SHEDDING SOME LIGHT

I heard voices and I woke. It was just before dawn. An inkling of light touched the sky outside the tent. Wind belted through a surrounding copse of juniper trees and piñon pines. I could barely hear them, men talking, coming closer.

I was camped with my wife and baby son in the sea-green forests just north of the Mogollon Rim in the central part of Arizona. The dry lands of the Colorado Plateau end there and a dense wave of pines blankets an eighth of the state from there south. No one but us should have been there on that morning, miles from the nearest paved road.

“Did you hear that?” Regan whispered.

“Yeah,” I whispered back. “Someone’s here.”

“Three of them,” Regan said.

I immediately slipped into my clothes, pulled socks on, then boots. Warm hat. Gloves. We were at nearly 7,000 feet in elevation, the morning brisk. The voices were starting to fade, heading off the other way. I laced my boots faster.

“Archaeoastronomers,” I whispered to Regan. It was the only thing I could imagine, perhaps an odd conclusion, but the first thing that came to mind. Archaeoastronomy is the study of ancient sites where people once aligned rock art or architecture to celestial events. Such sites are all over the Southwest, places that intentionally catch sunrise on crucial mornings like the solstice or equinox, or are aligned with the long rhythms of the moon. We had found a rock art panel nearby in the forest the day before, and it struck me as one that might have archaeological significance. It was in the direction the men’s voices were heading. Maybe they were coming up to check the sunrise, to see how its first light interacted with rock art figures. Why else would someone be there before dawn?

“I’ll follow them,” I hushed, zipping open the tent door. “I’ll be back.”

“Or they’re pothunters,” Regan said.

“Yeah, I thought about that,” I said. That was another option. There are ruined pueblos all over this area, fields of broken, pre-Columbian pottery. They might have come with shovels and screens, maybe guns. Diggers looking for artifacts to sell on the black market. But somehow it seemed more likely that they were archaeoastronomers, judging by the exact hour of their arrival.

“I’ll just see what they’re up to,” I said, and I zipped the door closed behind me.

The three voices had gotten well ahead of me in the chill wind. The men knew exactly where they were going, no pausing or looking for directions. They had been there before. I took off after them.
 

In the first light, pieces of pottery began appearing up the slope, remains of people from the 14th century, black-on-whites, black-on-reds, yellow wares. People had been living in settlements all around there. When I neared the top of the mesa, I stopped in shadows where I could see two of the three men above me. One carried camera equipment. Their movements were informal, unaware someone had followed them, that anyone else was out there at all. Their shoulders were jacked up against the wind, their heads down as they unloaded gear in an upheaval of large basalt boulders. The boulders were covered with rock art.

I looked for shovels, screens, perhaps a weapon that might identify these men as pothunters. Nothing of the sort. They had a sole purpose. They had come for sunrise. The two men sank down in front of a tall block of a boulder black as charcoal, taking shelter, their gloved hands tucked into their coats. I approached through the trees, slowly, my hands at my sides.

The man with the camera saw me first, a clean-shaven face caught suddenly at the sight of a stranger out of the woods. The slightly older man with a trim gray beard saw me next, and both of their faces went half-blank with confusion. I could see in their eyes that this site was not public knowledge.

I opened a hand, unarmed, friendly. I had to shout over the wind, asking if they were there for an alignment. The photographer did not move. The bearded man stood up and he seemed to be thinking there are enough oddities and coincidences in the world, why not a man appearing from the woods who knows these ancient maps?

The photographer rose behind him. We peeled off gloves to shake hands. They introduced themselves, both from the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff, a photo archivist and a bearded archaeologist. They were there for sunrise. “And the third man?” I asked.

“He’s the steward for this site,” the photographer said. “He’s working with the Forest Service, and he’s kind of old, so it’s taking him awhile to get up here.”

“And you’ve come for an alignment?” I asked again.

The archaeologist, Jerry Snow, told me that the rock art panels there seem to be a kind of calendar. He had been coming for years charting different sunrises, documenting the way first light strikes various images carved in the rock.

I explained that my wife, our son and I were camped down lower, that we heard them come through, figured it could mean only one thing. They laughed. Snow said there aren’t many of us in the world. I nodded, even though I was not one of them, not an archaeoastronomer. I was at least in on the secret, peeping into this subculture of people who document signs of prehistoric astronomy.
 

The third man approached with some difficulty, poking a thick walking stick ahead of him. He came out from around black boulders, his peaked hood protecting his ears from the wind. When he approached me and stopped, his body was like a truck lurching to a halt, swaying against its brakes. I could not read the age of his face under his hood, 70 years old, 80 maybe, but his expression was at least serene, not at all surprised to see someone there this morning. He introduced himself as Joe, the steward for this place, assigned by the Forest Service. With a handshake, I felt his large hands, a working man. He overlapped both his hands on the knob of his wooden staff.

Meeting Joe, I thought there had probably been stewards there for generations, for centuries, wizards and eccentric, dawdling rubes waving their sticks in the air, plodding up there to make sure light was still coming on schedule. Joe smiled under the shadow of his hood, his shoulders heavy over his walking stick.

Snow, the archaeoastronomer, took me aside to point out various facets of the rock art panel. He toured me through tightly scrolled spirals and distinct but hardly identifiable symbols.

“Most of the activity seems to be based around this central spiral,” he said, circling his hand around an east-facing plane of basalt decorated with numerous carved figures. He explained that just before the summer solstice, a perfect sliver of light comes across the large spiral in the middle, and its tip touches the very center like the point of a knife.

The same kind of spiral is found on Fajada Butte in Chaco Canyon, arranged like a clock face so that daggers of light form intentional patterns on the winter solstice, the summer solstice, and the spring and autumnal equinoxes. The same spiral-and-dagger arrangement can be found at numerous sites across the Colorado Plateau (other renditions of this have also been documented in Texas).

On this morning, Snow did not know what the sun would do. We were partway between the spring equinox and summer solstice, and he had come, documenting every increment of seasons he could think of.

“Of course you’re welcome to be here and watch the event,” Jerry said matter-of-factly.

“Thank you,” I said, finding his choice of words curious. The event. Sunrise.

Not 3 minutes later the sun lifted in the east, a luminous orange turtle. The photographer swung out his tripod, though it would still take some time for light to thread through these boulders and touch the appropriate spiral.

“What time you got?” Snow asked.

The photographer pushed back the sleeve of his coat and said, “5:53.”
 

The sun lifted through a haze of blown dust some 60 miles away in the Painted Desert. There was enough dust in the air between us and the sun that I could look straight at the sun’s ball for a second or two at a time. I was amazed at its roundness, a perfect globe formed above the horizon.

I now saw why people had carved their images in this location. The full distance of light was visible from this knuckle of a mesa, no rooftops or heads of trees to block the view. Sunlight came directly from the other side of the planet, striking a gallery of symbols positioned on the line where the desert to the north gives way to forest in the south.

“What time you got?”

“6:03.”

The sun began beating back the dust storm, its light becoming too brilliant to face. We shielded our eyes and turned away, feeling warmth soak into our bodies.

“What time you got?”

“6:04.”

Shadows cataracted across boulders around us, lining up with various etchings. Ducking my head, moving lower, I made sure my shadow did not cross any of these images. Keys were turning all around me, locks opening as light passed over lesser spirals and figures of animals. Snow lifted his hand and watched the shadows of his fingers, playing with the light, seeing how many seconds remained before it reached the central spiral. He pulled out his tape measure and took quick measurements. Joe stood back watching, a gnome with a peaked hood and broad shoulders.

“What time?” Snow asked.

“6:10.”

Light rolled quickly down the spiral and within a minute it severed the image exactly in half, one side in light, the other in shadow. The photographer moved from place to place, crawling over the rock, taking pictures from different angles as the clock face revealed itself. The straightedge formed between light and shadow cantilevered across the boulder, one-by-one touching other images carved on the rock. As each figure came into alignment, they seemed to be coordinates, as if on a Cartesian chart; the abscissa of the shadow line, the ordinate of stone.

“This is what I was hoping to see,” Snow said, and he began describing each figure, telling me how they fit in certain houses of the sun, how they are addressed by the light in orderly, annual sequences. Basically, Snow was describing a form of astrology, perhaps used in its oldest and most original definition: a scientific study of celestial motion.

The light show ended when all the carved figures were fully illuminated. We moved down off these boulders into a bit of shelter below where we sat, shoulder to shoulder, as if we had known each other for years. Joe kneaded the handle of his walking stick. The light kept coming, falling across pine forests the color of mint, showing the way.