The shore is an ancient world, for as long as there has been an earth and sea there has been this place of the meeting of land and water. Yet it is a world that keeps alive the sense of continuing creation and of the relentless drive of life.

Rachel Carson, The Edge of the Sea

i. Fog

4:30 on a cool afternoon, early September. In my second week of residency on the Schoodic Peninsula, the easternmost section of Acadia National Park, I’m paying more attention to the fog than I did last week. Schoodic Point, the tip of the peninsula, is a low, fractured, rocky slope, mostly pink granite interrupted by a few thick stripes of black diabase dike, jutting into the ocean. Most days the point appears like the clear, bright, colorful image I imagined as I flew here from the west: light stone blocks contrasting with vivid green firs on its inland edge, scruffy, light green grasses rising tenaciously from crevices, cobalt blue sea, cerulean blue sky. Down close to the shoreline the intertidal zone begins. Wet dark olive-green rockweed coats the lowest portions of the slope, the pinkish-gray rocks above the limits of high tide stay bare and dry. I stand in sun and sea breeze, studying the cracks and joints and fissures, the angles and shapes of slabs and blocks and shelf faces. I note changes in tide level, the shift from zone to zone—dense, dark green water-logged weeds, light green weeds draining sea water, damp off-white coatings of barnacles, the glistening, deceptively slick black zone. Sea and sky, those vast blue reaches immeasurable, draw my attention only to their immensity rather than to any fixed point. Each time I return to the Point in sunshine I become pleasantly detached. I’m content with the scale and scope of what I behold, and find it easy to simply engage in idle observation.

But the fog—that’s something else. It alters my sense of the world, makes me feel both isolated and involved.

Clouds that have hung above the peninsula since morning drift out to sea and the ground level fog thins in the afternoon sun. I wander out across the rocks, closer to the ocean, hoping for a better perspective on the shoreline, and stop at an abrupt drop-off, a broad break in the granite ledges. Rockweeds glisten in the refracted sunlight, thickly coating slabs and blocks ten feet below me; waves surge in from time to time to cover them, then ebb away. The fog merges with the ocean a little way out. The horizon is only a broad smear of bright blue-gray, except for a short stretch of gleaming silver just below the place where the sun, unseen, must hover. The thickness of the fog shrinks and swells like the surf, like the sea breathing in and breathing out. When it dissipates slightly, the distant silhouette of Mount Desert Island, across the broad reach of Frenchman Bay to the east, momentarily materializes out of the haze, then blurs and blends back into it again.

On the other side of this little inlet where I stand, seven gulls stand placidly near the shoreline; it’s as if they’re marking time, waiting for the tide to turn and reveal the vulnerable lifeforms of the tide pool. Further inland, upslope toward the landward end of the inlet, a raised lip at the far edge of a granite slab forms a partial dam above an area of lower rocks. The tide must rise and surge across the slab before it can fill up that inner pool and drown those rockweed-coated blocks again. I hear a thump and splash as saltwater spills over the lip. The gulls are silent, immobile. The only sounds are lapping waves, the slap of water on stone, the gurgle of water sucking itself back away from land.

The encircling fog, gradually increasing its distance from the shore, still closes in the horizon. I begin to comprehend the limits of my vision, strain to remember what is usually clear to me in sunlight. I suddenly realize that, if I wanted a place to lose myself, to momentarily step out of identity and obligation, it would be here and now. In this instant,—perhaps only for an instant,— I come wholly to my senses. Cognition ebbs away; feeling surges in. All at once my senses connect me to the most primal of elements—the soft enshrouding fog, the persistent rhythm of the waves, the implacable rock under my feet. In the distance a raft of eiders silently floats by, black shapes interrupting the gleam of sunlit waves, soundless, drifting, carried along by the tide and the waves. I feel myself drifting with them. I am no longer on the Schoodic Point I know, but some other where.

I don’t know how long the moment lasts or why I feel I need to leave—to “get about my business,” whatever that might be—but the moment haunts me, draws me back a few hours later. The sun is descending, the fog thickening, that inner pool slowly filling, other sightseers mostly gone. I am, for the moment, alone on Schoodic Point. I shiver occasionally in a brisk cold breeze. Directly above me I discern blue sky but on the ground I find my horizon still tightly circumscribed. Ahead of me, sea soon dissolves into fog; behind me, inland beyond the point, trees are merely a frontline of shadows, growing dimmer, the forest beyond it vanished. Clouds high overhead only hint at the sun’s descent. No gleam shows through the fog.

I concentrate on what encircles me; I close my eyes and listen to the surf, the slap and gurgle and s-s-s-s of waves against and across and retreating from the rocks. The air is palpable on my face, a chilly damp caress. I conjure up the image of Corregio’s painting of Io and Zeus, a naked nymph welcoming the embrace of the god in the guise of a cloud. I smile blindly into the fog, then banish the image to return to my senses. Minutes pass in the grasp of sensation, while cold seeps into me. It’s the pervading cold that makes me finally open my eyes. Blinking, I slowly take one last look around me, then I surrender the point to the fog, the surf, and the gathering dark.

ii. Crossing the Bar

The Boreal coast of the North Atlantic is known for the amplitude of its tides, the difference between high and low tide. The intertidal or littoral region is the area of shoreline between what the highest tides submerge and what the lowest tides expose; it can be divided into five distinct zones, each demarcated by degrees of submersion and exposure, each host to a variety of specially adapted organisms. Any casual idler along the coast of Acadia is likely to notice the changes that the levels of the tide make in the appearance of the shoreline.

For example, on the Schoodic Peninsula, depending on the time of day, East Pond Cove seems to be different each time I pass it. At one time, it is a broad, serene pond, a beachless basin almost surrounded by higher ground. Its grassy shoreline is close to the road; only a narrow strip of gray rock shows between the water and the pavement. This is the cove at high tide. At another time, at low tide, it is startlingly transformed. Now is revealed a broad stretch of exposed shoreline, little pools of water in between cobblestones and small boulders. A burble of flowing water can be traced to a temporary tidal stream draining the higher sections of the pool. The water’s edge is now perhaps twenty yards distant from the shoulder of the road. On the open shoreline, among small exposed rocks all high and mostly dry, are strewn the blue shells of mussels, the empty shells of snails, and billions upon billions of barnacles, the seams of their intricate interlocking plates tightly sealed. Bladder wrack, a rockweed with heart-shaped brown bladders, lies flat everywhere, as if discarded. Abundant, opportunistic gulls peck among the wrack. Across what remains of the water, on the exposed shore of Little Moose Island, a clammer cruises the coastline, probing at the sand and occasionally plucking something out to deposit in the bucket carried on a strap over his shoulder. It seems a zone of debris and detritus, everything dead—certainly the litter of mussel shells, snail shells, and an occasional dismembered crab suggest abundant death—but most of this will revive with the turn of the tide. The rockweed will rise and stand waving in the water, the barnacles and mussels will open to feed, the periwinkles and whelks will set into predatory motion. At high tide the following day, the cove is a placid pool once more, reflecting the sky and suggesting nothing of the abundant life at its bottom. The passerby who observes these changes feels he shares a secret with the landscape, and remains conscious of the tides wherever he goes in Acadia.

Bar Harbor is the name of both a harbor and a picturesque town on the eastern coast of Mt. Desert Island, where the main section of Acadia National Park is located. The harbor extends out into Frenchman Bay between two small islands and a somewhat larger island due north a quarter-mile offshore of the town. At high tide, Bar Island, the largest of the three, seems simply to be the nearest island, across a relatively calm and sheltered body of water. It’s only at low tide that it becomes apparent how harbor, town, and island all got their names.

Twice a day at high tide, for several hours at a time, Bridge Street leads down the slope from the town directly into the water of the harbor. It seems to offer only water access. It’s low tide now. As I stroll down the street a pick-up truck passes me near the bottom of the slope and continues out into the harbor, onto a firm, flat tidal bar the width of a two-lane highway. When the ebbing tide drains away the water in that part of the harbor, the flats turn into a packed gravel strand solid enough to support a van or SUV, and tourists and townies alike set out to wander across the bar.

I see ahead of me other people already walking idly on the bar. Two long vans park close to the water on the west side of the bar, one of them towing a partly empty trailer for kayaks. Off in the low pool beyond the vans floats a cluster of kayakers, facing each other and holding position with their paddles, apparently returning from an outing on the bay. Not far away a small sailboat heels over in the shallow water, more aground than afloat. Two small station wagons drive briskly across the bar; they pass an older couple ambling back toward town. Groups of people pick their way along the water’s edge, surveying the tide line. A little girl, walking several yards ahead of her mother, calls back to her that she sees a starfish; “It’s feeding,” she shouts. On either side of the bar, the tidal flats are cluttered with seaweed, blue mussels by the millions, barnacles in both their closed and their extended states, innumerable periwinkles, and various other tidal creatures.

Midway across the bar I stop and slowly survey everything around me. To the south the flats slope off gradually, and some water-filled areas separate ridges of shells; in the distance, where the harbor is still deep enough, small boats float gently at anchor or move slowly between docks and open water. To the north, where Mt. Desert Island arches toward the mainland, the slope is less pronounced, and the waters have receded less. At either end of the bar, toward the town or toward the island, small figures amble unhurriedly and small vehicles either recede in the distance or grow larger with increasing nearness. The top of the bar is as flat and worn as an old dirt road, but beyond its edges vast fields of innumerable gray-brown mussel shells fall off to the limits where water still covers them. It looks as if the retreating tide has revealed an unimaginable accumulation of lifeless debris, the discarded residue of centuries, yet I’m aware that much of what I’m seeing—and what I can’t see beneath the surface in the shallows—is alive, tightly sealed against desiccation from heat and air and exposure, waiting for full submersion before opening up to life again.

Life in the littoral, literally unlimited. Here on the bar I glimpse something of the scale of life in the intertidal zone.

I decide to step along briskly, to complete my tour of the island before the tide turns. The trail leads off the bar and winds through the woods of the island. It closes off the view of the harbor, but ends a quarter-mile later at a summit with an open view toward the south. Some prominent mountains of eastern Acadia National Park—Cadillac, Dorr, Champlain—fill the space between cloudy white sky and forested coast. Lower still I see Bar Harbor and its marina, with a couple dozen boats anchored off shore. The harbor looks calm and deep but when I lean out a little I can see off to my right the limits of exposed harbor floor and the places where people are walking and driving across the harbor.

Returning to the sandbar, I realize the tide was still ebbing when I first crossed it. The sea is even lower now, revealing the tidal life to be even more endlessly abundant. As far as I can see from sea level, the surface of the harbor bottom is now exposed. Only occasional low pools are still partly water-filled, where blue mussels poke only their tips into the air. The van with the trailer, now loaded with kayaks, stands where it did, a few of the kayakers milling around it. The second van has already left with its passengers. The shoreline has retreated further; the place where the kayakers floated together is nearly completely land. The sailboat is utterly aground, canted to one side and resting on its keel on mud and mussels, no open water anywhere around it.

The image of an exposed harbor floor dense with mussels and barnacles is a revelation to me. For the moment it looks drought-ravaged or like land drying out from a sudden torrential rain; it looks as if it has been devastated and will take years to recover. But I know the recovery begins within the hour, and within six hours it will all be submerged, the way I have most often seen it, as if it never could be drained—how do you drain the ocean? Here is life on a scale that staggers comprehension, here is resiliency of a resourcefulness that bewilders invention, here are life forms utterly unlike what we know on land, what we know of our own evolution, whose origins outdate ours by immeasurable millennia.

“Time and tide wait for no man,” it is said, but I think that expression a rather benign and banal reading of what we behold here. Instead, time and tide give us some inkling of what eternity must be like, even as, twice a day, they display for us what, ultimately, existence is like. To understand life we need a more panoramic perspective, a slower shutter speed, a more encompassing comprehension. I recross the bar slowly, still looking all about me. I know that all this will soon disappear beneath high water, a fecund existence spending half its time submerged and invisible. To recapture this sight I will need to time my return with another turning of the tide.

iii. Cobblestones

It’s nearly noon. I’m hiking on Isle au Haut, the remotest section of Acadia National Park. I’ve rounded Western Head, one of the peninsulas on the southern tip of the island; I’ve dawdled awhile over an energy bar and bottled water on a rounded bulge of volcanic rock, where I appreciated the good sense of the gulls to have their picnic lunches of crab on top of it—whitening shells beyond counting suggest how often they use it; I’ve sat contentedly in sea breeze and warm sun, gazing out at the vast openness of the Atlantic. To complete my circuit of Western Head, I’ve followed the Cliff Trail high above the shoreline on the east side of the peninsula. Now I’m nearing the end of the trail, at its junction with the road that will take me back north to the ranger cabin where I’m staying.

The trail descends to an open rocky beach. I try to distinguish among the stones the marker cairns that will keep me on the trail. Two prominent stone piles steer me away from the shore, back into the trees, but a glance toward the water makes me hesitate before starting inland. A dozen or more cairns have been carefully constructed upon the side of a knob of rock close to the shore. Some are stacked like a toddler’s stacking toy, decreasing in size from bottom to top; others are more haphazardly arranged and more precariously balanced. I see at once that they are not trail markers, since they would lead me back the way I came, along the bottom of the cliffs. I recall walking on Monhegan Island, further down the coast of Maine, along a trail through old growth pine forest, where hikers can discover a string of “fairy” dwellings, miniscule “houses” of twigs, bark, stones, and moss erected at the base of trees; I think that here Isle au Haut seems to counter that idle playfulness with a simpler and rather repetitious sea nymph or mermaid sculpture gallery. The cairns add only whimsical clutter to an already driftwood- and debris-strewn coast, but they prompt me to look back along the sheer cliffs toward the tip of Western Head. I realize more fully what I’ve been walking above.

Cobblestones make up the walking surface from higher up on the beach, where the forest begins, down to the shoreline, and they fill in the spaces between the higher, raised knobs of the rocky headlands. They make for noisy, off-balance walking; finally on a beach for the first time since I arrived on Isle au Haut, I clatter and lurch across a long stretch of them to get closer to the water. I can tell that the tide is coming in. Once I stop moving and stand gazing at the cliffs, I hear other noises than the clacking of the stones under my feet. I stumble toward the shore, pause, and listen more intently. In a moment or two I realize that, after an incoming wave, when the waters recede, I’m hearing the clatter of cobblestones. I step even closer to the water and stare at the foamy waves covering the lowest stones. This time I see some of them move as the waters withdraw. I continue watching and soon notice that the chattering sound of stones knocking together is louder when the waves are stronger and heavier. Taking a few steps forward onto wet stones I squat down, getting nearer eye level with the stones and the waves. I concentrate on the cobblestones even when they’re invisible under the breaking waves, camouflaged by white foam. The water recedes off the glistening stones as a wave twenty yards off shore curls above a low barrier of rock. Then the space in between fills with white turbulence. One wave rushes up almost to my feet and reminds me that this is a rising tide. I wobble backwards across the cobblestones to a stretch of sloping solid rock and perch on the edge, still focusing my hearing on the clacking sound of the stones.

The tide comes in farther onto the shore and, as it deepens, hits the stones more heavily. Now when it pulls back it draws more powerfully on the stones and the volume of the clatter increases. The racket the ebbing water and the rolling stones make together sounds like a heavy flow of rainwater gushing down a storm drain mixed with the rattle of thick chains striking against each other. The stronger waves pick up small stones and hurl them further back on the beach, and sometimes they toss up hollow stem kelp as well. The whomp and whoosh of the waves and the cracking and chittering of the cobbles grow more forceful. I’m alone on the beach, not a bird or other creature visible, and yet the rocks themselves are active.

The moment reminds me of an essay by Barbara Hurd, “Fine Distinctions,” in which she walks a shingle beach in southwest Suffolk, on the Atlantic shore of England. She tells how, on that site, the U. S. military constructed a massive listening device, “the world’s largest, most sophisticated, most powerful radar of its kind,” at a cost of a hundred million dollars, but soon found it wouldn’t work. As she explains, “Its ability to receive signals was, from the start, hampered by the presence of a mysterious noise. ‘Clutter-related noise,’ they called it. ‘Severe background noise,’ ‘excessive noise of undetermined origin.’ Months of testing failed to find the source of the problem.” Apparently none of the project’s military and technical personnel had ever sat on a cobblestone beach during an incoming tide. It’s not surprising that all that sensitive equipment couldn’t overcome the interfering rumble and clatter of wave-tossed cobblestones; but it’s discouraging to know that no one involved predicted the result.

“Shingle pebbles aren’t silent,” Barbara Hurd says; “they ping and clatter and clunk.” Just so. Days after I leave Isle au Haut, a woman will tell me that she can identify which beach she’s passing in the dark by the sounds the cobblestones make, differentiated in tone and pitch by the angle of the waves, the slope of the shore, the size of the stones. In At the Sea’s Edge William T. Fox has a handy chart distinguishing the rocks on the shore. Boulders are the largest rocks, cobbles are grapefruit sized, pebbles are the size of ping pong or golf balls, granules are pea sized. Smaller than that are the coarse, medium, and fine grains of sand, and below that silt and clay. These are handy distinctions.

For the most part the waves have been juggling peas and ping pong balls, but just now higher waves are tossing lemon and peach sized cobblestones up onto the rocky ledge a few yards from where I sit. Only a few minutes ago, when it was my route to this location from the beach, that extension of this rock was dry. I move a little higher up and watch the lower portion of the rock receive the brunt of the next wave. I’m in no danger here—my reading alerted me to folks being swept off rocks by errant waves and I’m a cautious fellow—but I’ll have to choose a different route when I leave the rocks. I watch the tide advance for a few minutes more.

When I feel spray reach this higher position where I’m sitting, I decide now might be a good time to go. I can’t go back the way I came—the waves are too vigorous across the cobblestones. Instead I scramble gingerly over the uneven surface atop the outcropping, then step carefully through that thicket of cairns—rather than topple any myself, I want to let storm tide decide their fate. Near the edge of the knob I pause to listen to the chatter of cobblestones a moment longer. I hope memory will record the sound, allow me to hear it again as I fall asleep tonight. Then I step onto the dry stones. The clatter of my crossing drowns out the sound of the cobblestones in the tide.

The trail rises again from the beach, veers easterly, and leads me around to high ground further down the coast. When I reach an open bluff I pause to look back and locate the spot where I listened to the cobblestones. Through binoculars I spot the cairn-adorned knob. It is now an island of rock; the cobblestone beach around it is completely submerged, and foaming waves are breaking on the cliff face beyond it. The sound of the cobblestones must be muted now, beneath the surf, but I know they will clatter again with the changing tide. What was simply a moment of attention for me is the timeless nature of their existence. Though few creatures hear it, the cobblestones have been making the same sounds, wearing themselves away slowly—slowly—by infinitesimal degrees, chattering, pinging and clunking all the while, eons upon eons, open to change on every ebb and surge of the tide. My clattering across the cobblestones was only an instant of static in the ever-varying, timeless transmission of sound.

iv. Fog

An hour after sunrise, for which there is little evidence beyond the ability to see the fog better, I stand again on Schoodic Point. Last night, returning from a clear, sunny day on Mount Desert Island, I was surprised to find heavy fog cloaking the peninsula. The further I drove, the more it thickened, until I could barely locate the beaches a few yards beyond the shoulder of the road. Near the point, Arey Cove was invisible behind an impenetrable white wall. Certain that the fog would still be here in the morning, I rose early, eager to get out into it.

I step slowly onto bare rock near the center of the point and at once detect motion down near the water’s edge. Dozens of eiders waddle off the weed-smothered shore and plop into the ocean. I’ve only ever seen them floating offshore, never spotted them out of the water before. I raise the field glasses hanging around my neck and discover an immense flotilla stretching around the point, hundreds of little dark shapes imperturbably rising and settling with the waves. The further out they bob, the more difficult they are to discern in the dense haze. From somewhere deep in the fog I hear a muted chugging, a lobster boat making its rounds; I shift my binoculars but only get a closer view of fog. On shore, in the rockweed just beyond the reach of the waves a herring gull picks at a crab he’s uncovered and dragged out of hiding. Early morning work for fishermen and gull.

I make my way toward the shore over the pink ledges and across two black dikes, searching for a gull-guano-free-zone somewhere close to the water. I find a narrow spot still unspotted and sit down on a low, narrow, nearly level block of stone. My feet rest on the slick algae of the black zone between rock untouchable by high tides and the sloping edge where barnacles and green algae cling. The fog is thick and wet, the rock hard and cold; a familiar chill soon settles on me. The eiders, which were drifting east, begin drifting back west in a thin, widely spaced line; some them pop up out of the sea onto the tip of a nearby promontory and begin to probe the rockweed with their bills. The turning tide slams more vigorously against the shore. I sit with my pen poised above my daybook but the chill makes my hand shake. The rest of me quivers at times as well.

Still, it’s hard to leave. Having become one accustomed to the fog, I try to settle in. I’ve come here to be in the fog. I breathe in wet air, inhale deeply, and as I slowly exhale, I feel my senses open up to my surroundings. I gaze, I listen, I feel, I taste the fog. The waves slapping the rocks and splashing, gushing, rushing on every side, the gurgle and glug of water drawing out of the crevices around me, the silent thickening parade of eiders floating past, the ghostly shapes of a thin line of spruces against the inland fog behind me, rockweed on a low, nearly submerged ledge before me bearing the force of breakers and filtering the white foam—this turbulence and serenity together are everchanging and yet timeless. For how many millennia has it been like this? How long has this been going on? Being here, shivering in this precise moment, is like having been here at any moment in all those millennia. It’s as if I could remember what the shore was like at the dawn of time because it’s like that every minute, is like that now.

Only when I hear the occasional thrum of the lobster boat starting up again do I know for certain when the present moment is happening. Then it silences. Once more I become attuned to the rhythm of the waves, the white noise of the surf, the pulse of the tide. I can tell nothing about the world except for what I sense, what I see, hear, feel, breathe, exactly where I am, exactly now. I am simply alone—with the rocks, with the fog, with the tide—somewhere in time.

It is the morning of my forty-sixth birthday and the sun just rose over the hills, painting them a watercolor pink.  I am sitting in the dining room of my parents’ house, the renovated upstate New York farmhouse where I grew up.  If there is any place that feels like home to me, it is this house.  But as I watch the sun greet the Sunday morning that brings me one year closer to fifty, I realize I have never stayed anywhere long enough to really feel at home.

Just at the moment the sun cleared the hills, a wild rabbit appeared outside the dining room window. The rabbit stood still, its ears twitching, closer to the house than I have ever seen a wild rabbit.  I watched it for a while, contemplated the life of a rabbit, noticed that this one’s wiry haunches were ready to spring into action at the first sign of danger.  Sure enough, within minutes the rabbit disappeared into the bushes with a flick of its white tail.  The rabbit was here, and then it was gone.  I was just an observer witnessing one brief moment of its life.

I have been eating a small piece of apple pie; I baked it on Friday after my husband and I picked apples at a nearby orchard.  We wandered through the rows of carefully planted trees, picked a few hard, red apples, then some green ones, then some that were both red and green.  The orchard had provided us with a large, white paper bag with its logo printed on both sides, and we filled the bag with half a bushel, then sat contentedly for a while on a hillside in front of a big red barn near some other weekend harvesters, enjoying the warmth of an unexpectedly sunny day.

I really shouldn’t be eating pie, before seven in the morning no less.  Lately I have been trying to regain the slim young body I once had.  Frankly, I have been aching to reclaim a lot of things I once had or was or felt, but I doubt I’ll ever see – or be – most of them again.  No matter how much I fight the truth, the Faye of yesterday seems beyond me, out of reach.  I chastise myself often, telling myself that if I were more disciplined about my diet, worked harder and denied myself more, the body I once had and the person I once was would reappear.  So far none of it has worked, and lately I am noticing that I am tired of trying.  Today is my birthday.  I have watched the sun rise and have noticed a rabbit, and I am eating a slice of apple pie before seven in the morning.  So be it.

I am not sure how I feel about turning forty-six, although entertaining the topic implies I have a choice.  For a number of years I have been increasingly uncomfortable on my birthday, because I am scared of getting old.  As soon as I feel the fear rising, or sense my depression about the passage of time, I think about a woman I met in Oregon when I had just turned thirty.  I was visiting the family of the man who would become my first husband.  We were gathered around the dinner table with Aaron’s parents and a group of their friends.  The occasion was the forty-first birthday of one of the guests, and Aaron’s mother dimmed the dining room lights and entered the room carrying a festive white cake.  A single candle stood in the middle, its flame reflected in large picture windows overlooking a stand of pine trees outlined by the moon.  We sang “Happy Birthday” as Aaron’s mother placed the cake in the center of the table.  The woman was tall and slim with a delicate face and short brown hair, and she placed her hands on her heart, smiling warmly as she looked around the table at her singing friends.  When the song ended she said, “Thank you so much.  For me, every birthday is a victory and a blessing.”  Aaron explained to me later that she had survived cancer.

Every year I try to think about my birthday that way.  After all, sixteen years ago my own survival was in doubt; I was diagnosed with a potentially malignant tumor.  I endured months of tests and two surgeries.  What is generally said about life-threatening illness proved true for me; I stopped taking things for granted the way I did before my illness.  I began to notice and appreciate small things more acutely, didn’t grumble quite as much about chores or other things I preferred not to do.  I don’t enjoy running long distances, for example; I am short, my stride is slow and I do not have especially strong lungs.  In high school I was a sprinter on the track team, “built for speed, not endurance,” as I’ve often been told.

Now when I don’t feel like running I remember a promise I made to God when I was sick, when the scars on my abdomen burned and I walked just five or ten minutes a day for exercise.  I promised that if I was ever able to exercise for real again, I would never complain about it.  I would appreciate the fact that I was alive and could move.

Now when I get bored with the road and resent the heavy, gasping feeling in my lungs, I remember that promise.  I make an effort to feel my legs moving and my feet hitting the ground.  I try to taste the air.  If none of that makes me feel alive or grateful, I challenge myself to notice something small along the road, something I would never see if I didn’t look carefully – a caterpillar on the leaf of a roadside weed, or a tree that is growing in an odd way, split in the middle.  I remind myself that if I endure the run just to be done with it, if I rush through anything without experiencing it, I will miss something important.

Why, then, do I feel sad today?  Shouldn’t I be filled with appreciation?  If I sense I am not grateful, I chastise myself and force the feeling, because it is a right feeling.  Still, there is no escaping the truth this birthday represents; I am a year older, a year further away from my youth, a year closer to whatever happens after youth disappears.  My sadness is mingled with fear, and I notice that the fear grows stronger every year.  When I was twenty-eight and living in Israel, I had dinner with a friend of my parents who lived in Jerusalem.  I told her that I was nervous about turning thirty.  She threw her head back and laughed and said, “If you think thirty is old, wait until you turn seventy.”

When I was young I tricked myself.  I believed that what was true for the rest of humanity would not be true for me.  I thought I was ageless and invincible, that growing older was for people I could not relate to or understand.  When I was sixteen my mother was forty-four and my father was forty-eight; I thought of them as older than I would ever be, at a stage in life when everything was settled and decided.  Somehow I convinced myself that time would not touch me the way it touched everyone else.  The future was always in front of me.  Opportunities were abundant and I would be forever youthful, my face wrinkle-free, my body flexible and strong, no cellulite on my hips.  I remember wondering how my body could transform from the age I was at to the next.  If my body is what it is right now, I thought, and it will be the same tomorrow and the same the day after that, how will it ever become something different, alien, old?

Today I am forty-six and very little in my life is settled or decided.  I can’t say that this is a normal state for people my age; I seem to have gotten a bit more distracted along the way than most.  I lost my ability to have children when I was sick, and an early divorce led to a lonely decade in my thirties without a partner or the opportunity to adopt.  The years passed and I never had the responsibilities taken on by friends who started families and were transformed into adults simply because they had children.  I missed that phase of life and now, although I married Jean-Paul in my forties, I admit I feel a little lost.  My original roadmap did not cover the territory I found myself in for much of my adult life, single, unable to have children and moving often – from Boston to Israel to New York to Colorado, then back to New York and Boston.  I changed jobs often.  For a long time I found myself following one road then turning onto another, deciding randomly if the turn would be right or left, then unsure if the choice I made was the right one.  Really, I see nothing ahead of me clearly even now, no brightly lit, picturesque town at the end of this highway.

Some people say fairy tales are deceptive and question whether such stories should be told to little girls like I was, who are not likely to grow up and meet handsome princes.  I am divided on the issue.  I do think fairy tales are deceptive.  As far as I can tell after forty-six years, there are no bluebirds tying bows on ball gowns or chariots arriving to whisk me off into the magical night.  True, there are wicked witches, but no prince’s kiss has ever woken me from a bad sleep.  Usually the alarm clock does.  My sense is that there is happiness to be found, but it is not “ever after” – it comes in starts and stops or at unexpected moments that do not necessarily have anything to do with love.  Let me reverse that.  Happiness always has to do with love – but it is not always about romantic love.  Sometimes love is feeding a cat.  Sometimes it’s singing Abba songs with a friend in a car in Wyoming.  Sometimes love just happens, in an instant, when you see something beautiful.  Romantic love is more about willingness than wedding bells and destiny.  Or maybe it is willingness and destiny, or destiny is what we choose to believe it is because we’re afraid to believe that life is all about luck.

Still, I believe that fairy tales should be told to little girls.  When we are young we have a special capability that is difficult to maintain in later years.  We can imagine the fantastic and believe in endless possibilities.  That capacity should be fed, I think, with extraordinary things.  Magical things.  Why not?  If we are not allowed to believe life is beautiful when we are young, will we find anything beautiful later in life?  Perhaps beauty is self-evident, but maybe it is just another thing we are taught, or choose, to believe in.  Beauty, like ugliness, is a human interpretation of what exists.  If our ability to believe in beautiful things is squashed when we are little girls, what will be left for us to see or discover later in life?

A little while ago my husband wandered downstairs, wondering where I was so early in the morning, and found me typing on my laptop in the dining room.  My parents, who are in their seventies now but still live in this house, are away for the weekend.  Jean-Paul and I came here to briefly escape from our lives, which have been stressful because we are both working, I am in school and my mother-in-law is very ill.  Jean-Paul entered the kitchen wearing nothing but his running shorts.  I think it is fair to say that my husband is handsome; his blue eyes, dirty blond hair and expressive lips almost landed him the lead role in “The Blue Lagoon” opposite Brooke Shields in the ‘70s.  Now, however, there are deep lines around his eyes and outlining his lips.  This morning dark red impressions had formed around his mouth where a sleep apnea mask had been pressing against his skin all night.  His eyes looked bloodshot and tired, and were tinged with yellow because of a benign health condition that is common among people of French Canadian heritage.

Jean-Paul, my high-IQ husband, is a cum laude graduate of Brandeis University.  He studied guitar at the Berklee College of Music when he was in his twenties and now holds a master’s degree in social work.  He also worked for about ten years as a stripper, starting out in a show called “The Male Encounter” at the Palace nightclub on the outskirts of Boston.  Crowds of young women arrived in stretch limousines rented out for bachelorette parties to be entertained by sexy men with muscles.  The women drank, cheered and laughed, and stuffed $1 tips into the dancers’ thongs.  Jean-Paul grew his hair long, added blonde highlights and performed in numerous dance acts, including one titled “Hellvis.”  At the end of every show the young women lined up to pay $5 for an autographed picture.

I knew Jean-Paul from Brandeis, where I had also studied, but hadn’t seen him in seventeen years when I returned to Boston.  We met again at a party hosted by a mutual friend.  I had been divorced for eight years and on my own for most of that time.  I knew nothing about Jean-Paul’s unusual career.  I learned about the stripping from a hair stylist at a Boston salon Jean-Paul recommended to me.  I told the stylist who had referred me and he said, “Oh, you mean the Chippendales guy.”

“Chippendales?”  I asked in surprise, and the stylist looked embarrassed, as if he had slipped up.  It turned out Jean-Paul, at forty, had transitioned from “The Male Encounter” into a job as emcee of the Chippendales show Friday nights at the Roxy.  He danced in the opening act and emceed the rest of the show, at one point pointing his microphone out toward the audience and asking seductively, “Is there a horny woman in the house?”  It was not quite the way Prince Charming had been described, but it was interesting.

Watching my husband shuffle around the kitchen and set up the coffee maker, it occurred to me that the women who once stood in line to meet him might be a little surprised to see him now, with his tired eyes and those other-worldly red impressions on his face.  But then I thought about what he’d said when he entered the room and found me typing.  He told me he was disappointed that I got up so early, because he had intended to bring me a cup of coffee in bed on my birthday.

Jean-Paul and I took a long walk yesterday along the back roads that climb up and down the rural, hilly landscape of my hometown.  First we walked from my parents’ house along County Route 5, past old farming homesteads and Colonial houses and into the center of town, an intersection marked by a blinking traffic light.  We stopped for croissants at a coffee shop that now occupies the old post office, then continued walking past acre after acre of old farmland flanked by woods.

Every now and then as we walked, I spied a caterpillar inching its way across the pavement from one side of the road to the other.  There is little traffic on the back roads but occasionally cars do pass, and I can never bear the thought of a caterpillar getting squashed beneath speeding tires.  So each time I saw one I found a stick at the side of the road or pulled up a weed and held it in front of the caterpillar until it climbed on. Then I moved the little creature to safety on the opposite side of the road.  This habit of mine makes for relatively slow progress on country walks.

At one point a car raced up over a hill after I noticed one of the caterpillars.  I had no time to grab a stick, so I scooped the caterpillar into my hands and rushed it to the side of the road before the car zoomed past.  I don’t think I got to the next caterpillar in time, and it bothers me to think about that as I sit here and write.  I thought the caterpillar was far enough in the opposite lane to be missed by an oncoming car, but after the car passed and I picked it up and deposited it on the other side of the road I noticed that a spot of yellow goo remained on my palm.  Jean-Paul suggested the caterpillar might have voided as a defense mechanism, as some animals do when they are frightened.  But I suspect that it had been hit by the car, even though it curled into a ball the way caterpillars always do when I touch them.  This thought bothers me so much sitting here that I feel for a moment paralyzed by my sadness.

I know, logically, that there are caterpillars I can save, and caterpillars I can’t save, and that it is perhaps more than silly to attempt to save any caterpillars at all.  It’s not as if I control the fate of the world’s creatures, or as if saving one or two or three or four makes any difference in a world populated by millions of caterpillars.  But I can’t stop my impulse.  Saving caterpillars makes me feel a little better about something.  Perhaps I am just playing the leading role in my own fairy tale, the one in which the smallest, most insignificant beings are hugely important, and I am a hero who can rescue them all.

A few years ago I went on a whale watch off the coast of Portland, Maine.  Riding in boats always makes me seasick, so I took medication before the trip that day to stave off the sickness.  Unfortunately it was October, the end of the whale-watching season, and the boat wandered around the harbor and the waters further out for six hours before the captain spotted a whale for us to watch.  Most of the passengers were in a good mood, excited for the outing, and they passed the long hours sitting on the deck wrapped in warm, waterproof clothing, enjoying the cold, salty sea air.  Occasionally they ducked inside to buy food at a small concession stand or to sit at wooden booths indoors.  Finally a humpback whale was sighted in the distance, the captain made a gleeful announcement over the PA system, and everyone rushed to the appropriate side of the boat, grabbing for their cameras and binoculars.  My medication had long worn off, however.  The boat was listing from side to side, I was nauseous and my head was pounding.  We headed straight into twelve-foot swells that pushed the bow up and then brought it crashing down so that the frigid seawater sprayed over the passengers and onto the decks.  Still, I stood up on shaky legs, grasped the cold railing on the side of the boat with my hands, and stared eagerly across the water.  When I saw him, when I saw that whale, my head, my stomach, the cold salt spray on my face and the icy railing under my hands didn’t matter.  I couldn’t breathe for a moment; I felt an indescribable joy.  The whale breached once, then twice, and I wrapped my frozen fingers around the small camera hanging from a strap around my neck and held it as steadily as I could, hoping to snap some pictures.  The whale breached again and I caught it on film.  It breached five times, leaping from the sea and falling gracefully onto its side with a massive splash, finally disappearing for the last time beneath the surface.  Then the boat turned around and headed back to shore.

I see the whale and I love the whale.  I see the whale and I turn my pounding head off, I turn my thoughts off, I ignore the salty taste in my mouth and the rocking of the boat and the sound of the excited captain yelling into the microphone.  In that moment there is nothing, there is no past, no future, no birth, and no death. There is just the whale.  The whale is beautiful, and I believe.

Today is my birthday.  I am forty-six years old, but I don’t want to think about it anymore. The sun is up and I smell the coffee brewing and I have spent too much time wishing I was something I am not – wishing I was young.  The sun does not care that I am forty-six, and the hills do not care and the caterpillars do not care and the whale does not care and my husband does not care, and if I am not careful it will all vanish in an instant, like the rabbit, and I will miss the moment we share.

Somewhere deep in my memory of children’s books is an image of the shepherdess tending her flock by the light of the moon.  An old, romantic tradition of doves cooing on the cowshed roof, sheep scratching out a spot to bed down, and the shepherdess wandering among them, knowing the calls and murmurs of each animal, disturbing them little as possible as she looks for a water bladder to alert her to an imminent birth, or a little lamb off in a corner, just born.

I remember this as I find my way to the lambing shed.  The half-timbered house casts a thick shadow across the yard.  The cows in the field are talking in their sleep.  The legs of my waterproof trousers brush in a whispering rhythm, punctuated by the clomping of my wellies.  There’s just enough light to make out the crouched bulk of the meal house, silage pit, and milking shed in the distance.  It scares me a little bit, being out here at midnight, but I know that many lambing students before me have walked this very same path.  They had the advantage of actual courses in pulling lambs and dosing sick ewes, but I have the advantage of desperation.  I’m five thousand miles from home, and if I muck up here there’s nowhere else to go.

As I get closer to the shed, I can hear the sheep shifting in their sleep and faint squeaks.  When I open the door and flip on the lights, the rats scurry across the pens and make a tinny noise as they scramble under the barn wall to freedom.

It’s warm in here.  Most of the sheep are lying down in the straw, dreaming of grass and sunshine, but a few are wandering about.  Please, God, let them be restless rather than lambing.  I’m not entirely certain that I’ll know what to do if a sheep gets into trouble.  No one else is awake to help.  Richard said I could wake him up if I needed, but I’d be too embarrassed.  I’m shepherding by moonlight, doves cooing and all that jazz, and all I want to do is crawl back in the sheets.

Just a few minutes earlier, I was in bed, curled beneath the covers with a pillow clutched to my chest.  When the alarm went off, I groaned in disbelief.  I’d only gone to bed two hours ago.  I reached over to the nightstand for a bottle of beer and took a long gulp, hoping it would help me get into a mindset where getting up from the warmth of my bed in the middle of the night didn’t seem insane.

Sighing, I pulled on my dirty jeans and felt my way downstairs.  Richard’s wife Arwen had left the porch light on for me.  I grabbed my work coat from the peg on the porch, brushing off the bits of straw sticking to it, and shoved a wool cap over my head.  I get cold easily when I’m drowsy.

At least I am getting used to the feeling of not having any sleep, that tightness in the forehead that doesn’t go away, the dark ground that surges beneath my feet like an ocean wave.  Late nights are hell on the indigestion.  Between Arwen’s farm meals and the work itself, my gorge rises every time.  Images shove their way into my gut and stay there: the brown mush of a miscarried fetus, the ewe ambling about with her lamb hanging out halfway out her rear end, the hoof-shaped bruises on my shins.

Something’s happening to me.  I’m losing control over my most basic bodily functions.  Just a few days ago, I peed my pants just two feet from the farmhouse door.  I actually peed my pants.  I’ve never done that before.  I was on my way to use the bathroom; I only had to hold on for thirty seconds more.  I stood there disbelieving as warmth and dampness weighted down the denim.  What was happening to my control over my own body?

I didn’t tell anyone.  God, Richard would laugh if he knew.  I went inside, changed my jeans, and went back out again without a word.

Richard likes winding people up, especially his lambing students.  He particularly enjoys throwing darts at their pride.  Every day, he wanders in a slow circuit around the sheep shed just before we go in to eat.  He stands for long moment in front of each pen.  He’s got dark, busy eyebrows and sharp eyes that don’t miss a thing.  Sometimes he jumps in and walks among the milling ewes, craning his neck to catch a better glimpse.  Then he comes sauntering back up the aisle and asks me if any sheep are lambing.

I tell him, with a bit of trepidation, that I’d seen none as of fifteen minutes ago.  It’s just the bait he wants.

“Oh, you haven’t seen that one in the corner there?  I thought for sure you’d catch that one.  Where all the commotion is?”  He looks at me sidelong.  “Keep an eye on the ewe in the bottom pen.  She’s going to lamb.”

“Oh!”  I slap myself on the forehead.  “I did it again!”

The twinkle comes back into his eye.  “I’ve had vet students here who couldn’t see a blooming thing the first few days.  Walk right by a lamb.  But by the end of it they catch on.  If they don’t….”   He chuckles wryly.  “They get the piss taken out of them every time!”

So maybe I’m not a veterinary student or even an agricultural one, but I grew up around sheep.  I was a good little sheep tamer.  I spent hours sitting on the fence babbling away to the sheep until they were no longer scared me.  The orphaned lambs even came to the sound of my voice.  But all I could say about lamb-pulling was that I knew how to sit on a sheep while someone else did the dirty business.  At six years old, that’s all I was capable then.

I told Richard the truth from the get-go.  “I’ve never pulled a lamb before.”

He shrugged away my confession.  “That’s alright.  I can hire you, without much experience, and you can get on with it while I’m off doing what I want to do.  These ewes didn’t cost me much, so if I lose one – and I don’t want to lose one – but if I do I can live.”  He picked up his mug and took a thoughtful sip.  “If I get less lambs, well, there you go.  But you can bet I’m not up until three o’clock in the morning worrying about each little lamb that might be lost.”  He glanced back at me, and his mouth twitched.

Of course.  That’s why he hired me: to stay up until three o’clock every morning worrying about his lambs.

They were wild ewes, Richard’s, bought from the cheapest flocks at the livestock market.  Everyone knew that Richard would buy on price alone.  They laughed at him, but Richard figured that he got the last laugh.  “I just pump each ewe up with 10 ccs of penicillin,” he told me, “and turn them out to pasture.  I figure that gets rid of any abortion sickness or anything they might have had.  You’d be amazed at how sprightly those ewes turn out!  Fit as a whistle!”

Fit, maybe, but to my eyes they were scruffy and manure-sodden beasts with a wily look in their eyes.  He’d warned me about them, sneaky little bastards.  They’d hide the signs they were lambing by finding a corner where no one would see them.  They’d lie down and groan and push until the instant they saw a person.  Then they’d stop and lick their lips as if they were just chewing their cud.

Their looks deceived.

Before I came here, all I knew was the brand: Welsh lamb.  Welsh lamb has a reputation as the best in Europe, and it all starts here: in the wet fields sliced by hedgerows and supervised by a grim slate-gray sky.  But even at the best of times, no one could accuse Wales of a hospitable climate.  Bringing the pregnant ewes indoors is the quickest way to ensure that the lambs don’t die of exposure as soon as they’re born.

That’s what Richard does.  Richard is a lanky but spry dairy farmer from England with a nose for realpolitik in world affairs and business savvy at home.  He married a Welsh woman he’d met through Young Farmers and settled on a farm in mid-Wales without bothering to learn the language himself, and proceeded to raise a family alongside dairy cattle and sheep.

But to get through lambing season with twice-daily milkings and three children under the age of five, he needs help.  That’s where the lambing student comes in.  Veterinary or agricultural students use their school holidays to get in a little work experience, and Richard gets their labor in exchange for teaching them a wham, bam, thank you ma’am style of lambing that couldn’t be more different from what their professors taught them.

Being a sheep’s midwife isn’t glamorous, trust me.  Medical glory is only part of it; the rest is grunt work.  Feeding, watering, tagging, disinfecting, you name it, I did it.  I was good at being a grunt.  I wasn’t so good at being a savior.

I’ll never forget that first one.  I was watching Richard pull a lamb.  He shoved his hand in, fiddled, and next I knew the lamb slithered out in a steaming heap.  He made his way to his feet with a groan and wiped the blood and shit off his wrists on the ewe’s wool.  Then he pointed across the pen.  “You take a go on that one.”

God, it was frightening.  I squinted and stuck out my hands to grasp the two hooves peeping out of the ewe’s back end.  I pretended that I couldn’t feel the slime sliding up my arms and dripping onto the straw.  I could smell the shit lacquering the sheep’s back, rubbing into my jeans like furniture polish, and feel her heave her belly against my knee with each breath.  Then I tugged, both hands gripped tightly onto the lamb’s ankles, worried that if I let go the lamb would slide back in and disappear forever into a watery womb.

It worked.  The lamb slid out with a ploop and a sound like wet leather slapping, in a cascade of dark blood and blue streamers of tissue.  Tiny black dots of feces and yellow puddles spread into the straw.  The lamb flopped a bit, choking.  It was sodden, each ridge of its coat soaked with a thick yellow fluid.  It didn’t open its eyes, as if to deny for as long as possible that it had left its mother’s body.  I understood how it felt.

“You want to know if she’s having another?  Here.  Feel this.”  Richard showed me where to place my hand on the underside of the udder.  “Tap it.  You should feel something hard.  It’ll slide back and forth if you push.  That’s a lamb.”

I put my hand on the ewe’s udder.  The skin was warm and textured and full as a human breast.  My touch faltered.  Was it right, groping a ewe’s privates for educational purposes?  But then I felt what Richard had described, something that wasn’t breast or udder but body.  A miracle right here, just under my hand, where the twin lamb sat curled in the womb, awaiting its call to ascend.

At twelve thirty Richard comes to the shed to get me for dinner.

“I was surprised you didn’t set up your radio out here,” he comments as we clomp to the house.

“What radio?”

“The one in your bedroom.”

I force a laugh, suspecting he’s trying to lead me into something.  “Nope, nope.  You can’t hear the sheep that way.  Why, have you had vet students do that?”

Richard just nods, chuckling to himself at the thought of his new lambing student boogieing among the pens.

We wash up before going in.  There’s only space for one person at the sink, so the boss goes first.  While Richard strips off his boiler suit and scrubs his hands, I shake off my wellies and wait.  He goes into the kitchen, and I take my place at the sink.  I soap up thoroughly, remembering Arwen’s admonition to use the nail brush.  I splash water around my mouth as well, worried that the sheep splatters on my face will make anything I eat taste of wool.

Dewi comes through the kitchen door and toddles down the stairs.  “What are you doing?” he calls, his voice high.  “What are you doing, Amy?”

“I’m washing my face,” I say.  “Washing up before lunch.  Er, dinner.”

His mouth opens wide.  He looks at me with round eyes.  “You said lunch!”

“Dinner, I mean.”  I grin.

I turn off the water faucet and dump the tub of lukewarm water down the sink.  I turn around to see Dewi standing in the door.

“You said lunch!” he exclaims with glee.  He runs back into the house to tell his mommy.  “She said lunch!”

I follow him into the kitchen.

It’s hell when kids make fun of me.  I don’t know why Richard seems to think I need to be taken down a peg when this language is doing it for me.  I don’t know what a spanner is, because I’m used to calling it a wrench, and my tongue keeps twisting to call the concrete area in front of the house a yard, the gravel roads tracks, and all old stone barns sheds.  Dewi even tried to teach me the numbers up to ten in Welsh and listened with wide-eyed delight as I repeated them back to him.  Of course I mangled them.  It’s Welsh, not Esperanto.

Richard takes his daughter on his lap.  Arwen is bringing jars from the refrigerator.  We’re having chips and mushy peas, but there are jars of pickled onions and Branston pickle as condiments.  I can’t bring myself to eat either; they’re just too foreign.

Richard picks up the newspaper and let his daughter play with it.  “She likes to eat it,” he tells me.

Dewi starts to cry.

“Stop moithering,” Richard commands, not looking up.

Dewi just cries harder, rubbing his eyes until they’re red.  “I want to sit by you,” he whimpers.  His mother has put him across the table to make room for their hired man Peter, who’s working late today to construct and hang the doors for the lambing pens.

Peter takes up with a hired man’s graciousness.  “Here, Dewi.  Don’t worry, lad.  I’ll take your seat.  See, watch this.”  Dewi watches with big eyes as Peter swoops him up and places him in Peter’s chair.  Peter slides himself into Dewi’s seat and sets his elbows down around the blue Thomas the Tank Engine plate.  “Is this mine, too?  Mmmm, I like this dinner.”

Stars begin to shine through Dewi’s tears as he watches Peter pretend to start in on the chips with a plastic knife and fork.  “Mine,” Dewi whispers with a smile.  He’ll snivel again a few minutes later for some unfathomable reason, but at least for now he is happy.

Arwen sets a pot of tea wrapped in a cozy and a jug of milk from the morning’s milking on the table, and settles herself in the remaining seat.  She has curly black hair and a curvy figure that couldn’t contrast more with her husband’s gaunt height.  She’s as pure Welsh as you can get.  I find it endlessly amusing that she speaks Welsh to the children and English to her husband.

The kids follow her lead.  They understand that they can’t speak Welsh to their dad.  Sometimes they’ll tease him, “There’s a pickle in your trwyn!”  They try to push their fingers up their dad’s nose, shrieking with laughter.  “Do you know what trwyn means?”  Richard just smiles and doesn’t say a word.  He brushes their hands away and lets them laugh.

“So….”

Richard’s voice breaks me out of my thoughts.  I brace myself for what he’s going to ask me next, like why I talk out loud to myself in the shed or what I’m scribbling down in that notepad of mine.

“What do you think of this war we’re having?”

I’m not sure if there could be a worse time for me to be traveling.  Kosovo is playing havoc on America’s relationship with the rest of the world, thanks to misguided NATO bombs.  Monica Lewinsky is still in the news.  When Richard learns that I’m from the “wild West,” he begins cracking jokes about John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and Columbine.  I don’t understand how I can be blamed for my country’s embarrassments, but, then again, I’ve never worked outside the U.S. before.

I’ve got lots to learn.

I write down everything Richard tells me.  I can’t afford to forget and give him more ammunition.  I keep a notepad and pen in my pocket, along with a Swiss Army knife and toilet paper.

I don’t go anywhere without toilet paper now.  I can blow my nose on it, wipe blood flecks off my face with it, or run behind the lambing shed and pee any time.  There’s a bank of bushes perfect for hiding behind, and it’s certainly better than making the long trek back to the house.  Except, when I put my brilliant bathroom plan into action, I found it had a flaw.  I squatted down in the bushes and was just about to relieve myself when I felt a sharp sting.  I jumped up, but I couldn’t see the bee anywhere.  It was only later that I found out about stinging nettle.

I think I’m starting to develop an eagle eye to rival Richard’s.  I’ve got all the signs of a ewe about to lamb written down.  She’ll be off by herself in a corner, preoccupied, scratching at the straw with her hoof, grunting or baaing as if she wants something.  Then she’ll lie on her side with an oomph, stretch out her legs as far as she can, strain her neck upwards, and push mightily.  She might think she’s done it after a while.  She’ll get up and sniff all around for her lamb, but she won’t find anything.  That’s when I need to keep an eye on her, to make sure she gets there in the end.

You’d think that if any animal could spit out babies, it would be sheep.  But there are dangers in birth.  Sometimes there is skin, like a fine membrane, surrounding the lamb like a plastic sheet.  If the skin doesn’t rip open during birth, the lamb will suffocate.  Other times, the lamb will refuse to wake up and lie there like a dead thing until you dip its ear in cold water or stick a piece of straw up its nose.  It doesn’t like that, so it squirms and starts life with a sneeze and a kick.

So when a lamb is born, I have to be on it.  No excuses.  As the lamb coughs, lying stretched out, splayed-legged, sides shivering and shaking its floppy ears, I am there.  Sticking my finger in its mouth to clear out the mucus, turning the ewe around so she can start licking off the afterbirth, and glaring about for lamb-stealers, ewes whose maternal instinct has kicked in early and want a lamb, any lamb, even if it’s not their own.

If everything looks okay, I leave.  Give the ewe ten minutes with her lamb to clean it up and bond.  Then back to the pen.  Prop open the gate.  Grab the lamb by its two front hooves, squeezing out wetness as if I’m wringing a rag.  It’s time to get this pair into private accommodation.

I carry the lamb out through the gate, dragging its back legs gently on the ground.  To get the momma sheep to follow, I have to catch her attention by making lamb sounds.  “Maa, maa.”  The lamb’s head dangles to the side as it struggles uselessly.  “Maa, maa.”  With any luck, the ewe will think her lamb is being carried away by a predator, and she’ll follow me with fury.

The first time Richard demonstrated this, I laughed.  You don’t often get to see a grown man making baaing sounds.  I’d thought he was trying to mimic what the lamb would really sound like, that high-pitched bawling that sounds so terrified even when the whole turmoil is for its own good.  But I was wrong.  The only point of making sound is to get the ewe’s attention.

You see, a momma sheep can’t recognize the sound of her own lamb’s voice.  She only knows its smell.  A lamb, on the other hand, can hear a sheep call and know immediately whether she is its mother.  But, for the ewe, sniffing is the first and last answer.

So when the ewe hears a ruckus and sees her lamb being carried away from her, she’ll stagger to her feet and rush over and headbutt you from behind with all the force of maternal instinct.  That’s the sign of a good mother.

But there are always one or two stupid or shortsighted ones who don’t realize that it’s their baby being carried away.  They go back to where they gave birth, nickering anxiously and casting about for their newborn.  You have to set the lamb down and wait patiently until the sheep sees it and gets the point.  Once the lamb struggles or lets out a bleat or two, she notices, all right.

From there the ending is quick.  Set the lamb down in a private pen and close the gate after its huffy mother.  Spray the lamb’s navel with iodine.  Give her water.  She’ll want lots after her lamb is born, because she’s lost so much fluid.  Leave them.

Next case.

Dewi follows me around after school with a first-grader’s keenness for getting things right.  “You give them nuts at supper, and nuts for breakfast.  Do they get silage for dinner?  Or just breakfast?  And you give the lambs milk at breakfast, and milk at supper, and milk at tea.  And the sheep will have water for tea.  Will they have water again for supper?”

He reminds me of myself at that age.  I was only interested in either feeding sheep or playing with them.  I didn’t have to help with anything else.  My job was to talk to them, imagining replies in the stamp of a hoof or flick of an ear.  After all, in books sheep can talk.  Maybe you just have to make the first move and gain their trust before they start talking back.

But I am dealing with Welsh sheep now, and I don’t think my English words will do the trick.

I check with Dewi to see if I am pronouncing my new phrase right.

“Oen bach,” I say.  “Little lamb.  Is that right?  Oen bach?”

He is kicking his feet from his seat high up on the haystack.  He looks down at me.

“Is that right, Dewi?  How do you say, ‘little lamb’?”

He looks towards the lambs, then looks back at me.  “Say it again.”

I oblige.  “Oen bach.”  I swap the bucket of silage to my other hand and wait.

At first, there’s no reaction.  Then he sits upright and starts to giggle.  “Say it again.  Say it again, Amy.”

“Oooen baach.”  I draw out the syllables.

He just laughs.  He’s delighted by it.  What am I doing wrong?

Ah, it’s no use.  I dump a handful of silage in the next pen and move on.  The whole thing is ridiculous, anyway.  I’m just supposed to feed the dumb sheep, not call them by name.

Two weeks and counting.  I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and flinch.  It’s a lie that farmers are fit.  Farm work may be physical, but it doesn’t count as exercise, not when farm meals accompany it.  Arwen serves us chocolates and biscuits at every meal but breakfast.  For teatime there’s plenty of bread and butter and full-fat milk straight from the cow.  I am becoming a right Rubenesque shepherd girl. Luckily, I wear so many layers that the only time I notice is when I take a bath.

I have to take a bath each morning, as the centuries-old farmhouse doesn’t have a shower.  Easing myself into the steaming water is always a shock.  The tub screeches as my skin makes contact with the ceramic.  Water closes over my legs.  Ahh, this is what it feels like to be warm and safe.

I paddle in the water with my fingers.  My hands are unrecognizable, raw, knobby, and streaked with wounds gone sour.  Perhaps they’re pretty in an odd sort of way: rainbow-colored with blue marking paint and white lime and the dark creases of dirt that never come out, not even with scrubbing.  It’s my fingernails that bother me most, though.  I sniff them.  They smell like day-old menstrual blood, and the blood isn’t mine.

I miss feeling clean and pretty.  I really do.  I haven’t worn makeup in weeks.  I’ve still got a bottle of scented shampoo I brought over in my suitcase, so at least one part of me smells like roses.

I avert my eyes from the sight of my soft skin and splash water onto my face and neck to rinse off the previous day’s uncleanliness.  But, really, there is no need.  In a few minutes, I’ll put on my dirty clothes again, and all that clean skin will be covered up as if it never was.

Richard offered me a blue boiler suit for work, but there is no way I’m looking like a Smurf.  Instead I throw a flannel workshirt over my t-shirt and ignore the smears and stains.  I usually wear my t-shirt for several days in a row anyway.  When I put it on in the morning, it is as if I’ve never stopped work.  Waterproof trousers go over my jeans to keep them clean.  The trousers take the brunt of the mess, with layer upon layer of manure, iodine, blue spray paint, and blood.  Lastly, I put on two pairs of cotton socks.  I need them both to fill up my wellington boots.  The socks are a bit brown along the toes where the pitchfork put a hole in my boots one night.  There are some memories I’d rather forget.

“Do you know how to keep a sheep still?” Richard asks me.  We’re standing around a sheep in the center of the big pen.  In the strain of pushing, the ewe has expelled her insides in a big reddish lump, and we’re going to push the prolapse back in.

I hold a red piece of plastic, trailing bows of twine.  “Uh-huh.”  Of course I know.  I get ready to grasp the sheep as I’ve seen my father do it, pinning the head to the side so that the neck will curl round and the sheep will sink into the embrace of the person holding it.

Richard just stands there.  He has that dopey smile on his face, and his limbs are hanging abnormally loose.  He takes the ewe from me.  With barely any motion, he has his thumb in the ewe’s mouth like a bit, pressing back against the jaw and circling around to reach his forefinger.

He says nothing, just smiles at me with those hawk eyes.

The ewe struggles.  This is her first time having a lamb, and she doesn’t understand what’s happening to her body or why she’s in a shed with these strange humans who dispense feed and fear with the same visit.

And now she’s got two of those two-legged beasts against her.  She’s all on her own; her friends are crowded into the back corner of the pen as far away from us as possible.  Her eyes roll in her black face.  She jolts her head back and stamps, pushing herself backwards against Richard’s hold.

She’s a fierce fighter, with four square legs of power and a wooly back to match.  She twists her head, squints her eyes, and grinds her teeth.  But she can’t bite Richard.  He’s got her behind the row of teeth.  She can’t move backwards; she can’t move sideways.

The shed is silent except for the ewe’s struggle.

“It’s very painful,” Richard says, “because it presses against sensitive skin.  If they struggle, you just hold them tighter, and they’ll learn.”

I nod.

The ewe slows her squirming and stands there heavily, eyes wary, breathing noisily through her nose.

Richard has won.

I glance up at Richard, complicit in this as in all things.

“How did your dad teach you?”

“One sec.”  I want to get this over for her as fast as possible.

I bend down and collect the flesh poking out of the ewe’s rear end in my cupped hand.  I slowly push it back in and hold it with one hand while I ease the plastic spoon inside with the other.  I tie the spoon on, wrapping the twine around the ewe’s belly.

I let go.

“He taught me to hold the neck.”

“You’ll have to show him this one,” Richard says.  He has a bright gleam in his eye.  “It’s better.”

As the lambs grow stronger, it’s time to release them into the fields with their mothers.  I have to mark them with numbers matching their mothers’ eartag, in case they get mixed up on the journey.  I pull the spray paint out of my vest pocket in a shower of twine and straw and lean over the fence to scoop up a lamb with one hand.  I balance the lamb precariously on my knee as I brand it with a blue number, then shove the spray paint back in my pocket and pull the elastrator out.  As I slip a rubber band onto the lamb’s tail, I get soft little black poops under my fingernails.  I take no notice.

This isn’t working for me.  Four weeks with no days off, no time to be by myself, and no space to get away.  I’ve begun shaking the damn little lambs that won’t lie still.  No more caresses, just in and out.  I no longer think twice when I fling a lamb into a pen and knock out its breath with a wheeze.  The lamb will get up again, and I have another one to get.  Efficiency is everything.

My notepad stays in my pocket, pages stained and rumpled.  I can’t think of anything reasonable to write anymore.  I scrawled my last note days ago, just a line saying that I wished the sheep wouldn’t shit in their own water buckets, but then again, what could I do?

Perhaps, by not writing, I’ll forget things, like the memory of the water breaking on a ewe, gushing piss-dark over Richard’s wellies as he reaches inside to pull out three dead lambs, dried and deceased so long that their mother has lost the lubricant to push them out.  They’ve been holed up inside her for days, bloated with gases.  If they’d been left there long enough, Richard told me, if the shepherd was a poor shepherd and didn’t notice that the ewe had lost its water bladder, then only a Caesarean could get the lambs out, and the ewe still might die from the poison fermenting in her system.

I throw the dead lambs and the remains of afterbirth into plastic feed sacks.  Every day, there are more.  Today it’s one stillborn lamb, one suffocated lamb crushed by the weight of its mother, who sat on it as she slept, and five straw-specked placentas.

I’ve left one dead lamb left by the pens in case Richard wants to skin it.  I don’t know how to do it myself, and I’m not going to ask for a lesson.  You have to slice through the skin so the pelt peels off into a jacket that another lamb can wear.  You put the jacket on an orphan lamb, and the bereaved mother smells it and believes that this lamb is hers, that her lamb never died in the first place.  If all goes well, she fosters the orphan until its smell becomes familiar and displaces the smell of the dead.

The stink is getting to me.  The line of body bags is four long now.  The dogs like to get into the bags and pull out the bodies of baby lambs or bits of afterbirth.  They swallow the afterbirth whole or chew on the lambs’ faces and leave a pale red mess behind.  Then I have to pick up the carcasses and put them back in the bags, folding the tops over carefully and smashing them down with something heavy so that the dogs can’t get inside.

I’ve stopped petting them because of that.  Moss and Sam and Bob.  Now I wish I hadn’t learned their names, so that I could despise the dogs more easily.

You can’t get too attached.  That’s the first lesson of farming.  You can’t have a personal relationship with an animal.  I learned that the hard way as a kid.  Don’t love the little boy lambs too much, because by autumn they’ll be loaded into trucks and sent off to become lamb chops.  All the crying in the world won’t bring them back.  Trust me: I tried.

After dinner, Richard tells me to pull the watery-eyed lamb off his mother.  The lamb had been born that morning, and his twin brother must have taken all the milk, because that afternoon I found him hollow and huddled in the corner of the pen.  Richard figured that the ewe was bunting him away because she was too stupid to realize he was hers.

I take the lamb out of the pen and put him on his own under a heating lamp for the night.  When his temperature returns to normal, I figure I’ll take him back to his mother.

That’s not what happens.  By the next morning, the lamb still hasn’t moved.  He doesn’t even twitch when I touch him.  I feed him the only way I can, by crouching down and cradling his head in my hand, then slipping a rubber tube into the corner of his mouth and down through his throat into his stomach.  With a plastic syringe of milk, I pump him until his sides swell.

When Dewi finds out about the orphan lamb, he follows me out.  “Are you going to feed the lamb, Amy?  I want to feed him.  Let me feed him.”

“You can come with me,” I say, “but I’m going to tube him.  He can’t drink properly yet.”

“Why?”

“Why?  Well…”  I look at the lamb.  It’s been two days, and he’s still huddled on his side, tongue hanging out.  He hasn’t lifted his head since I put him there.  Richard told me to flip him over every time I thought about it, so that circulation goes to both sides of the body.  He told me that he’s seen lambs that have lain in one position too long, and when they get well enough to walk they’re lopsided.

 “He’s a nice lamb, isn’t he, I?  Not naughty at all.”  Dewi holds the lamb’s head while I prepare the syringe.

“No, Dewi, not naughty.”  I moisten the tube with milk.

“Why does he not have a mother, then?”

I stare at Dewi, but he won’t look at me.

“Oh, Dewi, he wasn’t naughty.  It was just that his mommy didn’t have enough dinner for both him and his brother.  He still has a mommy.  It’s just that he can’t go back to her until he gets well.”

“Oh.”

Dewi plays with the lamb’s ears as I slide the tube down the lamb’s throat.  “We’ll have to name him then, won’t we, Amy?  We’ll name him.”

“All right.  What will you name him?”

“I’m going to call him….”  Dewi glances around for inspiration, mumbling under his breath.  Then he has it.  “Peter.  We’ll call him Peter, won’t we?”

“Peter.  Good.  Hi, Peter.”

I hold Peter in my arms and look at him.  His left eye is teary and milky, and I wonder if he can see out of it.  I stroke him gently, but he doesn’t bleat or move.  He’s far, far away from here.  I set him down, and the tube of milk splashes onto his forehead.  Peter sinks back into the straw, baptized in milk.  I’ll bet he dies in a few days.

The ewe with the dead triplets doesn’t seem to want to pull out of it.  She won’t lift her head, and she stinks.  She’s had that glazed, aimless look ever since she was pumped full of penicillin, after her lambs were pulled out of her.

But Richard has an idea.

She has milk, and Peter needs a mother.

Even Richard is surprised at Peter’s turn-around.  Maybe having a name helped him.  He can stand up on his own now, feet splayed for balance.  His weepy eye is half-shut, making him look a bit dozy.  I’ve moved him to a pen with a few other lambs, and he fits in perfectly, even though he’s been alive for a week and they just a day.

Richard tells me to take him over to nurse on the sick ewe twice a day.  He’ll need to be taught how to suck, but he should pick up it fast.  And who knows?  Maybe having a lamb will give the ewe a reason to live.

Peter takes to nursing with gusto, but the ewe still doesn’t respond.  I give her another intramuscular injection of penicillin in the leg: ten ccs, three times the normal dose.  I am to repeat the injections until the ewe gets better or dies.  Boss’ orders.

Richard reckons that it does no good to give them what it says on the bottle.  “Give her a good jolt,” he says.  “If that won’t cure her, nothing will.  No use fiddling about with a piddly three ccs.  You can bet that’s not what the vet uses.  It won’t kill her.”

It won’t kill her.  I repeat this to myself.  It’s only penicillin; it won’t kill her.

There’s another prolapse in the barn the next afternoon.  Nobody is around.  The lambing shed is quiet with stamping ewes and sunlight slanting into the dust.  In the second pen on the left, a ewe is lying on her side.  She grunts and strains, but no lamb comes.

When she rolls to her feet, I see why.  Her guts are hanging out.  At least, that’s what it looks like to me: a knotted up mess of organs spilling out of her rear end, flattened where she’d been sitting on them.

She’s a speckled-face with a green ear tag, which means that she must be an older ewe.  That’s good: she’ll be calmer than a first-timer.

There’s a clean spoon on the shelf.  I pick it up, tie strands of twine to it, then jump into the pen with one hand on the bars.  I land with a thud.  Sheep scatter.

Warily, I start moving towards where I’d last seen her.  The ewes closest to me jump to their feet with a bleat and dash away, the straw hissing with their steps.  I scan their black and pink behinds.  Ah, there she is.  The speckled face races by.  I leap to catch her.

Holding tightly to the fleece with both hands, I wheel in circles as the ewe continues to run.  At last she slows, tiring, and I find the breath to pull her over to the fence where I can pin her against the bars with my knees.

I lay the spoon on the ewe’s back.  She stands there, breathing heavily.  She can’t back up; my knee is there.  She can’t go forward; my other knee is in her shoulder.

With two gentle fingers, I push the prolapse in.  A few dry clods of manure that had been trapped inside fall from the folds of flesh.  As my fingers sink in further, the fleshy folds collapse in on each other, taking their right shape.

A fountain of warm water hisses out and splashes over my hands.  It smells like urine.  The ewe’s bladder has been blocked since she prolapsed.  This must be a relief to her.

I let the urine wash over my knuckles until it stops and I can work again, then gently push the prolapse in the rest of the way.  I insert the plastic spoon and tie it on with good strong knots.

I let the ewe go.  Without even a glance at me, she moves ahead and is back in the herd, surrounded by their comforting numbers.  I watch her as she walks to the water trough in short struts, hitching up her rear end to accommodate the new feeling.

It’s not that I’m disappointed.  I can’t expect the ewe to look up and bleat appreciatively.  That’s the balance of power between the human and the ewe: whatever I do, I am always the one to be run away from.

Still, if the ewe had just recognized me, looked me in the eye, known it was me saving her life, me who cared, not Richard….

But all human legs look the same from a ewe’s point of view.

I sigh.  I wipe my hands dry on my shirt and hop back over the fence to get some more marking spray.  I don’t know why I always seem to think everything’s about me.  It’s not.  None of this is personal.  The sheep seem to do a better job remembering that than me.

One week later, I move Peter and his new mother outdoors at last, to the observation field below the house.  They’re still alive.  They’ve taken to one another with the fierce attachment of survivors.

Peter’s wooly belly feels full in the crook of my elbow as I carry him outside.  The sun is a white halo in the overcast sky, and it smells like grass and dew.  I set him down inside the gate and step back as the ewe charges in, collects Peter, then flees down the hill to join the others.  The two merge into the flock and are gone.

No pause, no glance back.

But I’m okay with that.  Only children name lambs, after all.

I head back to the shed, towards the warmth and rich barnyard smell.  With only a handful of ewes left to lamb, I’ll be moving on soon.  Richard has promised to send me to a friend of his, an organic farmer.  Apparently the farmer uses homeopathic treatments on his sheep, making him the laughingstock of the county.

I can’t wait.

I seem to be having trouble with orientation.  Yesterday I stood on the mesa at Pueblo Alto and looked in the general direction of the people I love most in the world, recalling them in thought’s backlit profile against the largest land forms visible on the horizon. Huerfano Mesa’s stubborn resistance to the vanishing act erosion performs marks north beside its western flank.  Gazing past it in the featureless air, I tried to imagine the physical distance from this particular spot in New Mexico’s northwest corner to Manhattan, Kansas (my car’s odometer says I drove 916 miles to get here), and beyond that, nudging thought’s needle slightly more to the north, another some 800 miles to Athens, Ohio.  To the west, the La Plata Mountains in winter snow resembled orographic clouds rather than the peaks themselves, or maybe a small pile of tumbled moon-matter, the same pale substance we see when the full moon rises just before sunset.  Looking a little to the north of them, I envisioned the long curve of the continent stretching toward Bellingham, Washington, independent of the actual clutter of roads and cloverleaf exit ramps.

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.