaps counting those impressive days before the light subsided. 

            The plate itself, though I’ve only seen it in a photograph, draws imagination into its shallow basin.  Nearly centered in the visual field, a stylized rabbit arches its black-on-white back, tall ears cocked forward and a bright eye of concentric circles wide above a furry-bristly mouth.  This is the personified “rabbit in the moon” that many indigenous peoples see in the full moon’s mottled texture. Here, however, the exaggerated arc of the back, the sharp points of its little rabbit-feet, suggest instead the crescent moon, those “horns” in close proximity to the probable star.  The plate, though broken, has been reassembled, glued back together with only two pieces missing so that just a tiny bit of the rabbit’s back is absent from the image, as well as a section of the plate’s undecorated rim.  In contrast to the circles that define the design, the dark rabbit is ornamented with an angular light line, running from breast to tail: a bold, acute angle across the region of the shoulders, followed by series of step-like jags (ten of them) and an obtuse angle across the animal’s hindquarters.  I love the image’s contrasts: angle and curve, circle and line, figure and ground.  In the plate’s apparent perfect circle, the mytho-historic symbols are stilled in time, preserved in an understatement of clay and paint.

            And here, near Peñasco Blanco, there’s another pictograph fading in partial sunlight beneath the star/moon/hand composition.  A series of concentric circles, in fairly broad rings of yellowish paint with a wide sweep of subtle red extending to the right.  In certain light, it’s nearly invisible but at other times of day the yellow stands out from the sandy substrate. When I look closely, I see three rings, or really two rings and a central dot, with faint traces of red between them.  I stand as close as I can, in the protected dust and litter beneath the cliff.  Then I move back along the eroding hillside, balancing among shin-high stalks of shrubs–rabbit brush, probably–and compare perspectives.  It’s a comet, some say–the reddish tail blown back by invisible solar wind centuries before anyone had named, or perhaps even imagined, such a celestial force.  In 1066, Halley’s Comet would also have been visible here, so together the panel may record the astronomical marvels of a generation.  Marvels for sure, because although Halley’s loops back regularly, its elliptical orbits swinging it into our view once (or maybe twice) in a modern human lifetime, the sky records few traces of exploding stars that could have been witnessed by human eyes, whatever the millennium.            

            Concentric circles are a common figure in rock art across the desert Southwest.  Some scholars take them to be deeply standardized, like hieroglyphs or potent runes.  According to contemporary Pueblo explanations for three concentric circles, the rings and dot represent the sun’s great aura, the fiery body of the sun itself, and the sun’s “umbilicus,” a portal that opens “to provide mankind with game and other food.”  Farther west, the Chumash peoples associated concentric circles with connective portals between worlds, passageways between mythic and profane realms.  Despite the cultural conservatism that must have held sway to keep Chacoan great houses under renovation and care for three hundred years, I like to think of the aesthetic play that happens in the hands of gifted artists.  We can imagine the hoopla at the installation site.

            First, there’s the choice of someone skilled enough to be trusted to paint the panel just below the brilliant red star and moon, no longer visible in the night sky but preserved in still-bright pigment high above the alcove floor.  Not just anybody can be charged with such an important addition to a public mural.  I wonder who made the actual selection?  The decision might have been politicized, with a snarl of hard feelings or suspect motives.  But whatever the process, the choice has been made and now the artist is balanced high on a ladder, an assistant standing just a rung or two beneath him holding pigment and tools.  (Is it a he? Or a she? I’m undecided.)  Off at the small crowd’s periphery, someone else is blustering, trying to convince the people in earshot that really, he would have been the better choice, this guy’s not nearly as good as people say, etc.  In the front row, someone has pushed forward to see.  Oh, look, she breathes to the person standing beside her, or to herself.  (This time there’s no question.  In my mind, it’s a she.)  I like the way he’s made the long-tailed star look like the sun.  And I like the perspective:  its face is looking at us, even though the tail’s spread out to the side. 

            But the guy in the back row’s still having none of it.  Look, he scoffs, what a loser.  He can’t even tell the difference between a star and the sun.

***     

Though I can’t see Una Vida from here, I’ve compass-puzzled enough to be pretty sure I have the angle right, and I stare at the smooth horizon’s flank at 54 degrees.  South Mesa presents a pale, barely-sloping saddle of grass, dotted with only a few widely-spaced juniper trees, none of them coinciding with “my” imaginary line.  If illuminated in sunlight, I think, the grasses would look like a tawny pelt, but now everything–vegetation, stone, sky–feels vaguely metallic and gray.

            The moon will rise in mid-afternoon today and I had considered hanging around the ruins to watch it lift. Other researchers tell me they’ve watched this standstill moonrise, and it isn’t precisely over Una Vida (though the great house itself is occluded from sight by the intervening South Mesa).  G.B. and his colleague Ron watched from Peñasco’s height; they report that instead the moon rose over Pueblo Bonito, the oldest and largest great house in the canyon, clearly visible from where I stand.  But the cloud cover remains heavy and dull, and the chances of my seeing the moon in that sky seem pretty sparse. Besides, if I’m reading the research correctly, Peñasco Blanco isn’t aligned with the northern standstill.  Instead, that line I’ve abstracted outwards from the low point in the ruin’s bowl should point towards the moon’s southern standstill.  I’d have had to be here more than a week ago to see that–each month, the moon swings its arced trajectory from both extremes, north to south, cycled through in such short time compared to the sun’s annual pacing.  So even if the clouds were to lift, the moon to take the sky, I’d still be stuck with the compass, trying to measure the angle of the difference, plus or minus ten, and probably missing something else in the process. Suddenly, I feel very far from home.  Any way you look at it, I’m poorly placed for direct observation.  It’s probably time to think about heading back.

            But first I look around again, counting the side canyons.  There, second from Escavada Wash, should be Atlatl Cave, the earliest site of known habitation in the canyon. I’ve seen reproductions of pictographs from inside that remote rock shelter, stylized human figures with broad triangular shoulders and narrow waists; near them is a four-legged creature, a dog, maybe, or a coyote.  Impossible to see the cave opening from here, but I imagine it, too, under the striped awning of the sandstone above.  Researchers have sorted through packrat middens stashed away there–deposits dating back more than 10,000 years, filled with pollen and seeds and other hints at the vegetal life of the canyon. For all that time, this part of the world has been a desert shrub grassland, with variations of drought and cold and heat, of course, and greater or lesser numbers of trees–even, in those oldest deposits, Ponderosa pines and Douglas firs, now long since gone from the canyon.  Before corn and squash tethered their farmers into settlement, wide-ranging Archaic people visited the rock shelter, leaving behind bits and traces of gathered foods (pinyon nuts, hackberry seeds), rabbit fur “fabric,” and even a single yucca fiber sandal as well as the eponymous spear thrower, an ancient atlatl.  They came and they went, governing their movement by whatever season and surplus they saw in the landscape.

            Okay, okay.  I’m packing up, now, fingers back in my gloves, the sandwich bag stashed in a pocket.  But there on the ground where my stuff’s been sprawled throughout this little spate of amateur field work, I find a slip of bone and lift it up to see.  Off come the gloves again, and I cup the specimen in my bare palm.  It’s the upper mandible of some small rodent, a few exquisite molars the size of small beads, and one incisor poking forward, tool-like and yellowed.  Pocket gopher, maybe, I think.  Or a pack rat?  It looks too small for that, but bird and rodent bones always seem surprisingly small to me, such diminutions of the living animal.  I put it on a flat edge of stone that just barely protrudes from the masonry wall, a perfect shelf for my little installation–Rodentia: Memento Mori–and head back eastward.

***

One of my favorite petroglyphs from this trip is in the far eastern end of the canyon.  Beyond the cleft boulder G.B. showed me, there is a broad panel of images carved on spectacularly red sandstone.  Facing south and catching bright mid-day light, the carvings stand out imposingly against the patina of the rock face, without any sign of graffiti or vandalism.  A pecked rendition of a hand–except it’s a misshapen hand, only three fingers and the opposable thumb.  A few three-toed shapes, looking for all the world like the dinosaur tracks I’ve seen fossilized elsewhere in the West.  An animal, four-legged and with the perky antlers of a pronghorn standing in profile.  Some other designs, unidentifiable to my eye and a three-lobed shape–vaguely, I think, like a poorly-made backwards E (oh, it’s all about me).

            But commanding the middle of this intriguing panel is a spiral, so regular in proportion and execution it looks too perfect to be hand-pecked into friable sandstone.  The lines are thin and even, impeccably circular.  In fact, at first I thought it was a series of concentric circles, one trim form inside the other like a bull’s eye on the flat stone boulder. They’re so tightly packed they resemble the growth rings from Pueblo Bonito’s original pine beams, cut in the Chuska Mountains in the 11th century, and datable now through the painstaking yardstick of dendrochronology.  Each ring’s record of sap and girth, the sequence of dry years with wet, make a calendar of that particular tree-time, in that particular location.  But when I tried to count the rings in the petroglyph, I discovered it is a spiral, after all: fifteen grooves from one side to the other.  It’s a trick to the eye in bright desert light: the illusion of concentric completion, combined with the journey’s outward turn from the central point.

            There are other spirals on Fajada, a great free-standing butte in the eastern part of the canyon, which I will never see.  Beneath three slabs of sandstone leaning against the butte’s upper cliff are two pecked spirals.  The larger is slightly elliptical, over a foot in width, consisting of nineteen coiled grooves.  They seem designed to catch the light that crosses overhead, obscured by stone and then entering the gap between each slab in patterns that seem so richly symbolic I expect they’d make me weep to see them play across the rock.  On mid-summer’s day, in the flood of sun, a vertical blade of light would pierce the center of the largest spiral.  In mid-winter, the spiral remained in shadow but two vertical shafts of light would move into positions just touching the outer grooves on either side so as to frame the darkened spiral.

            The research team who recorded these seasonal patterns of light and shade hypothesized that the moon would cast timely shadows as well: at major standstill moonrise, the large spiral would lie bathed in light, the shadow just touching the left edge.  At minor standstill, the shadow would bisect the spiral through its center.  The site seems to be an ingeniously calibrated cluster: the slow-weathered butte; the sloughed-off slabs; the cyclic patterns of daylight and season, moonlight and menology.

            But all this is, now, academic.  The researchers simulated standstill moonlight and found the results they expected, but they never recorded the events themselves (unlike the solstices, remember, these cycles fall far apart (18.6 years), so at the time of their simulations, the team couldn’t make the direct observations to catch the moonlight’s actual patterns on the ontologic stone.  And now the slabs have shifted.  It’s theorized that, after the petroglyph’s discovery and fame, too many observers flocked there.  With the trampling weight of their own enthusiasm, they must have compacted the soil, shoved the boulders slightly out of line.  Predictable, ephemeral light on the stone is a thing of the past.  And anyway, Fajada Butte is strictly off-limits now.  The time of clambering up to catch the sunlight on Dagger Spiral belongs to the last millennium and to memory.                           

***

Some researchers argue that the canyon was never primarily a population center, a bustling pueblopolis with each great house filled, like desirable urban apartment buildings, with families–children playing in the dirt, annoying the dogs or turkeys, and their mothers chatting with a wrinkled grandmother about the latest raid some vermin has made on the remaining clay jars of corn.  Instead, they offer a story in which the great houses were mostly ceremonial, many of the rooms empty day after day until a time of festival when the surrounding roads would quicken with travelers, and then the canyon would fill with unaccustomed voices, perhaps in several languages, a cacophony of song and talk–a flash flood, maybe, of ritual, rising along the wash only to disperse again, days later.

Some of the evidence for this interpretation is that the buildings, for all their engineering expertise and aesthetic beauty, wouldn’t have been very comfortable or practical for daily family life.  Original excavation records indicate that Pueblo Bonito, with nearly seven hundred rooms, didn’t have enough kitchen space to support more than one hundred people.  (Kitchen space would translate, in archaeologese, to interior hearths, readily identifiable through burned dirt and oxidized stones.)  The rooms were laid out inconveniently for daily work rhythms like simply fetching fuel or water or letting the toddler hurry out to pee.  Another of my favorite ruins, Pueblo Alto, held 133 rooms but likely never housed more than 25-50 people.  However, its trash heap reveals something like binge-cooking, busted pottery and food scraps that are, as a researcher concludes, “strongly suggestive of periodic dumping events.”   I’m reminded of a group of foreign students who lived across the alley when I was in graduate school.  Following a noisy party, the dumpster we shared was filled not only with leftovers, but the pots in which the meal—unfamiliar food, which I looked at with interest when I went to dump my own trash—was cooked, along with the dirty plates.  No doubt heading back home by jet plane at the semester’s end, the young men had decided to pitch everything.

            But that’s my personal aside. “Ritual destruction of pottery,” is what the scholars hypothesize for these feasts, and the number of potsherds scattered around the earthen ring of just one un-excavated kiva suggests even to my casual glance that either the “ritual destruction” model is accurate or else the people were astoundingly clumsy in their most public places.  (The latter explanation is pretty far-fetched, since some scholars conclude that by the heyday of the canyon, most pottery was made elsewhere and imported, not the sort of thing you’d smash unthinkingly.)  Most likely, the breaking of vessels was something deliberate, maybe performative. 

            In this interpretation, the canyon’s primary residents were a priestly elite dedicated to astronomical study, art, ritual, ceremony.  Engineering and drafting too, I think, if the actual residents of Chaco had a leading role in planning the architecture and the roads that headed out, north and south, to additional great house communities.  One couldn’t spend most of the day grinding corn or hunting deer or otherwise bustling to secure one’s material needs for this mortal coil, and still have time left for the observation implicit in the canyon’s complex astronomical orientations, let alone for the expert level of artistry and craftsmanship left in stone.  And I wonder what else has vanished in the intervening centuries–paint on the inner plastered walls, or on the rock faces, exposed to sun and wind and everyone’s view. 

So perhaps the priests and scholars–one and the same–lived here year round, and shook out ornamental blankets and swept the kivas clean when, as modern scholars suggest, “pilgrims” would arrive for “episodic ceremonial events.”  Then, perhaps, the great round kiva of Casa Rinconada would be filled, the travelers descending into the sunken room through either of the opposing doors, one facing north and the other south. Some might duck through the antechamber on the north side, whose doors open east and west.  From the canyon floor, they might glimpse back up the way they’d come, through Pueblo Alto and then off on one of its converging roads. There’s a marvelous cardinal alignment among four of the central buildings grouped near Rinconda.  On the canyon floor, Pueblo Bonito and Chetro Ketl line up neatly on an east-west axis, while Pueblo Alto and the great house on the south mesa, Tsin Kletzin, define another one reaching north-south.  No matter how you came to the festival houses in the sandstone canyon, there’s a building associated with your cardinal direction. Line, staking out the proper relations among clans or seasons; Line, insisting on its power far beyond your sight.

            While the Great North Road leading to Aztec is perhaps the best defined, leaping off the mesa top at Pueblo Alto towards the San Juan River, the orientation to the south also casts its warp- line across the distances.  Archaeologist Stephen Lekson describes a “Chaco Meridian,” a north-south alignment running four hundred miles, from the ruins at Aztec, just south of the Colorado border, through Chaco Canyon’s careful alignments, south to the ruins along the Rio Casas Grandes in northern Mexico.  These three capitals, as he imagines them, lay out a time sequence, the architectural footprints for the migration of the culture’s elite.  Moving from Chaco, these founders established Aztec in the early 1100s; a century later they moved on to establish the “big houses” named in Nahuatl “Paquimé.” 

From the mesas above Chaco Wash, the way south dominates attention: South Gap stands invitingly, the wide, U-shaped grassland resting between West and South Mesas  gesturing with nonhuman elegance: this way.  One afternoon I descended into South Gap from Tsin Kletsin, as a rising wind finally shook snow from the low clouds that, for hours, had obscured the far horizons.  As I moved along the trail, a group of coyotes crossed in front of me.  Muscular and dark, their coats patchy with shades of brown and a little white mottling the tawny look familiar from tall-grass dwellers back home, they leaped and bounded through the scrub along the valley’s intermittent stream.  Suddenly startled, they noticed me and took turns staring at the red-jacketed human standing stationary in the snow while they moved onward, west and south.  The deer I scared up later, as the snowfall increased and I headed back, made no such effort to monitor my movement.  All five of them lifted from their daybed in wind’s lea and, heads high, trotted up South Mesa’s slope and out of sight.

            The southern influence on Chaco Canyon is strong in the archaeological record.  There are the trade goods from the south: exotic feathers, even macaws themselves, kept in dark, adobe cages more like caves that distorted their bone growth.  And agriculture came from deep in Mexico: maize, first coaxed into the hand-turned earth, out of the undisturbed grasslands of its undomesticated great-aunt, teosinte.  Mid-twentieth century archaeology may have over-corrected the earlier assumptions that cliff dwellings were the work of the great civilizations to the south–outliers from the Aztecs, as implied by the name given to the ruins by Anglo-American settlers in the 19th century.  It’s an “inappropriate name,” according to the Park Service, reflecting early Anglo ignorance of the Puebloan people’s connection to their ancestor-architects.  But recent genetic research complicates the matter, suggesting quietly that not just corn and the concept of its cultivation passed along through trade, but the planters and grinders themselves made the trip north as migrants from the metate-crucible of indigenous American agriculture. 

            Recently, researchers tested artifacts from what’s called the Basketmaker II archaeological period–in this case, items ranging from 500 BC-AD 500, before the rise of Chacoan architecture.  Throughout that thousand years, the people of that pre-ceramic culture in the Southwest left intimate hints of themselves in the dry caves and shelters of the Colorado Plateau.  “Quids”–plugs of what might be called “chaw”–have been dug up from the dust and sand of intervening centuries, with ancient DNA still caught in the masticated tangles of fiber–yucca, usually.  From the mitochondrial DNA sloughed off somebody’s cheek tissue, or left behind by the saliva, long since dessicated, geneticists can identify certain population subsets, or haplogroups.  Recognizable by certain shared mutations, these haplogroups indicate shared ancestry, and allow researchers to make improved interpretations about ancient migrations and the peopling of new territories. 

            The spat-out wads of chewed-up plant matter favor a particular theory of migration from Central Mexico; the presence of haploid A mitochondrial DNA seems to be correlated, the researchers believe, with farmers speaking Uto-Aztecan languages who walked northward, bringing their seed-corn and farming secrets with them, to become the Western population of Basketmaker people.  The Eastern Basketmakers, they conclude, however, were different people–an indigenous group who adopted the new agricultural arts introduced by their new neighbors.

            But the results are tenuous.  The sample number was small–the scientists seem to have seen this as a pilot project, to identify a methodology that others could repeat, developing a larger base of information.  But even more than the dried-up spitballs, I’m intrigued by the other type of object they tested: women’s clothes.  Called “aprons” (an “inappropriate name,” I think–they look more like a breechclout or a wide, fringed thong), these are known to have been worn by women because they’re depicted that way in decorated pottery.  Many are stained with menstrual blood. 

            The researchers sampled that blood, taking tiny snippets of the fabric, grinding them up with mortar and pestle while adding purified sand and liquid nitrogen, spinning them in a centrifuge and finally, after other, chemically-abbreviated steps, removing the ancient DNA for analysis.  Only two samples gave results, and neither of these seems linked to the out-of-Mexico theory: neither belongs to haploid A.  These women left behind blood-shadows, hints of who they were or weren’t, but only hints. I imagine them in profile, bent over the stone basins in which, day after day, year after year, they pulverized dried kernels into flour.  Then I picture them standing, stretching skyward, trying to lift themselves out of the kinks that settled into their muscles–there, ooooooh–before they have to bend again to start the fire and hustle up some supper.

***

            This month the park can be seen to re-enact the theory about Chaco’s ceremonial importance in its cultural apex, the 11th century. Throughout December, the few resident staff in the park are hosting guests, travelers from elsewhere who have come for the solstice season. We’re all on a first-name basis though some of us exchange formal business cards, as if we’re at a special seminar or institute workshop.  In an empty duplex in the residential area, a series of archaeoastronomers come and go over several days.  Alonso, from Chiapas, comes to see the sunrise at Bonito.  Anna, from Santa Fe, photographs the sunrise at Wijiji with John, from Durango.  A dark-sky preservationist from Albuquerque, Peter, drives up for an afternoon of meetings and stays the night. Cherilynn, with her belongings already en route from Colorado to Georgia for her new job there, arrives for the solstice and the lunar standstill afterwards at Chimney Rock.  Tyler, here for three weeks from Los Angeles, takes time-lapse pictures each clear night, showing us his finished pictures when they turn out well.  From Kansas, I’m the relative easterner and I’ve brought prairie-fed bison meat from back home to use in evangelical outreach: Reducing the Hegemony of the Cow in the American West. 

            It turns out I’ve been assigned quarters in a duplex called “The Cantina,” and my week-long host, Kelley, believes deeply in the ameliorative power of dessert, especially chocolate.  So most nights the travelers gather at the Cantina for dinner, following whatever we’ve been up to in the day.  Several members of the permanent staff drop in, one night or another, and people bring dishes to share–roasted vegetables, a giant Tupperware wheel of salad, a pot of soup nearly the size of a small generator, six-packs of beer to sit outside on the porch, keeping cold. After dinner one evening, we move furniture and take down one of Kelley’s hanging quilts so Alonso can show slides on the clean white duplex wall, and he describes astronomical alignments in Mayan ruins at Palenque while fudge brownies bake in the Cantina’s oven.

            It’s nothing like the swell of folks who’ll be here in the summer, everyone says so.  In fact, the campground’s almost empty, with only the hardiest enthusiasts (and, one night, that errant drunk guy) sleeping in their vans or a few tarp-topped tents on single-digit nights.  And despite the continued importance of the winter solstice in the local traditions, I think it must have been a hard thing a thousand years ago to journey to the canyon for the standstill of the sun.  Even if, for people living anywhere in the Colorado Plateau drawn to Chaco for festivities or ritual, their travel converged on the wide, prepared roads that approach the cliffs from dozens of miles, their trek would likely start in more remote topography, perhaps in snow.  Assuming you could cover twenty miles in a day, all but the closest travelers in the Chacoan world could have expected to spend more than one night abroad before they reached the great houses and the waiting guest rooms.  And weather, of course, can always slow one down.

            I was planning to brave the campground to be here, if I had to.  Until I learned that by joining the volunteer community I earned a heated place beneath a roof, I’d imagined pitching my tiny backpacking tent inside a larger, heavy one for a wimpy kind of double-walled construction.  A friend was set to lend me her expedition sleeping bag, rated for temperatures of forty below zero.  But it would have been a grim experience after an hour or so at the campfire, burrowing under down and rip-stop nylon, feeling the cold cast its tactile shadow along my spine, disk by disk.  Enough, perhaps, to make a person change her mind, pack up, head homeward early.  Certainly without the social pleasure–and distraction–of evenings in the Cantina. 

            Two hours before sunrise, when I slip out the door to the front porch to check the sky around Fajada Butte for clouds or stars, the single-digit cold is a shock in the lungs. It’s clear and I bet the temperature’s right above zero, just like the night before.  Exhaling, I’m exuberant, but if for hours my breath had frosted every nearby surface–pillow, bag, the inner tent walls inches from my face…  That would have made worlds of difference.

            It would have been hard, I think, to set out from somewhere two days or more away, and crunch over the frozen sagebrush in rabbit fur socks, perhaps, and ankle-laced yucca sandals.  It would have been hard to watch the sun go down knowing the next settlement–an outpost, maybe, on the Great North Road–was still hours away, and who knew how full the rooms would be when you arrived?  And harder still when the feasting was over, the great fires burned out, maybe, and your pack and pockets far lighter than when you came, to direct yourself back over the snow, back through the days that, though marked by the promise of returning spring, were still so much shorter than the long, cold nights, and your home-bound shadow lengthened by the low sun’s low angle, from morning to dusk, until icy moonlight overtook the sun’s last hint of twilight, and you kept walking homeward, the canyon falling back beyond the visible horizon.

           I hadn’t wanted to ride him; he was too small. But the hectoring Thai guys hawking pony rides convinced me to take him out for an hour for 500 bhat, more than the cost of a good meal. I couldn’t resist the idea of galloping through the surf in the Gulf of Thailand. Seymour had short legs and an eggbeater gait, and while it was kind of fun to gallop through the surf in front of scads of belly-heavy sunburned northern Europeans, I probably could have run faster and with less discomfort on my own. Plus Seymour—I knew that wasn’t his real name, but I liked that whatever it really was, the way the Thai guys pronounced it made it sound like my great-uncle’s name—was kind of a jerk, pinning his ears and throwing his head when he didn’t want to accede to my requests.

           So when, after spending too much time at the bridge on the river Kwai—because the train that was to be the continuation of our tour was delayed for more than an hour—and then boarding and traveling for another hour of noisy rumbling, past fields of sugar cane and what our guide called “sweet potato”; after a buffet lunch of pad Thai, Indian sweet curry with don’t-ask-don’t-tell meat, and fried chicken and bananas; after getting back in our air-conditioned mini-van (now more appreciated in the afternoon sun); after getting to the elephant park and climbing the stairs to mount, I was disappointed to see that my elephant was not the biggest.

           She was not, to be sure, small. I jittered like a kid at the state fair preparing for her first time astride a pony. With awkward steps—like boarding a small boat from a dock—I managed to climb onto her back. I settled onto the bench and was seat-buckled in for the event.  A long line of elephants with tourists on their saddle-benches and young Thai boys on their necks followed each other on a short path through the jungle.

           I have sat bucking horses more easily than I remained seated on the elephant’s back. I held onto the sides of the seat, my arms aching as I felt each of my vertebrae smash against the padded back of the seat; each step lurched me to one side, and then the other. It made the beach pony ride feel like gliding.

           I asked the guide how old the elephant was.

           He said sixteen.

           I asked how old he was.

           It was a question he seemed unaccustomed to answering in English and it appeared to take some calculation.

           Sixteen he said, finally.

           Yes, he was a sixteen year old boy, and an asshole in the way that sixteen year old boys often are. He called out “I love you!” to young Asian tourists as they passed us in the other direction  He whooped Yeehaw when we went downhill, and cut the line in front of other elephants, urging his—our—steed to go faster by kicking her hard behind the ears. He and his fellow guides carried on long and loud conversations that cut into the heavy jungle air.  

           Then, toward the end of the ride, he stopped, climbed back from the elephant’s neck, and sat on the bench beside me. When we arrived at the park I’d seen a sign listing the rules. The second one, after the customary caution about keeping an eye and a hand on your valuables, was “Not allow to sit on the neck of elephant or other parts except specific place only.” I said to him, “I get to ride on her neck?”

           He said “Yes, you want.”

           So I slid down, reaching my legs behind her ears. I asked her name, and what I heard was “Chopin” like the composer and the writer.  I urged Chopin forward, but she didn’t move. Instead she drew her trunk to the top of her head and searched for my hands.

           “She hungry” said the guide, her conspirator, and then mentioned something about 500 or 1000 bhat, as I wished. I’ve been swindled in Thailand before so I said, “Sorry, no money.” Chopin lowered her trunk and ambled off.

           Sitting on the neck was far easier than on the bench. It was, in fact, thrilling. My riding muscles are well developed and my body responds instinctively, able to balance without thought. I no longer feared falling off. I started to understand her rhythms, began talking to her with pressure from my legs. I didn’t want to stop.

           But eventually, of course, I had to stop. After the elephant ride, we tourists dismounted and, in the middle of a jungle in Thailand, we were funneled into a line to see photos of ourselves displayed on a computer screen. I hadn’t understood why, shortly after boarding, we rode the elephants into the muddy river. I thought that perhaps it was for them to have a chance to cool down and get a drink before we ventured on a long jungle trek. I was wrong. Now I saw that it was just for a photo op before we set out on the short well-trampled loop around the camp.

           I have never bought souvenir photos of myself—I am either unphotogenic or simply less attractive than I would like to believe—and wasn’t even going to look at this one, but I was standing there in line for I didn’t know what and it popped up on the screen. I have few documentary impulses, but I felt compelled to purchase it.

           I look happy in the photo, though you can see the tendons in my arms straining as I clutch the sides of the bench. My light orange shirt—I’d bought a button-down Thai schoolgirl shirt because it seemed more modest than the beach wear I’d brought for my two-week stay at a friend’s borrowed luxury condo in Hua Hin—picks up the yellows in the leafy background, compliments the red in the blankets piled underneath the seat.

           But the focal point of the photo is not me, and it’s not the elephant. The eye is drawn to the tee-shirt on the guide. This 16-year-old Thai boy setting astride the neck of an elephant is wearing a black tee-shirt. In the middle is a swastika, black in a white circle, framed on a red square.

           Because I was so excited, looking only at the elephant, I hadn’t noticed the boy’s tee-shirt, not until I saw the photograph. I showed it to the Thai guide who had taken us on the trip, who had booked the tickets to this elephant park. He looked embarrassed, laughed a little. I waited for more of a response.  He said it was a symbol in eastern religions.

           Yes, I said, I know that symbol. This is not that. Look at the colors. Look at the design. This is a swastika.

           There were five of us on the tour, the others were German women, likely two lesbian couples, who talked mostly to each other in a language I’d been taught as a child to hear as ugly. One of the couples came over having just bought a print of their elephant-riding photo. They showed it to me; it was a romantic setting, indeed, a good photo opportunity.

           Then I showed them mine. At first they cooed, commenting on how happy I looked. Then one of them gasped.

           “Not gut,” she said. “This is not gut.”

           We all turned to the Thai guide, who tried again to make his argument about it being a religious symbol.

           The quietest of the German women delivered a lecture. Yes, she said, in the cadence of an academic, there is a symbol like this that you often see in India. It signifies new beginnings. But that is not what this is. She shook her head. She kept shaking her head.

           Two nights before I had watched, with Thai subtitles, the bad American movie Valkyrie, about a plot to murder Hitler. Seeing Tom Cruise in a Nazi uniform—even as a member of the resistence—was unsettling. The imagery of the Third Reich can’t not rattle you.

           I had booked this tour, to go to the bridge on the river Kwai, because after two solitary weeks at the beach reading and writing, I needed more than sun and surf, excellent cheap food and daily massages that cost seven dollars an hour. I needed a little history, a little culture, a chance to get out of my own head.

           We’d spent the morning immersed in World World II. Everything we had done and seen that day was tied to the years between 1939 and 1945. Our first stop, after a two-and-a-half hour mini-van ride north, was a cemetery built by the Thais for the British and Dutch dead. Our second stop the JEATH War Museum in Kanchanaburi.

           It was, we learned, established in 1977 to commemorate the horrors of the construction of the “Death Railway,” an appropriate nickname for the strategic train line the Japanese built connecting (what was then) Siam to (what was then) Burma. Most of us know one small segment of this history from the movie, The Bridge on the River Kwai. As it turns out, JEATH is a curious acronym of the names of the countries involved: Japan, England, America (and Australia), Thailand, and Holland. The poorly-copied museum brochure explained that “The Japanese were the controllers of the railway project, Thailand was involved as the conquered country and the other four countries were involved as PoW’s on the actual construction of the 415 kilometre long Death Railway and the bridge over the River Kwae.” It continued on the next page, “The word JEATH also replaces the word Death because it sounds too horrific.”

           The museum consists mainly of a replica bamboo hut with a display of photographs of the POWs, more than 16,000 of whom—plus 100,000 impressed laborers—died during the construction process which Japanese engineers first reckoned would take at least five years. The railway was completed in sixteen months.

           The last paragraph of the brochure read as follows: “Dear visitors, JEATH museum has been constructed not for the maintenance of the hatred among human beings, especially among the Japanese and allied countries, but to warn and teach us the lesson of HOW TERRIBLE WAR IS.”

           After leaving the museum, riding on a railway that had been hacked into the jungle by men fighting off disease and starvation, I thought about what I thought about World War II. Growing up Jewish in a rural, agricultural community, my father taught me that the most important thing about my ethnicity was that there was always somebody who wanted to kill me. My great-grandpa Max, a giddy and sweet man, had numbers tattooed on his arm. He didn’t talk about them. Once, during my childhood, someone painted a swastika on the sidewalk in front of our house. At Yale, because of my blonde hair and pale eyes, my “Ellis Island Special” last name, I got to overhear the scions of Robber Barons make anti-Semitic comments. When I thought about World War II, to be honest, I thought about the Jews.

           In my twenties, as an editorial assistant at Oxford University Press, I worked on a joint US-Russian authored book about the collaboration between US and Russians forces during the war. (In a small world moment, I later dated the US author’s brother. He turned out to be a toad.) I’d thought about the dropping of the bomb, about Rosie the Riveters, about the internment of Japanese Americans, but I confess to not knowing much about what was happening in Southeast Asia during that time.

           So this winter I spent a sunny morning in Thailand feeling abashed by my ignorance, learning in visceral ways about what had happened here during WWII, and hopped off my elephant and looked smack into a photo of a happy me with a swastika-wearing Thai boy.

           The German woman urged me to take the photo back.

           No, I said, I’m keeping it.

           I’m Jewish, I added. Somehow, this was something I needed to say.

           The Thai tour guide said, “He doesn’t know.”

           I don’t know what he knew, that teenager, that elephant-riding, trash-talking, rambunctious boy. I wanted to ask him, to talk to him, but he had already loaded another tourist onto Chopin’s bench and taken off on the loop, whooping and hollering. His English was limited. How much, really, could I have learned from talking to him? Was that swastika just another incomprehensible symbol of the far-off West, like the ubiquitous tee-shirts from American universities that didn’t exist? In Thai tourist markets there are often vendors selling tee-shirts with unutterably nasty English messages. Was this just another example of rampant commercialism with no content?

           Thailand, so long a country known for its tolerant and accommodating people, is undergoing change. The beloved king is ailing; there is now gang violence.  Did I want to know what, specifically, this young boy knew? Was it meaningful? Did it matter? There is no such thing as global political correctness. I have no more right to question his appropriation of cultural and political symbols than he does to accost Americans who adapt Buddhism to suit their needs.

           For years I have been thinking about the commemoration of atrocity. A decade before this trip I’d gone to Asia with a college friend, and we had dinner with friends of hers, expat Americans living in Hong Kong. They were giving us advice on our itinerary. The guy, well-educated and well-spoken said, “I’ve been to Auschwitz, I’ve been to Dachau, you gotta go to Tuol Sleng. No one does concentration camps like the Cambodians.”

           I never saw him again but have always hated him for that remark, though I understood, when we went to Tuol Sleng a few days later, what he meant. It was an awful experience, moving and unsettling and tear-filled. We had gotten lost on the way, consulting our guide book but unable to negotiate the streets of Phnom Pehn. My friend wanted to stop people on the street and ask them for directions. I blocked her. I couldn’t imagine asking locals to think of a place like that—a former school where just 25 years before their families, their friends, their teachers, had been imprisoned and tortured—as a tourist site. How do you commemorate atrocity? How do you keep people informed and aware of the vicious vicissitudes of the past, how to educate young people in ways to foster tolerance? My intolerant father often quoted, without attribution, Santayana’s remark about the condemnation of repeating the past. How do you do this in a way that is not ham-handed?

           I look at that cheerfully-framed picture of myself on the elephant, smiling and unaware, seated behind a Swastika-branded teenager. I think about the contemporary genocides, and how so many of my college students have no idea about things that have happened in their lifetime, that, as those of us who are steeped in history know, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” It makes me wonder what the best way to engage and instruct people about “HOW TERRIBLE WAR IS.”

                                     …. one must let the mind loose to respond as it will, to receive impressions,

to sense rather than know, to gather rather than immediately understand.                   

 – Edward Albee

1.   Coma

Most of all I think it was her arm, doubled back at the elbow

and poised,  rigid wing, mid-air, that stopped me, so much

I’d brought to her bedside to tell. 

Martina’s safe landing, the plane, the full

moon tonight and the fawn with its pebbled

coat fading.   A light

touch to ease her dying.  To tell her our grief

would not try to hold her back. 

As though it could.

As though her turning inward had not

been noticed.  What had I been thinking? She, who left

home to get on with this dying.

Who waved goodbye last week

at the door.

Bones, bones, and steady breathing, and hearing

 said to be last to go.

2.    Change

But how do we jump from the speeding train of our own

good intentions?  There I was reading out loud in front of your coma

something I’d folded and stuffed at the last minute into my skirt

pocket, a passage I’d found and typed and planned to

send in the mail, in which one of the characters–young, much younger than I–talks about

change, not knowing how it happens or what is required or how it moves but only what it

feels like to change.  She gives us her great-great grandmother’s words, she gives us beautiful. 

Mary,

what I’d been wanting to say was how, the last time we spoke, I saw that change

in your eyes, I never had seen you so beautiful.  That was my word, in my own mind,

right then.  And then I found hers.  And by the time I read this passage to you,

it didn’t reach the two feet between us, already you were no longer there.

3.    How I Knew

.. Dora Rouge said it happens all our lives.  She said that we are cocoons who consume

     our own bodies and at death we fly away transformed and beautiful.     — Linda Hogan

Such imminent news and still the blue jay

Squawked, like any other day, relentlessly.

Grape leaves over my head in the new arbor                                                                            

Flickered and swayed, morning sun between them

Flinging itself at the ground and falling forever

Short, and the book I was reading held me

Just enough so at that moment I was not thinking of

You, the tiny leaf that landed on my upper sleeve

Was one more small distraction: or was it the dried

Half of a maple-pip, bright veins the color of rust

And nothing in between:  fallen wing  I couldn’t

Identify, which bush, which nearby vine

Had leaves like that?  And then just as quietly                                                

As it had come it rose and was gone.  “Mary,”

I said without thinking, “Mary.” 

And waited for the call.

4.   Why Not

If our softest words, spoken into a cellular phone can beam

out and up to satellites hundreds of miles above us and bounce

Back to ears on the other side of earth in less

time than it takes to type the word “less”                    

If we grant to radio waves the power to cross open air between the hill

with its blinking-red tower, far outside of town, and beam the same

Voices and music right through walls of homes, offices, skyscrapers, cars

on the freeway moving in different directions, all at the very same time

If invisible waves of impulse, can B like the pitch picked up by ears of dogs – slip

without our knowing, into spaces inside us, around us, and just

As silently leave,

why not the spirit?             

5.    Already Beyond Us

And now our friend Ken, in his dying, sends poems.   

New ones, a flurry in these wintry days.

He writes of emptiness and promise.                                         

He writes of writing before sleep.  

How to respond, find the words for good-bye?

The last time we saw another friend, Joe, just

this past October, he told us he’s dying

not because his body’s diseased.  He’s done

what he came on this earth to do.  His work is complete. 

Yes, but what of our friendship?  

Will we ever get enough of Ken’s poems? 

6.    My Mother as Chickadee

Well, no, not reincarnation, exactly, nothing

so life-long.  Rather

The day before she died, my mother, coming home from church, wondered

was there really anything There to look forward to?

Well, I said, if there is, come back.  Tell us.  And two days later,

there I was on my balcony eating breakfast, under the shade of

Morning glories strung to the roof when a flock of six or eight chickadees

skimmed the air right over my head, were soon out of sight.  But one

Turned back, perched on the overhead twine and looked right down, in my

direction, cocked its little black-capped head   

Back and  forth, back

and forth      

And flew on.

(Why not?)

7.  Beyond Us

And what of our good friend Joe?  On that final visit I told him

about my mother.   The bird.  And how for almost a year my mother came

Not as a bird (never again) to visit every night, just

after I’d settled, as usual, into bed with a book, just after

Ralph was asleep: the lightest pounce

at the foot of the bed

The weight of a cat,

but there wasn’t a cat, there wasn’t any

Thing to see at all.  Who will believe this?

How can a poem get by with such nonsense?  Such

Hocus pocus?  Still, the day Joe left us, as law allowed,

with Susan and all three grown children

Around him B a Stellar’s Jay, royal blue with its pointed crown shiny     

black as obsidian – kind of jay that never in all the twenty-five years

We’ve lived in this house has come so far from woods to town – skipped

from branch to branch just outside of our window, looking

In.  And that very same night

on the foot of our bed, a pounce.

8.  A Gathering

Days and days burdened

with what I’ve often impressed on students:  write

as though it’s for someone with only a short time to live, make it worthy

(good theory)

and then last night, my head on the pillow, re-reading

Ken’s poem, his custom of putting pen to paper last thing before sleep,

this flurry:  the pounce, the birds, the leaf, my mother, what I never

before would have dared tell the world.

Back then, on that thin strip of barrier

island, at your parents’ beachfront

house, we were at war with each other

over territory: psychic premises, time,

responsibilities, attention. We plumbed

desire and fury, threatened one another

with abandonment. Sometimes the wind

would shift and blow from the land, across

the sound, not from the sea, and bring

dank pressure and a horde of insects,

tropical, hard and heavy, banging into

the screens, hanging there with barbed legs

and the faces of demons. I snapped them off

with my middle finger which annoyed you

sitting across from me under the lamp

that had drawn them to our windows,

nursing our newborn son and trying to read.

What did we know about love then? Why

did we stay together, we two, grandparents

now, long married, writing books of poems,

our dedications to each other in italics?

The wind would shift, again and again.

We seem to have always known that much.

                                                for K.