| Submitted by: Mark R. LeeperUnited States |
| Submission Date: 15 February 2005 |
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Then of course you can go out and actually look at the crater. You can walk around the crater, but I am not sure what that would get you. You won't see a whole lot more.
I thought everything was done professionally until it came time to leave and we went to the gift shop.
One of the employees, A, walked up to another, B, and said, 'I hear you're upset I'm not working the museum today. Maybe you'd like me to complain every time you don't clean the whole floor.'
B a minute later said to another employee, 'I'm going to report that.'
We bought a long strip of postcards showing the meteor impact that I will be putting in the album fanfold. We took this to the cashier and it turned out to be B who starting folding the postcards. Evelyn stopped him and had me do the folding. I started folding from the other end, the end that would be attached in the album. When I got to his folds they were folded just the right way, and I said so. 'I've only been doing this three years,' B told Evelyn in a snooty way. These are not very professional people.
Okay, I waxed enthusiastic about Monument Valley, so just so you don't think Old Mark is a pushover, let me tell you one of the major attractions that didn't do too much for me. I am speaking of the Petrified Forest. Over this huge park are tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of trees that have turned to stone. The actual process is that they were washed into a lake where they were covered with mud and minerals. Silica leached into the wood preserving the structure. Then the water evaporated, leaving the dry lake bed. The lake bed eroded, leaving only the trees--now more stone than wood.
Now why was I unimpressed? Well, to see one petrified tree is of some interest, I must admit. Two petrified trees are even more interesting. Get up to five trees and you are about up to the limit. Seeing acres and acres of the stuff is just overkill. And this is hundreds of acres. On top if that, you are made to feel unwelcome. A great deal of petrified wood has been stolen. Every time you turn around, you see more warnings that the stuff must not be picked up. I agree with the sentiment, of course, but if you are not a thief, all the warnings are a pain. It is sort of like you have already subscribed to an NPR station but still have to listen to the pledge breaks.
They even have a case they call 'the Museum of Conscience' with letters from people who have sent them back petrified wood fragments or pottery or anything else from the park. Some have the most atrocious spelling saying that they stole petrified wood and have had bad luck ever since. They are obviously trying to create a superstition that stealing petrified wood is bad luck. I told Evelyn I was going to take a film canister and fill it with apple juice and send it to them with a note that I've had bad luck ever since I drank from their water fountain.
On the grounds we saw a pueblo made with pieces of petrified wood. It is thought to be 'a `motel' for traveling farmers.' There are stops in the forest with walks among the trees. On the walk to the pueblo we saw in the distance storm clouds and rain. The rain may have been more interesting than all the petrified wood, incidentally. You see a gray cloud and what looks like gray curtains from the cloud to the ground, but the curtains go down at different angles in different places depending on what the wind is doing.
On one of the stops we take a scenic walk and it just seems to go on and on! It must have been more than a mile and of course it starts raining on us while we are walking.
Most of the rest of the drive we see from the car. Occasionally we stop for a picture. The Painted Desert looks pretty drab due to the gray skies.
Next we visited the Hubbell Trading Post Historic Site. Most of the old trading posts have a bad reputation. John Lorenzo Hubbell ran the most successful of the old trading posts and was considered by both Anglos and Navajos as being scrupulously honest. He built overnight hospitality hogans complete with baking powder, salt, canned peaches, and canned tomatoes. He gave the Navajos good advice on how to make their jewelry salable, even to bringing in a silversmith from Mexico to teach the Navajo how to improve their quality. He did similar things with their blanket weaving. Visiting the trading post was often a several-day social event. It was how Navajos found out what was happening with friends whom they could not visit.
It was raining when we got to the trading post. So we knew what we were looking at, I suggested we go first to the Visitors Center. Mistake! A bolt of lightning took out the lights. We ended up exploring the trading post by the flashlight in my pocket.
We made a quick stop in Window Rock to see where the Navajo Nation has its government buildings in the shadow of the Window Rock. That's a cliff with a huge almost-circular hole. It is a majestic sight.
That completed our time in Arizona and we drove to Gallup, New Mexico. We had barbecue for dinner, then drove away from lights just to watch the spectacular lightning for a half-hour or so. Back at the room we wrote and read.
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Breakfast was a Ranch Kitchen where I had pancakes and a glass of buttermilk. People think about buttermilk the way they thought about yogurt twenty-five years ago. It is a weird and vaguely disgusting dairy product. Actually I have become a devotee of the stuff. It fulfills a cheese craving. Add some pineapple juice and it makes a nice lassi. Add some Hershey's syrup instead and it tastes like chocolate cheesecake. I think it has real potential as a diet food, but you almost never see it on a menu.
The first destination was Zuni, the government center for the Zuni tribe. It looks very much like a lot of New Mexico towns. Occasionally you do see outdoor domed ovens, but this isn't really a tourist spot.
The Zunis make it illegal to photograph, audio record, or even make sketches in their capital. This is to protect the privacy of their religion. I told Evelyn they could sell cassettes of their non-religious music and call them 'Zuni Tunes.' (Of course, jokes like that may be the reason they don't like Anglos.)
Historic grafitti is the attraction of El Morro National Monument. It was a water hole that travelers, first Indian and later Spanish, stopped at. Eroded sandstone made the area visually attractive, but today as you walk along the cliff base you see Indian petroglyphs as well as some detailed inscriptions in English and Spanish. One Don Francisco Manuel de Silva Neito wrote an homage to himself ('whose indubitable arm and valor have overcome the impossible...').
As I told Evelyn, the impossible is easy to overcome. It is the things that are real and exist that are tough to get around. What makes the cliff enjoyable is the irony. The inscriptions tended to be pompous and one way or another they got stone come- uppance. One general calls attention to his great victories and talks about what this gentleman did. Apparently one of his men scratched out the word 'gentleman.' Another general has an inscription on how he passed by and under it one of his corporals scratched in, 'accompanied by Corporal ....' Another titled himself the conqueror of the Maqui. History records that he said that before he intended to conquer them. His mission was a total failure. Moral: Don't believe it even if it is cast in stone.
Malpais (Badlands). It's not a very nice name and it was not a very nice place, according to the Spanish who named it. Of course, they were the ones who had to march over the cracks and fissures of this lava bed.
Lava when it cools can have one of three textures. It can have aa (pronounced 'ah-ah'). That is what you'd get if you wadded up fresh oatmeal cookies, then let them get stale to the point of turning to stone. You don't want to walk on aa barefoot. Pahoehoe ('pa-HOY-hoy') is in hollow noodles. It flowed in streams with the outside hardening and the inside continuing to flow. Notice when you burn a candle at the top you almost get a tube because the outside shell is cooler than the inside near the flame.
The third formation is cinders ('SIN-ders'). Then it is in small pieces.
As we drove through El Malpais National Monument, we stopped at a lookout that showed the lava flows, then La Ventana, a huge rock bridge in the majestic (do I use that word a lot?) limestone cliffs. It created a great echo chamber and one large crow just loved that. He kept giving loud three-caw caws. When we showed up he flew over us to investigate, then back to his rocky soundstage. We could hear his massive wings cutting the air. Some of the sandstone cliffs are reminiscent of Chiricahua National Monument's formations.
As we drove, we ate pinon nuts, said to be a favorite of the Indians. They are actually pine tree seeds. I have had them before under the name pine nuts. They have a sweet flavor. They are tough to shell, but Evelyn with her sunflower-seed experience is pretty good at it.
After driving through the park we returned to about the midpoint and the Acoma-Zuni Trail. This is a trail that takes you through prairie and then across lava beds.
I will be honest: I don't much enjoy hiking, but I had a lot of fun lava hiking. It becomes like a series of puzzles. They have sticks stuck in rock piles to mark the path and in theory you can see from one trail marker to the next. In theory. But sometimes it's tough to see the next marker. It blends in. And once you find the next trail marker you have to figure the best path to it. There may be a long but easy way to do it, and a short but complex way to go involving figuring the right rocks to step on.
You are stepping all around crevices that are maybe six feet deep, but they are usually easy to avoid. You occasionally risk rocks falling on your foot, but they are light air-filled rocks. Lava is quite light. Even when we turned back, the way was not obvious. Being able to see B's trail marker from point A does not mean you can see A's trail marker from point B. It may be shorter, for example, and hidden by a bush. Seeing the same topography from A or from B may lead you to different conclusions as to which path between them is best. In short, lava hiking offers a lot higher puzzle-reasoning-to-physical-ability ratio than most hiking.
Back in Grants we got a room and got dinner at a 'family' restaurant. I had chicken pot pie; Evelyn had chicken teriyaki.
Back at the motel I did some reading about Acoma, our goal for tomorrow. Acoma was already a village by 600 A.D. That makes it the oldest (or possibly second oldest) continuously occupied village in the United States. It is on top of a mesa 357 feet above the surrounding plain.
In 1598 the Spanish arrived in Acoma and the inhabitants made friends and nominally submitted to the authority of the Spanish throne. Something went wrong with the friendly relationship and for motives never recorded the Acoma massacred a nobleman and twelve soldiers. The Spanish wanted to express their displeasure so they stormed the well-protected pueblo (it took three days) and captured it.
To show their displeasure they murdered seventy warriors. Then sixty young girls were taken from their families and sold as slaves in Mexico. All the rest of the village over twelve years of age were sentenced to twenty years' slavery. Each man over twenty-five years old additionally had a foot cut off. And the Spanish built a mission in Acoma to help the Acomas become gentle Christians as the Spanish were. |
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