Wild Indigo

by Sandi Ault

  Then I remembered: It was in the ruins.

  While I pondered this, the red painting faded like moisture evaporating from a hot surface. The rock’s veneer became a blank, gray slab.

  I shook with a deep, involuntary shudder.

  “Time to get back,” I told Mountain, and we broke into a fast-paced run, neither of us tired now.

  15

  The Ruins

  In my first year with the BLM, I’d been assigned to a sector of land on the northern aspect of Sacred Mountain. Just off a two-lane road headed for the Colorado border, an unassuming stretch of sage and chamisa pasture was cordoned off with barbed wire. Some of the locals knew what lay beyond. They needed a good four-wheel drive vehicle, preferably one they didn’t mind risking to scratches, dents, and maybe even a damaged oil pan. The heartiest among them would open an inconspicuous cattle gate and drive through, closing it carefully behind them lest their secret be discovered. Then they would grind their way up a gradual ascent, wind and turn and twist as they climbed, dip through ruts and ease over rocks in the red dirt track, scrape through stands of juniper and piñon and hear the paint scratching, claw their way across red dirt washes that ran like rivers in the monsoon season but were dry gulches the rest of the year, bang and jolt and jostle and dip and tip and list and yaw over the roughest terrain around, rising toward the top. And if they survived this two-hour ordeal without getting stuck, breaking down, bottoming out, giving up, or going back, they would be rewarded with a beautiful, remote, and largely unspoiled treasure—a camp high on a canyon rim among ancient ruins.

  They say the Indigo River used to run through here, forming this deep gorge. The cliffs on the south-facing slope of the canyon were dotted with ruins and ceremonial caves. The People who once lived here hunted the high mesas above, planted corn in the mountain valleys, and drew water from the river. Thus, they had everything they needed. But one day, the river turned away, cutting through rocks and boulders in the other direction, twisting through arroyos and bubbling down slopes until a little brook flowing down into the valley land below was formed. The People followed the water, and it showed them a new place to live. They no longer needed to dwell in caves or behind piled stone walls under overhangs of rock. The hallowed water from the falls led them to a beautiful valley nestled at the base of Sacred Mountain. And so Tanoah Pueblo was built, and the People came to live there.

  Now the canyon above was dry and desolate. High on each side of the ravine were ruins of round houses made from stacked rocks—lookout stations to protect from attacking tribes. A courageous modern-day traveler who made it this far could make camp next to one of these ruins and watch the moon rise over the peaks on one edge of this wide split in the earth, then see it set over the summit of Sacred Mountain on the other side. And an even more brave, hale, and athletic adventurer could cross the narrow wash atop the mouth of the chasm and then skirt the rim on the other side and find ways to navigate the ledges and stretches of sheer rock face to get to the many aboriginal sites. It was difficult and dangerous climbing, but the mystery—the lure of the silent, empty ruins—was irresistible.

  And so, one day when I was just doing my job, I rode a paint mare named Redhead up to the canyon rim ruins. I had packed in gear and provisions for a quiet night among the ancient spirits. I arrived close to dusk and worked fast to settle my horse and roll out my sleeping bag. I built a campfire on a flat of stone overlooking the seven-hundred-foot drop down into the gorge. It was midsummer, hot days and cold nights up here close to the stars. I could hear water running below me, a spring or mountain seep falling on rock. I ate jerky and drank from my canteen while an enormous pink-gold moon floated up over the rim and bathed the canyon with rosy light. A demoiselle rose like a church spire above the lip of the cliff wall, a stem of stone-colored purple and terra-cotta, indigo and gray, with a perfect red-clay turban for a hat. Coyotes howled a call to prayer.

  That night, I lay on flat rock and looked at the sky. Even with a full moon, I saw dozens of shooting stars. There was no sound except that of wind and water, the crackle of piñon wood as it burned inside a ring of stones nearby. I smelled trementina, cooling rock, juniper sap, the wonderful charred scent of my campfire.

  In the stillness of that night, I could imagine the People doing ceremony in one of the caves, building a fire as I had, and singing and dancing to celebrate life and its wondrous mystery. I envisioned them making simple offerings to gods that inspired both devotion and fear.

  In the morning, I broke camp early, scattered the ashes of my fire, and rode down the rim a ways to look through my binoculars at the dozens of ruins on the opposite side. One place in particular interested me—a narrow ledge perhaps four feet wide with part of a stacked rock wall still intact. Above it, on a sheer slab of cliff face, a prodigious petroglyph loomed like the face of the moon. It was a large circle with eyes and a smile and a headdress. I decided to follow the lip of the canyon back to my campsite, then cross the wash and head along the opposite rim. Perhaps I could see a way to get down to that ruin.

  I tied Redhead in the shade of a twisted old juniper near the only suitable place I could find to drop down into the gorge. Wearing my backpack and good leather gloves, I lowered myself between two giant boulders and started climbing, hand and foot, down the cliff wall. I worked at this for more than two hours, climbing deep into the ravine, across ledges, back up a rock-slide area, then over a huge, precariously placed round of stone to a spot where I could get a handhold up to the narrow ledge that led to the ruin I sought.

  I passed several other ruins as I worked my way along the face of the canyon wall. On some, brass markers indicated their registration as archaeological sites. Small corncobs spilled out of round, stacked rock storage silos built into cliff overhangs. Pot shards littered the sites.

  In one place, a shattered ledge led to a pond that had formed deep in the mouth of a high stone overhang, a basin that reached back into the belly of rock that made up the wall. The lagoon was no doubt fed by the seep that I’d heard running in the night. Reeds and grasses grew out of the edges of the pool. I could almost see the People wading there, the women washing pots, the children splashing in the water that collected in this stone depression hundreds of feet above the floor of the gorge.

  The ledge had given way in places, and I took a detour downslope to go around some giant stones. On the other side, I found that I needed to pull myself up by my upper body alone to regain the ledge. My boots perched on a narrow mantle of basalt. I saw no way to use my feet or legs. I found myself fearful and off balance. There was no other route up, and the only alternative was to go down. I wasn’t even sure I could go back the way I came, since I couldn’t see to place my feet. I clung to the outcropping and studied my possibilities. I knew that if I lost my grip before I got my boots on that shelf, I would not be able to keep from falling to my death. I had gotten myself into a real predicament.

  Finally it seemed there was nothing to do but to take the risk and try to hoist my body up to the overhang. Perhaps because no one was around, I found myself whimpering under my breath. My hands and arms were trembling. I sucked in my gut, rose up on my toes, gave a little jump, and pulled my weight up to where my chest mashed into the rim of the ledge. I swung my right leg and got the tip of my boot to lodge, shoulder height, on the rock, then pressed and pulled and hauled my body over the edge and onto the foot-wide outcrop of stone, flat on my face, lying down. I lay there for a moment quietly celebrating, sniffing back tears, until I realized that I was facing the wrong direction. I would have to stand up on the thin shelf, cling to the rock face, and change directions. I waited for courage, but it never came. Eventually, I resigned myself to the task. Carefully gauging my balance as I went, I cautiously maneuvered my body into an about-face. I edged forward on the ledge to the place I had spied through my binoculars.

  There was another body-lift ahead of me, this one easier than the last. I pressed my hands into the flat floor of the narrow ruin a
nd pushed up until I could get a knee on the ground. When I finally stood on firm base, I saw the great glyph above me like a smiley face. There were hundreds more petroglyphs on the walls: bear tracks, mountain goats, deer, badger, snakes, spirals, alien-looking people with large hands and fancy headdresses, a mountain lion, and even what appeared to be the story of a man falling off the very ledge I’d just traversed.

  A magnificent and solitary glyph was etched into the cliff wall where the rock face jutted out to create the end of the room. It was a large figure, nearly life-size—and though carved, he was also stained with red tint. He stood alone: part man, part bear, wearing a necklace of what might have been bear claws. He held a raised staff to challenge all comers. He was the only figure adorned with the blood red color, or with any color, for that matter. He was partly covered with adobe plaster, and slabs of dried stucco had fallen away and mounded in a heap beneath him, as if he were emerging from a tomb where he’d been sealed in the wall.

  The space was narrow, no more than four or five feet wide, and perhaps twelve feet in length. The rubble of a rock and plaster wall still held on the outer edge of this room. There was evidence of a firepit against the cliff face. There were no corn bins here, or anywhere nearby, no other dwelling-type ruins, not even any caves. There were no pot shards either. Suddenly I realized that this must have been a place of ceremony, a sort of kivalike space, with the legends recorded on the walls of the room, the venerated images of bear and deer—their sustenance and their strength—carved and pecked with loving reverence into the sanctuary itself. The one large, facelike image above all the others must certainly have represented the sun.

  What rituals had been held, what sacrifices offered in this ancient and sacred place? I closed my eyes and felt the presence of the People, who lived in the shoulders of the Earth Mother, revered the Sun Father, and took energy from the deer, fortitude from the bear, and warrior spirit from the badger. The remnants of their life here were immersed in mystery and enchantment, like the crypts beneath ancient cathedrals—dark and full of wonder, hidden, forbidden, steeped in secrecy and soul. I looked again at the Sun Father image and felt transformed by its radiance. Somehow, I knew I had seen something, felt something, sensed something that was an uncommon privilege. I turned to leave and said aloud, “Thank you.” My voice echoed in the ravine, and a chorus of thank-you’s added to mine.

  In those days, I didn’t know to leave an offering, but my expression of gratitude was given with the same spirit.

  When I made my way out of there and back to the canyon rim, I felt a new strength. The climb out was not as difficult as it had been coming in, yet still dangerous. But I felt a quiet calm. I had been somehow altered by what I had seen and where I had been.

  16

  Learning Pueblo Ways

  I should have been tired, but after the startling vision I’d seen on my run that evening, I returned to my cabin and moved and restacked the better part of a cord of firewood in the dark, trying to burn off some of my nervous energy. Mountain, too, remained disturbed—and rather than fall into a pleasant slumber as he normally did after a run—he paced back and forth with me as I carried the logs from one place to the other.

  Later that night, I tried to write. My collection of notes from my many visits with Momma Anna lay heaped on the table before me, and I sifted through them to avoid looking at the blank page awaiting proof of inspiration. Each time I had visited, Momma Anna told me a story or demonstrated a tradition, teaching me—in the course of performing her daily routines—about what she called “Indun Way.” She had warned me that writing these things down would surely bring the disapproval of the tribe, as they guarded their cultural traditions fiercely. Another author had written a book about the more beautiful and better-known Taos Pueblo, and its sister pueblo, Picuris—and those tribes had banned him from their reservations. Tanoah Pueblo joined together with Taos and Picuris and the other northern Indian pueblos and raised funds to buy all the copies of the book they could find, and then burned them in a colossal ceremonial bonfire while they circled the blaze, screeching war hoops and firing off rifle rounds. The book was now out of print. The publisher refused to reissue it, for fear of reprisal. The author never returned to Taos after his house was destroyed in a fire of suspicious origin.

  I promised Momma Anna that I would not write anything personal about anyone related to the tribe, nor would I include photographs, as the banned author had done. I told her I would not mention any names, and I would not reveal anything about the religion, the dances, or any other sensitive rituals, should I succeed in getting the book published.

  Momma Anna warned, “I not tell you religion. We not talk religion, we do. Religion not think, talk—religion doing. So you not hear me talk any religion. But they knew I tell you even this—stories, way to cook, all that—they stone me, maybe burn my house down. They take revenge my relatives. My grandchildren, even their children be made suffer. That man write that next other book, ’bout Taos and Picuris? Those ones he take picture, those ones talk to him—they make them leave, go live Utes. They not welcome among Tiwa, not here, not Picuris, not Taos Pueblo—not them, or any they family. It sad day when they leave the People, they can never come back.”

  “Why do you risk it?” I asked her.

  “No one teach old ways now. They say we tell—give away power. But Tanoah children not speak Indun language. My grandma’s stories, her grandma’s stories—these dying. Our ways dying, too—feasts, baking, what we cook, thing we do.” She paused for a moment, then looked me right in the eye. “I am told do this. You want learn. This way you learn, this writing. There something here you need.”

  And she was right about that. I needed what Momma Anna gave me—both with her teaching and by including me in her family. I was a child of a broken home, abandoned by my mother and neglected by my alcoholic father, who never recovered from my mother’s leaving, and later from a farm accident that left him minus one arm. Since I was raised alone by a man absorbed in his own misery on a solitary plot of land in Kansas, I felt drawn to the strong sense of custom, tradition, and especially family that I saw in the Pueblo Indians. I looked on in wonder at the joyful gatherings of extended relatives that gave every Tanoah child a host of aunties and uncles, cousins, grandparents, godparents, and even extra parents when he came of age and could choose them as teachers and protectors. In contrast my childhood was lonely, isolated—even during the school year when I would take a bus nineteen miles to a small, one-room schoolhouse for my education and then ride the same, near-empty bus home to the end of its route. A still, vacant house awaited me when I returned each day, my father out in the fields working, an endless list of chores inscribed in my mind beckoning me. In the late evenings, I cared for my father after he came in from the fields to commence his long nights of drinking. When the supper dishes were done, I escaped upstairs to my room to read and write and dream, always lonely, always alone.

  In writing a book, I was trying to capture—both for myself and for anyone who might read it—the guidance and teaching, the care, the presence, the love of a large family, the privilege of gathering with them for baking, cooking, feasting, even for burying the dead, which proved to be another forlorn chore for me when my father finally died.

  I sifted through recipes for red chili and greasy bread and cookies and prune pies, all of which were coupled with stories. I had notes and drawings from the day I’d watched the plastering of the old part of the pueblo, where Grandpa and Grandma lived—how all the females, from young girls to old women, hauled water in buckets from the river to mix with mud and straw in wheelbarrows, and then applied it bare-handed to the walls of their ancient structure. I’d drawn the brush arbors the tribe erected in a circle for the summer ceremonies, told of the day I went gathering piñon nuts with the women in the family. There were more notes from the day of the bake. I had made drawings of Yohe swabbing the ashes out, and sketched the long paddle that Serena used as a peel to place and extr
act the loaves from the hot caves. Then I had jotted down how the women threw in day-old sliced white bread to toast on the hot stones after the handmade loaves were done baking, and later made supa, or bread pudding, with the toast—a delicacy rich with raisins and caramel sauce.

  I sorted through these stacks of myths and stories that my pueblo mother had shared with me. I pulled out one sheet of paper and studied what I had written there. Two words caught my attention, and I read through my notes:

  It is late afternoon, and Momma Anna is making posole, a rich venison stew made of plump dried kernels of hominy, elk meat, and green chiles. As she pokes at the iron skillet full of frying meat, she tells me that the men in the family are away gathering feathers for the making of prayer sticks and will be hungry when they return. I am sitting at her kitchen table writing as she browns the elk meat while the hominy bubbles in a pot with the animal’s bones. “Those men. Their hands gonna be red, red, red,” she mutters, shaking her head and pressing her lips together with disgust. “They get red on everything, no matter I tell them hundred times, wash hands.”

  “Why will their hands be red?” I ask.

  She grabs a long stick and stirs at the cauldron of posole. “They make eagle feathers, give to Red Bear.”

  I jumped up from my own table in my cabin and dropped the paper on the pile before me. I hurried to the door and grabbed my jean jacket. Mountain, who had been dreaming restlessly on the floor beneath my feet, rose to join me. I reached down to pet him, then went to the refrigerator and removed the big bone Jesse had given me. The wolf leaped up and sat before me as I unwrapped it, a long strand of drool growing from his lip. I handed it to him, and though he was clearly excited by the juicy treat, he took it almost reluctantly. He knew the drill; this meant I was leaving.