A Shiver of History

THE NIGHT IS COLD, PIERCINGLY COLD. The cold is the kind that finds its way through your nose and fingers and permeates your very core in a matter of seconds, making you wonder why you ever left the comfort of the indoors, why anyone would ever venture outside until summer. It is so cold that the stars themselves seem to shiver in the night sky, so cold that the air feels brittle and glasslike, as if it were about to shatter into shards of ice. The winter solstice is upon us, announcing its arrival in the high country of the Colorado Plateau with a sudden blast of polar wind. The thermometer stands a couple of degrees north of zero; the ceaseless gusts mean it is colder still. As if to warm herself, Venus hugs close to the waxing moon, a super-bright beacon in the night. Geminid meteors streak through the pitch-black sky, on their way to somewhere else. The North Star gleams, and the Milky Way spills out across the universe.

An astronomer by training and photographer by avocation, Steve Strom blows on his fingertips to warm them up enough to capture the brilliant night sky with his camera and gazes contentedly into the far distance. He takes a few long exposures, and then we surrender to the brightly lit, tinseled Christmas tree that beckons us inside Canyon de Chelly's Thunderbird Lodge. We and our wives are about the only outside guests braving the cold for a holiday sojourn, but a dozen or so Navajos of all ages have gathered in the dining room. The older ones visit with each other while the younger ones play under the tree, singing along to carols playing over the radio.

WE MAKE A MODESTLY DRAMATIC ENTRANCE, pushed through the door by the wind. A stranger wrapped in a down jacket and several layers of sweater, I resemble the Michelin man-or perhaps, more suited to the wild setting, a bulked-up bear, casting a big shadow on the dining room.

A child darts past me. His mother calls, "Nidlohish?" ("Are you cold?"). He nods and scampers over to sit beneath the tree, where hot cocoa is soon delivered to him. At least it's not only me who finds the weather a touch nippy.

No one seems alarmed by my appearance, but indeed I'm hungry as a bear. A big bowl of lamb stew laced with lots of chile, a big disc of frybread smothered in honey, and a big cup of hot tea eventually takes the chill away. Steve and I, no longer having to grit our teeth, talk about astronomy, football, Navajo history and the next day's plans. I refill my teacup, saying "axéhee'" ("thank you") to the young Navajo woman at the cash register. It's a lovely, nasal tongue-twister of a word. The cashier and her colleagues giggle, sharing delighted looks at the shambling, stammering bear who is mangling their tongue.

When cold, a bear will tell you, the best thing to do is hibernate. It seems sound advice, and we make for our rooms and burrow in against the long night. Still, I am enchanted, and from time to time I awake

'It's like church. This canyon is a sacred place to all the Navajos . . . . . . it clears your mind . . .'

to look out the window to see how the stars have wheeled their way across the night sky, following their ancient path.

Daniel STALEY IS TEACHING ME TO MAKE A FIRE. Sitting beneath the ancestral Puebloan ruin called Antelope House, he takes strips of cottonwood bark, lays them against a log and steadily scrapes one of them with a larger chip of cottonwood. Three minutes go by, four, while Daniel talks, quietly, about the things his grandfathers taught him. And then a slender plume of smoke rises.

We have been traveling through Canyon de Chelly National Monument-the Navajo word tséyi', of which Chelly is a Spanish approximation, means “within the rocks.” For a few hours, we have bounced in a truck along the sandy bed of a steadily narrowing wash, cracking our way over thick layers of ice. Normally at this time of year, only a trickle of water flows through the wash, but up at the little town of Tsaile at the canyon's head, the reservoir is full of water from the steep, well-watered Lukachukai Mountains, and so some of its supply has been freed to spill down the wash. The result is that Canyon de Chelly's floor is a winter wonderland of thick, glittering ice that sends spectral beams of light into the dark-red corners of the canyon's high walls, illuminating their store of tucked-away caves and ancient rock dwellings like pixies.When we set off early on this bright December morning, slipping and sliding along the wash, it was a scant 5 degrees above zero. We have been traveling slowly, steadily, up the ominously named Canyon del Muerto (“Canyon of Death”), an 18-mile-long tributary of Canyon de Chelly. The sun has risen above the canyon's walls, filling the valley floor with light, and it has warmed up to a crackling 28 degrees. Grateful for this newly arrived balminess, we stop below Antelope House to make an alfresco picnic of salami, cheese, apples and chocolate, a perfect outdoors feast.

The little fire flickers merrily as we eat. Not that Daniel has been complaining about the cold in the first place. When we met him early this morning, we came wrapped up as if for an Arctic expedition, gloves and mufflers and balaclavas and thick wool socks deployed. Daniel strode up wearing a sweatshirt and a denim jacket, looked us over, and smiled. What he was thinking I can only guess.

Karen Strom, also an astronomer, stands in a curve of shade below Antelope House, peering at a rock ledge 20 feet overhead. “Look,” she says, excitedly, “there's Cassiopeia!” “Does it make a W?” I ask, searching for its faint outline on the rock ceiling. I have thereby come close to exhausting my store of Boy Scouts-won star knowledge, but I press on by saying, “And that up there looks like Ursa Minor.” “Could be,” says Karen. “Probably Ursa Major. There's Polaris over there, and there's the morning star.” I finally make out the W shape of Cassiopeia, what the Navajos call Náhookos Biáadii, and the Big Dipper, Náhookos Bika'ïi. Both figured prominently in last night's starscape, as did the morning star, Venus. Their representations here, scratched long ago into the crumbling sandstone alongside one of the canyon's best-preserved ruins, suggests their importance to the ancient inhabitants of the Colorado Plateau. Those people sited their cliff houses for many reasons, not the least of them being ease of defense and proximity to productive agricultural fields, but also for the best possible views of the night sky, that infinite source of stories and metaphors. Indeed, just as the stars guided Europeans before we learned to let machines do our looking for us, the ancestral Puebloans organized many of their lifeways around the heavens.

The Puebloan people's knowledge of stars is well attested in Canyon de Chelly, where dozens of “planetaria” grace walls, ledges and caves. The winter night sky is particularly well represented, since winter was traditionally a quiet time, the harvest in and stored and the planting yet to begin, a time to make art and plan for the future. So it is in Canyon de Chelly today: Some 80 Navajo families still own farmland there.

We hear the whinnying of a farmer's horse, and a curl of smoke rises above a nearby hogan tucked into a spectacularly, explosively golden grove of cottonwood trees. Daniel walks up to me and says, “It's like church. This canyon is a sacred place to all the Navajos. When you come here, it clears your mind, and you go home strong. The canyon is our mother, and she feeds us.” Standing beneath the cottonwoods, their leaves rattling in a now soft wind, I understand.

Daniel knows of another planetarium up the canyon, not far from Mummy Cave. It will take some work and some climbing to get there, but the day is steadily warming-it will soon break the freezing point-and we're ready to wander. We clamber into Steve's well-weathered truck and move deeper into Canyon del Muerto, past the rock island that marks the mouth of Black Rock Canyon, the walls growing higher and higher. Daniel sings softly: We can chase my horse We can chase my horse In my Jeep Wrangler In my Jeep Wrangler . . .

I can show you a shooting star I can show you a shooting star In my Jeep Wrangler In my Jeep Wrangler . . .

The melody could be a thousand years old, rhythmic and gentle, but the words are his own. They'd do both Merle Haggard and an ancient Indian astronomer proud, and they make a pleasing Christmas carol now, echoing off the redwall cliffs.

We halt. The ever-warmer sun has finally bored through the thick ice, and the little cottonwood-lined draw before us has suddenly transformed into a small but deep lake. Daniel, Steve and I climb out of the truck and stand at its edge, sounding the depth with an obliging branch that has fallen from a dead tree. We debate it a little, poking and stroking chins, then decide that Tsegi Creek has become a touch too high for our comfort zone. Daniel remarks, brightly, "Well, it'd only take us until sunset to walk out," whereupon we decide to leave the planetarium for a drier, warmer day.

Karen and my wife, Marianne, warm in the truck, are laughing as we climb back in. "You looked just like little boys out there," Marianne says. "The stick was a nice touch," Karen agrees. True enough, but Christmas cookies and hot chocolate await. We wind our way back to the national monument headquarters, leisurely backtracking to take in a view of another magnificent ruin, White House. An ever-brisker wind herds us along, just to remind us of the cold night to come, and the sun slowly begins its descent.

I ask Daniel how he'll spend the holiday. "Oh, I don't know," he replies. "Maybe I'll go to Paris." He looks at me, and since he is a well-traveled man who would find much of interest in the City of Light-and the Parisians much of interest in him-I take the remark at face value. Then he breaks into a smile. "Naw," he says. "I'd like to go there, maybe, but my family would miss me. I'll be here with my children and grandchildren. It's a day for family. It's Christmas!"

NIGHT FALLS, AND VENUS TUCKS HERSELF IN CLOSE to the moon. The canyon's walls loom in the soft white light, and the stars burn brightly in their courses, wheeling above us in much the same configuration, I imagine, as they did above three riders crossing another desert long ago, looking for a newly arrived king. Horses whinny in the near distance, their calls echoing off the cliff faces, and I am reminded of the words of the Navajo poet Laura Tohe: "Every time I return to Tséyi it's as if I had never laid eyes on it."

In this season of transformation, it is all new, and it is a wonderful pleasure to be alive to behold it. The air fills with the smell of wood smoke mixed with the inviting scent of frybread, and trees wrapped in festive lights gleam merrily. There is so much promise, so much beauty in the world. All