Can You Dig It?
Teresa bought a shirt a few years back that features twelve images of petroglyphs and the caption, “My Life’s In Ruins.” She wore it one day last week when we were touring pueblo excavation sites in Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado, and when a ranger at the Canyons of the Ancients visitor center caught sight of it, he got the biggest smile on his face. That wasn’t surprising because we did a lot of grinning of our own over the course of eight days immersing ourselves in southwest antiquity.
Whether it was walking about what is left of Urquhart Castle beside Loch Ness or the remains of Pueblo Bonito, a great house that once hosted kivas and plazas and over eight hundred rooms in New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon, we have always tried to respect the integrity of the artifacts and structures as well as the memory of those people who lived within. In Scotland, I had a moment when I first stepped into Cawdor Castle that sent a chill through me and gave me the sense that I had somehow lived there before. I didn’t make a such a psychic connection when I entered Lowry Pueblo or hiked past towers at Hovenweep National Monument last week, but I do believe that there is something beyond my perception that endures in those places. And I embrace the idea shared by modern-day Pueblo people who say that their ancestors never actually vanished when they abandoned their settlements some nine-hundred years ago but rather dispersed and live on today in their descendants.
Being home for a few days has given me time to reflect on the significance of our visits to those digs. I thought about seeing artists’ depictions of Mesa Verde as it might have looked in the thirteenth century, and while I tried to visualize what life was like when those houses were whole, the sounds and aromas that wafted throughout the stone rooms, it was hard to get a clear understanding as I stepped among and around and in many cases above the remains that now stand protected and preserved. And as I am wont to do when I can’t quite grasp the literal, I turned to metaphor to help me comprehend.
How do pueblo ruins relate to my life? To the lives of those I love and those I briefly encounter? I’m not suggesting that my life genuinely lies in ruins, or that the elderly man sitting across the way from us at a Santa Fe restaurant was nothing but a shell of his former self. And yet, in terms of who I was so many years ago, that young person can be as hard to access as a once sturdy stone wall that long ago crumbled to a dry and dusty detritus. Look at the first picture below, and you’ll see a body that has wrinkled and grayed, its joints and muscles no longer supple and strong. But dig down to the second photograph, and you’ll see the second grade Eric, days away from making his First Holy Communion, a boy with his whole life ahead of him. Yet all those years later, that young dreamer who exuded physical and emotional energy is a ghost, if you will. Even my early adult life is sometimes as hard to see as a once-teeming household that has been reduced to rubble. I can remember what it was like to be twenty, but as you can see by looking at me now, the physical man is in a state of decline. Oh, I’m in a lot better shape than the settlement at Chaco that you see above, but then again, those walls have close to a thousand years on me.
Still, the essence that was me all those years ago not only remains within this aging form but has dispersed itself as well, much as the Puebloan ancestors’ spirits have endured the centuries. As a husband and a parent, as a teacher and a friend and an artist, I know that my influence has spread over the years, and while you might look at me today and see nothing but wear and tear, if you and I were to spend a little time together, and you dug around a bit, you’d see that my spirit is stronger than ever, and that part of it lives in you, too.
Our trip last week taught me that each of us is a pueblo with a unique story to share. Wouldn’t it be nice to take a little time to explore that history in others over the next few days? All it takes is patience and the willingness to dig.
