I spent more than six months a while ago exploring Navajo Nation, doing research for a book about…read morethe prehistoric predecessors of the Navajo, the Anasazi (or, "Ancient Ones," as the current occupants of the Four Corners region of the American southwest called them).
When the Navajo arrived about 500 years ago, they encountered cliff dwellings in ruined and deserted adobe mud brick villages, but no one who had ever actually lived there. Those people were gone without leaving any notes other than petroglyphs on the high sandstone cliff walls in every direction. Clearly, they had a lot to say, but no written language to preserve their ideas. It was for those who came later to interpret the stone drawings. My curiosity drove me to investigate these earlier occupants of this rugged dessert landscape and conjecture where they had gone.
Most of my time was spent with Kayenta or Chinle as a base of operations, and a rented 4WD to carry me to the most remote parts of the Nation in Utah (Monument Valley) and Arizona (Canyon de Chelly). I always hired local guides to escort me into the backcountry where the most extremely isolated ruins were hidden. Those men and women knew all the folklore and often owned land up in the dry washes where they pastured their sheep in summer. We would drive off road as far as we could push the transmission, and hike for miles up and down the canyons until we reached a ruin either I had asked about, or they knew from experience. We encountered rattlesnakes, coyotes, wild donkeys and cattle carcasses stuck in quicksand, half eaten by opportunistic predators.
At more than 27,000 square miles, there was much to explore, and more that I would never find. Still, the guides became friends, who I would hire again and again, and they looked forward to seeing me, knowing I respected their lifestyle, culture, and was a paying customer.
On one occasion while crawling through a large ruin with dozens of multilevel houses with dried food still sitting on wooden tables, facing the southern sun, I rested on a low stone wall contemplating who had lived there and what their lives must have been like. My guide, Johnny Black, whose family had been responsible for protecting this site for generations, saw me lost in thought, and whispered the most important thing I had heard in all my time in the Nation, and ultimately what became the key to my interpretation of this world.
He said that his grandfather had brought him there as a boy, and explained to him that in reality the Anasazi hadn't passed on into history, but were still there. If he was silent and aware, he would find them. As keepers of the site, this was passed to every generation over the centuries.
Not everyone was gifted enough to actually see them, but all were knowledgeable enough to respect and care for even what their eyes could not see and their ears could not hear.
If they were quiet and still within, their senses would divine their presence.
It was enough of a clue for me.
