Hovenweep

The solivagant’s life as metaphor: Driving through Canyons of the Ancients in southwestern Colorado and crossing the Utah border into Hovenweep. These adjacent National Monuments encompass hundreds of square miles; their primary attraction: over 8,000 documented Puebloan archaeological sites.

Prepared solivagants always carry a bound companion with correlated information. Terry Tempest Williams, in her book “Red, Passion and Patience in the Desert” mentioned the difficulty of describing this landscape.

“How can I convey the scale and power of these big wide-open lands to those who have never seen them, let alone to those who have?” she wrote. “I have found no subject to be as intellectually challenging as writing about wilderness....” Here is simply a sea of hardscrabble sagebrush and Pinyon-juniper trees, its shoreless inlets and rocky tides, its flowing islands and stagnant currents as windblown as its high clouds. It is love-struck desolation. Indeed, the very word “Hovenweep” is Ute for “deserted valley.”

I visit Hovenweep’s largest aggregation of ruins called the Square Tower Group dotting Little Ruin Canyon. A short hike from the visitor center brings one to the canyon’s edge, from which an array of ruins of various geometric shapes and sizes can be observed. An encircling path allows closer inspection, but this gallivant was focused on attractions further west and soon headed back into monument miles of tarred and gravel roads. With few discernable signs, I soon experienced a solivagant’s delight: I got lost. I drove on and came upon a car pulled roadside, two women standing next to it in apparent distress. Three bicyclists had already pulled up. Asked if they needed any help, one woman turned to me and pointed, said, “We stopped and my dog went under the car and he won’t come out!”

A dog’s head was visible under the car, one of the cyclists stroking his ears and speaking softly, gently urging the dog out. I asked if they had water and they did not, and I refilled their container. Assured there was nothing more I could do, I moved on.

I wandered forth through sun-stroked vistas until encountering a “Entering Colorado” sign, indicating the wrong direction. Turning about, I re-passed our distressed friends, the dog still steadfastly ensconced beneath the car, and soon took some Yogi Berra advice: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” Gently satisfied, without time constraint, to meander somehow back to terra firma and proper signage, I turned right.

Miles further, I noticed an impediment ahead. Drawing closer, I saw it was a small herd of perhaps twenty wild horses crowding the road. I pulled behind, marveling at their leisurely gait as well as apparent disinterest in my appearance. Nudging my car forward they parted slowly, some stopping directly in front of me turning to stare, others nosing into my window. I edged forward until the last shifted aside and as I passed, he turned and eyed me curiously, a slight breeze lifting his mane. Once free I sped up and felt the same breath of arid air lifting my own hair.

Terry Tempest Williams contends that stories inform our landscapes, that timeless rocks beneath our feet are meaningless without associated experience. Just as Lassie conveys the traditional and Mr. Ed the silly in cultural landscapes; just as Buck the dog in “The Call of the Wild” and Commanche, a horse survivor of Custer’s Last Stand inform historical landscapes both fictional and factual, so does Hovenweep’s dog and pony show inform my landscape story.

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The solivagant’s life as metaphor: don’t be the dog, afraid to emerge into light of broader worlds, however foreign, dark, and foreboding that sagebrush sea may appear. Don’t be inhibited by fears even somewhat rational, worried that if you wander too far, you might fall off the edge of the world. Be the wild horse with a gentle breeze lifting your mane, indifferent to schedules, goals and the whims of others, clomping forward only dimly concerned with present needs. A lesson learned late in life, lost in southwest Utah’s ocean maze, tossed overboard to sink or swim in the ancient canyons of Hovenweep.

In following days was experienced Blanding and Bluff, the Valley of the Gods, the stunning stretch of highway from Mexican Hat to Hanksville, and finally Canyonlands National Park. And then a quick run over to Telluride for lunch at the Brown Dog Pub, just for the hell of it. For the last four evenings I sculpted my landscape, laying down bare essential bedrock words, caressing the clay of cadence and vocabulary, pacing and pitch, shaping meter and rhyme until reluctantly checking my return flight itinerary.

It’s time to crawl back under the car.