Finders Keepers

by Craig Childs

  Let’s say you were a digger in Guatemala and you found this temple. You would put two or three short tunnels made of cockeyed limestone blocks into a clump of overgrowth and find nothing but architectural fill and a smattering of cheap, broken artifacts. Maybe on the fourth try you would hit a smooth slab, the inner wall of a tomb. Picking out a seam and breaking through, you would reach an interior vault where you would have to clear away fallen rubble, which would then open onto a seated skeleton enshrined in shells, pottery, vessels, and jade adornments.

  A looter coming upon this site would quickly survey the immediate area, knowing that if there is one temple, there are probably many others. Most often, these temples are formally arranged around a cardinal axis, and those on the north side tend to produce the richer tombs, a by-product of Mayan cosmology.

  It might have been enough to stand beside this monument of vegetation and recognize it for what it was—eighth-century Late Classic Mayan architecture succumbed—but I wanted to get to its crest. I started climbing. In a way, it was sheer vanity that drove me up the side, my desire to get as close as I could to a very long time ago, just to see what it felt like. At least at the larger temples, there used to be human sacrifices up top. Evidence of iron and albumen soaked into stucco floors at certain sites suggests they were once awash in blood. One could imagine sacrificial victims struggling up blood-slick steps to reach the top, where they would have been laid across a stone altar, bare chests aimed up into the thrust of an obsidian blade. That in itself was reason to climb.

  A smaller temple, this one probably saw less-dramatic sacrifices. There may have been decapitations of turkeys up here or the burning of fragrant herbs, maybe a tad of royal bloodletting on special days. The Mayans were not nearly as grim as the Aztecs to the north who followed them. An archaeologist once told me of sitting on one of the great Aztec temples, slapping mosquitoes on a limestone altar. He said the mosquitoes were engorged with his blood, and he was enchanted by the bridge built in his mind, his blood and that of ancients there on the same stone. Maybe it’s just sympathetic magic, maybe it’s not even real, but it sure feels tangible.

  Building my own bridge to the past, I ascended the temple’s side, shirt matted against my skin. Insect urine fell from the canopy in a gentle, continuous drizzle. I was not imagining sacrificial bodies tumbling down the steps around me Aztec style. Here I saw a man alone, ascending clean limestone steps, a bundle of ceremonial items in his hands as he climbed to make an offering. Perhaps he had come some distance on a pilgrimage, and maybe like me he was on his hands and knees owing to the steepness of this temple. It was like climbing a ladder, roots and tumbled limestone blocks filthy and pitted with erosion. The thing had more or less been turned into a forest, and I was gripped by the awareness of civilizations abandoned and falling back into the ground.

  Hands reaching ahead, carefully grabbing trunks to pull myself up, I came to an upper platform enclosed by broken-down walls, which was more or less the top. To go any higher I would have to climb on unstable pillars, so I plunked down in a bed of humus to catch my breath. Sunlight winked through the canopy onto my shoulders. Ants came and went, making busy commerce of the site. I crawled along their teeming trail behind this altar chamber, moving over roots and crooked stones. It was a sort of foyer, with only one way in and out. The ornately carved altar that probably once stood here was gone, as were stone facings covered in glyphs that would have borne the names and dates of those who ruled here or the wars they made, now perhaps in a museum vault or standing against a wall in a Fifth Avenue apartment. How much more powerful they would be if they were still here, presiding over this civilization and its continual fall.

  At the top of the temple I sat listening to the stillness, not a breeze in this place. Only the tinkering of insects said anything about the movement of time. I was back inside the altar chamber, thinking that a shaman-priest must once have stood on this spot, right where my feet were, looking across great ceremonies of fire and blood. Throngs of men and women would have gathered below, with glittering hair ornaments and turquoise beads stabbed into their noses. The audience would have been decked out in jaguar robes and feathered banners; traders, growers, and architects all in attendance. Trees would have been felled long before, the ground pounded hard and chalky white from limestone cutting. I could have seen this nowhere else.

  James O. Young points out that Stonehenge was once for sale. “It would have been a travesty,” he said, “had an American tycoon bought it and had it relocated to Druidworld in Florida.”

  Though it is remarkable to walk into the actual Egyptian Temple of Dendur at the Met, or step out across the London Bridge that was transported stone by stone to Lake Havasu City, Arizona, they seem perfectly out of place. It is a different experience to know you are in the original location. The air feels charged. Maybe it is historicity, all in the mind, but the mind makes it real. Like the Jowo Shakymuni or the Cadboll Stone, objects take on a unique power when they are in situ. Holtorf is absolutely right in saying that we are creating more past all the time—but it’s not this past, and not this place.

  I peered through what straight lines were left in the temple’s architecture onto a world where a priest once paraded in a jeweled headdress past his subjects, listening to their cries, watching his civilization slowly fall. And as I watched, the jungle seemed to be closing in tighter, finishing its kill.

  CHAPTER 14

  HOLDING ON

  Connections with the past are not always maintained in place. Some artifacts are in motion, flying from hand to hand with no actual home to return to. You’ve got to practically race to keep up with them.

  A private collector in Santa Fe named Forrest Fenn is a cheerleader for the right of anyone to get his hands on the past and carry it with him. Fenn has enough money to make a multimillion-dollar go at his obsession, turning his house into a museum.

  I visited Fenn when he was seventy-eight, a jovial, gray old man, not very tall but neatly dressed. He made his money from the Santa Fe art market, selling art and antiquities to so many of the rich and famous that he became a People magazine celebrity twenty years ago. Now he had a softness about him, an exciting innocence. As he moved with a wobbly shuffle through his remarkable collection of antiquities, I could see that age had caught up with him. He must have been goblinlike in younger years, his limbs and face still ripe with enthusiasm. He showed me a number of ornate bronze canisters he had had cast, planning to bury them around the world with his memoirs sealed inside. He wants someone to dig up his story. One of the bronzes is actually a bell on which he has indelibly inscribed, If you should ever think of me a thousand years from now, please ring my bell so I will know. It is kind of like freezing your head after you die, but with an archaeological twist. The cherry on top, Fenn grinned, was that the tongue inside the bell came from a seventeenth-century Spanish mission bell.

  “Save the past for the future?” Fenn boasted. “When is the future? Give me a date.”

  As a collector, Fenn has made himself conspicuous and been outspoken. He likes to argue with archaeologists because, as he says, “they are so easy.” (I have heard the same said of him.) There are a good number of archaeologists who would not stop to help Fenn if his car had broken down on the side of the road. He just has that effect on them. (He once held a barbecue for a group of Pueblo Indians and archaeologists, and after they began eating he told them he had grilled their burgers on charcoal excavated from an ancient New Mexico ruin. According to Fenn, the Indians grinned, as they often do when amused by Anglo irony, while the archaeologists just went pale.)

  Years back, he bought a piece of land on which stood a huge ruined pueblo, his sole purpose being to excavate at his leisure. He has taken about 1 percent of it, which amounts to the emptying of around thirty rooms. Because it sits on private property, he can do as he wishes. In public hands this would be considered a major American archaeological site, a multithousand-room pueblo occupied from pre-Columbian tim
es up to the installation of a Spanish mission. In Fenn’s hands, some consider it a catastrophe.

  There are those who would have him shut down in a heartbeat. They have used aerial photos of his digs to try to legally force him to stop, which failed. One government land agent wrote an interagency memo that stated: “The best action would be to somehow get the property into federal or state ownership so it could be better protected. Land exchange or purchase could be possible by the BLM. The bad publicity by the lawsuits could entice Fenn to give up his property.” Fenn responded with lawsuits of his own, and he kept digging.

  (A few weeks after my visit, Fenn’s house was raided by federal agents. They walked out with his files, computers, and a handful of artifacts, but Fenn’s antiquities are so well provenanced that they got what he sees as next to nothing. And he has the legal savvy to make sure they won’t come back for more.)

  Fenn self-published a thick book on his finds from the pueblo he purchased and has done a surprisingly fine job of curating the artifacts down to the potsherd-and-charcoal level. The site has its own room in his house, as neatly drawered and labeled as any public collection. He explained that he is not interested in sloppy work; he wants it done right. He goes to archaeologists for help with identification or for suggestions on conservancy techniques. When he digs into something fragile or important—say, a cache of painted wooden masks—he asks archaeologists if they would come and make sure nothing is damaged. A few have responded. Most, however, consider it professional suicide to be caught working shoulder to shoulder with Forrest Fenn.

  But Fenn, as I discovered, is not the enemy they would like him to be. In his own way, and very successfully, he has worked to bridge the gap of time. In a personal fashion, he is reconnecting stories to objects, doing very much what researchers are striving for, only in a way they never could, or would.

  Fenn’s house in Santa Fe is a personal museum. With its steel vault and its decorated halls, it is a tour through the ages, bits of Pompeii and Chaco, statues on pedestals, painted skulls, rugs, and Indian robes on the walls (one Plains skin bears a bullet hole, and the hole has been sewed up with beads after the fact, as if closing off a mortal wound). Wanting it all to be seen, he invites strangers like me into his halls. The day I was there, he left me alone in a room crowded with pure gold and silver gewgaws centuries old. There was a jade mask of Olmec origin one might be tempted to lift up and wear, surreptitiously putting on a dead man’s face just to see what it felt like. When Fenn returned he noticed me lingering at the mask.

  “Try it on if you want,” he said.

  I laughed nervously, said no, thank you. Fenn shrugged. “I don’t especially like it. I got it about five years ago so I could trade it for something I really want to play with.”

  One thing Fenn is is honest. He plays with these things. No words are minced. He used to sell fake antiquities, and he admitted up front what he was doing even as other dealers accused him of poisoning the market. He could not care less.

  “This!” he announced as he picked up a tarnished silver bracelet with inlaid turquoise beads. “This is the bracelet Richard Wetherill had made after he discovered Cliff Palace—when was it?—1888! And these twenty-two beads are the very ones he collected that day!” Wetherill had gone on to work with Gustaf Nordenskiöld at Mesa Verde. Like a happy wizard, Fenn shoved the bracelet into my hands. He wanted me to adore it. Everything he touched had some story. There were even two flattened soda cans, the kind you might find on the street, hung on the wall along with pre-Columbian artifacts. Fenn lifted one off its nail, commenting on the rarity of such a perfectly flat can. It was nearly as thin as paper.

  “I can relate to this can,” he said. “Somebody’s driving down the street drinking a Coca-Cola, they throw the can out on Galisteo Street right downtown, five hundred cars run over it, and it turns into this, like a little piece of art. It’s kind of a metaphor for a person’s life. It has history in it. If I knew who bought this can, how much they gave for it, where they got it, when they drank it, when they threw it out, I would write a story.”

  When you start looking around Fenn’s collection, when you get behind the glare of premier artifacts, you begin to see an undercurrent of smaller, personal histories that speak to his obsession. There is a 50-mm shell that he said misfired when he was a fighter pilot in Vietnam, the brass chewed up when it flew into his intake. And among those objects of gold and silver, you’ll find a sturdy pair of sandals made from black tire tread. He said he got them from a Viet Cong prisoner. “I traded him a package of cigarettes right through the concertina wire. He took them off and handed them to me. He was a nice guy, he was just the enemy.”

  “You’ve got this deep need to gather things,” I said.

  “Information,” Fenn replied. “It’s not the object, it’s the story behind the object.”

  Fenn rattled out a small plastic box filled with brass tacks. “These came from a conquistador. I was getting gas twenty miles this side of Cody, Wyoming, when this truck pulled up and everybody was gathered around looking at what was in the bed. I went over and they had a conquistador and his horse—everything, the bones, armor, chain mail, all the horse trappings. They found it eroding out of an arroyo. Now, I don’t think conquistadors were supposed to be up that far, but there’s your story. I asked, if you let me crawl back there and pick up those tacks, would you let me keep them? They said yes.”

  He picked up one of the tacks between thumb and forefinger. It was as small as the butt of a pen. “See the square shank? It’s the real thing. Here, I’ll give you one.” Before I could figure out whether to say yes or no, he popped it into a small plastic specimen bag and handed it to me. “Here you go. Treat it with respect, it’s very historical.”

  He said, “Every time I drive through that town I stop. There’s a little museum where I ask if anyone knows anything about that old conquistador, and nobody does. It’s gone. Who knows, I might be the only one who remembers the story.” He gestured at the bag, which I had already tucked into my shirt pocket. “Now you know it, too.”

  Fenn is like a bag lady shambling ahead through time, carrying all the past he can collect, sprinkling it into the pockets of passersby. He is a transporter. But not only of objects; he is moving stories along with them, bringing them back to light in the glow of his own enthusiasm. He writes everything down—the gas station where he got the conquistador’s tacks (Meeteetse, Wyoming) and details of a card game in which he won Wetherill’s bracelet. These are the stories often lost to the laundering process as dealers and collectors scrub out the past so it won’t be incriminating. Meanwhile, Fenn marvels over the entire testimony, every hand along the way. He does not believe in laundering. He sees what researchers often do not, that an artifact’s history does not end when it falls into the ground. Granted, he treats the past very differently from, say, Bill Saturno, who left his mural discovery in place, but he has a completely different version of what it is right to do.

  Said Fenn, “I can’t tell you how many thousand times I’ve been digging and I found something, an arrowhead, four feet deep. You know what I tell myself? My Lord, how pleased this thing is to be looking at the sun again after being down there in hell. I liberated it. It was made to look at and to use. When you find something like that out there, isn’t it just begging you to take it?”

  “No,” I said, thinking of the ground more as a place to sleep on than as hell.

  “It’s not talking to you?” he asked, incredulous.

  “I think that’s the sound of you begging yourself to take it.”

  “It’s not talking to you?” he asked again, as if he could not believe my answer. “Here’s what it’s saying to you. It’s saying, Craig, if you don’t pick me up and take me home and love me, Joe Smith is going to find me tomorrow and sell me for twenty-five bucks.”

  “I know,” I said. “But Joe Smith has to figure it out for himself.”

  “Let me show you something.” He walked across the floo
r of his vault and lifted a display box containing an elaborate wooden pipe, its long stem spiraling into a red soapstone bowl.

  “You know what this is?” Fenn asked. “Sitting Bull’s pipe.”

  I puzzled for a moment, questions flying into my head. How did you get this? Is it real? It should be in the Smithsonian, or in the hands of the Sioux. It is a national treasure. What are you going to do with it? My thoughts distilled into disbelief.

  “Are you serious?” I asked. “That’s Sitting Bull’s actual pipe? You’ve got Sitting Bull’s pipe?”

  “This is arguably one of the most important American Indian artifacts in existence,” Fenn said. “There’s no way it isn’t the original pipe. It’s exact. I even measured the concavities in the bowl itself. The ratios are perfect.”

  He had also, he would later explain, compared digitally enhanced pictures of the wood grain to 1883 photos of the grain on the actual pipestem (Sitting Bull was often photographed holding it). The grain matched perfectly. A number of collectors and keepers have claimed to have the original, but this one is almost impossible to refute. It is indeed Sitting Bull’s pipe, the one that belonged to the Lakota Sioux holy man and warrior, his tool of intimacy and diplomacy. Fenn said it had come out of a mom-and-pop museum in Minnesota, where the owners had had it for thirty years without ever knowing what it was. A trader recognized it and picked it up. Fenn asked if he could hold on to it just to prove that it wasn’t the real thing. When he realized it was, he bought it.

  I asked, “Do you… touch it?”

  “Oh yeah, you want to touch it?” Fenn said, opening the case, lifting out the age-slicked wood, its mid- and foresections decorated with rings of brass caps. “You can touch it. I want you to feel the hand polish on it, the velvetness of it.”