The Four Corners

It’s a daunting climb to Mesa Verde’s Balcony House, up the steep, 60-foot ladder set against a dizzying slab of slickrock. Below, red rock cliffs plummet several hundred feet further. My admiration for the climbing talents of the ancient Anasazi, who climbed with only minimal handholds on the bare rock, rises with each step. At the top, a stone complex of more than 40 rooms built over two stories huddles in a vast, grotto-like alcove in the sandstone wall.

With its remarkable examples of Anasazi architecture and culture, Mesa Verde National Park is a good place to begin exploring native cultures of the Southwest. From its earliest ruins built around 500 A.D. to its most sophisticated housing built near the end of the 13th century, the ancient Puebloans of Mesa Verde evolved from a hunting and gathering culture living in crude pit houses to a relatively complex people who, due probably to drought and over-population, moved to the south and west.

“The architecture here is reminiscent of Hopi pueblos built centuries later,” a National Park ranger says of such features as second-story balconies and a balustrade on the edge of the cliff. “The people who built Mesa Verde didn’t just disappear in the 1200s, but carried their knowledge elsewhere and evolved.” With that in mind, I decided to spend a week exploring the Four Corners’ rich concentration of prehistoric sites, as many as 200 per square mile, and studying the people of Hopi land and their neighbors, the more recently arrived Navajos.

Red rock hills stand out above the great sage plain of the Navajo Nation. Eight-sided hogans, the traditional Navajo dwelling, seem dropped from space, dwarfed by the vastness of the land. Bright yellow school buses crisscross the desert like scurrying ants, returning their charges to the isolated homes that dot the countryside. At the mouth of the Canyon de Chelly, the struggling town of Chinle looks sad with its prison for youth, Christian fundamentalist missions and tattered trailers. I stop at the supermarket to buy beer and discover that the reservation is dry. “You can’t even possess liquor,” a man tells me, “but ask any teenager, and he can probably sell you beer on the spot.”

In the coolness of morning, I climb into a 4-wheel-drive, open-air “bus” and head up Chinle Wash, the sometime river that runs down the middle of Canyon de Chelly. On both sides, rock walls rise precipitously 1,000 feet over the canyon floor. The contrast of the rich reds of sandstone cliffs against deep blue sky and the bright green of huge cottonwood trees is stunning. As in Mesa Verde, deep alcoves have given shelter to families for hundreds of years, while the moist soil in the narrow valley has provided sustenance for crops and livestock. Today, the Navajo still grow corn, beans and alfalfa on the valley floor, and cattle and horses graze there.

In Window Rock, the capital of the Navajo Nation, I drop in on the Navajo Council Chambers and meet Harold Morgan, a 65-year-old legislative assistant. After 30 minutes of talking with him about Navajo politics and history, Morgan veers in a surprising direction. “My father was a hand trembler, a medicine man,” he says. “He could communicate with the spirit at any time, and he gave me the same ability. So what I know comes from my ancestors and from spirits talking through me.” When I ask a question, he becomes silent for a moment, as if waiting for an answer to arrive from elsewhere. When it comes, he chuckles to himself as though listening to some subtle comic only he can hear, and then he gives me the answer.

A few blocks away, at the Navajo Nation Museum, Education Curator Norman Bahe explains the reservation’s schism between traditionalists and progressives. “Our elders want to preserve our traditional ways,” he says, “but we also need to develop jobs and economic opportunities. A lot of our children are moving away from traditional ways. To balance that, we now have immersion programs that teach the children our songs, language, ceremonies and history. They even spend time with their grandparents and help them shepherd the flocks.”

From Window Rock, it is only an hour’s drive west to the three mesas where the Hopi have lived since they left their ancestral pueblos in the Four Corners area more than 700 years ago, perhaps in search of water and fresh land when drought and diminished resources made survival precarious. Numbered from east to west and several miles apart, the mesas extend like fingers into the desert below.

The Hopi are proud and protective of their culture, yet they are friendly and open, even playful. They protect their traditions perhaps more than any other tribe in the lower 48 states, to the point of prohibiting photography, tape-recording and sketching within the reservation. They are, however, willing to share their beliefs with interested newcomers. For me, they delineate the impressive pantheon of kachina spirits who they believe are responsible for all things that happen, including vital rainfall that keeps crops alive.

A Hopi woman, whose son carves kachinas that she sells in her small store, invites me to a dance for a successful harvest that evening in Shungopavi village on Second Mesa. Under a turquoise sky, the setting sun turns tendrils of cloud to flaming orange. To the south, the San Francisco Peaks, holy mountains to the Indians of the region, pierce the horizon across a desert punctuated by sharp buttes and rock pinnacles.

Soon, 50 women with ears of corn in hand and corn husks hanging from their hair emerge from a kiva, the traditional underground ceremonial site of Puebloan Indians, and file into a dusty plaza. While children play on the roof of a stone house that could have been built 400 years ago, the women chant a mesmerizing song, dancing in a circle from one foot to the other. The luminous air of the high desert and the rays of sun hanging low on the horizon transform the tired village into a timeless world.

Despite the issues that roil life on the “rez” and the ubiquity of American culture surrounding them, these ancient people manage to live in accord with their traditions and beliefs. As I traveled through this desolate, ravishing landscape, I realized that perhaps nowhere else in North America does the past and present so intermingle. There is no cell phone reception, no espresso machines or Internet cafes, nor even a cold beer at the end of a hot day. Often our clothes are the only props that plant us in the 20th century.

“Reverence for the land is our number one value,” Norm Bahe, educational curator of the Navajo Nation Museum, had told me. “We Navajos and our land are indistinguishable.” Harold Malcolm, the son of the hand trembler, put it even more succinctly: “The earth is our mother.”

Now a Park City citizen, Roger Toll has lived all over the world, writing travel articles for major magazines from most of those places. He was also editor of Snow Country magazine in the 1990s.