A green-tailed towhee is down
in the canyon, hidden amid the green leafy oaks, singing his heart
out as all male towhees do. I am in Colorado’s Mesa Verde
National Park, gazing at the spectacle of Cliff Palace.
Just then, a ranger appears announcing some spare tickets to Cliff
Palace; someone, it seems, has reconsidered the precipitous descent
into and out of the canyon and surrendered their ticket. A moment
later, I am headed down the steep trail to the canyon floor, out of
the hard summer sun, to where a cool draft belches from within the
cavern.
Our guide to Cliff Palace is a young Native
American woman park ranger. She stands among the tourist throng in
her crisp uniform and Smokey Bear hat; there, in the shade of the
overhanging sandstone walls, she lectures about the Ancestral
Puebloans who lived here before they abruptly departed.
The elaborate stone-built pueblos such as Cliff Palace were
constructed probably between 1190 and 1280, and then they were
abandoned by 1300. At Cliff Palace, household items were left in
place as the people departed, moccasins, cooking utensils, jewelry,
tools, all discarded. The ranger relates how the people eked out a
living here, growing maize and beans up on the mesas, hunting mule
deer and other game, domesticating wild turkeys. They collected
water in pots from snowmelt and the infrequent rains running offthe
cliff walls, and all these provisions they stored in recesses in
the cliff, carefully walled off to exclude rodents and insects.
Tree-ring analysis has shown that a sustained drought
afflicted the region in the last quarter of the 1200s, right around
the time when the cliff dwellings were abandoned. When the time
came that there was no runoff to collect and store, the springs
that made the canyons such attractive living sites would also have
gone dry.
The inhabitants of Cliff Palace even trekked to
the distant Mancos River to fetch water. Perhaps, that, too, went
dry. A marginal existence would have become untenable. All that
they had labored to construct, the towers, their subterranean round
ceremonial rooms or kivas, the storerooms, all were abandoned.
Without water, there could be no life.
I wander about the
pueblo, taking pictures. An athletic-looking woman in a tank top
has cornered our guide. She is inquiring about the guide’s
ancestors, whether they came from Asia across the land bridge of
the Bering Strait. No, replies Smokey Bear Hat Woman, this is not
the case. In fact, explains Bear Hat Woman, her ancestors emerged
from the underworld through a hole in the Earth. A symbolic
facsimile of this portal, called a sipapu, can
be seen in the floor of every kiva.
She goes on to
suggest that Tank Top Woman can see this hole for herself if she
would care to have a look down into the kiva. Tank top Woman is not
inclined to see for herself. She has her arms folded, her head
cocked; she smiles blandly. Bear Hat Woman remains steadfast in
this matter.
This year in Colorado, the rains came back.
Prairie sunflower and western spiderwort were in abundance on my
property. I had never seen so much blue-grama grass, lush bunches
with tall, violet seed heads. The earth drank deeply. Even so the
hills were riddled with drought-killed lodgepole pines; the rivers
finally ran lean, as irrigation gobbled up the flows. Even in a
time of rain, there are lawns to water, sugar beets to irrigate,
powerboats to float, cars to wash and wash again.
I hang
back at Cliff Palace as the others leave. Finally, I follow Bear
Hat Woman up the pine ladders that exit the canyon. Halfway up the
ladders, Bear Hat Woman pauses upon the wooden rungs. She points
out to me the pecked hand and toe-hold trail used by the ancestral
Puebloans to climb into and out of the canyon. I try to imagine
women in moccasins or bare feet, with water pots in hand and
children strapped to their backs, padding across the exposed slabs.
“You can still see where the old ones touched the rock,”
she tells me. She lays her hand upon the nearest hold, the tips of
her three middle fingers fit seamlessly into the impressions there.
Then she departs, up the ladder. Below me, amid the canyon’s
oaks, the towhee has resumed his song.
Rob
Cordery-Cotter is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service
of High Country News (hcn.org). He is a
veterinarian and writer in LaPorte,
Colorado.
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