Memory is a funny thing. While riding up US 160 to Mesa Verde National Park I couldn’t get my brain to shut up. So much to say about the experience before it even began. I could have written it down as I went, but I was so enthralled, so excited, that I wanted to experience the whole thing without looking back and forth from my notepad, I had so much to say, so much that is completly gone less than 24 hours later, so much that was pristine on the way up that’s now stained.

I have wanted to see the cliff dwellings at Mese Verde since 1984. I was 11 years old and had bought a book on the dwellings during a trip to Colorado Springs. I mean, it wasn’t an undying goal of mine, but the fascination was always stuck in my head. When I realized how close it was to Durango, I put in my bid to go to the park.

I plugged out the chatter of my truckmates early in the trip up the mesa, my inclination leaning heavily on the Indigo Girls. Two songs kept jumping out at me: “Get Out the Map” and “Welcome Me”. The former got my attention before we started the climb, while driving through ranch towns, speckled with occassional tourist traps like The Hogan, a gift shop with big metal teepees and oversized arrows dotting the lawn. Dad said that’s what he loves about this part of Colorado as opposed to Colorado Springs and Estes Park. In those towns, the tourist is everything. But here, it’s working people. Ranches with horses whose lot in life isn’t going to be spent under the asses of city-folk tourists trying to feel wild while riding little more than a tethered carnival pony. The tourists can go to hell out here and everything would keep going on.

And that’s why “Get Out the Map” really slapped me around. I could be home here. So why am I putting up with a job that makes me miserable, longing for someone who’s equally distant and miserable? I’m too fucking young to be as shackled as I feel. Shit, I’d be happy herding 2000 head of sheep down the road at this point.

Words are escaping me when it comes to entering the park. The upward climb is immediate, hairpin curves cutting past pines and sagebrush and pale red rock up the edge of the butte. I tumble off the edge of the world each time we curve, facing the ridges that descend from bluff to quilted fields padded with stones, brushed with scratchy green, dotted with houses and barns that graze the closest edge of sky, sun streaking through the grey of the clouds across the vista. When I was little I thought sunstreaks like that were evidence of Jesus descending. I don’t believe in Jesus now, but I’ve got to believe in something. I am transfixed, so excited that I keep rolling my eyes upwards to keep the tears contained, because I know that as soon as one tear tumbles, the whole lot of them will be streaming down my face, and I don’t feel like explaining why I’m crying. Hell, I couldn’t explain it, not even to myself.

I know “Welcome Me” is about Los Angeles, but art has a way of transcending the experiences of the artist, and I apply it to where I’m going, up the edge of an aridly green mountain, to a place where people lived thousands of years ago. Why do I need to be a part of this? Why do I want to crawl through dusty ruins? What am I looking for? Ghosts? I think so. I think I’m looking for answers to questions I don’t know from people who haven’t existed in these woods since 1200. I want to know how they simply lived, with only grain and stone and water and other living things, when it takes so much for me to survive. Throughout the tour everyone kept saying how rough the Anasazi had it. I wish I had it that rough. They contended with nature. Look at what we’re contending with. Emerson and Thoreau said it better than I will ever be able to say it, but they were still looking through Western white eyes looking at how they could gain (in their cases, intellectually) as an end to their means. “I crave inertia so I’ll stop moving”. Another Indigo Girls lyric that I heard repeatedly during the drive up the mesa, and only now is it sinking in through my thick skull and too-rational brain.

I know I’m looking at this through the gloss of history. I questioned everything in the museum and read on the signs in the park. The Anasazis and Pueblos didn’t leave written histories, so why should I believe what some white anthropologist? They painted a pretty picture ... too pretty. I don’t buy much of it.

But still, my own imagination was almost able to override the metal explaination signs and guardrails at the sites, enough that I could still fathom the mystery, the shadows of the dwellings.

Well, I was wrong. I was afraid this would be about how I got seperated from the group after hiking up from Spruce Tree House or the coughing fit I had all the way to Durango fromdry air and dehydration, or how my dad drove so fast down the mesa that I thought I would puke, or how all I could see of the spectacular view was the charred, dead trees from last year’s fire. I guess that’s really what memory does; it doesn’t work chronologically - it works with what’s important.