Navajo National Monument protected three well-preserved cliff dwellings. I had applied there because it offered an opportunity to teach at a deeper level. I wanted to explore teaching that could go deeper than a 45-minute campfire or nature walk. Betatakin, the most-accessible cliff dwelling, could only be visited on a three-hour tour limited to twenty people. The trail dropped seven hundred feet down into a beautiful aspen-lined sandstone canyon in which Betatakin nestled. Within its quiet, we would deepen our understanding of this place for an hour. Finally, we would hike back up the seven hundred feet (at 7000’ elevation) together.
Two or three times a season, it would be my turn to lead a pack horse with supplies out to Kiet Siel for a ten-day solo tour of duty. Kiet Siel, a crown jewel of the National Park Service, required a sixteen-mile round-trip walk or horseback ride to visit. Only twenty visitors per day were permitted to enter the ruin in groups of five or less.
The ranger out there lived in a pre-fab log hogan with a front porch wrapped around 60 degrees of it. No electricity. Propane refrigerator. Composting toilet. Our water was a spring about two hundred yards away at the bottom of the thirty-foot deep arroyo. (Arroyos are gullied streambeds in arid regions. Many have cut down into otherwise broad, level terrain. Many are seasonally dry. Kiet Siel’s always had a broad, inch-deep flow.)
(Lots of good pictures of the arroyo (which one hikes along to get there) and of Kiet Siel at this site: https://www.flickr.com/photos/alanenglish/albums/72157631169582058)
In the cool shade of each morning, before the sun rose above the canyon walls, I would carry two five-gallon, black plastic jerry cans down to the pipe coming out of the side of the arroyo and let the slow-flowing spring fill one and then the other. I would stand straight between the two cans, bend my knees, grasp the handles, and lift straight up, exulting in the feel of 80 pounds of water pulling straight down through my muscular-skeletal frame. The most challenging part was right at the beginning, carrying the water up the loose, sliding sand of the trail to the top of the arroyo. There I would take a rest, enjoying the beauty of the morning canyon around me. Then, bending the knees again, rising and carrying the water back to the hogan and up the trail behind it to the storage tank that gravity-fed the faucet at the hogan’s sink.
I loved the discipline of doing that every morning. It was like a meditation. It was like earning my daily keep to live within this beautiful place. I would always leave the storage tank topped off for the next ranger. Also, it gave me a kinesthetic appreciation throughout the day of every drop of water that came out of that kitchen faucet. (Two ways to raise the Upper Level of flow: Increase the inflow of water up to that tank; decrease the outflow down out of that tank.) One didn’t let that hand-carried water run while brushing teeth, only when rinsing off the brush. But on the other hand, every sip of cold fresh water sliding down my throat had been well-earned.
In the late morning, a pair of ravens would fly up the canyon, announcing that the day’s visitors were coming up the canyon. The people would arrive about ten to twenty minutes after this raven announcement. I gave a Kiet Siel tour to a couple of Israelis. They were asking a lot of questions about the inhabitants’ social structure and the names of their leaders and their history, and I kept saying variations of “we don’t know.” I could feel irritation growing within them that they had walked eight miles out here only to be stuck with an ignorant ranger who didn’t know even the basics of the place. And then I realized what was happening. They were from Israel, where thousands of years of history had been written down. The culture that built Kiet Siel (whom archaeologists call the Anasazi) did not have writing. These dwellings have no written record for understanding. We have the architecture (type of doors and rooms, evidence of smoke-blackening), tree ring dating, oral history of their probable descendants. Broken pottery and small corn cobs still lie scattered about. That is some of what we have to go by. Trying to understand these places leads us straight into a thicket of cultural assumptions. Which assumptions are generalizable to these people? Which are not? How was being human in this place back then different from being human now?
For me, the cliff dwellings were more valuable as a place to explore these questions rather than tell answers. And the setting of Kiet Siel was so beautiful. I really wanted people to be present in this unique place. Only five people at a time could go up with the ranger for a tour through the right half of the town. Sometimes, if there was no one else waiting, we would sit up there in a wide-roaming philosophical discussion about culture for two or three hours. I was opening to a more intimate form of Socratic education, rich with engaging questions, responsive give and take, and mutual inspiration.
In small groups of five, it was easy to create this depth. At Betatakin with twenty people, it was harder but still possible. One time the tour was going magnificently with twenty people. Nearing the end of the tour, I brought them to the center of Betatakin to sit. The center is a wonderful place to sit quietly because the curved sandstone alcove, 450 feet high and 300 feet across, acts like a parabolic reflector, a giant ear focusing sound towards the center. You can hear the trickle of water at the spring near the ruin, lizards scurrying in the dried oak leaves, a breeze in the aspen trees in the canyon beyond. You sit within a space that is shaded and cool on summer days when the sun is high but sunny and warm on winter days when the sun is low. It’s a special place, and there I brought the group to stillness and gently laid out the question for them to drift away on: What would it have been like to live your life within this space? The group settled quietly into that question, looking up within this incredible space. A contemplative presence grew palpable.
Until one person, in a voice too loud, answered, “It must have been really boring here without a TV or stereo.” That comment was like a bullet through a hot air balloon; the upward spirit of the group started to sag towards the ground. What could I do? I’m the ranger; how can I restore the feeling I had wanted to cultivate? I couldn’t ignore the comment; it had done its damage and the group was sinking fast. If I told the man to shut up, that would totally shut down the energy. If I tried responding to the comment, that would lead the whole group’s energy off into ranger lecture and also end the moment. I didn’t know what to do. It was then that Raven appeared.
Ravens are large, all-black birds. They are the largest members of the crow and jay family, which are some of the smartest animals in the world, somewhere between dogs and primates. I once came upon a raven sitting on a branch talking to itself at length. Raven plays a prominent role in many Native American stories. You are never quite sure what you might experience with a raven.
Raven came flying up the canyon and into the alcove above us. The alcove amplified the “whooshes” of its powerful wings as it circled three times above us. Raven flew up to the roof of the alcove and, reaching upwards with its talons, grabbed hold of a flake of rock and hung there, suspended, upside down like a bat, looking down at us hundreds of feet below. It hung there several seconds and then let go with one foot and dangled up there by its other foot, all the time staring intently down at us with a glistening eye. It released its grip, dropped, and glided out of the now silence-restored town.
What was it like to live in a place without a TV or stereo? Like that. What we just did.
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