| Submitted by: Mark R. LeeperUnited States |
| Submission Date: 15 February 2005 |
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This is a very high and dry part of the country. I washed my hair last night and towel-dried it. In about five minutes it was totally dry. We are up about 6500 feet.
Breakfast was French toast and then we were off for the Acoma Sky City.
The 'Sky City' is a pueblo on top of a mesa. This place seems to have more rules than Singapore. For taking still pictures the fee is $5. Sketching and painting licenses are $40. Entrance fees are $6 per person. Then there are a bunch of donation jars for things like the school's senior class party. We got there at 8:40 AM and they said there was a tour at 8:45 AM. It is at this writing 8:56 AM and a small school bus labeled 'Acoma Sky City Tours' just showed up. (It finally left twenty minutes late.) As we go up the hill there are lots of signs saying no trespassing without guides.
When you get to the top of the mesa you see a village that is probably not atypical of what you'd expect from an isolated Indian village. The houses are sandstone but a lot have fairly modern windows.
About thirty people actually live on the seventy-acre mesa as sort of a tag team to keep the place inhabited. Living on the mesa is an Acoma mitzvah. While it claims to be the oldest continuously inhabited site in the United States, the claim is made for two mesas several miles apart. When the approach to one of the mesas was washed out, the Acoma moved to the other. This makes the claim somewhat dubious. There are about 4000 in the tribe now and many have problems of getting through the doorways of their more economically-sized ancestors.
For the small-sized community there is a fairly large mission. That is because it was a fortress when the Indians controlled it. After Onate's conquest, a Brother Juan Ramirez was given actual dominion over the Acomas. A devout man, Brother Ramirez wanted to instill Catholic ideas in the Acomas. He had his mission, but he had a problem. There was no mission bell. How could he bring the heathen to the Catholic ideal without a mission bell? Finally Brother Ramirez was able to make a deal with a Mexican business. They would provide a bell for no money if they could have just four Acoma boys and four Acoma girls as slaves in return. As far as the good Brother was concerned, there were more than enough Indians and he could spare some. God had provided. So good Brother Ramirez got his bell and could continue with God's work as he saw it.
Today, of course, the Catholic Church is a bit more sanguine and allows those Indians who want to celebrate the old religion to keep it, though the guide said that the kiva was where the men had their religious ceremonies and poker games.
In the mission there is a painting of Christians burning in flames in Purgatory being rescued by angels. There is also the famous painting of St. Joseph. This painting was the center of a court case in the mid-19th Century. It was renowned for bringing good luck and prosperity to the pueblo. Now the nearby Laguna Pueblo was going through hard times and asked to borrow the painting for a month. Unfortunately, it did seem to turn the fortunes of the Lagunas and they decided unilaterally to extend the loan. Eventually the painting was returned after a good deal of armtwisting. A little while later the painting was stolen and showed up back at the Laguna village under guard. It could not be stolen back, so the case went to the courts. The court ruled that the painting had to go back. The Lagunas appealed. I suspect they knew they'd lose eventually, but they wanted to forestall the inevitable. Eventually the appeals ran out and the courts ordered the Lagunas to give up the painting. Runners were sent from Acoma. Halfway to the Laguna village, they found the painting leaning against a tree. It was said that St. Joseph started for home on his own but got tired.
The Acoma get their water from cisterns that look less than totally clean. Some boil the water; some drink it just out of the cistern because it tastes sweeter.
Where there are multi-story buildings there are still outside ladders leading to the upper stories though when I asked, the guide said they usually have indoor stairs these days also.
Some of the poorer homes are made of adobe straw-brick or have windows of mica layers.
Tour over, we were given the choice of taking the bus down or walking the stone steps. All seven of us chose the stone steps. Simple, huh? Actually, no. It looked scarier than it actually was, but .... There was an older couple with us and the woman did have problems. I probably felt less than totally secure about the descent, but said nothing or perhaps joked about it. A sense of humor has a lot of useful side benefits.
At the bottom it was a five- or ten-minute walk to the Visitors Center. There we talked with another couple on the tour. He was from Santa Fe and looked the part of a cowboy, maybe sixty years old, with a moustache and beard. His wife (companion?) looked twenty years younger and did not look all that Western. She just looked very boyish, with a short boyish haircut. He talked about how he used to come to the mesa when the only way up or down was by the stone stairway. He recommended a local NPR station on which an Indian humorist would talk and who he thought was very funny. People around here seem very likable and friendly. We talked about the $5 cost for taking still pictures and he said he thought it was a good idea. People used to walk right into the Indians' homes taking pictures without permission. In Santa Fe people would ask him, 'Are you a cowboy?' 'Yes,' he'd say, and then if he didn't stop him, they'd take his picture. I'd seen the same behavior in Israel with boorish tourists taking pictures of Bedouins and their camps. TOURISTS!
We then drove to the Indian Petroglyph National Monument in Albuquerque. Anyone who claims that Indians lived in great harmony with nature should see all the grafitti pictures they made on stones. One sees animal shapes--four-legged and birds--spirals, crosses, zigzags, snakes, etc., all etched into rocks.
From there we drove to Taos, got a room at the Super 8, did some gift shopping in town, and had dinner.
Taos is another very touristy town, sort of the Monterey of New Mexico. Prices are elevated and things are very touristy. Through most of the Southwest and particularly in Taos there is a peculiar reversal. In New York, French is very chic. I don't know why, but people think that the French do things right. Something French just has to have more class than something that is, say, Korean. There are ads saying, why should you like such-and-such? Because it's French. That ad does not work on me because I don't have any natural predilection for French culture. There are signs that France is losing its special place to Japan. That may be because Japan is doing well economically. But two cultures that do not do well economically these days are Mexican and Indian. Yet here in the Southwest it is thought to be very chic to be Indian or Mexican. The upscale shops sell Indian blankets and concho belts. People kill for real Indian pottery. And it's good to see that at least someplace Indians and Mexicans have a real upscale market for their wares. At least some can be making a bundle. Of course, some of that is made by Anglos just dealing in Indian goods, but the Indian culture does not appear ready to flicker out any time soon.
In the bookstores in town, just like the book stalls at the archaeological sites we are visiting, my first question is always the same. Where are the Dover books? Do you have any Dover books? Dover is a New York City publisher who deals in reprints mostly of good out-of-print books. The majority of their stock is in socalled 'trade paperbacks,' but on subjects that there is not that much trade in.
On the way to the Grand Canyon I was reading in one of the tour books excerpts from the log of W. J. Powell, who'd explored the Canyon. That gave me fairly good odds that I was going to be able to find a Dover edition of Powell's complete log fairly cheaply. Evelyn silently drew the same conclusion.
Sure enough, there among the touristy books that the souvenir stands sell--picture books of the flowers of the area and that sort of thing--was a $7.95 Dover of the log of the Powell expedition. Generally at least half of the books of real scholarly interest will be published by Dover. And of those books they will be the best bound (acid-free paper and bound in signatures) and they will generally be a bit cheaper than the others.
Go into a Taos bookstore and you will find the best books on Indian culture on the bottom shelves (they are not high-profit items) in Dover editions. With the possible exception of Penguin, Dover is the only publisher I know that has a fandom.
After shopping we had dinner at a Mexican restaurant and returned to the room.
Actually the Super 8 in Taos is one of the nicest motels we've stayed at. The furniture is all in Mexican and Indian style. When's the last time you stayed in a hotel room where the furniture was signed by the maker? The room is very nice-looking and everything works as expected.
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Well, there was a message on the radio telling you to warn your children about cutting between parked cars when they go out trick-or-treating. There are lots of warnings on the radio. As a fan of horror and the macabre, I sort of regretted that Halloween has been turned from the scary event it once was to a light, fun children's holiday. In its origins it was a time when evils were loosed on the world. Apparently, however, the tide is turning and Halloween is once again becoming a time to fear the unknown evils around us. Halloween is once again a really scary time for people. And you thought the world was going downhill, huh?
We found a restaurant on the main drag of Taos that had an overflowing parking lot, a place called El Taoseno. Most of the clientele look like laborers, most of Mexican descent.
Huevos Rancheros seem different each different place they are ordered. I ordered this with green chiles but it still wasn't all that spicy, I think. Of course, I think my tolerance for spicy food has increased so that it does not taste as spicy to me as it once did. The dish came with a tortilla and margarine. I am not sure if you just butter and eat a tortilla or what. I used it to sop up chile sauce.
We headed out on the Enchanted Circle. This is supposed to be really beautiful scenery, but as the Southwest goes it is overrated. A lot of it could be the Mohawk Trail.
Along the drive we came to the DAV Vietnam Veterans Memorial. I am of mixed opinions on the various Vietnam memorials. I do not want to understate the seriousness or depth of the wounds of the Vietnam tragedy. I just wonder if this country spends a lot more effort licking its wounds than other countries do. I kind of doubt there are as many memorials in Vietnam, which lost a lot more people. It's like the Challenger accident. You keep seeing memorials to the Challenger astronauts. People start seeing the space program as costing billions and it only kills people. If mankind is going to survive, we have got to get to the point where we can have viable life in space not dependent on the Earth. We have got to get to the point where no single disaster can destroy all of mankind. Planets don't last forever. Either man-made or natural, the disaster will eventually come. |
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