Southwestern Homelands Read online

  ALSO BY WILLIAM KITTREDGE

  Hole in the Sky: A Memoir

  Owning It All: Essays

  We Are Not in This Together

  The Last Best Place: A Montana Anthology

  Who Owns the West?

  The Van Gogh Fields and Other Stories

  Taking Care: Thoughts of Storytelling and Belief

  The Nature of Generosity

  Southwestern Homelands

  WILLIAM KITTREDGE

  Southwestern Homelands

  NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC DIRECTIONS

  NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

  Washington D.C.

  Published by the National Geographic Society

  1145 17th Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036-4688

  Text copyright © 2002 William Kittredge

  Map copyright © 2002 National Geographic Society

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from the National Geographic Society.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kittredge, William.

  Southwestern Homelands / William Kittredge

  p. cm.—(National Geographic directions)

  ISBN: 978-1-4262-0910-9

  1. Southwest, New–Description and travel. 2. Kittredge, William–Journeys–Southwest, New–History. I. Title II. Series.

  F787.K54 2002

  979–dc21

  2002019349

  One of the world’s largest nonprofit scientific and educational organizations, the National Geographic Society was founded in 1888 “for the increase and diffusion of geographic knowledge.” Fulfilling this mission, the Society educates and inspires millions every day through its magazines, books, television programs, videos, maps and atlases, research grants, the National Geographic Bee, teacher workshops, and innovative classroom materials. The Society is supported through membership dues, charitable gifts, and income from the sale of its educational products. This support is vital to National Geographic’s mission to increase global understanding and promote conservation of our planet through exploration, research, and education. For more information, please call 1-800-NGS LINE (647-5463), write to the Society at the above address, or visit the Society’s Web site at www.nationalgeographic.com.

  For the true traveling companion, Annick Smith

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  CHAPTER 1 Going South

  CHAPTER 2 Mutual Enterprise

  CHAPTER 3 Homelands

  CHAPTER 4 The Invasions: Spanish Swords, Christianity, and Americans

  CHAPTER 5 Timeless in Our Time

  CHAPTER 6 The Santa Fe Triangle

  CHAPTER 7 The Spin We’re In

  EPILOGUE Mudhead Dreaming

  Southwestern Homelands

  Preface

  Every continent has its own spirit of place.

  Every people is polarized in some particular locality, which is home, the homeland.

  D. H. LAWRENCE

  Studies in Classic American Literature

  At the trailhead, waiting for the man with the horses, we were stunned by light, the yellow-white needles of the cholla backlit by sunrise, abruptly luminous. So this was the Sonoran Desert.

  Annick and I were going for a day in the Superstition Mountains, a range which rises abruptly in a line of dark basalt cliffs at the eastern edge of the Phoenix metroplex. We were there with the attorney general of Arizona, a man obsessed with rediscovering the Lost Dutchman Mine, a legendary vein of gold-bearing quartz. Examples of that quartz existed. They were fabulous, thick with clots of gold. But all idea of the mine’s location died with the man who found it. Searching in the Superstitions was the attorney general’s hobby. Because of my childhood, I was sympathetic.

  My grandfather on my mother’s side came of age in a mining camp. Having run off from his father’s farm in Wisconsin, by the age of fourteen he was “sharpening steel”—picks and pry-bars—working as a blacksmith in Butte, Montana. He wandered to “Old Mexico,” and up to Goldfield and Rhyolite in Nevada before settling and marrying in Grants Pass, Oregon, where he and a brother opened a blacksmith and horseshoeing shop. But that failed and most of his working life was spent blacksmithing for COPCO, the California-Oregon Power Company. His name was Al Miessner, and he was the most openhanded man I’ve known.

  When I was a boy I’d follow Al up the alley behind the house on Jefferson Street in Klamath Falls where he lived with my grandmother, to the door of a remodeled garage where a mining-camp pal of his, a man crippled deep underground, lived a sort of hermit’s life. They’d sip bottles of home brew and talk about the runaway boys they’d been. “Too young to know a damned thing. Or care.” The old crippled man would struggle to stand, raise his bottle, and curse the mines, and Al would smile. They had known heroic times. What to say? My heart breaks for them, so long dead, and for me, without them.

  So, having grown up on stories like those, and because of the example of my parents, who were bravehearted in their own ways, I yearned to take part in legendary doings. But no such luck in the Superstitions. No gold. We had a semi-gourmet camp lunch, in the shade of great-armed saguaro cactus instead.

  Not long after, I was in a room with mountaineers who were asked to tell us what they thought they were doing as they roped up to risk their being on perpendicular stone walls in the vastnesses of the Alps and the Rockies and the Andes and Asian ranges. They surprised their audience by talking about intimacy, about being at home on the rock faces, and staying happy on the endorphins generated by their bodies. As I understand it, they were talking about drifting and dreaming, nomadic leaning and learning, and how all can be a continual move toward home.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Going South

  Going south is a pervasive notion in the northern Rockies, where I live. It has to do with fleeing winter. Often we go to the American Southwest, arid lands bounded by the watersheds of the Colorado and Rio Grande Rivers.

  Seeking warmth and sunlight in a land where spicy food, music, and frivolity are understood to be ordinary human needs, our mood lifts as we go. Flight involves a spot of reinventing the sweet old psychic self.

  Our species evolved on the run. Part of us yearns constantly toward nomadism; we’re emotionally hardwired to every once in a while hit the road. As my old pal, the poet Richard Hugo, said, “The car that brought you here still runs.”

  It’s an ancient dream: Walk out, and as you go listen while the world in its intricacy sings and hums. The child on its mother’s hip listens as she moves on through the world, and speaks the names. In the Southwest her litany might go “badger, quail in flight from the bosque, cotton fields, ocotillo, coyote skull, mudhead kachina, roadrunner, expressway.”

  Entering my seventh decade, I usually opt for quiet pleasures and diversions. No more nonstop drinking and driving. I like to contemplate the stars and planets surrounding a cup of moon in the night sky over Arizona. Or ease along the banks of Cave Creek, below the reddish cliffs on the eastern edge of the Chiricahua Mountains, in the quick presence of hummingbirds. I want to unreservedly love my beloved, and fool aimlessly around while it’s still possible.

  At the same time, without purposes we wither. So it’s useful to understand that travel is not altogether an indulgence. Going out, seeking psychic and physical adventures, can reawaken love of the shifting presence of the sacred Zen “ten thousand things” we find embodied in the wriggling world. Travel, then, is a technique for staying in touch, a wake-up call, not a diversion but a responsibility.

  Journeying is ideally a move toward reeducation, but it’s also a try at escape from our insistent hom
ebound selves, from boredom or from too much to do, not enough quietude, from the mortal coil of who we’ve lately been.

  Where were you last night?

  Out.

  What were you running from?

  Mechanical civilization, I want to say, and its sources of discontent, the Stuck on the Wheel of Repetition Disorder, or Temporary Blindness, or what might be called the Yearning for Other Points of View and Variety Anxiety.

  Overwhelmed by the intricacy of our relationships, we turn resentful and cranky, constantly aware of what’s called “the bastard unfairness of things.” There come times when we dream of afternoons reading on a veranda overlooking Mediterranean islands or a mountain lake. Or fantasize about nights spent dancing down Bourbon Street with strangers.

  We’re not by nature always entirely at ease with nonstop domesticity. (I’m not advocating infidelity; what I’ve got in mind are other forms of psychic renewal.) Don’t mistake me. The virtues of a rooted life are real. It’s just that, as with agriculture, they can be practiced too intensively and deplete the soils.

  In the Southwest, where it’s natural to study distances fading into distances, landforms are almost impossible to ignore. Multicolored badlands and dark mountain ranges rising from the arid flatlands like islands and intricate water-carved gorges are insistently present in the stories travelers tell of where they’ve been and where they’re going.

  Dinosaurs fed and bred and roamed beside a shallow sea with marshy shores and beaches where sand collected in wind-and-water-driven swirling patterns. The sea dried up and the fossilized bones of the dinosaurs, along with petrified trees and seashells, hardened into limestone ridges. Millions of years passed as the dunes compacted into the swirling reefs of sandstone we see in the walls of the Grand Canyon and Canyon de Chelly, then eroded into the towers of Monument Valley or the mesas where the Hopi live.

  At least 150 million years ago, the North American plate began breaking off from Europe, drifting west, to collide with the Pacific plate. One sank, the other rose—the Pacific plate was driven into the earth’s hot liquid mantle as the North American plate reared over it. The result was mountain building, known as the Laramide orogeny—aka the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada—which formed a barrier and cast a rain shadow. Damp air from the Pacific rose and stalled, rain fell over those mountains, but the lands beyond to the east, our Southwest, left to dry winds, evolved into deserts.

  The most basic physical fact human settlement runs up against in the Southwest is aridity. Drought and rain dances of so many kinds testify to the constant need for conservation. Cities like Phoenix and Tucson and Albuquerque evolved in conjunction with adequate (so far) water.

  The Earth’s crust lifted and stretched, and a five-hundred-mile north-south rift valley was formed in what’s now New Mexico. Streams eventually collected in the Rio Grande. At roughly the same time the vast highlands of the 130,000-square-mile Colorado Plateau rose in northern Arizona and northwestern New Mexico. The Colorado River eroded down through the stratas of sandstone into the ultimate ancient black schist, creating the Grand Canyon. There’s a ridge across north-central Arizona, where the highland deserts of the Colorado Plateau fall off two thousand feet, which is known as the Mogollon Rim (Muggy-OWN). To the south and into Mexico lies Basin and Range Country—vast, shimmering creosote flatlands, salty and arid, and high timbered mountains, the Santa Ritas, the Chiricahuas, the Santa Catalinas.

  So, a lost inland sea, a collision of plates, a rain shadow, a highland plateau, isolated rivers cutting through reefs of sandstone, islands of mountains in lowland deserts, fields of lava, tracts of shifting white sands—the Southwest can be thought of as shape-shifting.

  My first trip to the Southwest, in the spring of 1969, was for me a time of discovery. We’d sold the cattle ranch where I grew up in the Great Basin “cold desert” country of southeastern Oregon—lava rock and sagebrush—and I was launched into another life. I dreamed of William Faulkner and tried to reinvent myself in classes at “the famous Writers’ Workshop” at the University of Iowa, where stress levels were running high by mid-March. It was time to run for sunlight. A friend from Oregon, William Roecker, was teaching at the University of Arizona in Tucson. I took him up on an invitation to visit.

  We went immediately to a biker bar called the Poco Loco, on Speedway in Tucson, and played pinball alongside giant tattooed fellows who were amiable enough until I tripped over a cord and unplugged a machine. In this way, a daylong effort to accumulate hundreds of free games was lost. My very life seemed in jeopardy until it was decided by a very judicious daddy with a mane of tangled gray hair that it wasn’t my fault since I was clearly a fool and not to be held responsible.

  “Forget it. This ninny don’t know where he is.” I was judged to be dumb as a spare tire. So I carried my can of beer outside and sat on the steps and sulked.

  Foolishness aside, a couple of other phenomena, when reflected upon in tranquillity, quite turned my head. The first was a Gila monster. Driving across the deserts to the Kitt Peak National Observatory, Bill Roecker slammed on the brakes and we swayed to an emergency stop. After walking back a couple hundred yards we found a Gila monster, poisonous enough to be lethal, nearly two feet long, a rough old customer, scales on his heavy body blotched and broken into spots of black, yellow, and orange, a dangerous nighttime creature, and near the highway in daylight, tongue flicking, tasting our air. It seemed important to focus on this creature closely. But the monster was utterly alien. I tried to look but could not see. I had difficulty remembering any details a week or so later. Touching was unthinkable, as was sitting down and getting used to that lizard’s otherness.

  This dysfunction, the Failure to Experience, is common among travelers, is often also called Paralyzed by Expectations. Seeing comes easier to those who are calmly unworried, like skaters on hard ice who are only skating, flowing along and not in the least conscious of style or trying to reinvent.

  But, semi-blind, I at least understood that surprises were what I was there for, and unlikely unless actively sought after, courted. I was thirty-six years old and had never been to a place so foreign as this; maybe another version of my life was beginning.

  The next move, almost immediately, was on to another country, Mexico. We tried the after-dark pleasures of Nogales, but the memorable episode came during a fishing trip to Guaymas on the Mexican coast, three big boys doing a Huck Finn imitation, running to territory, hoping to be scandalous but not seriously. We rented a skiff with an outboard motor, trolled the bay, and caught innumerable mackerel. At first it was routine, the baiting and hooking, fishing.

  But, then, the utterly singular. Gray whales rose around us, dozens of gray whales. I have no idea what they were doing—feeding, flirting, whatever—a great sighing and seawater splashing through rainbows, creatures rising on all sides until it was possible to think of them as extraordinary but nevertheless natural, not at all miraculous.

  So this was the sort of thing that could happen, encounters with evolving actual real-life otherness. I’d never seen anything like those whales. The world, the whole all-over-the-place, reeked and was more various than I’d ever before been driven to imagine.

  Bill Roecker eventually gave up writing poetry. After a pretty good book was published, he quit. He’s now a deep-sea fisherman on the coast north of San Diego. I’ve always admired the fact that he was willing to turn away from what he’d thought he was supposed to do—write poems every morning—and devote himself to what he loved, Fishing.

  In the 1970s, on the weekend of St. Patrick’s Day, I trooped along with quickly aging pals on the hillside streets of the tough old empire city in the northern Rockies, the deep-mine town of Butte. What were we seeking? “Wateringholes,” someone said, “like in Africa, where animals congregate.”

  But the fun turned predictable and repetitive. The animals and wateringholes were not so interesting as they had been. Maybe we, ourselves, were boring. It took awhile, but we finally
acknowledged that possibility. What to do about it? Who knew? Maybe we were getting too old for fun. Was it possible to outgrow pleasure? Was that the problem with old grouchy people? The answers here, of course, are no, no, and no. My father told jokes and laughed a week before he died of system failure and agonies at eighty-nine. Maybe it’s just that the venues change.

  In 1976 I started going to conferences focused on western problems. I’d spent a decade carousing and it was time for a change; I wanted desperately to get in on some serious intellectual action. At Sun Valley, prize-winning historians like Alvin Josephy and William Goetzmann sat in the front row studying me with what I took to be suspicion one July morning as I stood up and spent my allotted seven minutes pushing the concept that the American West as commonly understood was a manufactured story that could and should—if the West was ever to emotionally and intellectually own itself—be retold. While I thought I was breaking new ground, it was a line those scholars no doubt found familiar. But they were kind. They included me in lunchtime discussions and recommended books. Another education began.

  In the fall of 1978 a man named Terry McDonell, an editor and a grand one—I was having a run of luck—called and asked if I’d write an essay for a new publication called Rocky Mountain Magazine. I didn’t know how to write an essay, but Terry told me how on the telephone and got me through a little piece called “Redneck Secrets.” Which he published. So then I was an essayist, and I’d found a new form in which I could shoot off my mouth, one that seemed to fit better than the fiction I’d been producing at the rate of about a story a year for the last decade. I was at last getting my act sort of together after suffering a run of self-made defeat, including divorces that were my own damned fault.