by Craig Childs
Has it always been this way? I wondered. Ryan was not the first person to close this village. She was merely the next in line, a woman mindful of small acts, making sure the rooms were properly buried so that her presence, too, would fade with time. This is a new ritual of departure, a twenty-first-century abandonment.
Ryan’s dig begins to answer the question of how the Anasazi left the Four Corners region, revealing actual ceremonies of departure. The question of why they left remains. Just before the area wasvacated, there came a dramatic shift in settlement patterns. Many people began living as if in fear, using the land in a defensive manner. This signaled that the end was near. The foremost place to witness this change is Mesa Verde. When I climbed the ladder up from the trench, I could see the mesa towering over Ryan’s dig. It looked like a castle standing in the clouds, a place to hide.
PROTECTION
MESA VERDE
Iheld the pay phone receiver in the crook of my neck and tried to listen through the flapping of my notes and the roar of the winter wind skating across Mesa Verde. A woman spoke on the other end, but I heard not a word. I had come to the park visitors’ center, to which the phone was attached, to make calls, turning the pay phone here into an office for the afternoon. The center was closed for the winter, the corners of the building webbed with old snow.
Switching to my left ear, I said, “Sorry, I didn’t get that last thing.”
“Your research project looks like it will be accepted,” she said. “The park superintendent has looked at your proposal. There are just a few details.”
“Good, good,” I said, hunching my back to block the wind. I had turned in a proposal that would allow me to go into Mesa Verde with a park archaeologist and spend time inside a particular cliff dwelling.
I barely caught her next words. She was telling me how much it would cost. I switched the phone to my right ear, my knuckles sharp and cold. “What was that?” I said.
She repeated the figures as I scribbled them down on a piece of paper. Two hundred dollars for the permit. One hundred fifty for the application fee, so that my proposal could receive an official stamp. And fifty for every hour spent at the cliff dwelling.
“Fifty dollars an hour,” I said. “That’s kind of steep.”
“Excuse me?”
“I said that’s a lot of money. I don’t know if I can come up with that kind of money.”
The woman was quiet, and I imagined her glancing at the clock in a warm office where the air does not move except through ceiling ducts. I suddenly felt foolish clutching at this pay phone with a piece of paper ticking violently under my hand.
Prior to this I had gone into Mesa Verde like everyone else, instructed along by signs and rangers as if touring a crowded art museum, hands kept to myself while I gawked at the beauty of the mesa’s cliff dwellings. What happened here in the thirteenth century was extraordinary. Settlements that had previously sprawled across the lush top of the mesa were left empty. People ducked into the shelter of local canyons where they constructed unparalleled villages, vaulted architecture protected in caves, neighborhoods as compact as Hong Kong tenements. Kivas looped around one another back in the shadows. These structures are all called cliff dwellings, even though some look more like churches than actual dwellings—much like Chaco’s great houses, some have more ritual spaces than domestic ones.
Asphalt paths lead in front of certain dressed-up cliff dwellings where the public is allowed, and there I would come up against the Do Not Enter signs, my imagination pressing back into the shadows and black doorways. The ranger would tell us now to turn our attention elsewhere to take note of some other feature along the tour, while I would keep staring past the sign imploring me not to enter. Eventually, the crowd would move on, and I would dutifully follow. The glimpses I got inside these sites were too fleeting and abbreviated for my taste.
So I approached the park with a request. I wished to examine one of the cliff dwellings more closely, to drift through its spaces day after day. Nothing purely scientific, I said. I just wanted a closer look, room by room, if I might.
My proposal had been accepted, but in reality it had not. Fifty dollars an hour was well out of my reach.
“Well,” the woman said, her voice genuine on the phone. “Feel free to give us a call if you have any further questions.”
I said goodbye and hung up, staring at the numbers I had written down. Frustration welled up inside me. I collected my things and walked to a low wall intended to prevent people from falling into snow-lined canyons below. I leaned over the wall, looking down the gashes that stream through Mesa Verde’s forested, stony flesh. In classic Anasazi style, this stonework visitors’ center was built at one of the highest vantages, peering across an isolated piece of land, a realm of dark and spiked conifers, a secret place. I could barely see where in the distance cliffs began bowing back into caves, burrowing into a country that lay unseen within, canyons made exquisite by forces of erosion. Within these canyons were six hundred documented cliff dwellings, each waiting silently beneath the sloping deck of Mesa Verde, not a soul around.
My earliest memory of Mesa Verde, from maybe the age of eight or nine, is of a ladder. It is stretched beyond reality in my recollection, a wooden ladder rising up a cliff, testing any acrophobia that dwelt in my nervous system as I climbed rung by rung toward a mansion of stone high overhead. I do not remember what the cliff dwelling itself was like, only the earth falling away beneath me as this ladder lifted toward a place never meant to be reached by intruders like me.
Mesa Verde has always been a well-protected place. It is the hope chest of Southwest archaeology, where cliff dwellings have remained neatly sheltered for centuries, artifacts preserved inside them as if curated. Ceramic mugs have been found still dangling from wall pegs, blankets rolled and stored inside fat jars. Pre-Columbian structures in Chaco or Aztec have steadily diminished beneath the open sky, each year buried deeper by blowing sand, their walls eroding and collapsing under their own weight. Meanwhile, whatever was placed in Mesa Verde was still here when archaeologists first arrived at the end of the nineteenth century, finding relics covered with dust and a little rubble, but well guarded within these dry, hollow cliffs.
My frustration with the park’s bureaucracy began to subside as I looked across the clipped tops of these canyons, thinking of the archaeological value placed here. Of course, I thought, the Park Service should not be letting in strangers like me to wander unchecked through the treasured halls of the mesa. This is, after all, hallowed ground, as guarded now as it may have been eight hundred years ago. Anasazi sentries have been replaced by armed rangers and by a backcountry bristling with motion sensors. Wilderness riffraff has been kept out, the hordes who would stain these delicate ruins with their greasy hands, who would eventually push down all the ancient walls and demand that libraries of informative signs be erected in their place. If I were given carte blanche, I would somehow be disappointed.
By its physical nature, Mesa Verde is not a public place. It is geographically private, a fortress. The mesa tilts up from the Northern San Juan Basin, with a leading edge rising thousands of feet over the greasewood barrens below. Access to the top is limited by a number of pinch points, likely places to build entrances where each person coming through can be checked. The mesa is a topographic Babylon, its gates guarded by lions and bulls, canyons and cliffs, while inside lie naturally arched passageways and hidden slabs of masonry buildings, more rooms per square mile than anywhere else in the Southwest.
In the thirteenth century, Mesa Verde stood in the middle of the most densely populated region in the Southwest, a region housing more people than live here today. The many lowland Anasazi living below Mesa Verde must have looked up often at this looming landmark—a man using a stone hoe scratching dry ground stopping to peer at Mesa Verde’s abrupt edge above him. What mental pictures must he have had of a place he perhaps never visited? Graceful masonry towers set back into the shade of canyons he could
not see; high, cliff-bound villages surrounded by the sounds of dripping springs and by loops of wild grapevines—a paradise, a secret garden.
I do not imagine a person would ever have ascended this huge battlement of earth without invitation, without paying a toll. I gathered my things at the closed visitors’ center and walked off to find another way in.
Later that winter a blizzard coasted up and over Mesa Verde, leaving the tree trunks and the park’s roadside signs decorated with streaks of snow. The storm fussed across the mesa top, but down in one of these canyons, back inside the rooms of a dwelling called Spruce Tree House, the air was still. Gray daylight turned to dust and drifted in through open windows and doorways, barely illuminating the cobwebby attics of ancient rooms.
I crouched slowly through a T-shaped doorway and entered a darkened chamber, where I reached down and touched the icy floor for balance. Walls around me were finely finished in plaster, cold as a stone castle in the middle of winter. I felt as if my moments inside this unstirred cliff dwelling were not the ones I had bargained for in my life. They were a surplus, gleaned from the invisible edges of time, everything around me suspended, unchanging.
I had found a way into Mesa Verde. Every fortress has a back door, a sentry willing to engage in conversation. I had begun talking around the park, explaining that I was tracking the Anasazi, traveling along trails of archaeological bread crumbs. Some rangers, though they wore chattering radios and were trained to shoot moving targets, revealed a heartening softness for this place. In their years of guarding archaeological sites, they had lingered after closing time, pausing before they locked the gates to listen to the silence behind them. They said that on certain nights, they would walk to watch moonlight flower across the cliff dwellings, and they were astonished by the sense of time this sight engendered, by the majestic stillness of these places.
When most of Mesa Verde was closed for the winter, a ranger asked me down to a ruined cliff dwelling called Long House, where we walked through chambers as quiet as a vacated church. She wanted me to experience the place when it was not crowded with tourists, telling me this is how she imagined it was before we got here, a pocket of ruins slowly drinking the morning light. Showing me through Long House’s complicated architecture, she said that the Anasazi had made their edifices beautiful when they could have more easily built quick row houses. She thought they had been people of conspicuous elegance.
She introduced me to others, and soon researchers were unrolling maps across their desks for me, their fingers dancing excitedly to show their findings. They had unearthed the remains of impounded reservoirs with steps leading down to them, like a utopian Maxfield Parrish painting, and had found trees that had been manually straightened when they were still young so that they would grow into good construction timbers. These researchers showed me the park’s locked vaults, where we looked through hoards of artifacts—bowls and ceramic mugs, necklaces of finely polished beads.
I told them that if I could have any wish, it would be to spend time inside Spruce Tree House, the second-largest cliff dwelling on the mesa. It stands right under the visitors’ center and has a paved trail leading to it. I had lingered in front of it many times, my eyes straining to see into the dark, receding chambers where I was not allowed. I sensed that the site was much larger than it appeared. There were other dwellings far more remote and handsome in their robes of debris, but this was the one I wished for, Spruce Tree House swept clean and polished until it looked like a museum piece. The paperwork was signed, and I was taken down.
Doors opened around me. I passed through them, craning my neck, looking up through gaps of fallen ceilings straight above me, where wall plaster changed color from one level to the next; the walls of these rooms were banded with multihued murals. This had once been a remarkably colorful village, occupied by artisans.
I stopped in a room with a floor pitted with holes where looms had once been anchored. A room of weavers, I thought. These people were in possession of loom-woven textiles—kilts, shirts, and leggings patterned with intricate designs and interwoven with vibrantly dyed strands. Someone had etched a number of geometric designs into the stone threshold leading into this room. When I looked closer at these etchings, I noticed that they were the same designs one finds on Anasazi textiles, stairstep patterns set against each other. A weaver had sat on this threshold planning out a pattern for his loom work, scratching it into the rock.
Before the thirteenth century and before the Anasazi began building their settlements in canyons and on cliffs, their populations had grown to near the carrying capacity of the land. A few centuries of generally good weather had resulted in vigorous crop growth, which had made for more populous settlements, stimulating trade and expansion. Desert great houses had taken off and spawned replicas in faraway places. Of course, decades of hard drought had been scattered throughout, but the people were used to such affairs, mobile enough to leave places like Chaco to reach higher ground in time to plant their corn. Only now this higher ground was supporting more settlements than ever before, people of complex and disparate ancestry all gathering around the most well-watered and seasonable territories, their numbers heavy on the land.
Entire villages and towns were abandoned during a debilitating drought in the thirteenth century as people moved into defensible positions and to the last places of water. This happened not only at Mesa Verde but also all across the Colorado Plateau. Populations that had been enjoying centuries of growth and prosperity were now driven up in elevation, finally forced into the crags and sharp places in the land where they could defend their last resources. Surrounded to the south by flanks of desert and to the north by the bitter winters of the Rocky Mountains, the highland province of the Northern San Juan Basin became isolated from the rest of the Southwest, and for that matter from the rest of the Americas. Thirteenth-century aridity deepened the isolation, as trade with outside regions virtually came to a halt. Shell had previously been a crucial import for jewelry and offerings and was hardly seen again. Likewise, the importation of southern pottery styles such as White Mountain Red Ware and Tsegi Orange Ware diminished to a trickle, and the tropical bird trade ceased entirely.
The Anasazi, accustomed to sprawling communities and open skies, now lived in towers and packed cliff dwellings, breathing one another’s breath, inhaling the smoke of winter fires from down the hall, listening to other people’s sexual activities. They began experimenting with elaborate organizational schemes in their floor plans to keep order. Public architecture flourished across the region, and great kivas and plazas sprang up inside precarious cliff sites. Structures were built with concentric layers of rooms to regulate the movement of residents and visitors and to keep certain people away from others. The Montagues were now living just downstairs from the Capulets.
From numerous lines of ethnological and archaeological evidence, it appears that the Anasazi kept rigid systems of lineage. Namely, they were matrilineal. The named head of each Anasazi household was a female. That system was then separated into moieties, intermarrying groups that kept their own customs or at least their own neighborhoods. Many of Mesa Verde’s cliff dwellings are divided into two wings thought to represent two separate moieties living in close proximity and able to marry back and forth. At Spruce Tree House pools of eligible husbands and wives were kept apart by a block of tall, spacious rooms painted more elaborately than any of the others where people would have met in organized, ritual activities perhaps akin to high school dances.
Floor plans of the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings are obviously based on social engineering, designed to regulate contact between groups of people. Even the way separate dwellings were built in relation to one another suggests larger corporate divisions and unions. Not just a concentration of hundreds of cliff dwellings jammed in here and there, Mesa Verde was a federation of settlements, different canyons and drainages having their own interrelated alliances. Cliff Palace, the largest and perhaps most impressive site on this me
sa, looks like a boxed-in version of an old great house—too many kivas and too few residential rooms for it to count as a true living space. It must have been a ceremonial locale, perhaps a gathering place for all of Mesa Verde.
The first time I was shown into the back rooms of Spruce Tree House, I carried my infant son with me, his little body tucked against my hip as we ducked through doorways. The archaeologist with me said it was good to see a baby back in these chambers. He imagined a cliff dwelling once full of life, like a schoolyard, where untethered voices rang through its rooms. He said the inner rooms of Spruce Tree House had been vacant for too long.
This time through, I was here alone on a chilled winter day, writing in my journal with a crabbed hand. I walked back and forth through rooms until Spruce Tree House’s floor plan was nearly as familiar as that of my own house.
I stopped over a kiva that had been built toward the back of the dwelling, as secluded as a bathhouse. Its circular enclosure dropped into the ground below, its timbered roof missing. Peels of plaster hung from the inside, revealing patches of construction stones turned a pinkish color where they had been oxidized by an intense fire. The fire had been contained, kept from escaping into the surrounding rooms, most likely set upon the residents’ departure. People at Mesa Verde were doing the same thing that people at Chaco and Aztec and on the Great Sage Plain had done, igniting their holy spaces as they set off on a migration.
I imagined roils of smoke pouring out of this burning kiva, flowing through one doorway after the next, choking the upper-story rooms. I held up my hand, feeling the air where the tips of my gloves were cut off. The air was moving, almost imperceptibly. I followed it, envisioning the path of smoke eight hundred years ago as I passed from room to room. I walked into an open plaza, where I stopped before a two-story wall peppered with T-shaped entries. Smoke would have poured from them as if they were weeping.