On the Back Roads (27 page)

“My maiden name is
Vigil,”
Ruby had said. I thought that an unusual caveat but said nothing about it until I began looking around the depot and reading captions under the pictures. There were pictures of Alex Vigil, the yard foreman, and of him and his crew struggling in the snow to put derailed equipment back on the track.

Along one wall is a diorama, a three-dimensional mini ature scene of the town as it was in 1946. Ruby pointed out the section-house where she was born, a wood-frame home with three bedrooms, one bath, and a woodstove. She said her dad brought home old creosote-treated ties for firewood. “Boy, did they ever burn!” Ruby remembered.

I examined the line of little white section-houses. “You say there were ten kids in your family?”

“We weren't all there at once.”

“It wasn't crowded?”

“Probably! We were also poor, but I didn't know it then.”

Ruby's dad and his crew, kept the railroad safe and operating for over half a century. The train ran once a day, up 2,233 feet of mountain and down again, connecting the remote towns of Durango, Mancos, Dolores, Rico, Telluride, and Ridgeway. None of them were or are significant cities of the West. But they are still there.

On a narrow-gauge piece of track, in front of the visitor's center, rests Galloping Goose Number Five. It is being restored, which it sorely needs. Built on the body of a 1926 Pierce-Arrow limousine, it earned its name bygalloping along the rails at the ungainly gait of a goose, so they say. From 1931 to about 1950, seven such one-car “motor-trains” carried passengers, mail, and light freight up and down the RGSRR system. One ran every day. It was a rough ride. I was
told of a man who rode it from here to Stoner, a thirteen-mile trip. He refused to ride it back, so he walked.

As states go, Colorado and Texas are decisively different. Roads go up and down in one, into the suns et in the other. Texas is so big it takes dawn nearly an hour to cross it. Colorado is so high, parts of it have winter weather all year.

In the fall, right here by the Dolores River, they meet and connect. People from these two unrelated states share common ground.
Ground
literally, but more like
space,
as in vast, unrelenting, awesome, and wild. Whether it nurtures pine trees or cactus, space is the essence of the American West. It reduces a man to a common level and pushes him to a greater reliance on him self.

These are an unfettered sort here. They know their limits and those of the wilds. Otherwise they would not have come to these rugged mountains either as hunters or homesteaders.

A
nother thing about the American West: if John Wayne or Jimmy Stewart didn't tell us about it, then it never happened. As for the really olden days, like in the time of Moses or a few centuries afterward, everything supposedly happened on far-off continents. It fell to Charlton Heston and Cecil B. DeMille to fill us in on those. That's just the way it was. Or so we thought.

None of those emissaries of the Old West, nor their contemporaries like Randolph Scott and Henry Fonda, had ever heard of Mesa Verde. Nor Charlton Heston, for that matter. At least if they had, they never let on. As a result, millions of us grew up lacking a true perspective, the big picture of the Old West.

In fairness to history teachers, they certainly told us.
National Geographic
and
Life,
which everybody saw when I was kid, had pictures of the cliff houses here in Colorado. In fact, some of these prehistoric dwellings were still being discovered in the forties and fifties and were making news then.

Getting it from a flat page, however, was not the same. To have meaning and relevance, history had to be multi-dimensional, with music and fistfights. It had staying
power only if we learned it in the dark, from those extraordinary ladies and men who really lived it.

What happened here around a.d. 750, I think, got jumbled in the classroom with algebra formulas. It remained as knowledge probably just long enough for the final exam, at least in my case.

What's more, we could see it for ours elves: there was nothing out here but wide-open spaces. It was just cowboys and Indians, horses and buffalo. Nobody else was here or ever had been. That's just the way it was.

My history refresher began in the visitor center in Mancos, a town of 950 people in the southwest corner of Colorado. It started with coffee and zucchini bread served by the volunteer hostess, a retired stewardess from the DC-6 days, when first class was the whole plane. She also gave me a big napkin decorated with the brands of the cattle ranches in “Four Corner Country.” (The Four Corners are eighty miles southwest of here in the Navajo Nation. It's the only spot in our country where four states meet: Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah.)

Handing me brochures, she tossed off a comment. “More people lived here 1,500 years ago than now, more than twice as many, even at the peak of our tourist season.”

“Lived where?” I asked, not sure what she had said.

“Here in Montezuma County.”

“Where in Montezuma County?”

“Mostly up there on the mesa,” she pointed out the window, “now Mesa Verde National Park. It's in those brochures.”

They were the ancestral Puebloans, or
Anasazi,
a Navajo word meaning “the ancient ones,” sometimes interpreted as “the ancient enemies.” They arrived here about a.d. 400, give or take a few centuries. They mysteriously went away, leaving as if on vacation, around a.d. 1500. Having no known enemies, they farmed the mesa tops and hunted the canyons. Growing in numbers to maybe 5,000, they first lived in cleverly vented, covered holes in the ground that we latecomers
call pit houses. Later they built stone dwellings using stone tools.

Most lived on the mesa, but a few lived in elaborate stone villages built into the sheltered recesses of canyon walls. These cliff dwellings became their legacy. Some of them are still 90 per cent in tact. Interestingly, these dwellings were discovered less than a hundred years ago by a couple of cowboys looking for stray cattle. Unlike many of our “discoveries” in the West, the Indians never told anyone about them. Some speculate that Mesa Verde was forbidden land in the Indian world, never to be discussed or visited, the remains of an ancient culture best left alone.

Despite decades of careful excavation and analysis, archaeologists say we will never know the whole story of the Anasazi. They left nothing scratched on rocks or in writing. Much that was important in their lives has perished.

Yet for all their silence, these ruins speak with a certain eloquence. They tell of people adept at building, artistic in their crafts, skillful in wresting a living from a difficult land. The Anasazi of Mesa Verde were apparently the heirs of a vigorous civilization that originated some where else. Their accomplishments in community living and the arts rank among the finest express ions of human culture in ancient America, if not the world.

Established as a national park in 1906, Mesa Verde was designated a World Heritage Culture Park in 1978 by UNESCO, an organization of the United Nations. So it is now a site of international significance. It ranks up there with the pyramids of Egypt, set aside to preserve the early works of human kind.

This day was quickly passing. I thanked the stewardess and headed for the mesa. It's only seven miles ahead. I looked for a RV park along the way. I found one that had shut down, another that might just as well be. The campground inside the park at Morefield Village, I discovered, was closed for the win ter.

Towering over me was the mesa. The setting sun had turned it to rust. I imagined a city there, families living in a
crevice or a hole in the ground, comfortable, warm, probably wanting for little. Their spirits, looking down, surely chuckled. Here was I: frustrated for lack of a ready spot to plug in my motor home. I didn't need much. Just heat for the night, a market wrap-up on CNN, maybe a rerun of
Seinfeld,
a warm shower and coffee in the morning.

Near the park entrance on Highway 160, RVs situated up a rutted driveway looked friendly. It turned out to be the suburbia of Mesa Verde. Many of those who work at the park, for its private concessionaire, live right here. Since park jobs are seasonal, they spend the summer here, living conveniently in their RVs with hookups provided by their employer. Come the end of October, just a couple of days from now, they head elsewhere for the winter.

Gwen and Bob Bills were walking down the rutted road from their Bounder as I walked up. We met halfway. Within minutes, my luck turned for the better. Not only was I assured of hot coffee and a shower in the morning, but I was to see firsthand what John Wayne never showed me.

Retired from the corporate world, Gwen and Bob were tour guides. Tomorrow, Gwen was conducting an all-day tour, the last one of the year. I would join her. She loaded me with books and an overnight reading assignment. Then they pointed me to the A&A Mesa Verde RV Park next door, which I mistook earlier for just a mini-golf course and riding stable.

“Somehow I missed the sign,” I told Ray Huseby when I checked in.

Ray and his brother brought their dad and their families here three years ago to get their kids out of Denver. “It got so my son was scared to go to school,” Ray said. “They have really flowered here.” And well they should, with horses and dirt bikes and everywhere a nonthreatening wilderness in which to ride them.

Ray built not just a forty-five-site campground but a family park. Every night in the summer he hooks his tractor to a wagon, loads it with kids, and goes on a fossil hunt, leaving the adults to unwind around the campfire.

I met Gwen at the appointed 8:30 A.M. She had the heater running in the big Bluebird bus. The 1,000-foot climb, winding to the mesa top, took thirty minutes and made a noisy case for rear-mounted engines. Yelling over the dies el roar, Gwen said the park had a fire in August 1996 that uncovered 411 new archaeological sites. The firefighters on the ground were not too thrilled with the help they got from the water-dropping helicopters. It seems that they got their “water” from a sewage pool.

Gwen picked up her tour group at the Far View Lodge, the only motel in the park. The rest of the day was divided between today and fifteen centuries ago.

Some cliff houses we studied from across a canyon, others we stood next to and looked inside.

At the Spruce Tree House—each cliff dwelling has a name—Gwen told us that the Anasazi tossed their trash close by. Scraps of food, broken pottery, tools, anything unwanted went down the slope in front of their houses. Much of what we know about their daily life comes from their garbage heaps. The Anasazi also kept turkeys and dogs as pets but Gwen didn't say how we know that.

I did get some firsthand information, though, from park ranger Michael Groomer at Step House.

“We have a phone for emergencies,” he told me. “I got a call one day from a lady named Betty. She was with AT&T and wanted to talk with the resident at this number. I told her that they left 700 years ago. She just said, ‘Well, I'll call later.' I told her that I really did not expect them later, or anytime in the future. You know how those telemarketing people are. They don't give up. So she asked me to take a message. I told her, ‘Sure, but I don't have a stone to write with.' She went away.”

He said that the phone is hidden, but the line is visible in places. When visitors ask about it, he tells them that the cliff people had cable TV “You know what?” Michael laughed, “some people believe it!”

He went on: “They ask me why they built their cliff dwellings so far from the highway. And why the people back
then only built ruins. One guy asked me to settle an argument. He wondered if I knew at what elevation deer become elk. I am still wondering where that idea comes from. Of course, when I tell people the number of known archaeological sites here on the mesa, someone invariably asks me the number of unknown sites. I just say that we are still looking for them.” Jimmy Stewart would have loved it.

I
heard reports of snowstorms around me, so I headed south, deep into New Mexico. I stopped in Gall up, on the western edge of the state. Rusty and I walked around town. I made some instant coffee and decided that is all I would do here.

I turned east on Interstate 40 toward Albuquerque. New Mexico was new to me. This is the seventh state I have visited since I started this rambling trek last April. Seven states in seven months. Sounds like a slogan for a commercial tour direct or. But no travel agency could package this tour. Who would buy it? No American tourist, certainly. He wants seven states in seven days. Or better yet, a lifetime of adventure in two weeks, the thrills of risking his life without taking any risk at all.

For me, it's been perfect. Creating memories are what these days are for. Tomorrow, this day will be a memory. I will make the most of it while it's still here.

Alongside the road, big, gaudy signs overwhelm nature. Their black-on-yellow letters told where to buy. Along the bottoms red strips told how many miles to get there. Carved
onyx. Zuni silver. Cactus candy. Kachina dolls. Desert honey. The last one has a big arrow and the words Exit Here.

I followed the red arrow and parked by a historic marker in front of a curio shop, or trading post, as they like to call them. Spread before me was a painted fence of signs, behind which rose the tops of three fake teepees. Along with souvenirs, film, and a Navajo rug weaver, the fence advertised coffee at ten cents.

I got out to read the marker, carrying the remains of my coffee from Gallup. I was at an elevation of 7,275 feet, straddling the Continental Divide.

This was the same stony backbone of the North American continent that I stood upon at South Pass, Wyoming. But this spot has been gussied up. The marker reads: “Rainfall divides at this point. That falling on the west side flows into the Pacific Ocean; that falling on the east side flows into the Atlantic.” I did the natural thing, what any curious tourist would do. I poured the rest of my coffee on the great divide. It hit the ground and disappeared.