Southwestern Homelands Read online

  “All I wanted,” Eastlake said, “was to get published in a literary magazine. Then a first-rate literary magazine, then a slick-paper national magazine, then a novel, then a well-reviewed novel, then a well-reviewed novel that sold hundreds of thousands of copies, a book everybody was talking about. Made it most of the way but never took that last step.” He laughed.

  Eastlake was telling us the heart was gone from his life, not because he’d never gotten rich and famous but because the ambitions that drove him to stay with it through a lifetime of work were dead. He wasn’t telling us that his ambitions had been foolish, just that they were over, and so was he. I never saw him again after shaking his hand good-bye on the porch of the Copper Queen Hotel in Bisbee.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Homelands

  Going south, Annick and I look forward to entering a country where the place-names sing like music—Zuni and Hopi and Navajo, Apache, pueblo and Chicano names, Penitente names: Acoma, Truchas, Kaibito, Jicarilla, Aramosa, Shonto, Betatakin, Kayenta, Chilchinbito, Shungopavi, Sipaulovi, Oraibi, Laguna, Taos, Santa Fe, Jemez, Cochiti. And El Paso, Albuquerque, Tucson, Phoenix.

  Why does this run of place-names sound so like music? Partways because they’re musical, but maybe more so because I tend to think of the people and cultures who live in conjunction to those places as examples of accomplished ways to live, and because some of those cultures have proven to be enduring.

  Most of us spend a lot of energy telling ourselves a story in which our homeland is defined and located. Homelands are specific, but their qualities have to do with much more than landforms.

  The most secure home, we know from history and our experience, is in the coherent self, but it’s also comforting to feel physically located. Where you know how water should taste, where the migrating birds arrive on time, and landforms personify stories about geologic upthrusts, and you hear other stories in the barbershop, some scandalous. Where you of course know your neighbors, when and how they came, why they stayed, and whether or not their children who went off to law school and/or drugs in the cities will ever return.

  Apache on the White Mountain Apache Reservation in eastern Arizona, according to anthropologist Keith Basso, in Wisdom Sits in Places, name the physical particularities of their territory—river crossings and rocky outcroppings—after incidents that took place nearby, like “Widows Pause for Breath” or “She Carries Her Brother on Her Back.” The Apache live not only in places but in a webwork of names which imply stories about who they are, moral stories about the consequences of foolishness and the rewards of generosity, about acting right, about decency and forgiveness, or, as Basso says, “morality, politeness and tact.”

  In Zuni and the American Imagination, Eliza McFeely says the people at Zuni pueblo balance “cultural independence against the steady pressure of America’s mass-produced homogeneity.” The Zuni exists simultaneously as community and tourist attraction, but a semi-timeless Zuni can still be found, “an archaeological treasure buried beneath new buildings, hidden around the corners of the treacherously winding roads, quietly playing second fiddle to the beckoning marquee of the video store.”

  Homelands are, simply enough, emotional homes. Beyond that they can be defined in many ways. The Southwest is a weave, from Mexican-American neighborhoods on the south side of Tucson to pueblos along the Rio Grande to the designer environs of Santa Fe, from upscale Scottsdale to isolated Navajo hogans, from Sun City after Sun City, from Acoma pueblo to the cotton farms south of Phoenix, from survivalists in the highlands of New Mexico to seekers after divine crystal wisdom in Sedona. The Southwest is itself a homeland, the Hopi pueblos are homelands, and middle-class neighborhoods in Phoenix are homelands. They can be as large as our nation or small as the valley where I grew up, large as the Colorado River watershed, small as a village or rural family. We usually live in more than one at a time; they nest inside one another. I remember a litany from when I was a child: “me, our house, school, Adel, Lake County, Oregon, U.S.A., North America, the world, the universe.” I used to write it in my schoolbooks. In the Southwest, ancient homelands tend to cluster where by accidents of nature there was water to sustain crops like corn and squash, places like Zuni and the pueblos along the Rio Grande. And there are newcomer homelands, Mormon communities, mining towns like Globe or Bisbee, and retirement towns like Green Valley. Each can be a position from which to enjoy and withstand the gorgeous, evasive, and invasive world, or to despair.

  In 1932, at Blackwater Draw, near the New Mexico/Texas border on the Llano Estacato (“staked plain”), the most extensive flatland on earth, a highway crew came up with a precisely worked stone knife in conjunction with a huge animal tooth. Blackwater Draw turned out to be a Pleistocene oasis, where shallow ponds drew mammals and their human hunters.

  Archaeologists flocked in, did their digging, and established that men (the Clovis culture) had hunted mammoths, camels, bison, horses, turtles, and small animals near the ponds along Blackwater Draw from very roughly 11,500 to 10,900 B.P. (before present). The Clovis people were followed by a culture of large-game hunters called the Folsom complex, known to have the best weaponry in the world for that time.

  Through these centuries North America suffered one of the world’s severest episodes of species die-out. Herbivores, from twenty-foot ground sloths to beaver the size of bears, together with horses, camels, mastadons, and musk oxen, vanished and were soon followed into extinction by carnivores who lived off them, lions and cheetahs, saber-toothed cats, the dire wolf and the short-faced bear—twice the size of our grizzly.

  While human hunting beyond doubt contributed to the die-out—a theory called the Overkill Hypothosis—a long period of global warming (the water table hasn’t reached the surface at Blackwater Draw in the past five thousand years) had more to do with it. Human hunters moved on to other ways of life.

  We aren’t much different in our psychic capabilities from early men, and we too are involved in overkill and global warming. Can we learn from their example? Sure. The theorizing goes this way: Everything evolves. Nothing lasts. Don’t destroy that which your people depend on. Take care, and plan for the seventh generation, the long future.

  The Southwest is as populated, given environmental realities, as it reasonably can be (urban areas are vastly overpopulated), and the people who last tend to be tough-minded. In Pueblo: Mountain, Village, Dance, the preeminent architectural scholar, Vincent Scully, Jr., says the ancient people, as their country dried up and they were forced to move from homelands where they had invested enormous efforts over hundreds of years, were held together by their “most important possession: the incomparably rich and intricate structure of their ceremonial lives.” Scully calls native peoples in the Southwest “American empiricists, hopeful, reasonable, and hard. Something true and clear, massively unsentimental, runs through all their works.”

  The native cultures are stoic, ironic, mystic, and practical, dreaming, praying, whimsical empiricists. Their lands are populated by stories about those who came before, beings who they often called ghosts. Even newcomers like Abbey might be counted among the ghosts.

  After the demise of the great mammals, people wandered the deserts and canyons, hunting creatures they could find and gathering seeds and nuts, cactus fruits and various greens. Following a three-thousand-year drought, people returned to the Southwest about 2,500 years ago and settled in watered places so as to pursue small-scale farming. Maize and squash, cultivated crops vital to the civilizations of central Mexico, made their way north 1,500 years ago (many plants in the Southwest were harvested for food but none were domesticated).

  People dug pit houses four to six feet into the earth, and roofed them with beams. A house took some three to four hundred hours of labor to construct. People began living in villages and producing well-made sandals and cradleboards.

  People lived longer, had more children, and more of their children survived; populations increased. Settled life was easier on the aged, and w
omen in villages were able to reproduce more often than those wandering in search of food. By A.D. 500 pottery, hard for wanderers to transport because of its weight and fragility, was in common use. For thousands of years food had been communally owned. Rules for sharing were clearly defined. But now each household had its private stores, its wealth. Class distinctions evolved, and divisions of labor, elites, even work gangs.

  Common rooms and buildings used for religious purposes, eventually kivas, were being constructed. Communities and religious leaders were increasingly focused on directing and placating the forces and spirits they believed to be in control of their world. Farmers have always been vitally interested in predicting weather, frosts and rainfall, the seasons. Complex astrological observations, over decades, centuries, eventually became a cultural obsession. Shamans, in their trances, sent their spirits out into time and space, searching for information, messages.

  But most important, for the eventual development of civilization, there was trade with Mesoamerica, in turquoise and tropical feathers, musical instruments like conch-shell trumpets, copper bells—and food. High cultures in the Southwest were on the frontier, extensions of elaborate civilizations in Mesoamerica. Beans from Mexico provided complex amino acids missing in maize and squash, and contributed to healthier diets. Ideas and goods came north along many routes, predominantly by way of the largest settlement in the prehistoric Southwest, Casas Grande in what is now Chihuahua, Mexico, a pueblo with finally more than two thousand rooms. There, macaws for trade were bred in captivity.

  The obviously related religions practiced in the native Southwest today also seem to have evolved from beliefs come north from Mesoamerica. Which doesn’t mean that native cultures in the Southwest should be thought of as derivative. Their beliefs seem to be, rather, a morally sensible flowering of ancient ideas.

  Regional traditions evolved. While language studies suggest a much wider diversity, prehistoric cultures identified by scholars as distinct are the Hohokam, Mogollon, and Anasazi.

  In the Navajo language, Anasazi is sometimes taken to mean “ancient enemies.” It’s a usage not favored by native peoples, seen as dismissive and/or divisive. “Ancient Pueblo Ancestors” or “Desert Archaic Peoples” are politically correct ways to go. But I’ll keep saying Anasazi, a word that sings of my yearning to know what it was like to have been alive at Chaco Canyon. I apologize but there I am. There was, after all, warfare among tribes. Why pretend otherwise?

  In any event, at the rim of the Grand Canyon and in the deserts of southern Utah, having reached the ecological limit of a corn economy, those cultures went no farther.

  The Hohokam—“those who are gone” to the O’odham, who are likely their descendants—lived in villages and farmed along the Salt, Pima, and Verde Rivers of what’s now Arizona. Their culture is famous for a hand-excavated irrigation system—diversion weirs in the rivers, canals extending ten to fifteen miles from the river, head gates paved with stones. The Lehi canal system, fed by the Salt River near the modern city of Mesa, Arizona, leads to Mesa Grande, a great house atop the largest platform mound in the the Hohokam territory, and a cultural center for as many as sixty thousand people in the Phoenix Basin by the late thirteenth century. This was certainly the greatest density of population anywhere in the prehistoric Southwest. As well as corn, beans, and squash, they grew cotton, agave, and other native plants. Village ball courts, of which there were 225, imply a ritual system for healing the community together, resolving animosities.

  As a boy I herded water down garden ditches between rows of strawberries, corn, and squash. As a young man I farmed three thousand acres of alfalfa and domesticated grasses, and another three thousand acres of barley on irrigated land in the high-desert country of southeastern Oregon. Water rushed into fields, bringing life to life. My purposes ran with the flowing.

  So I love maps which outlined traces of the Hohokam irrigation systems. This I understand. But the Hohokam archaeological sites lie on a dusty flatland, and are a not-much-to-see cultural phenomena. So I thought. I could have imagined ancient lives, birds and water murmuring like acquaintances. Maybe whoever it was there, south of the Salt River a thousand years ago, found themselves, as I had in southeastern Oregon, happy at the thought of getting in on the greening up, irrigating and thus triggering fecundity. I could have loved the notion that Hohokam irrigators and I are versions of the same old confounded creature. But I didn’t, I was focused on other continuities. Phoenix was vibrating along as usual, and I was hot to make a spring-training game in Scottsdale, and then retire to the casual upscale ambiance of Pischke’s Paradise, a tavern where the chic byword is “No Sniveling.”

  The Mogollon lived in the piney mountains and grassland valleys of east-central Arizona and west-central New Mexico, a cooler, wetter, sometimes snowy country. These days it’s given over to mining centers like Silver City, hideaway cattle ranches, hunting camps, and towns like Pinetop, where people from the shimmeringly lowlands gather on summer weekends to cool off.

  The Mogollon hunted, gathered piñon nuts, juniper berries, walnuts, and cactus fruits, and cultivated, without irrigation, maize, squash, and beans. They built pit houses, and eventually moved to above-ground sets of rooms comparable to modern pueblos. Many tribal groups in the Southwest believe life flows between this apparent world and various underworlds, and stage ceremonies in underground shrines called kivas. The Mogollon were in on the beginning of this tradition.

  To me the most interesting of the Mogollon lived along the Rio Mimbres in southwestern New Mexico. Around A.D. 1000-1150, within a generation, they developed a style of decorating ceramic bowls—mostly black images around a curving white interior—which is as imaginatively valuable as any produced by people anywhere. But the bowls were not art objects. As is shown by wear patterns, they were in household use. As bowls.

  The images inside those bowls, however, of both common and mythic figures, sometimes with simultaneous human and animal characteristics, images of sacrifice and beheading, and of figures which resemble the kachinas of contemporary pueblo religion, seem to have been of ritual significance. Most of the existing bowls were recovered from graves (often by pot hunters, to sell on an upscale international market, a swinish, devious practice which continues). The Mogollon Mimbres wrapped the dead in cloth, positioned the body in a pit alongside a wall, then covered the head with an inverted bowl with a small hole punched in the bottom (the bowl was said to have been “killed” or sacrificed). What was allowed to escape, the soul, excessive grief, or perhaps seriousness?

  I say seriousness because those bowls, commonplace and sacred in Mimbres houses, reek both of dignity and whimsy (that sacred combination). As a friend said, “They remind us of what life is.” She meant, I think, the joke, the tragedy, salt and sweetness, to be enjoyed, and forever lost. The often profoundly ironic, cool-hearted, dualistic, and geometric images were likely the work of women (stunning art produced by a few generations in economically marginal villages, the artists all known to one another) who traditionally shaped and fired pottery. The tails of identifiable animals intertwine and lead off into a circle of sine waves. What are we supposed to see here, animals or the cosmos? Or that things large and small are irrevocably interwoven and at play with one another?

  The images likely refer to concepts of sacred space and cosmic geography still commonly accepted in pueblo cultures. Homelands and community are understood to be at a “central place,” which was sought for and found by their ancestors, a space both metaphoric and physical, framed by mountains, springs, caves, and shrines. The Mimbres bowls are circumscribed by a framing line around the rim, and may have been thought of as both a map of and prayer for an orderly, bounded world, safe and fertile, however complex.

  Cryptic and elegantly drawn, often beyond our powers of interpretation, illusional, the images refer to the everyday and myth in a constant dancing—with counter rhythms and multiple symmetries, evolving, never to make as much sense as we’d like and yet
to be revered. Domesticated space inside a household bowl. Mimbres women, in their obscure valley, would have been ideal illustrators for work by Borges and Nabokov.

  As with the Hohokam irrigators, I have to think their lives were ultimately like ours. Their responses are enduringly, profoundly instructive and useful, even reassuring. They saw as we do, and their example helps me accept the limitations of what I am and lead me to wonder what we mean by progress? Toward what?

  Populations exploded in the Southwest after a period of above-average rainfall around A.D. 1000, increasing ten-to twenty-fold. The people of the deserts, the Anasazi, spread and filtered to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and to the tops of isolated buttes.

  At Chaco Canyon they began work on nine “great houses.” As Annick and I walked the ruins there under a blazing sky, fingering the intricately stacked stony balustrades of Pueblo Bonito, we were spooky, uneasy. Perhaps because windy, echoing silences and emptiness carried news about the fragility of our lives and families and downtowns and yearnings, colored by the elegance of those remains. All this, and it was not enough?

  The great houses were built during a brief florescence in Chaco between A.D. 1025 and A.D. 1100—an enormous project. It’s conjectured that great houses were headquarters for a theocracy ruling an area “only slightly smaller than Ireland.” This is reinforced by the fact that while only two thousand people seem to have lived full time at Chaco, there was space for some five thousand. Perhaps Chaco Canyon was a ceremonial center and central marketplace, always prepared for an influx of pilgrims and traders.

  Native architecture from Chaco to Zuni and Acoma and Hopi to the Rio Grande pueblos imitates desert landforms, mesas, and rimrocks. Vincent Scully, Jr., in Pueblo: Mountain, Village, Dance says such structures were almost works of nature, like “the homes of bees.” But Chaco seems to have been a devised rather than evolved community, intensively planned and precisely built by a large managed work force. The houses were fitted together from tons of red stone cut in quarries and mortared into tapered load-bearing walls, five stories high on the curving back side of the Pueblo Bonito. Tens of thousands of pine timbers were cut and trimmed with stone axes in mountains sixty miles away and brought to Chaco by people without horses or wheels. Generations labored away for many thousands of hours fashioning the constructions along the wash in Chaco Canyon.