Road Trip: Flagstaff - Wupatki and Sunset Crater
1.
Here is a paradox: the older you get, the more rest you need. But, the older you are, the harder it is to sleep. Aches and pains keep you awake; worse, the monkey-mind races, sorting through old grievances, propounding worries, and, then, teasing you into impasses made from shame, fear, and disgust. It’s like the little box canyon uphill from the powwow grounds in Gallup, a draw clogged with fine, powdery sand the color of snow, stubby cliffs to the right and left that begin as low drifts of rock secured by tangles of sage and mesquite, but, then, rise imperceptibly to hip-high walls, then, cliffs that are above your head, and, at last, a sheer stone brink blocking your way, broken sandstone rims of rock that are not impressive, or beautiful in any way (this isn’t Antelope Canyon) but just too high and crumbly to ascend. Life is movement. You forge ahead, stumbling through the powder, either snow or dust that has accumulated underfoot, and, at last, find yourself in a walled pit.
So, resting in the bed under “heaven,” I am awake before I should be. There’s no point leaving this morning before dawn since the national monument that I intend to visit doesn’t open until 9:00. The place is only 31 miles a way and, so, I loiter in the room, read a novel (The Savage Detectives) and some poems by the Polish writer Wislawa Szymborska. I leave at 8:00 pm – with a stop for breakfast, this should get me to the Visitor Center a little after it opens.
2.
At the Burger King on old Highway 66, I’m squirting some ketchup on hashbrowns, seated in my car, when I see some slight misfortune developing in front of the strip mall nearby. The mall is shabby, with blind, dead shops, but anchored by a laundromat that is very much alive – despite the early hour, people are coming and going and I can see customers folding laundry behind the dusty floor to ceiling windows at the front of the place. A crippled man is hobbling across the parking lot, a shaggy desert rat in torn clothes shuffling behind his battered walker. A fat Hispanic woman hauls her basket of laundry from inside the laundromat, raises the back of her SUV to slide the clothes inside, and, then, gets distracted by her small child who has ventured out into the lane fronting the mall facade. She hurries forward, take the child by the hand, and pulls the kid into the SUV, getting behind the steering wheel and, then, putting the van in gear. She has forgotten to pull shut the trunk or rear door to the van and, as she starts forward, the wing of the door hinged to the top of the SUV remains open.
The crippled desert rat observes the SUV starting forward with its back gate open and gestures to the woman, then, pushes his walker forward in the hope of catching up with her. The woman sees the old drunk approaching, eyeing his figure in her side-mirror, and concludes that no good can come from an encounter with this man. So she accelerates forward and turns sharply to pull onto the highway with the SUV wide open at its rear. The old man stops dead on the asphalt and glares at the SUV as it shows brakelights, pausing before the woman pulls onto the highway.
What happens after this? Who knows? Perhaps, at the first stoplight, the woman will sense that something is wrong or some other motorist will honk at her or, perhaps, as she accelerates on the green, her brassieres and panties, her dresses and blouses and sweaters and socks will spill out all over the road.
3.
I turn at the sign that tells me that I am 81 miles from the Grand Canyon. This is Highway 89, north - south running across the high, vast, and empty Colorado plateau. There are four-lanes where the road leaves Flagstaff and the speed limit is 70, then, 75, and the highway is smooth and fast as ice, frictionless as I ascend through the tall pines and meadows up to a long, elegant ridge too dry for forest and, therefore, all grassland. The enormous white flank of the San Francisco Peaks rises to the west, glacial cirques overhead, and canyons full of snow dangling off the sides of the white tower, and an intricate terrain of cinder cones and lava fields lies to the east. Emerging from the trees at the top of the peak’s long, tilted shoulder, the country opens up before me, brown plain sloping very slightly downhill and extending to the horizon, a treeless steppe marked with cairns of broken rock and a low trapezoidal buttes. It seems as if you can see for fifty miles and the land appears to be totally empty. It’s a spectacle that lifts the heart.
4.
The turn-off toWupakti is below the ridge and the border of the national monument land is only a few yards east of the highway. A good blacktop road runs in that direction across the chaparral, dipping around big, bald bluffs rising as foothills to the black volcanic plateau above. (When I was here twenty years ago, the roads were graded gravel.) Some cut-offs wind toward indistinct outcrops that might be extruded patches of lava or ruins – it’s hard to ascertain in the grey-green distance. It’s still early, twenty minutes to nine when the visitor center opens, and, so, I take one of the side-roads north a couple miles to some broken walls and a tower like a (mostly) square-cut yellow dog-tooth built atop a squat pedestal of natural rock. The structure stands about a hundred yards from a little parking lot, across terrain strewn with chipped and crumbling sandstone blocks. Unlike Homolovi, I don’t see any conspicuous sprays of shards in the pebbles and dirt around the outcrop.
The ruin is called Wukoki – the names are Hopi – and looks like a fortress. The tower is partly intact, about 15 feet tall with an elegantly curved wall that skirts the edge of the low cliff on which the place is built. I suspect that the tower was defensive and, probably, aligned to establish line-of-sight contact with the other pueblos scattered across the rocky, rolling terrain. A sidewalk encircles the ruin, stranded like a ship on the desert, and in the lea of the sun raking across the land, where the shadows of the walls fall across the trail, it is cold, wintry and dark – the high elevation and thin air and the chill coming from the ground at this time of day create a mountain-top aspect to the pueblo. I admire the builders’ audacity; they have stacked several stone-block walls atop fissures in the Moenkopi sandstone formation. One of the walls seems to almost arch across the rift in the stone. Under the prow of the ruin, gullies run down to a watercourse clogged with white sand and tumbleweed. I am completely alone.
5.
The most impressive pueblo in the Monument sits on a flat sandstone terrace extruded from a steep bluff like the paw of a sphinx. This is the Wupatki ruin that gives the park its name, another long sailing vessel made from red rock, that seems, run aground on a ridge that flanks a shallow sandy canyon between the Visitor Center and the structure. A kiva with bench is cut into the side of the ridge under the parapets of the pueblo that is a maze of stone cells with walls rising two or three stories above the structure’s stone base. At the bottom of the hill, where the terrace-paw drops steeply into the gulch, there is a perfectly round enclosure, formed from cut blocks that are about waist-high. This is a rare feature, a ball-court. A few yards to the side of the ball-court, there’s a sort of target-shaped lid built from concrete and brick over a blow hole. (This masonry box over the pit was built in 1965 by the park service.) This is a deep fissure down into maze of lava tubes, cracks and caves that underlies the featureless plateau surface. True to its name, the blow-hole is puffing a gust of air out of the guts of the earth, a steady plume of chill wind rising over the opening carved in the concrete shield over the chimney dropping down into the caves. It’s impossible to know whether the ball-court and pueblo was built here because of the shaft alive with the earth’s breath or whether this feature developed later, eroding down into the caverns measureless to man under the nondescript round-shouldered gully after the village was abandoned. In other words, no one can tell whether the site’s proximity to the blow-hole is intentional or, merely, fortuitous. Since air is expelled from the shaft according to barometric pressure, this sort of feature could be used to predict the weather and, perhaps, as an indicator of rain – but whether the blow-hole had any significance of that sort is unknown. The Moenkopi sandstone in this place is weirdly anthropomorphic. Tangles and contorted heaps of eroded stone look like the figures in the Laocoon. Some of the rock is honeycombed with big fist-sized cavities that imitate the eye-sockets on gargantuan grey-yellow skulls.
When discovered by ranchers, this ruin was surprisingly intact, notwithstanding its abandonment 750 years ago. (I am unable to avoid the offensive nomenclature of “ruins” and “abandonment;” and, of course, the Hopi were well aware of the place with some families tracing their ancestors to site.) The first park-ranger guarding the ruins, lived with his wife and children in a couple rooms in the pueblo over which a roof had been built and plank siding affixed to the ancient walls. The ranger’s wife wrote a memoir about her experiences in this remote place in the 1920's; you can buy copies of the book in the Visitor Center.
In Hopi tradition, the name “Wupatki” means “where he cut a long thing.” The reference was to some sort of dispute in which a tribal leader denounced other members of the clan for failing to abide by proper ritual, good manners and etiquette – the Hopi have a highly developed code of social conduct. To draw attention to his concern that here life was proceeding out of balance, the man is said to “have cut a long thing”, a gesture of disapprobation.
In the Visitor Center museum, there are some display cases full of decaying wicker baskets alongside polychrome pottery. This village was apparently a trade-hub here under the San Francisco Peaks – ceramics associated with 14 other cultural groups have been identified in the rubble around the pueblo and there are seashells, quill-work objects, cut and polished abalone beads threaded on necklaces, and copper bells from old Mexico. I ask the Indian park ranger about pottery shards at the site, noting that I had seen vast amounts of broken ceramic at Homolovi.
“Oh, it’s been picked over,” the ranger says, “but a lot’s still out there. When it rains, the stuff comes out of the ground. But I turn the shards over so they just look like pebbles. You don’t want to tempt people.”
The volcanic eruption at Sunset Crater in the 11th century left the high desert drowned in thick, black ash. The ash retained water and, for a hundred years, made fertile soil where the people raised squash and maize. As many as two-thousand people lived in pueblos on the plateau, but, perhaps, this was too large a population for an environment that is essentially without any source of reliable water. The inhabitants of the pueblos moved away around 1250. Wupatki, the largest complex in the area, has more than 100 rooms and the ball-court, built on the model of Hohokam structures in the Phoenix valley, is the farthest north structure of this kind.
6.
Other sites can be visited. All of them are distinct and have unique features and their own aura, as it were. The barren ground here has been extensively surveyed and studied. In the ten mile radius of the Visitor Center, archaeological sites are densely distributed. There are said to be 100 sites per square miles, mostly a patchwork of trails, pithouses, caches and granaries together with hunting pens and antelope ambush sites and a network of cultivated fields visible along shallow acequia.
Lomaki and Box Canyon preserves three masonry structures built at the edge of jagged, zigzag gash in the plain. The crack in the steppe is about twenty feet deep and the three buildings, each separated from the others by about a quarter mile are set on very edge of the crevasse. “Lomaki” means “beautiful” in Hopi and the largest structure made from elegant orange sandstone was once two stories high. The walls step up to high ledge overlooking the sheer-walled black crack in the desert. On distant ridges, cairn-shaped heaps of masonry marks other ruins. Two smaller block-houses stand with walls backed up to the very brink of the dry canyon.
Water, of course, dictated this building site. Apparently, snow run-off and rain could be impounded in the little gorge splitting the relatively flat plateau. From this location, the peaks of the mountains to the southwest, all buried in radiant snow, are readily visible.
We don’t know what the people who farmed here thought about the mountains, although, it is likely that vestiges of their beliefs remain in the Hopi imagination. To the Hopi, the San Francisco peaks were the dwellings of powerful supernatural beings, not exactly gods, but saints with the power to intervene in human affairs. The Hopi call these beings katsinam, a work anglicized as kachinas. The kachinas live in the clouds and mist sometimes tangled around the high thorn of the peaks. In February, they descend to the Hopi villages and appear as masked dancers in elaborate regalia. At intervals durng the first six months of the year, the kachinas stalk the earth and interact with villagers. They are relied upon to make the corn grow and bring water to the land. After a final festive appearance in early July, they retreat to the peaks again, as if to avoid the worst heat of the summer, concealing themselves among the grey and white rainclouds that swirl around the mountaintops from which the snow is mostly melted.
Kachina lore is an important part of the spiritual practice of the Hopi (and, to a lesser extent, the Zuni and other tribal groups in the region.) Hopi craftsmen made small dolls as replicas for the kachina-beings, each figure carefully equipped with the spirit’s characteristic dance regalia and elaborate, towering mask. Of course, tourists were fascinated by these figures and, by 1900, the Hopi and other tribal groups were manufacturing kachina-dolls as curios for tourists. Some of these figures are exceptionally well-crafted, detailed with respect to their buck-skin shirts embroidered with bead and quill-work and fringed with tassels. The surreal masks crowning these little figures are blocky, intricately designed headdresses that seem to represent not only the attributes of the specific kachina but, even, the village or pueblo in which the being appears. Some of kachinas have antennae like insects or the bulbous eyes of dragonflies; others such as badger and bear spirits have blunt noses and formidable jaws; some represent abstract forces of nature – lightning or rain or snow or wind. In famous dance rituals, the masked kachinas would march in trance-like processions singing and writhing as they shuffled forward, sometimes, their arms wreathed in coiled snakes.
To the Hopi, this is the fourth World. Creation is cyclical. Everything made dissolves or melts away like the snow. In the beginning, the sun created the first world, a fissure in the earth filled with winged insects who were the only sentient beings in existence. The insect people suffered in their dark chasm and so the Spider Grandmother planted something like a maize seed in the upper reaches of their dark grotto. The maize plant grew upward and pierced into the second world. The insects clawed their way up and out of the fissure to a new existence as bears and wolves in the second creation. But these beasts were violent and tore one another apart and, so, the Spider Grandmother planted another corn seed and the bears and wolves ascended on the green plant into the third world where these animals were transformed into people. Spider Grandmother sent the hummingbird to teach them how to use the fire drill and gave them the law. But the people were cruel to one another and selfish and so Spider Grandmother planted bamboo and the shoots from that plant grew upward and pierced through the soil, flowering in the fourth world. A cataclysm wracked the third world, a flood (in some versions) or a volcanic eruption or, even, perhaps, meteor striking the earth. The survivors of the third world climbed the bamboo shoot into the fourth world, the creation in which we now live – the sipapu or orifice through which the people ascended to the fourth world is the Grand Canyon. In the fourth world, Spider Grandmother decreed more laws for the people and taught them how to live together. When a drought gripped the land, the people heard the sound of copper bells tinkling amidst the San Francisco peaks, then, a sound of feet pounding on the clay and drums pulsing – these were kachinas, beings created to guide humans, and they came down from their mountain heights and walked among the people and showed them the useful arts and crafts and brought rain from the high country to quench their thirst and make the corn grow.
As long as the relations between the kachinas and the people are cordial, mankind will thrive. But when there is enmity with the kachinas, the fourth world may come to an end. The sentinel guarding the passage between the fourth and fifth worlds is Masauwa, the skeleton man and fire-keeper. He wears a hideous mask but it is studded with jewels and, although no one has seen behind the mask, this spirit is reputed to be the most hansome man in the world. Masauwa protects the four tablets of the law which establish right conduct in the world. He has told the people to watch for the coming of Pahana, the lost White brother who has gone to the east but will return again one day in a canoe that has crossed the seas.
7.
A mile or so from the Lomaki pueblos, on the south side of the entrance road, a small ruin called Nalakihu sits along a short trail next to the parking lot. The name means “lone house” or “house standing outside the village.” The place was built under a steep-sided mesa with a thorny crown of crooked, fierce-looking basalt rising about a hundred feet above the structure. Nalakihu was relatively intact to the extent that it was roofed and several rooms used as visitor center for the park ninety years ago. (These improvements have now been removed and the structure is now just some walls erected into a corner gaping open to the sky.)
A trail leads around the back of the mesa and to its top where a larger pueblo, called the Citadel once stood. The place has ramparts primarily composed of crooked-looking black basalt sutured together by a matrix of pink and yellow-orange limestone mortar. At the top, the sun is merciless although this is a cold day. Some tourists are scuffing their toes on the savage, fanged rocks. A couple hundred yards farther to the south, an immense sinkhole forms a cavity on the plateau. The Citadel looks down into this abyss, a square pit like a colossal elevator shaft into which huge blocks of sandstone seem to be descending slowly to the center of the earth. The sinkhole is dry with sheer black walls and it looks like the mouth of an oven. Beyond the abyss, ten miles away, the pyramidal black cone at Sunset Crater rises into the sky.
8.
Approached from the north, across the corrugated table-land at Wupatki, Sunset Crater is shapely, a dark, symmetrical peak like a witch’s cap. At closer range, the mountain assumes a yielding, pillowy aspect and, viewed from other angles, is more complex, a rounded double shell of cinders and ash, open like a conch-shell at its top. The dune-like sides of the dark pyramid are tinted red and pink. The edges of the open crater, partly visible as a swale in the side of the mountain, are the color of cooked salmon.
The cone is the result of an eruption between 1050 A.D. and 1125 A.D. The dates aren’t exact and it’s probable that the fissure vent from which the peak grew spewed out lava and hot ash for a number of years. We know that the area was inhabited when this happened and the spectacle must have been impressive, and memorable, to the people in the pueblos in the area.
The National Monument road runs through hideous lava fields heaped up around the base of the cone. Once, there were popular hiking trails to the thumb-print of the crater atop the pyramid of cinders. But the mountain is as soft and yielding as it looks from the road. Generations of hikers ground a diagonal trench into the side west and north sides of the peak. Rain sluiced down the manmade gulch and widened it. When the trail was finally closed, flash floods and boots had ripped a gash in the cone 60 feet wide and waist-deep. The fading scar on the slope of the cone is still readily visible, a faint but obvious slash across the cheek of the mountain.
It wasn’t only the feet of hikers that imperiled the cinder cone. In 1928, a crew from Paramount Pictures arrived in Flagstaff about 30 miles to the south. The crew was scouting locations for a movie called Avalanche directed by Otto Brower. Avalanche was based on a novel by the Arizona author, Zane Grey. At the book’s climax, a landslide interrupts a duel between feuding brothers, tearing up a cabin where they are fighting. Brower’s crew proposed to plant dynamite all along the rim of the reddish cone and blow the thing up. They had no doubt that properly positioned explosive charges would produce an impressive landslide. This plan leaked to the public and the citizens of Flagstaff were incensed at the concept of blowing up a local landmark. Led by H. S. Colton, a geologist associated with the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff mounted a protest and, after a few days, the Paramount second-unit crew retreated back to Hollywood without detonating the mountain.
Avalanche was released 1929 with good reviews. Apparently, the film crew found another hillside slope near San Francisco that they could destroy with dynamite. People who saw the movie proclaimed the climax as spectacular – a contemporary review notes that a whole mountain is shown in a great avalanche.” The Russian actress Olga Baclanova played the love interest. (She’s most famous today for appearing as the mutilated “hen-woman’ hybrid at the end of Tod Browning’s Freaks.) Brower, the director, made many movies, most notably The Phantom Empire (1935), a serial starring Gene Autrey, the singing cowboy. (When I was a child, my brother and I attended matinee movies in St. Peter with our cousins who lived in that town. I recall that there usually twenty minute episodes from The Phantom Empire, in badly abraded and scarcely legible prints, preceded the Elvis Presley features that we saw in the theater.)
A trail loops around the edges of the lava field northeast of the cinder cone, an impassable house-high labyrinth of jagged, black rock. Some stations along the trail mark points of interest. Some felled ponderosa pines lie in the rubble. Ponderosa pine don’t grow upward or outward, but rather propagate in a spiral pattern and so the fallen trees show twisting grooved whorls in their cross-sections – this sort of growth, coiling to the right is called a dextral growth pattern. Another tree, stripped of its bark, stands amidst the trenches and palisades of black rock. This tree gestures like a monster, pale as a ghost, with elbows extending out from the top of the dead tree, hands sheared off by the calamity surrounding the apparition on all sides. “Hornitos” (or ovens) are small fumarole cones, rounded domes of black boulders and slag that once spattered lava in pinwheels like roman candles around their vents. There are a number of these features at the edge of the lava field, mostly imploded and collapsed into themselves like boils that have been lanced.
The people who lived in the vicinity visited the lava field when it was still veined with fire and spitting magma. For some reason, they used sticks to push corn cobs into the lava, then, retrieving casts of the kernels burnt in the molten rock. These corn casts have been found at various locations in the ruins of pueblos, sacred mementos of the eruptions at Sunset Crater or Palatswa as the Hopis named the place.
The Hopi assign a specific Kachina (katsina) to the crater and its girdle of slag lava fields. This is Qa’na katsina, a being whose role is to restore life to balance after catastrophes. The Zuni, more secretive, won’t talk about their beliefs and traditions about the eruption. It’s their understanding that if you talk about bad things or dwell on past calamities, you disturb the order of the universe and, thus, cause those events to happen again.
9.
Back in Flagstaff, I follow directions on my phone to the Museum of Northern Arizona. The route takes me through forests and meadows on the southwest flank of Mount Elden. The boulevards are pleasant and run past nice houses in the shade of majestic ponderosa, golf courses, and hillsides where rocky boulders brood like idols in the gloom.
The museum is a chalet, built in the Spanish manner with heavy walls built from field stone and a roof covered in rounded orange tiles. Only a few yards from the entrance to the museum, a gorge wild with thirty foot cliffs and slick-looking boulders sluices the Rio de Flag down the side of the mountain. The little black canyon is crooked like a stroke of lightning and the stream runs as a white zigzag thread over fallen rocks in the shadow of the basalt palisaded cliffs.
(The Rio de Flag has its source a few miles away in a spring that gushes from the side of the mountain. The stream must have been christened after the town was founded. When the village in the highlands under the San Francisco peaks was established, someone is supposed to have hacked off the boughs of a ponderosa pine to turn the tree into a naked vertical shaft on which a flag was tied – the so-called “flagstaff” that gives its name to the place.)
The museum of much larger than it seems from the vantage near the little black canyon. In fact, the structure consists of two courtyards, each surrounded by museum galleries.
In the first big hall, I am surprised to encounter a large case in which two mural fragments are displayed. These are patches of fresco from the kiva paintings discovered at the destroyed Awatovi (sometimes “Awa’tovi”) pueblo on the Hopi Second Mesa. The murals are enigmatic, protected by glass like specimens on a huge microscope slide. The surface of the glass runs quicksilver with reflections and I’m not able to take a picture of the paintings because the light from the windows and room pours over the images in a chaotic way. Perhaps, the mural fragments’ resistance to photography is significant, an intentional concatenation of factors that keeps me from picturing the shattered images and protects them as mysterious and sacred. I can’t really tell what I am seeing: against a grey-yellow background, the color of desert at twilight or dawn, some feet mounted on crooked legs seem to be stomping out a rhythm; there are abstract zigzags and lightning bolts, a cascade of feathers, something like a pale mask dotted with obsidian-black eyes. No matter how hard I try to focus on the pictures, concentrating on the imagery, the thing eludes me. The vegetable dye colors are faded but still bright enough to look like flowers erupting out of cactus after a monsoon rain.
The Hopi are skittish about Awatovi. Although they are culturally far less secretive and paranoid than their neighbors, the Zuni, Hopi elders prefer not to say much about Awatovi. The enormous ruin on a windswept mesa top is not open for tours. Bad things happened at the place and, unlike the other empty villages that the Hopi regard as waystations for their ancestors and still vibrant with life, Awatovi is, indeed, abandoned and, in fact, a ruin by all accounts. “Hopi” means something like “the peaceful people” – but the story of Awatovi contradicts cultural norms; what happened at the village wasn’t peaceful at all and the Hopi regard Awatovi’s history with both shame and dismay.
Founded in about 1325 (although some accounts date the place to the 12th century), Awatovi was a very large pueblo. Excavated by Harvard archaeologists between 1935 and 1939, the villager contained 1300 rooms – a half million shards of pottery were discovered in the rooms and tons of other artifacts. When the village was destroyed in 1700, the people’s stuff was just left lying in the ashes with their bones scattered by wolves and coyotes.
The pueblo enters Western history in 1540 when Coronado, occupying some villages of the Zuni eighty miles away dispatched Pedro de Tovar to the Hopi nation. (Coronado, the Spanish conquistador, was looking for the seven cities of Cibola, an El Dorado of gold and silver.) Tovar didn’t find any appreciable mineral wealth at Awatovi and the villages in its vicinity and, so, he reported to Coronado that there was nothing significant on the First, Second, and Third Mesas. Forty years passed before the Catholic priests began missionary work at Awatovi. The Hopi had intricate religious traditions involving kachina spirits that visited their villages each Spring, descending from the snow-capped San Francisco peaks and they weren’t particularly impressed by Christian doctrine – that is, before the missionary, Father Porres, performed a notable miracle. A boy, blind from birth, was brought to the priest. He applied a silver cross to the boy’s eyes and, immediately, the child could see. This seemed proof to the Hopi that the Catholics had magical powers and, so, many people in Awatovi converted to the new faith. Indeed, so many villagers became Christians that the converts built a church directly atop the town’s largest kiva, in the process burying the colorful murals in the underground chamber and, incidentally, preserving them from destruction. A rift formed between the Hopi traditionalists and the Catholic converts and there was serious dissension in the village.
In 1680, the pueblos across the Southwest rose in revolt against the Spanish priests. A missionary and some lay brothers were killed at Awatovi and the rebellion exposed a deep schism between Catholics and traditionalists. The Spanish returned, putting down the rebellion in 1695 and restoring the church at the pueblo. Traditionalists were entrenched in the other villages on the Hopi mesas and, ultimately, warriors in an alliance representing the old religion attacked Awatovi in 1700. The Christians were treated as dangerous sorcerers – the town was destroyed, the men and boys hacked to pieces as witches as well as all women who had been baptized. The unbaptized women and girls were spared and distributed as slaves among the other Hopi villages. Awatovi was cursed, thought to be an abode of ghosts, and the Hopi avoided the place.
During the excavations between 1935 and 1939, trenches were cut into the gravel beneath the wrecked Catholic church. An underground vault was discovered, the old kiva, and the archaeologists were amazed to discover murals on the crypt walls picturing life-size supernatural beings. The murals had been painted and repainted over hundreds of years – some parts of the fresco were built up from 27 layers of plaster and pigment. Peeled from the walls, parts of the kiva mural ended up in Harvard’s Peabody Museum and the Museum of Northern Arizona in the Watson Smith collection. The story of Awatovi, although, of course, well understood by the Hopi, was not generally known until the early fifties. World War and massacre in Europe intervened and it wasn’t until 1952 that some of the Harvard excavation findings were published. The enormous collection of artifacts extracted from Awatovi wasn’t fully collected and reported until the mid-seventies.
10.
The Museum is spacious and mostly empty, no visitors on this chilly afternoon, and, as I wander the galleries, the light outside fades and the shadows of the mountains are icy and grey, leaching the color from the world.
Pots and other ceramics dominate the collections but there are weapons, regalia, and, of course, many kachina figures. (One of them is called ‘Chavayo’, the so-called Awatovi ogre, a monster carrying a whip made of fronds who lashes Hopi who have betrayed their traditional culture and espoused Christianity – once the figure was feared, but he is now akin to a Hopi clown, equipped with an equally grotesque and sadistic ogre-wife.) The Hopi are renowned for their jewelry fashioned from silver and turquoise. Yet, it is interesting to consider that the Hopi didn’t make jewelry of any kind until 1898 when the Navajo artisan Sitsomovi taught a man named Sikyatala how to forge silver for jewelry. For the first 44 years, all Hopi jewelry followed Navajo patterns. The Navajo, under Spanish and Mexican influence, had become expert craftsmen in silver and carried on an extensive and lucrative trade with tourists. The museum worker, a man named Virgil Hubert thought that it would be beneficial for the Hopi to have their own distinctive style of silverworking craft. So Hubert adapted Navajo techniques to his own designs that he provided to the Hopi community. Today, the Hopi are famous for their jewelry work as well.
11.
Near this area, a forest fire ravaged the hills beginning on July 19, 2021. A contractor excavating for tile lines in the Dry Hills about a mile north of Flagstaff drove a metal shovel blade into a buried boulder. Sparks flashed from the metal scraping the rock and a fire was ignited, although the blaze didn’t really flare out of control for about 14 hours. When the winds picked-up, the hillsides above the Museum of Northern Arizona burned, charring a total of 1961 acres. At the peak of the fire, more 600 “hot shots” battled the blaze. The scarred hillsides are now being extensively terraced and re-surfaced with the arroyos re-sculpted to sluice water down the slopes in such way as to avoid flash flooding, mudslides, and rock falls.
The fire alarmed the local Hopi children living in Flagstaff. They saw the mountain heights directly under the San Francisco peaks ablaze and the smoke billowed toward the summits, obscuring them in noxious haze. The children expressed fear that the katsinam (the kachinas) would be harmed by the fire and the clouds of billowing smoke. At the museum, an artist painted a picture to reassure the children. It hangs on the wall, a big image of a sea of flames surging up toward the peaks where the smoke forms into a vast kachina, a towering figure from which there dangle jingle bells and ornate fringes of feather and quillwork. The masked kachina has welcomed the firefighters and is helping them put out the fire.
The situation is less benign in another big and colorful canvas. The Hopi elders were unhappy when a corporation built the Arizona Snow Bowl ski area in a hollow high above town on the west side of the San Francisco Peaks. Skiers were intruding into the realm of the katsinam. Things became even more controversial when it was learned the ski resort was conserving fresh water by recycling waste water through its snow-making machines. Even at high altitudes, snow isn’t reliably present in this part of the world and, so, big cannon-shaped snow-making machines are deployed on the slopes. The Hopi were offended that water tainted with urine was being blasted onto the mountain in the form of snow. The heights were sacred and, even though the water had been heavily treated and sanitized before being condensed into snow, the process was thought to be offensive to the kachinas and sacrilegious. Of course, the operators of the Snow Bowl felt that they were being good stewards of the land, conserving water by virtuously turning urine in white powder snow. Commenting on this situation, the Hopi artist depicts a stylized cone-shaped peak under a foreboding sky. A skier in the form of the Hopi clown, Kossa, is blithely gliding down the slope. Kossa wears stripes like a convict, white and black and his face is painted in similar stripes under his ski goggles. He has absurd tendril-like horns protruding from his head. The picture shows him about to negligently ski right into the mouth of a huge water serpent, Paalolokon, a writhing figure that looks like the big serpent in the Laocoon (and seems to have a similar name; I haven’t duplicated the umlauts over the first two “o’s”.) Nearby, some mortar-shaped snow-makers belch clouds of yellow snow into the air. The label describes the subject of the painting. But I don’t know how the dispute was resolved.
13.
Fire haunts this area. As I drive down the hill on the broad curving highway leading into town, I see some flashing lights. A cop car is parked near a pickup truck engulfed in flame. Big orange coils of fire writhe out from underneath the truck’s chassis. The cop stands by his squad car, helpless and watching the blaze as if befuddled. The orange blast of fire is bright against the dying day.
14.
In a park with green lawns groomed between erect, statuesque ponderosa pine, some thigh-high walls are knit together with CCC-era mortar. The low walls form a grid across the mountain meadow. The round brow of the mountain rises overhead. This is Elden Pueblo, a Sinagua house consisting of about 60 rooms. The village site, dating from 1000 to about 1250, is very close to old Highway 66 (now named 89), within a stone’s throw of the traffic coursing in and out of Flagstaff.
The place is peaceful, shapely field-stone stacked in a matrix of cement-like mortar. There’s no scatter of fallen blocks, no trace of any pottery or artifacts. The bones are all picked-clean here. A photo from the late twenties shows the grid of walls already stabilized and rational, a schematic diagram of a dwelling laid out across the meadow. An anthropologists from the Smithsonian Institute excavated 35 rooms here in 1926. The objects unearthed were sent to Washington. This upset the local people who petitioned that the pueblo be federally protected – it lies on government land in Coconino National Forest. For a time, the network of walls was part of a trading post, a good location because the site is next to the highway. The foundations of the trading post were built with left-over stone from the pueblo. But, after the business failed in the Depression, the stone was restored to the remains of the walls and, ultimately, the site fell under the protection of the Forest Service.
A rich collection of objects imported from the Gulf of California and old Mexico, including macaws, show that the pueblo was a trading center. Informational signs at the ruin display a plump pig-shaped figurine with an open mouth that seems to be barking like a dog – the little object is thought to be a pregnant antelope, possibly an ensign of the “Antelope Society”, a religious cult that exists even today among the Hopi. But who knows? It’s equally possible that the small figurine, the size of a child’s fist, was a toy or some sort of bibelot, a whimsical curio that may have decorated a bench in someone’s small room. The Smithsonian archaeologist, Dr. Jesse Walter Fewkes, kept the effigy antelope in a small wooden box under his bed at the hotel in downtown Flagstaff where he stayed. He recognized that the artifact was not made by the Sinagua people who lived in the pueblo, but traded to them by Pueblo Indians who fashioned these kinds of ceramics (technically Leupp black-on-white) at their villages sixty or seventy miles away. The present-day whereabouts of the figurine aren’t obvious to me. However, it seems that the artifact may have ended up in the Smithsonian, contributing to the consternation of the local people who wanted things like this kept in Flagstaff.
Misinformation and a haze of unknowing surrounds the ruins. The so-called “Winona meteorite” is supposed to have been unearthed at the Elden Pueblo. This is untrue. The meteorite was discovered wrapped in a cloth and interred like an infant burial at another Sinagua site about five miles away. (The meteorite, like the antelope ceramic, is no longer around to be seen – when meteorite, a stony mass weighing about 54 pounds was lifted from its grave, the thing crumbled into tiny pieces.) Two skeletons were reputedly found in a burial mound at the Elden Pueblo. But this is also questionable. The so-called burial mound seems to be just spoil dirt heaped up in the 1920's during the Fewkes’ excavation. When the spoil mound was cut through, the foundations of more stone walls were found beneath it, pretty clearly establishing that the “burial” mound was no such thing. Accordingly, the original burial location of the skeletons is uncertain and no one seems to know exactly what happened to the bones.
When you visit ruined villages of this sort, signs invite you to imagine the place when it was lively with people: women grinding corn, old men making arrowheads and lance-points, children playing while tired warriors returned from the hunt shouldering deer shot in the forests. I must be defective when it comes to imagination. When I close my eyes, or think about these ruins, nothing really comes to mind. The intrigue and glamor of such places is that they are mysterious and, in some fundamental way, unimaginable – the topless walls and the shallow cell-shaped pits and the square kivas dug into the hard ground are sufficient for me. Adding imaginary people, barking dogs, children’s laughter, the gossip of women bent over grinding stones...this is something that I can’t really achieve.
15.
Satchmo’s turns out to be a block beyond the Vietnamese café, a little square hut that looks like it was previously a chiropractor’s clinic or a realtor’s office. There’s a big painting of Louis Armstrong blowing his cornet, cheeks puffed out like a renaissance or baroque image of the Boreas, the north wind. People are dining in booths in a small room and door-dash drivers come and go. Barbecue is good but expensive. A meal for one with some nondescript potato salad comes to 42 dollars. For another 25 dollars, you can buy a souvenir tee-shirt. New Orleans’ jazz, Dixieland style, plays over the sound system. I take my food home and eat it in the motel room under the spinning disco ball.
