Return to Navaho

Alysia and I took a one-week vacation to the Southwest. We stayed three days at Navaho National Monument, the last National Park site I worked at. I haven’t been back there for about thirty years.

As we approached a mesa ahead, I wasn’t sure whether it was Black Mesa. As we traveled around it, another mesa came into view in the distance and the moment I saw that mesa, I knew it was Black Mesa. The identifying shape was still in my memory; I just couldn’t recall it on its own.

We set up camp in the evening and had dinner in the dusk. I sat in the dark a long time afterwards, allowing strange feelings to well up, realizing that this place was a hinge in my life. “32 and 40.” My first 32 years was an outward exploration culminating with 9 years in nature as a hitchhiking birdwatcher and then a seasonal NPS naturalist. The focus was on me. But at this place, I decided to try teaching (in LA !!!!!). The week before I left for LA, I experienced a series of thunderstorms that hooked me on my avocation of “rain walks.” The 40 years since are ones of building together with others: teaching, marriage, writing books, raising two daughters, starting and administering Chrysalis. Navaho National Monument was where I transitioned from youth to middle age, from self-seeking to serving others.

That evening I also was feeling the enormity of my 72 years. Alysia and I had driven for two days through the basin and range country with desert mountain cliffs composed of sedimentary rocks many millions of years old. A lifetime seems insignificant on that scale. But it is too easy to shunt all significant change into the “Millions of years” category. Significant change is happening within our lifetimes.

That afternoon, on our way to Navaho, we had taken a break at Lake Powell at an overlook of Wahweap Marina near Glen Canyon Dam. My grade school Weekly Reader had a cover picture of the building of that dam, a celebration of our command of the world. But downslope of me floated a marina of houseboats upon an emptying reservoir.

Seeing the houseboats down in a shrinking reservoir reminded me of tadpoles in a shrinking pool.

Western civilization is floundering as it crosses limits camouflaged by time lags. From the overlook, I could look across the dam to Page, AZ and see the bright, emerald-green of a well-watered desert golf course. We want to retreat to still being in command of the world. But time lags are coming due and significant changes are accumulating within our life spans. On the outskirts of Page, the Navaho Generating Station is gone (video of the 775′ smoke stacks coming down). The massive 2.25 GW coal-fired power plant that burned more than 20,000 tons of coal per day could not compete against increasingly cheaper gas and solar power plants.

The next morning at Navaho National Monument, I suddenly remembered (because I hadn’t thought of them for decades) the “plays” I had made here more than forty years ago. There’s a large section of mostly bare sandstone slickrock along the road to Tsegi Point.

Back when these canyons were first calling me to try creating what I now call upward spirals, I had gathered rocks and walked over the slickrock looking for places where I could wedge a rock into a crack. Perhaps during a rain, eroding sand might settle out behind these rock dams. The sand would absorb a bit more runoff than the crack otherwise could. That extra sandy soil and moisture might support a plant where formerly none could survive. Searching for a good place to place the rocks felt like looking for a good spot to move a chess piece so I called the placement of these rocks “plays.”

After breakfast, I walked out to the slickrock to see if any of my plays still existed. I could find only a few; most of the rocks must have been flushed by forty years of thunderstorms. But most of the remaining few did shelter plant life.

In all honesty, these are insignificant changes – especially given forty years. And yet, they were the beginning of my exploring a new relationship with this living world. They provide evidence that there might be something worth exploring in this direction.

Time and Significance. How much time does it take for something to become significant? In the long haul, is anything significant? I can stir Time and Significance into those questions but I think the more important ingredients are Direction and Consistency. Is there a direction one can navigate by and, if so, how consistently can one hew to that direction? Consistency of direction is the opposite of randomness. Randomness will keep cancelling its efforts out over time. Nothing will form or emerge. Consistency of direction, however, allows small changes to accumulate over time. This is important; direction is fundamental. Consistent movement in the wrong direction is worse than randomness. Most of my life since Navaho has been an attempt try finding a direction that creates possibilities and letting that sense of direction shape as much of my thoughts and actions as possible. Thank you, Navaho National Monument.

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