The Vanished House

Delta, Colorado

I have just finished eating a fresh apricot, and its sweet, juicy flavor and plum-like texture brought back memories of the apricot tree in back of the house I once owned in Delta, a small ranching town in western Colorado.

The tree was right behind the old white-clapboard carriage-house. It bore a lot of fruit, sometimes massive amounts that we’d dutifully pick and give away, eating only the best. My daughters Isadora and Ursula, who were four months and two years old respectively when we moved into the Delta house, loved to climb that tree, ascending its many branches to nearly the top, where the most tasteful fruit grew. Across the yard there was a crab apple tree. Though we never made use of its fruit, the birds certainly did. The girls also climbed that tree, though the branches were smaller and more tentative. Indeed, it was from the crabapple tree that Ursula fell and broke her arm when she was seven.

The house itself, like the carriage-house, was a white clapboard, two-floor structure about a century old. The dining room was the girls’ bedroom, and they basically had most of the first floor to play their pretend-games, construct elaborate structures of colored yarn and paper cutouts, and send their pet guinea-pigs for rides on the .027 gauge Lionel train set. The kitchen, with its white-painted wood cupboards and Roman numeral clock forever stuck at 10:24, faced west, and I would often sit in the big stuffed armchair we placed in its corner and contemplate the great rise of land that comprises the Uncompahgre Plateau out there beyond the back yard. Upstairs was the attic – a compendium of half-broken furniture, rolled up posters, and dusty boxes. From its back window Ursula, insulated from the frightening noise, used to view the fireworks that roared up from nearby Confluence Park.

From the glassed-in front porch, we could watch the great Southern Pacific trains roll past just on the other side of the street, their mighty diesel engines rumbling like deep-earth tremors. And past the porch stood the tall, heavy-trunked catalpa tree, which the girls also climbed. From its massive fork they could watch the carnival assemble on the Gunnison River flats beyond the grain elevators, the one that came every year on Ursula’s birthday, with its Ferris wheel, rocket-ride, and miniature dragon rollercoaster.

Not all my memories of the Delta house are fond ones. After all, it is where my first marriage fell apart, and it was the scene of many bitter arguments. But for the most part, it was a place of happiness and delight, especially for my daughters, who lived there for seven of their most formative years before moving to Grand Junction, a mid-sized city to the northwest of Delta.

One day about three years ago, when Ursula was 21, she and I were passing through Delta on our way home to Grand Junction, so we thought we would visit the old home. We turned left on 1^st Street, and headed west for Columbia, where the house stood. When we got to the tracks by the grain elevators, I stopped in confusion. Where was the house? Instead of the row of old homes with great trees and sun-filled yards, there was the concrete and stone arc of a highway bridge, taking a bypass route over the train-tracks and around the town. Everything – the apricot tree, crab apple tree, sunflower garden, catalpa tree, glassed-in porch, attic of dusty wonders, mysterious stairway, bedroom, kitchen, dining room, and living room with its echoes of children playing and electric trains running – all of it was gone, vaporized, seized by time and progress and cast into oblivion.

I drove along the Frontage Road and pulled over on Silver Street, which used to be behind our house on the other side of a dirt alley. We both got out and stared at the unreal, almost futuristic structure. I was stunned. Ursula began to softly weep. All of those seven years were now simply and absolutely a memory, for the physical structure was gone, eliminated for an easy way to skirt the town – a vanished house.

Summer Snow

Grand Junction, Colorado

My Journeys with Myla, pt. 3

Note: This is the third of a sequence of blog entries concerning my travels with Myla, a superb dog of uncertain breed (we think she’s half rat terrier and half dachshund) who was found barely surviving on the streets of Grand Junction and rescued by a group called Grand Rivers Humane. We adopted her in the autumn of 2013, and she has been a beloved part of our family ever since.

Recently, as my dog Myla and I have been walking the nearby trails that pass through the cottonwood bosque lining the Colorado River, we have been experiencing two early summer Southwestern phenomena – the sweet, honeysuckle scent of blossoming Russian olive trees and the heavy “snowfall” produced by the proliferation of seeds from the cottonwood tree.

The first of these, the aroma of the Russian olive blossoms, only concerns me, as far as I can tell. Myla probably detects the scent, but I can’t imagine it has any importance in her perpetual hunt for lizards, rabbits, chipmunks, and squirrels. However, she does, surprisingly, enjoy eating the small, hard “olives” that drop from the tree in September.

On the other hand, the annual inundation of cottonwood seeds, or “snow,” certainly does affect Myla. When these seeds are at their height, covering the ground with white drifts of parachute seeds, Myla gets them all over her nose and face. This especially happens when she dashes into a sagebrush patch or a tangle of dead branches after some reptile or lagomorph. After these excursions, Myla often emerges with a face full of cottonwood fluff.

The Russian olive originated in western Asia, and was introduced into western America as an ornamental tree in the late 19^th century. While it is a beautiful tree, with silver-green leaves and buttery yellow flowers, it is an invasive species that tends to crowd out native trees and plants. So, while I find the tree delightful, I reluctantly agree with those who wish to diminish the tree’s presence in the western landscape so that the native riparian environment can be reestablished.

Conversely, the cottonwood tree is native to the Southwest and plays a vital role in the region’s river basin ecology. Sadly, the cottonwood is under assault from human development and the widespread growth of invasive, western Asian plants like the tamarisk and the Russian olive.

So, while I enjoy both the sweet scent of Russian olive blossoms and the strange, unseasonal flurries of cottonwood seeds, the former should be a fading Southwestern scent, and the “snowdrifts” should be piling higher. As well, Myla might do without her Russian olive snacks in the fall.

The Towers at Night

Grand Junction, Colorado

There’s a certain place in my backyard, in between the glass-topped table and my tool shed, where, at night, in the silence of a small city at midnight, under a near full moon painting the sunflowers with the white light of transcendence, I can stand and see, far off to the west, the double radio towers that stand on a distant arm of the Uncompahgre Plateau. They each hold three red lights. The bottom ones are steady; the top ones flash a warning to the dazed pilots of nighttime aircraft.

These towers remind me of when I was a child and my father would drive us from the rural outback of upstate New York across the Alleghany Plateau to Binghamton – a city, like Grand Junction, that rests in a long valley where two rivers meet. And there, high on the far hills beyond the city, stood similar radio towers, three of them, with the same arrangement of red lights. When I was young, those towers held the same magic for me as the science-fiction novels I devoured, evoking a world of wondrous technology, so different from the farmlands and forests where I lived.

Today, from my Grand Junction backyard, the paired radio towers of the Uncompahgre are a far off, mysterious sight, a fine accompaniment to the shadows of mulberry leaves on the white shed, cast by the twin lights of the moon and a nearby streetlamp. If my wife is still awake, the five-sided window high up on the bedroom wall blazes forth with a light that rivals even Luna’s glow.

A New Canyon

Uncompahgre Plateau, Colorado

My Journeys with Myla, pt. 2

Note: This is the second of a sequence of blog entries concerning my travels with Myla, a superb dog of uncertain breed (we think she’s half rat terrier and half dachshund) who was found barely surviving on the streets of Grand Junction and rescued by a group called Grand Rivers Humane. We adopted her in the autumn of 2013, and she has been a beloved part of our family ever since.

I am midway up a winding, narrow sandstone canyon on the northern reaches of the Uncompahgre Plateau. This canyon is new to me, which is a situation that is always special – I have never before seen these cliff walls with their bands of salmon and ivory, wind-carved caves, spherical swallow nests, and scattered junipers, pinions, and sage. The sand on the canyon floor is smooth and damp, and small ovals of water still collect in the carved stone basins. They provide water for Myla to drink, and this saves on the water in my steel bottle, its shining cylinder bright in the high sun. An occasional orange and brown butterfly drifts in the still air, the first of the season. I sit on a granite slab that centuries of massive storms have tumbled down canyon from the mysterious heights above. From there I watch the waning crescent moon, a smile-shaped rim of white world so pale it nearly vanishes into the pure blue sky. It is setting, and the high walls of the plateau, like the prow of a great ship, will soon receive it, well before the fall of night. I am tired from the climb up to the canyon’s mouth from the basin floor, and I am content to rest on the granite block. But Myla is still filled with energy, and hunts lizards, digs at the undersides of rock, explores the ledges, and even flushes a rabbit – a brown streak of fur vanishing into a tangle of brush and dead juniper, well ahead of Myla’s open jaws.

The new canyon, the moon, the butterflies, the excited dog – it all becomes a moment of pure joy, a simple but wondrous experience in the American Southwest.

Watchers of the Sky

Moab, Utah

I recently went hiking in eastern Utah with my daughters, Ursula and Isadora, to a canyon hidden from the broad plain which holds Moab’s southern stretches by a series of high stone bluffs. A stream runs through this canyon, strong flowing and flushed with water during this unusually wet summer here on the northern edge of the Colorado Plateau.

Parowan Gap

I have been to this canyon several times before and had always followed a trail downstream, but on this journey, I decided to go upstream, walking along a jeep road instead. The scenery was marvelous – high sandstone mounds and cliffs, moss covered seeps, cottonwoods, vast expanses of sage, and the ever present juniper. A falcon flew overhead, and now and then jackrabbits dashed across the path.

To our delight, we discovered a broad waterfall plunging about fifteen feet down a stone ledge. But even more exciting, there was a series of pictograph and petroglyph panels stretching about 100 yards along the clear faces of a high sandstone bluff. I am always thrilled to find ancient Indian rock art that is new to me, but one panel in particular drew my attention, for it held astronomical images that were remarkably similar to those found in Parowan Gap, about 300 miles to the west.

Parowan Gap

One of the most important petroglyph sites in the American Southwest, Utah’s Parowan Gap is a deep, V shaped cut or pass in a volcanic ridge that separates the Great Basin Desert from the mountainous western reaches of the Colorado Plateau. This cut is perfectly aligned so that its eastern opening directly faces the rising sun on the Summer Solstice, and its western opening the setting sun on the Winter Solstice.

A millennia ago, the Fremont Indians, named for the explorer who discovered their artifacts, used Parowan Gap as an observatory, documenting the cyclic patterns of the sun, moon, and Venus in hundreds of petroglyphs carved in the stone faces throughout the cut. The Fremont, who created this visual record of astronomical and mythological data, were contemporaries with the Great House Anasazi of Chaco Canyon in New Mexico and the mound builders of Cahokia, the vast civilization centered on the Mississippi near St. Louis. However, being more dependent on hunting, the Fremont dwelled in humble villages of brush houses or single-story stone structures, directing their potential architectural energies into religious ceremony and extensive petroglyph sites like those at Parowan Gap.

Parowan Gap

To find Parowan Gap style images on the other side of Utah demonstrated that the Fremont possessed a remarkable cultural continuity. Here in this hidden canyon near Moab, I found a rectangular set of 13 lines and a shaman figure holding a wheel with thirteen sections. Both are probably calendars depicting the thirteen “month” lunar cycle. There was also a small solid circle within a larger circle. 

Anthropologists believe that similar images at Parowan Gap represent the sun at solstice. And most exciting, there was a star shape next to a crescent moon, an image that appears in a number of petroglyph sites in the American Southwest and is thought to represent the supernova in Taurus, which burst forth in 1054 C.E. and appeared next to the crescent moon at its height.

Turning from the petroglyphs, I could see that from this spot, there was a clear view of the sky to the east and northeast – a good place to observe the position of the rising sun, moon, and Venus, since the stone mounds and bluffs create distinctive shapes to note where the celestial orbs had emerged from the horizon.

We were standing at the very site where a thousand years ago astronomer-priests measured the skies and recorded its rhythms in images chipped out of the darkly varnished stone face. Peering up at the blue skies, one could feel the passing of centuries, and the eternal round of the heavens.

Postscript

Parowan Gap

The petroglyph panel near Moab that I describe above is close to a popular jeep trail, and a large section of it has been nearly destroyed by graffiti and defacement. Unfortunately, the section that is nearly obliterated holds Archaic Indian pictographs, which are quite rare and may be 4,000-5,000 years old. Therefore, the excitement I felt at discovering the Parowan Gap style petroglyphs was tempered by a feeling of deep sadness at the tragic and widespread destruction of American Indian artifacts in the Southwest and beyond.

Essayist Barry Lopez brilliantly expresses the depth of this tragedy in his essay “The Stone Horse,” found in his collection Crossing Open Ground (Vintage Books, 1989): “The vandals, the few who crowbar rock art off the desert’s walls, who dig up graves, who punish the ground that holds intaglios, are people who devour history. Their self-centered scorn, their disrespect for ideas and images beyond their ken, create the awful atmosphere of loose ends in which totalitarianism thrives, in which the past is merely curious or wrong.”