“Peaches, apples, plums, pears, apricots.” He says it once and then again because someone didn’t hear it the first time. “This is where we plant peaches, apples, plums, pears, apricots.”
Always the same order. An incantation. The rise and fall of his voice. The birth of the fruit. Then the harvest. They plant the seed, water the tree, watch it grow. Do it again. And do it again. Peaches, apples, plums, pears, apricots.
He is our guide, Benjamin, and he is leading us through Canyon de Chelly — an enormous chasm that opens out of the landscape, just past the Best Western and the Holiday Inn, to take us deep, deep, deep into the past, into the hidden mysteries of Nature. It is so glorious. The rocks are sun-soaked. Orangey red. Is it Pantone 152 perhaps? Sheer here. Bulbous there. With glades of trees at the base. And a meandering sand bed, once a river — a torrent of water (Now you see it, now you don’t) — that brings particulate matter from further north and deposits it here. Over and over again.
It is tough going for our Jeep. But not impossible. Would that we were on horseback. But after many hours on a motorcycle, that is not so appealing.
Peaches, apples, plums, pears, apricots. It seems impossible. How does one grow such exotic fruits in this parsimonious soil? How does one reconcile all that fecundity with the cold hard abandoned surfaces of the Anasasi cliff dwellings whose remains are nestled in hollowed out cavities of rock a third of the way up these walls? That’s where Benjamin’s ancestors lived in the centuries before his nieces and nephews and aunts and uncles — Benjamin is related to everyone — decided the cliff dwellings were too difficult to access and instead took up residence on the ground, in kivas and shade houses.
This, not that, is my dream house.
The red canyon rock surrounds us on all sides. We are swallowed up by it. But happy and content. Despite the fact that visitors are standing on the rim, looking down on us in our orangey red fishbowl, we feel safe and protected in the saturated quiet and stillness. We are in Nature’s arms, if you will.
The red rock canyon is not completely red. Where rain has dribbled and run and poured down on all sides, the red sand has melted away and exposed the black manganese lying just below the surface. “My mother called those rain marks hair,” says Benjamin, “Nature’s hair.” And now that he has said it, it is all we see. Tresses here. Strands there. Long black straight and shining. We shall see it again, the following day, in the beautiful waist-length hair of the Indian Ranger at the Canyon de Chelly Visitors’ Center.
The rock is not an it, I realize. The rock is a she. A woman, with feelings and thoughts and stories to tell.
“You see that rock over there?” It is a question Benjamin asks many times. And we always say yes, in eager anticipation of what will come next. "We call that Laughing Bear. We call that Sitting Duck. We call that Barking Dog." We hadn’t been thinking about the masses in quite that way, up until now, but from this moment on it’s impossible to stop.
Echoes of otherness everywhere we look. The abstract petroglyphs he shows us, using a shard of mirror to capture the Sun’s laser-like pointing finger, highlight lines and shapes. A snake? I see it now. Yes, a man on horseback. And isn’t that a figure 8? Infinity?Benjamin intones: "the two circles, stacked one on the other, is the Indian symbol for the place below the earth, from which we came, and the place above the ground, where we will spend the rest of our days."
Peaches, apples, plums, pears, apricots, I remind myself. Life to death. Death to life. The circle cannot be broken. At least we hope. Let us pray.
Days later, I drop a Mentos mint on the ground. You know that nasty habit they have of falling from the cylindrical wrapper just before you pop them in your mouth. I step on it. Squash it, just for fun. And it fractures along its mint-y fault lines to become a bear’s paw. A footprint in the sand. Benjamin would be proud of me. I am learning to read. I never would have noticed something like that before.
I am flying through Arizona and the Four Corners landscape on the back of a motorcycle — a passenger, not the driver. I have time on my hands, nothing to do but be in the moment, watch my thoughts rise and fall. And nothing to write on, nothing to capture these thoughts, but a cheap ball point pen stolen from the motel and my bare hands. It strikes me, not for the first time, that the west is nothing like the east. In the west, my thoughts roll; back home they roil. Here they undulate up through Benjamin’s figure 8 and back down. Up and over; over and down. In the east, back home, they erupt like petty volcanoes, rushing and spilling and making a mess.
I am at peace in this place. Is it sacred perhaps? Or just so very different from whence I’ve come. Peaches, apples, plums, pears, apricots. I am mesmerized. Caught in the spell of this alien landscape, this dry heat.
