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| Milky Way from Glacier Point, Yosemite |
“How
could you be so stupid?”
I was looking out over the mesa and
talking to myself. A hot wind was
blowing bits of sand and dust into my eyes.
I wiped my tears with my sleeves and protected my face by making a visor
with my hands.
My memory was suddenly jolted to a
time almost forty years ago when my father had spoken those same words to
me. I had good reason to remember the
moment. Dad had seldom been so angry.
I
had been granted use of the family car for three hours on a Friday night. When I arrived home, fifty six hours later,
I felt like my eyes were spinning in different directions. I had checked in by phone twice in all that
time, and had said something like, “Everything’s okay dad, the dust motes are
really colorful and pretty soon the sun will know my name. Don’t worry I’ll be home soon.”
The
car was fine. I was stumbling over
imaginary boulders that were actually little pieces of gravel. I hadn’t quite come down yet.
My father is normally mild and
calm. This time he was frightened and
furious. I don't blame him. He was discovering that his oldest son was
taking much stronger drugs than the
benign Mexican Pot he had overlooked on several occasions.
He tried to keep his voice from
shaking. "What on earth have you been
doing for the last two and a half days?"
Rather than be honest, I shrugged and used a sulky whine that is
the male adolescent’s indication of witless lying.
“Uhhh,
I don’t know,” I said, fidgeting and not meeting his eyes. “Guess I just lost
track of time.”
Generally,
when I was in trouble I had no problem dishing up convincing stories. Now I was exhausted. I could not think! I knew my response was pathetic, but I had no idea how to confess
to my dad that psychotropic drugs were involved. I didn’t know how to explain why my friend and I had just
finished burying a bust of Beethoven in his mother’s rose garden. How could my father possibly understand the
motivation for such a deed?
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| Our First RV |
We
had spent a prolonged LSD weekend in my friend's parents’ big empty house. All through the night, whenever we gazed at
the composer’s frowning lips and fiery eyes we felt scolded, accused. The bust of Beethoven looked completely
alive. He scowled down upon us like a
disapproving parent.
“What’s
wrong with you, Ludwig?” I implored.
“You were a revolutionary! We’re
just doing the same thing in our modern way.
You look like you're about to explode!.”
He
replied in German, which was just as well.
He said something using the word “vernichtung” which is a word that Hitler
was fond of using. It is a word meaning
“annihilated", or "destroyed".
Finally, we dug a hole, took the bust off the mantelpiece and put
Beethoven under two feet of fertilizer.
After that, we felt much better.
We had annihilated HIM!
“Don’t tell me you don’t
know,” dad riposted. “You KNOW… you
just can’t tell me without making yourself look like a fool.” He was right about that. It was the mid sixties and my dad knew what
was happening. He knew what I had been
doing and said, simply, “How could you be so stupid?”
The words hurt. I wanted my father’s respect. I didn’t want to admit to being an idiot but
I knew he was right.
I was sixteen then, fifty-two years
old now, and I was as disappointed with myself as my father had been all those
years ago.
Again, I answered weakly.
“I
just didn’t know,” I replied to this voice of memory, “I didn’t think it
through. I thought it would be easy. I
thought we could do this, one- two- three.”
The thing that I thought we could
do, one- two- three, was go camping in Utah in the middle of July. The temperature was well over a hundred and
there wasn’t a spot of shade. We were
isolated and in trouble.
Yes, I was stupid. I had led myself and my wife down a certain
famous creek without a method of propulsion.
(There is, by the way, at least one real place called Shit Creek. It’s in Ireland.)
We were the worst campers in the
world. We were camping at the wrong time, in the wrong place, with the wrong
equipment. We were dog sick. Our heads
were aching, our joints felt like someone had poured hot glue into every
ligament.
The heat was stifling and we were at
twelve thousand feet. We had a dose of
altitude sickness that we were too naive to recognize.
We had arrived late the previous
afternoon. We set up the tent in the middle of the desert near a leafless
tree and a large boulder. We ate while
we watched the sun set over the buttes and the sandy wastes. Then we reveled in the beautiful star-lit
night. We had done it, we had arrived!
By ten the next morning we were
utterly miserable.
We had driven from the west coast,
pushing hard across Nevada, traversing the salt flats of Utah’s Great Basin. We
traveled on a mix of coffee and adrenaline, eating hideous truck stop
food. Our car’s air conditioner
insulated us from the desert reality outside.
We had no clue what awaited us.
Then it hit us like a hammer. Heat exhaustion, altitude, bad food,
caffeine and long hours of driving. It
was a deadly combination.
At that moment we felt
helpless. Outside the tent there was
choking dust, a torrid wind and smoke from Colorado forest fires. Add to these miseries the existence of a
trillion tiny white gnats, enough to get into every crack and orifice of our
gear and our bodies. We had arrived
during some kind of mating phenomenon. The bugs were frenzied with pheromones,
they gathered in great opaque clouds which drifted towards our tent until we
were lost in a storm of little white insects.
We couldn't see our hands in front of our faces.
The next day they would abruptly
disappear.
It was probably a hundred twenty
inside the tent. Occasionally, I would stick my head outside, and find it even
worse. The sun made me so dizzy I
couldn’t stand up. I prayed for a cool
breeze. I didn’t have the strength to
be outside, nor did I have the strength to endure being inside. Fox and I dragged our sleeping mats to the
tent’s door and lay there, half in, half out, turning ourselves every now and
then to alternate head and feet.
“I think I’m going to die”, Fox
said.
She was the color of an old bed
sheet. She was serious.
“Do you want me to do
something? Find an emergency room?”
Fox thinks she’s going to die four
or five times a year. I knew she would
refuse. She is terrified of
doctors. She would rather die than see
a doctor. She thinks that if she lets a
doctor examine her, he’ll discover a terminal illness and tell her she’s going
to die. I know this logic is like a
mobius strip, it leads endlessly nowhere, but that’s Fox.
“Look at you,” she said, “You
couldn’t drive, you can’t even stand up.”
“If I have to,” I offered, “I’ll
drive. I don’t know if there’s an E.R.
within a hundred miles, but…..”
“No no no, don’t go to the
trouble. Maybe I won’t die.”
She got to her knees and lurched out
of the tent in time to empty her stomach.
I
pressed my palms to my forehead, trying to rub out the headache that sat like
an anvil atop my skull.
At the time, I blamed part of our
dilemma on age, as if camping were limited to young people. The end of my youth
had come hard. I seemed to have gone
from young to ancient without stopping off at middle age.
I was fifty two, Fox was forty eight and it was July in the
desert. We were dumb rookies, not
hardened adventurers. I hadn’t been in
a tent since Boy Scout camp. If an
eleven year old had come along, he would have rolled his eyes and sneered at
me.
Why were we killing ourselves with
this poorly planned trip?
Fox had compelling reasons for
wanting to see the area of The Four Corners.
A few months previously, she had learned that she was half Apache. This came completely out of the blue.
Give it a moment to sink in.
She was supposedly the child of a
Swedish father and mother. On a trip
back to the old Iowa homestead she was shown her birth certificate and a few
other documents. They had been kept by
Aunt Inge, the only remaining member of her generation. Fox learned that she was the illegitimate
child of her father and an Apache woman named Star In The Morning.
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| Campground Beauty Show |
Things began to make sense. Fox had black hair whose strands were thick
as cables. She was slow to anger, but
when she saw an injustice she could become a turbine of formidable rage.
Growing up on a farm, she saw a lot
of animals being mistreated. These
situations acted as a trigger to her rage.
She often charged into a situation with fury, chastising a farmer for
whipping a horse or prodding a cow. She
was a little black-haired girl, standing between a farmer and his
livestock. She was considered totally
nuts.
She had a spooky ability to speak
with animals. She was called an “ear”, what is now called a “whisperer” or, in
some circles, a “Pet Psychic.” She
wandered the plains alone, hunting for arrowheads, sage, abandoned birds’
nests. She gathered her findings into
little packages, over which she made “magic”.
Whether or not we know it, the blood
of our ancestors paints the world in its own unique colors.
Fox understood, at last, why she had
spent her life wondering why she was not like the rest of the family.
Fox’s father had fallen in
love. The child of this love was taken
in, the secret was kept. Now only Aunt
Inge remained. She had held the story
forty eight years, waiting for the right time.
Fox was Apache from the Chiricahua Band. She was a descendent of those fierce warriors who were impossible
to subdue. They clung to their
independence with a tenacity that has no parallel. When I consider these last sentences I think, “yep, that’s Fox”.
My own personal engine for making
the trip is my enthusiasm for astronomy.
I am crazy for the night sky, and for everything to do with night
photography. I love lenses, binoculars,
telescopes, all kinds of gear. City
lights plague me. That means getting
away, going to high desert, remote camps, away from the constant soaking of the
sky by wasted electricity.
Our camping journey to the Southwest
was something bigger than a vacation.
Fox and I shared a deep bond: we both suffered some degree of chronic
pain. We understood each other's
limitations. What could we do? Sit around and feel sorry for
ourselves? Grow old like a couple of
leafless trees on a dry hillside where the water no longer flows? On the contrary, we felt a defiant need to
go out and expand ourselves, to push the horizons a little farther back.
It was natural for Fox to be drawn
to the epic lands of the Four Corners.
We wanted to see Arches National Park, Monument Valley, the great
Anasazi ruins. We wanted to see
petroglyphs and walk the land of Fox’s ancestors. After the revelation about her lineage, Fox hungered for all
things Native American. She tracked
down her native cousins and followed strings of genealogy back several
generations. The idea that her people
had walked the continent for ten thousand years was compelling.
How would you feel at almost fifty,
if you discovered you were not as described?
What would it be like to suddenly acquire a new mother, a new genetic
heritage? How would you handle the
abrupt and total validation of a lifetime of uneasy feelings and
suspicions? Fox was having a major
shift of identity.
We obtained one old black and white
photo of Star In The Morning. It’s
about two inches square. I scanned it,
Photoshopped it, did everything I could to restore it. When we saw Fox’s
resemblance to her birth mother, it gave us goose bumps.
Fox’s life changed. She fought her way free of a marriage that
had been a nightmare. She had made a
vow to herself: when her three children got into college, she would file for
divorce. She would no longer be subject
to the blackmail of having her husband “take the kids to visit their cousins”,
as he charmingly put it. That had
always been his ultimate threat, to snatch the kids and vanish back to the Old
Country, where Fox would be unable to see them. Ever.
There were a lot of forces at play
in this re-invention of our lives.
We wanted to keep traveling, but
tents were not suitable. We purchased a
pop-up trailer. It towed behind the Jeep and expanded into a two-bed canopy
with fly-screens for windows.
We didn’t know, at the time, that we
were embarking on a major life-change, that within a few years everything would
be turned upside down.
The photographs I took on that first
trip to Utah were the turning point of my career as a photographer. I won a prize from the United Nations, and
my prize winner traveled the world in the U.N.’s exhibition.
Once we had recovered from that
dreadful day of illness, we found a better campsite and spent the remainder of
the week driving into and through Arches National Park.
I was in a fragile emotional
state. While Fox was having a wonderful
experience, I was struggling with anxiety and depression.
The main road through Arches is eighteen miles long, and every
curve has a new vista, a gaping
impossibility. The place scared me. It was
so beautiful! I felt bad for not being able to let myself go and enjoy it. The place felt like the eerie silence before
a tornado strikes. It was inhumanly
awesome, a land of gods and giants.
Fox’s experience was different. She was possessed by spirits, she was
walking with her ancestors. She had
come Home.
As our week came to an end, we felt
as if something had not been completed.
We had not visited a major petroglyph site. We were looking for
something off the beaten path. We wanted
to avoid the crowded places with fenced-in panels and fact sheets in
glass-encased marquees.
Fox was mingling with Native
Americans. Being a distant relation of
Geronimo didn’t hurt. We met a local
native who gave us a tip about an obscure petroglyph site. It lay down a dirt road leading to a Ute
reservation. At the head of the road, a
defunct town discouraged tourism. It
was a mess, a junkyard, a place that had died in the sixties. There was a wrecked motel, a dozen rotting
houses, a gutted restaurant. A few
people still lived furtively in this ghost town.
The road led straight into a canyon,
whose sides rose ever higher as we drove, bumping and dusty, into the
unknown. We felt anxious and isolated
as we descended mile after mile on this gravel path. Our luggage tumbled around in the back of the Jeep as we yawed
our way across several dry washes. It
was late afternoon, slanted rays of sun lit the eastern wall of the canyon,
putting the western side in deep shade.
After almost an hour of bumpy
driving, we rounded a slight turn and there, on the west side of the canyon,
hanging over a deep dry stream bed, were giant ochre figures. The site was overgrown by tall bushes of
wild sage, unruly stalks of white yarrow and stink-weed. The owners of the land
had put up a little fence composed of two log rails. There was a single
information sheet in a small wooden frame.
The place was deserted, there wasn’t a soul. The silence was as complete as a windless day on Mars.
The petroglyphs were from several
different eras, some going back to Anasazi cultures thousands of years old.
There were surreal helmeted figures with spooky blanks for eyes. There were incomprehensible shapes and
signs. There were later petroglyphs
layered on top of old ones, and finally there were graffiti laid down in the
1880s. There was one graffito, etched
right over one of the ochre priests of the Ancient Ones. This witless white man had written, “F.S.
1885.” Thank you so very much, Mr. F.S., for defacing the holy cliff wall.
On the opposite side of the road lay another cliff wall full of ocher
figures, rock carvings and yet more grafitti.
We wandered dream-like for an hour
among these potent signs and symbols.
Fox was in another world. She
was CONNECTED. She gathered sage and
juniper to make herbal remedies. Her
big black hair seemed to coil with energy.
After a time, we heard the sounds of
a car approaching. We had slipped so
far back in time that the gurgling noise of the engine came as a deep shock.
An early 80s model Buick, buffed down
to its gray primer, slowly drove past us.
A man from the Ute reservation was at the wheel, staring straight
ahead. I had to step aside to let him
pass. He was just a few feet away.
The man did not acknowledge our
presence. He passed as if we were invisible.
Or, I thought, as if he believed HE was invisible. There was no communication, zero, not a nod
or a flicker of an eye.
The isolation of the spot was so
complete that to encounter a human being felt very odd. We were a hundred miles from a town, sixty
from the nearest gas station. The man
was hexing us. By refusing to nod, make
eye contact, turn his head slightly, he altered our reality, he put us into
negation.
He scared us.
Fox and I were seized by an
overwhelming sense of danger. We wanted to escape from the canyon immediately.
We had used up our welcome, that was the only way to express it. Our allotment of time, granted by the
residing spirits of the place, had expired.
Night was falling. We got into the Jeep, quiet and apprehensive, and
drove back out the way we had come. We
rolled onto the interstate highway, and began our trip back home.
