by Craig Childs
For various convincing reasons, this site is thought to have been a lunar observatory for the Anasazi, a place that may have been used to confirm and commemorate one aspect of the lunar cycle. When the moon reaches its northernmost point, an event that begins every 18.6 years in the lunar standstill cycle, it rises directly through a pair of massive, natural towers off the end of this ridge.* The towers stood high in fading light, two dark, knobby monoliths eroded from the far end of the ridge. These towers form the chimney of Chimney Rock, a set of imposing twins aligned so that, seen from this great house, they are almost touching, leaving a narrow vertical strip of sky between.
Walking through this nighttime verge, Regan cradled our son in a deep-blue fleece checkered with moons and stars. I stood just behind her, blocking the cool breeze. Beyond her shoulder the river valley below became a pair of parting hands revealing the desert farther into New Mexico. A fire lit at this site—perhaps the moment the moon slid like a marble into the slot between the twin towers—may have quickly relayed its light to Pueblo Alto, leapfrogging down the Great North Road from signal to signal, finally touching Pueblo Bonito on the floor of Chaco Canyon. Gazing into this southward gap, I wondered how far beyond Chaco the message might have gone, on down the dry bends of the Rio Puerco to the ancient communities of Manuelito Canyon and farther to a great house in the Painted Desert of Arizona, perhaps all the way to the high end of the Mogollon Rim, a couple of hundred miles away, where there is a great kiva perched in a forest, a southern twin of Chimney Rock.
Tonight’s moon was not going to thread the needle. It was to rise almost dead east, a prosaic location out across a far ridge and nowhere near the two towers. But for tonight a commonplace moonrise would be good enough. After this the Forest Service would close the site for the season, blocking the road for the coming of winter.
I once came to the crest of Chimney Rock on a cold Christmas night. I had a candle burning, although it was not necessary, the sky blazing with moonlight. At least the little flame warmed my face. I was taking shelter in a modern fire lookout, a wooden Forest Service building that had been constructed between the great-house ruins and the two rock towers. Windows framed the entire surrounding view, a snowbound landscape radiant under the moon. When the candle burned down, I descended to the frozen ground below the lookout. Out in the open I pulled my sleeping bag from my pack and unrolled a pad across the ground. For the rest of the night, or at least the stretch of it that I lay awake, I watched the moon sail past as satellites cruised the deep winter blue of stars.
The next morning I crawled out of a bed of frost and sat between a pair of kivas as the sun rose. I stayed on the ridge watching the sun go about its rounds, the shadow of Chimney Rock sweeping across forests like the arc of a sundial.
When the sun had nearly completed its circle on this short winter day and began riding low in the southwest, other people showed up. This was not a summer tourist crowd, but a group of twenty or so researchers in various scientific disciplines. Forest Service workers walked ahead of them, chipping ice off the trail and salting the rock steps as if casting rose petals for arriving pilgrims. An elderly ethnohistory professor came behind them, stamping her cane. Two astrophysicists, both somewhat elderly, followed her, tottering along the trail to reach the great house. Behind them came other researchers, archaeologists.
A tall man named Ron Sutcliffe had made all the delicate calculations, determining when and where the moon would rise. He had come for months of moonrises, waiting like a silent monk at three in the morning, noon, sunrise; checking and refining his computations in preparation for tonight’s event—the first night in almost eighteen years that the full moon would appear between the towers.
Sutcliffe seemed a little nervous, distractedly going through the numbers in his head. A tall man with a graying beard, Sutcliffe towered over everyone else, a good stature for a sky watcher. Standing on the deck of the fire lookout, he raised his hand and announced that anyone to the right of his arm would not see the moon. You would want to be to the left at the appropriate moment, which he had figured to be 5:29 P.M. To arrive at this moment and this place, he had designed algorithms based on spherical trigonometry, all of his work done first by hand and then entered into a computer for fine-tuning. He had made a map of the heavens and then one of the ground, putting the two together, matching landscape with celestial motions. In this way he had created a calendar of both earth and sky.
As I watched Sutcliffe pace the deck, I imagined a person of much the same station a thousand years ago, also nervous as everyone lined up—macaw feathers blooming from their hair, turquoise and shells adorning their bodies. Among the crowd there may have been some well-dressed and fierce-looking people who had come all the way from southern Mexico and could not be disappointed. There must have been such a person as Sutcliffe, a moon watcher who made the final call and said that after almost two decades, the moon would rise at this moment and could be seen only if everyone stood in this particular place.
Sutcliffe considered his possible errors as he checked the horizon. Cameras on tripods lined the deck in the six-foot viewing zone he had established. These were eyes positioned to tell the story later: automatic timers, shutter speeds set slow to catch the quality of the coming moonlight. Even someone’s personal camera, a little point-and-shoot, sat on the deck railing facing straight between the towers. Sutcliffe had announced earlier that this was principally a naked-eye experience. He requested that no flashes be used and that the tripods not hinder anyone’s view. The event was to be experienced by living people, as it had been before. The scientists did not object. This was not, in fact, an entirely scientific undertaking. We had all come merely to see what could be seen, to place ourselves at what may once have been a sacred crossing of time and place.
Twenty warmly dressed people huddled behind the field of cameras. They were silent, focusing all their attention on a single point, a dark space in the distance.
“First light,” Sutcliffe said. “There, first light.”
He was pointing at a faint glow pinched between the towers—not the bare moon itself, but almost. Sutcliffe’s eyes were good. He had stared at this horizon for years now, able to spot its slightest aberration.
Voices stirred. One of the astrophysicists commented that this must have been a powerful event to witness long ago. Wistfully, he said it was too bad no one worshipped this particular moonrise anymore. I wondered, Does he not see this cluster of cameras we have set up? Does he not notice that twenty of us have crowded together in a windy December chill atop this ridge just to watch a single moonrise? In my mind this was an unquestionable form of worship, but I did not say anything. It was not my place, and I did not want to miss the first fleck of light.
Sutcliffe said that it was best to remain quiet for the duration. He asked for the time.
Someone said 5:29.
He said nothing else.
Into the breach of the towers an eggshell light broke the sky. The moon rose, exactly when and where Sutcliffe had said it would, piercing the space between the towers.
When a great house was built on this crest in the eleventh century—an outpost of Chaco, predecessor of Salmon and Aztec—people lived from the river bottom clear up to the height of the crest, with the more noteworthy settlements located on top. But why would people be living on this high, dry, and unprotected ridge when water, wood, and farmland lay far below? Eighty-one households, with about 360 residents, had been constructed on this exposed ridge, their ruins still visible. As one survey team wrote, “We hesitate to resort to the tired cliché of explaining the unexplainable as ritual, but in the case of Chimney Rock occupation, this explanation does have its merits.”
First full-moonrise between the Chimney Rock towers during a major lunar standstill, photographed December 26, 2004. CRAIG CHILDS
Limited amounts of prehistoric trash and daily-use artifacts atop the ridge, coupled with massive, permanent architecture, imply a remarkably intense but
brief use of Chimney Rock as a residence. The tree-ring dates acquired here suggest that short periods of occupation and construction occurred during two consecutive lunar standstill cycles, A.D. 1042 and 1060.
The Forest Service fire lookout was built some thousand years later, the wooden structure shaped like a squat pagoda, something that might easily be mistaken for a ceremonial site. Crowds gathered along the lookout deck on this autumn night as if waving goodbye from the railing of a cruise ship. I stayed below at Regan’s side, Jasper content and bundled against the slight and changing wind.
Tonight’s lecture was given by a Forest Service scientist named Glenn Raby, who stood at the base of the fire lookout. Just enough twilight remained for me to make out his figure. Well-spoken and animated, versed in recent research and ethnography, Raby gave an articulate description of lunar cycles and then explained that it was merely a quirk of geology that these towers happen to fix so accurately on the lunar standstill cycle. He called this a sensitive landmark, a sacred place belonging to those descended from the Anasazi—modern, indigenous clans who claim ancestry with this ruin. At Chimney Rock we should behave with attentiveness and respect, Raby said. He reminded the onlookers that scientific research is only a thin veneer; there are more ancient customs. He spoke the names of the September moon: Yellow-Leaf Moon; All-Ripe Moon; Little Sandstone Moon.
As he said this, I looked up at the first stars—one blue, another pink, a third a frail pinpoint of white. I held my hand on Jasper’s chest. The lecture ended, and the three of us found our place over the cliff edge on the eastern side of the ridge. People sat around us on blankets. Quiet conversations floated up and fell back as we watched a mound of light pushing up in the east. Jasper lay against Regan’s shoulder, and I stood beside her, feeling the crook of Jasper’s body.
A fleck of white light nicked the horizon, followed by a quick shuffle of voices, fingers pointing, and then silence. The moon lifted out of the earth bright as a bomb, the perfect full circle. It pushed upward, displacing the horizon around it. Jasper woke for a moment, his eyes open to the moon from behind his mother’s guarding hand.
Once the moon was free in the sky, the talking resumed, laughter over near the fire lookout. Forest Service docents announced it was time to leave; everyone must have a flashlight; please walk very carefully down the trail. Like seat belts unsnapping on a halted airplane, lights sprang on all around us. People began moving around the great house toward the narrow trail below.
A docent came to urge us along. Regan spoke almost in a whisper, leaning gently toward the woman. “He’s finally asleep. We’ll just come down last so it will be quieter—so he doesn’t wake up.”
The docent ducked her head slightly, whispering back, “Oh, yes, well, we can wait for you down lower.”
“Thank you,” Regan said.
The docent left.
As the last people descended, we came up behind the tail end of the crowd. Below us a procession of lights moved into the darkness—people strung out for a quarter mile, each flashlight illuminating a circle of ground along the switchback trail. Their lights stretched into a singular column of lanterns swaying along the lower ridge.
Strung all together, the people looked like worshippers, with their small white globes dangling in the blackness. As I watched them descend, I thought they looked as if they were stepping off into space, their lights trailing over the open vault of the land. I was reminded of the scale of this landscape, the vastness of horizons that once gave rise to the Anasazi. These ancient people often sought the highest points they could find, places that stretched the eye beyond its limitations. They lifted their great houses and studded distant buttes with buildings and fire signals so that they could see and be seen. In doing this, they left an unmistakable trail tofollow—those lights below me, rocking gently into the sky.
PART THREE
HIGH MESA VERDE REGION
MEMORY
SOUTHWEST COLORADO
White beams of headlights opened the highway. A dotted centerline flashed by, counting out a steady rhythm. Mark Varien was the driver, a compulsively passionate and equally gentle archaeologist out of Colorado. Varien is in his early fifties, a man with full white hair. He kept fiddling with the radio as he spoke, although the stations were faint and he seemed not to care. It was a way of keeping on track, of reminding himself that he was still driving. As we traveled through the night, Varien told stories of migrations, his tales seesawing back and forth between New Mexico and Colorado. He rebuilt time, conjuring a thousand pueblos, monuments of data. He had spent decades digging in the ground and poring over research, looking not just at large, impressive sites but also at the more telling hamlets and villages that had once filled the spaces between. The land, he found, was absolutely covered by people, just not all at the same time.
Varien told me he once excavated a thirteenth-century kiva in the Four Corners area through which we were driving. He dug deeper and found that the kiva’s foundation was built inside an older, wider pit-structure. The pit-structure had been built around A.D. 625 and was abandoned long before 1225, when the kiva was constructed inside it. Then Varien came along seven hundred years after that, next in line. The even spacing of these three separate events enchanted Varien, giving a context for him to work with—some idea of how long a site might have waited for someone to return before construction would begin again and what the site might have looked like after being abandoned for hundreds of years.
“They were coming back to the same places,” Varien said, his voice calm but leading forward. “Their landscape was not just a physical one. I think they were moving within a landscape imbued with meaning. Over the centuries, people left these regions full of objects that had meaning, and the natural landscape came to be associated with stories of things that happened there. They became not just buttes and mesas, but people and houses and burials and hilltop shrines. When folks returned to a particular place long after it had been abandoned, they saw something very similar to what we are seeing now. They found a landscape still alive and inhabited, even if no one actually lived there anymore.”
On this night Varien and I were returning from an archaeological site near the San Juan River in New Mexico, driving into Colorado in the early dark of winter. Intervals between oncoming vehicles had been long—a truck with a lazy left headlight ten minutes ago, a beady-eyed Jeep after that.
Varien explained how people left this part of the Colorado Plateau nearly vacant back in the tenth century, before the height of Chaco. They migrated out of southwest Colorado, many going to the Chaco region, where they perfected their masonry techniques by building great houses. They later returned to southwest Colorado during a dry spell, heading up from the south and reestablishing their claims in this higher, wetter region. He described a boomtown atmosphere as people came back—citadels rising on the high points, villages and households appearing across the countryside. Settlements more than doubled in size in a matter of a couple of decades, mushrooming into communities sometimes ringed with hundreds of kivas.
“The rate of growth for this period exceeds what you would expect from birthrates,” Varien said as he drove. “People moved into the area in truly large numbers. It’s one of the clearer cases of migration that I’ve seen.”
All this happened out in the dark to either side of the highway, a region of clay gullies and saltbush that I could not see but knew well. I had my own well-traveled memories along here, having driven this particular highway more times than I could possibly count. In the invisible world beyond the headlights, I envisioned Sleeping Ute Mountain and farther northwest the snow-headed Abajo Mountains, like blue pyramids on the horizon. Out the side window I could detect the hard, dry crest of Mesa Verde, its steep slopes decorated with countless tumbled boulders.
In my earliest memories I am driving past these landmarks, my small face in the window watching the stippled horizon of Monument Valley come into view or the threatening snows of the Rocky Mountains en
gulfing us as my mother drove us to the ends of my known world and back in our blue Volkswagen bug. Half of my family lived in Arizona and the other half in Colorado. I grew up burning a path between the two states.
My mother was single, and we moved as frequently as once every year or two. Why we moved so often I never learned, but it became a habit that I adored, a way of living I could not do without. My mother worked as a secretary, a waitress, a carpenter—no evident occupational need to leave one state for another so frequently. Even now when I ask her about our moves, she tells me they were each circumstantial, that she would rather have stayed put but things kept coming up, a thread of aspiration perpetually leading our small family of mother and child across the Southwest. It was as if we were looking for the center of a whirling spiral. Every time we found the center, it slowly dissolved from under us, and we left to follow it elsewhere.
Migration simply happens to some people. Maybe a restless, spring-loaded gene keeps us on the move, or an alignment of perpetual coincidences pushes us from place to place. It is the tether, though, that I find most fascinating, the return to the same regions. My mother and I traveled the same highways on our repeated moves, north to south and back again. A sort of hardwired stability developed in me as my home became an entire landscape where I lived not in a place, but along a series of lines tracing back and forth, connecting one anchor to the next.
The impulse that commands me to go is balanced by another that commands me to stay, the two working together to send me into quick but returning orbits around certain places: the Mogollon Rim of Arizona, the low desert south of there, the high desert north, and the castle perimeter of the Rocky Mountains beyond. I am constantly in motion among these landscapes, yet my life rarely ranges any farther, tethered by history and experience to the Southwest.