Departures: East to the West: Part 4

Some actual tourism...

Bandelier National Monument

We pulled into Bandelier's Northern parking lot, which was full. According to a pamphlet we'd been handed, we might have to wait for a while for a parking space. Great. This place was one of the few places on the continent that had known settled civilization for more than 2000 years, and no-one had gotten around to providing decent parking? Fortunately, a car left after we'd circled the lot once, and we thus got a spot. We piled out of the car, through the visitor's center, and onto the main loop trail.

Bandelier is a big place, with trails and campgrounds and cliff dwellings and archaelogical sites and petroglyphs and waterfalls, but we were pressed for time, and were thus going to stick to the main loop through some cliff dwelling ruins, with a side jaunt to check out a ceremonial cave high up on some cliff face.

After perhaps a klick, I was glad we were going for such a short hike. My sea-level lungs weren't used to this high-altitude air. I felt light-headed. I really enjoyed Bandelier, but part of me wonders if delirium might have made me think I was enjoying it more than I was, if that makes any sense. I'm not sure if it makes any sense to say that one only thought one was enjoying oneself. I guess my point is that I'm not sure I would have enjoyed the park so much if my brain hadn't been starved of oxygen most of the time. But I still would have liked it plenty.

We were in a red rock river canyon, a riparian shelter from the sweltering desert without. We were in a cool river valley, shaded by trees. The trail wound among plants, it wandered over to the stark cliffs. Up in the cliffs, we got views of the valley. It kicked ass. It was a pretty spot; I think I understood why the Anasazi might have chosen it as a place to settle down--though they might have been concentrating more on the nice water supply.

The ruins weren't that interesting to me, perhaps because we had skipped the informative film back at the visitor center, and were hiking in a hurry instead of pausing to read the interpretive text in the little guide book that Bryan had purchased. It's all very well to look at some foundation stones in the ground in the middle of a valley and nod and think, gosh, what a large structure. Now, in the comfort of my apartment, I'm looking at this artist's conception of this adobe village whose foundation stones I was looking at. The main thing that I notice is that there aren't any ground-level entrances. To enter a first-floor residence, one climbed up a ladder onto the roof, then climbed down through a hole in the ceiling. Perhaps they had fewer pesky poisonous critters getting in that way. I don't know. I didn't even know I was supposed to be on the lookout for settlements that weren't smack-dab up on the cliffs there.

At first, Bryan was reading to us out of his little guide book, but he didn't relish the task. He didn't especially want to carry the guide book, either, and when someone else wanted to read something, Bryan wouldn't take the book back. Whenever Dave ended up with the book, he would ask someone, "Could you hold this for a second?" and they'd take it before they realized what was going on--and of course, Dave wouldn't take the book back. He didn't try this trick on me; I was kind of curious to know whether it would have worked.

There didn't seem to be that much to see of the cliff dwellings. There were holes in the cliffs, holes into which roof beams had been stuck. These beams stuck out from the sides of the cliffs, supported roofs, under which there were dwellings. What remains today? The beam holes. Some cliff dwellers, perhaps desperate for closet space, dug into the sides of the cliffs. So in some places you can see these rooms dug into the sides of the cliffs. You can climb up into some of them.

Bryan kept wondering if he'd been here some time before. He remembered that Rob Pfile and he had stopped off at some cliff-dweller park before in the middle of a road trip from Los Angeles to Chicago.

Then he recognized a certain hole in a certain cliff. He recognized it because it appeared in a photo, namely the photo of him (Bryan) which had graced his (Bryan's) web page for many years. Obviously, he'd been here before.

We contemplated one spot where a simple pattern had been painted on the rock. Now there was a sheet of glass or plexiglass protecting the design. We looked at it for a while. Brendan pointed out that he saw why we should protect this painting, but at the same time, the simplicity of the design made it seem kind of ludicrous. I wondered why I found this design so compelling. It looked like stuff I'd doodled in my notes during boring classes or meetings. Did its age make it interesting? Willa Cather looked at art by cliff dwellers and seemed to think that it was important that this ancient, almost alien people still had a creative urge.

Bryan and Dave threw pine cones at one another--soft ones. Brendan tried to ambush the others by hiding behind a tree--unsuccessfully. With a "Could you hold on to this for a second?" Dave once again managed to get someone else to carry the guidebook. I kept waiting for my lungs to get used to the air--in vain. According to reliable sources, we climbed something like 40m of ladders to get up to that ceremonial cave. It had a pretty damned nice view, too. I took in red cliffs, tree tops. No doubt worth a little shortness of breath.

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