Myla: Petroglyph Hunter

Uncompahgre Plateau, Colorado

My Journeys with Myla, pt. 4

Note: This is the fourth in 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.

We’ve had Myla for nearly three years now, and we’ve done a lot of exploring together. During the first year of our journeys, I discovered that Myla is not only a lizard-hunter, but she is a petroglyph-hunter as well.

It was late spring of 2014, and Myla and I were taking a hike in one of my favorite canyons on the Uncompahgre Plateau. (I’m not going to name the canyon for reasons that will become clear.) At the time of this hike, I knew there were petroglyphs in this canyon, but I had never found them, despite hiking there a good ten to twelve times a year. Well, this one spring day, we were heading down canyon, following the main trail as usual, when Myla started up a dusty side path that climbed towards the western cliff face. I almost called her back, but decided to follow instead. We passed through dense patches of sagebrush and juniper, and soon arrived at a tumble of sandstone boulders and debris at the base of the cliff. To my surprise, I could just make out that past these boulders the cliff face held a set of petroglyphs. Myla had discovered the mysterious petroglyphs that I had failed to find for nearly twenty years!

We scrambled atop the boulders closest to the cliff, and there they were, pecked out of the smooth sandstone surface centuries ago – several horned shaman around two foot high, and two abstract shapes built on a set of arcs. From their style and age, I would guess they were either late Fremont or early Ute Indian figures. It was a fairly modest display, but I was nonetheless excited about finding them at long last. And I had Myla to thank for their discovery.

What saddened me, however, were several pieces of graffiti next to the petroglyphs, some drawn with charcoal-coated sticks from an old nearby campfire, but some, the far more destructive kind, scratched into the sandstone. These names, obscenities, and images of skulls were a violation of the sacred, a sacrilege equal to the defacement of a cathedral or synagogue.

Unfortunately, just a few days ago I went to the same petroglyph site, and the amount of graffiti at the site has tripled from when Myla first took me to them. I have watched this increase take place steadily over the past couple of years. It seems every time I visit the site, there’s another defacement, and the graffiti is starting to cover the petroglyphs themselves.

I have written about this problem before in this blog, when I described a petroglyph site near Moab, Utah (see “Watchers of the Skies” – February 18^th, 2016). As I did in that entry, I would like to quote National Book Award winning author Barry Lopez, who brilliantly expresses the depth of this tragedy in his essay “The Stone Horse,” from 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.”

East of Kayenta

Grand Junction, Colorado

Announcing the release of my new book – East of Kayenta – a collection of poetry from the heart of the American Southwest published by Turkey Buzzard Press.

John Macker, author of Disassembled Badlands, writes – “This is his best book of poetry so far: serene, immediate and full of passion.”

Arthur Stringer, author of Late Breaking, adds – “John Nizalowski’s new collection ranges wide, just like the American West, the center of this poet’s world. His highly allusive poems cross cultures and eras to blend the sacred and the profane into an abiding spiritual presence. . . . The music and the immediacy of the words can be haunting. Yet we are not lost, for the voice knows its way.”

Read the Stay Thirsty Magazine review by Gerald Hausman at http://www.staythirstymagazine.com/p/hausman-book-note.html[J1] 

Watch the Lithic Bookstore book release reading on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0tHP_gU-LI

Copies can be ordered from Lithic Books in Fruita, Colorado. To request a copy, please email Danny Rosen at danny@lithicpress.com

East of Kayenta by John Nizalowski  / $12.00 & shipping and handling / ISBN 0-945884-45-1

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 [J1]

The Sandstorm

Gray Mountain, Arizona

I was recently reading Coronado’s Children (The Southwest Press, 1930), J. Frank Dobie’s wonderful account of the lost mines and legendary treasures of the American Southwest, when I came across his classic description of a Mojave Desert sandstorm:

Nothing in nature is more maddening than a summer sandstorm. The thermometer mounts to 110, 120, even more degrees in the blazing sun. Then the wind rises and begins shifting the dunes. It moves them fifty feet, five hundred feet. Above the swirling, cutting sand the sun becomes a dim copper disc; then there is no sun. The peaks of arid mountains, generally so clearly defined in the distance, blur out. A man caught in the storm cannot see his own hand. At one place the wind scoops out sand until “bottom” is reached; at another it piles up sand into overwhelming crests. On the grazeable fringes of the desert the sand sometimes plays humorous tricks. It has [been known to] cover up a windmill.

This passage brought to mind the sandstorms I have encountered. While the sandstorms of the Colorado Plateau are nowhere near as devouring as those of the Mojave, they are still awesome phenomena. I once drove through a sandstorm near Thompson Springs, Utah that totally blotted out the road, creating a very dangerous situation. When the headlights of approaching cars become very dim orbs and the highway looks like a contiguous piece of the sand-blasted desert, then you are in deep trouble. It is tempting to pull over and stop, but this action places you in danger of being rammed from behind. The best strategy is to slow down, watch for snatches of revealed pavement, and keep plowing forward.

The most impressive sandstorm I’ve ever witnessed, I observed from a distance. I was hiking one very windy March day on the northern rim of the Uncompahgre Plateau, and I had a clear, unobstructed view of nearly the entire length of the Grand Valley about a thousand feet below. A massive cloud of rust-colored dust came pouring in from the west – billowing and twisting and crawling its way across the valley. It must have been going a good 40 mph as it followed the river and ultimately swallowed the city of Grand Junction in a turbulent, ground-hugging nutmeg-colored cloud.

My most recent encounter with a sandstorm was a few months past. I was driving through Arizona’s Painted Desert between Cameron and Gray Mountain, and the wind really picked up, sending horizontal layers of sand across the highway. Most of the time, those sand streams stayed down around the wheels, but for a good twenty minute stretch, they crept up around the windshield. And while they weren’t heavy enough to cause the road to vanish, they did plunge the world into a vague, gritty indefiniteness, like being in an abrasive fog.

As always, the sandstorm was an experience most strange – almost mystical, but certainly unnerving. 

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.