PIESTEWA PEAK

I waited for nightfall at the foot of Piestewa Peak, smack in the middle of Phoenix. Sunset drew back its bright lash as crickets started up in the rocky flanks of the mountain; first one cricket as the light faded, then hundreds. By dusk, the mountain above me sang.

Still, I waited to start climbing the peak, sitting on a warm concrete picnic bench, watching hikers stream down the trail from above. They looked like worshippers returning from a shrine, some carrying flashlights to show the way as darkness came on. Flashlights became like lanterns swaying and bobbing down from the high summit.

Every day hordes go up and down, a couple miles round-trip, an average of a half-million hikers each year, a couple thousand on weekends. All sorts of people come here, tube-sucking water-drinkers clicking at the ground with their trekking poles, and gruff, unshaven desert rats carrying canteens on their hips. You watch every kind of outfit pass — cutoff jeans, Lycra and khaki cargo pants. Children and elderly, fat and thin. The unhealthy struggle on ham hock legs, while sprinters shame the rest of us.

By a hair, Piestewa is not the tallest mountain within the city (it’s second to Camelback Mountain), but it has the most dominating presence with its singular upraised summit. At 2,607 feet above sea level, the mountain is the color of fire ash, slabs of schist rising more than a thousand feet off the valley plain. At twilight, the mass of lifted rock turns a luminescent lemon color, absorbing the footlights of Phoenix.

The mountain used to be called Squaw Peak. By federal decree, the name was recently changed to Piestewa Peak, a big intellectual move for one of the largest central landmarks in the city. The word “squaw” fell from favor, a derogatory term for Native American women. But even if the old name has been respectfully removed, it takes time to rewire one’s brain. I grew up knowing it as Squaw Peak, and for me the word has only meant a singular horn of rock rising from inside Phoenix. It is hard to change.
 

In 2008, the peak was officially renamed for Lori Piestewa, a Hopi woman who was killed during combat at the onset of the Iraq War in 2003. She was the first Native American woman to die in combat on foreign soil.

Piestewa was a Tuba City girl, a mother of two, and she worked as a Humvee driver for the Army’s 507th Maintenance Company. In the first wave of the invasion, her convoy became lost in the desert and was ambushed in Nasiriyah. She was hit by what Army investigators called “a torrent of fire,” and died jamming her foot down on the accelerator to get her and her company out of there. Her body was later found buried in a shallow grave behind an Iraqi hospital.

Taken from the Hopi language, Piestewa has been generally interpreted to mean people-who-live-by-the-water. An acquaintance on the Hopi Reservation in Northern Arizona asked around on my behalf, and returned explaining that the name is used in reference to the Flute Society. On their dance day, he told me, members of this society journey to a sacred spring and perform prayers, meditations and songs. They chant prayer-songs and play their flutes into the spring. Then they return to the village plaza, where it is said they bring rain.

The Hopi man explained, “All this is done for moisture of rain, harmony and peace on Earth.”

He broke the word down for me to pahu (water), yesse (gather or sitting) and tiwa (an adjective of something happening). It means sitting-at-the-happening-place-of-water, or something like that. The Hopi spelling is Pa-yes-tiwa, pronounced Pie-ess-too-wah, a word that calls the rain.

I came to this mountain tonight to climb it and make peace with its new name. It seems fitting that such a word comes to Phoenix, like a beacon, a prayer for rain in the middle of a very thirsty place.
 

I did not get off the bench at the foot of the mountain until the sun was well below the electric glow of streetlights. Only then did I hike up the trail, rising and switchbacking along the face of Piestewa. I do not know how many times I’ve climbed this mountain, but I’ve grown to prefer the solitude of night, with the city so bright all around me. It is a sublime sensation, millions of people packed wall-to-wall below while I walk up completely alone. It is a rocky spiral staircase to another world.

Todd Bostwick, an archaeologist for the city of Phoenix, once commented to me that a thousand years ago the Hohokam people who occupied this valley must have walked up these very same trails. He figured that, like us, they used mountains like this as a retreat from the noisy, smelly villages in the valley below. It makes perfect sense. Not much different today, the city can be busy and oppressive, and the mountains act as a sanctuary.

Piestewa is not alone. The Phoenix Mountains form a broad chain of summits about 8 miles long. In my mind, they are what make this city beautiful, if not bearable. In the 1960s and ’70s, Phoenix resident Dottie Gilbert, along with a faithful group of diehards, worked to convince the city that these mountains needed preserving. They would establish a rare form of wilderness within metropolitan boundaries. Their hard-fought battle succeeded, and now the Phoenix Mountains Preserve has been set aside, a point of pride in the midst of sprawl.

No manicured Central Park, mountains within the preserve are rugged and left mostly to themselves, traversed only by dirt trails. Geologically, they are made of layers of very different rock formations tilted back steeply so that just about every mountain within the range consists of a different kind of rock. This offers a variety of textures and colors to the city’s skyline. The mountains rise sharply, their outcrops harsh and wild. Charles Christiansen, director of the Phoenix Parks and Recreation Department in the early ’70s, said at the time, “There will always be that beauty there, untarnished by man.”

Few cities in this country have landmarks like these, rough interior landscapes holding up the central horizon. They span from Shadow Mountain, Moon Hill, and the flat top of Lookout Mountain in the north to the terra cotta flanks of Camelback and South mountains in the south. In the middle is a dense, rocky cluster: the arroyos of Dreamy Draw below, and the masterful hood of Piestewa above. Though the city presses in from all sides, a relieving emptiness remains in the center.
 

With every hundred feet of vertical gain, the city below appeared to grow larger. Taillights and streetlights accumulated by the millions. Helicopters raked across grids as freeways flowed like luminous arteries. Airplanes stacked behind each other approaching from due east, lined up like flares in the sky — welcome to Phoenix — while an equal chain of lights departed to the west — let’s get out of here.

Directly below me, the mountain preserve was ink-black against the tungsten glow surrounding it. If this place had not been preserved, the final darkness of this city would have been pushed up the flanks of these mountains, nearly extinguished as mansions and swimming pools fit into every last crook and crevice. Holding back internal development and allowing these mountains to stand free might be the best thing Phoenix ever did.

In 1966, the year I was born down in that mass of light, Dottie Gilbert wrote a letter to then-mayor Milton Graham. She urged him to properly plan what to do with various pieces of land, writing, “How sad it will be if it becomes an unimaginative dense urban area with city streets and curbs and sidewalks, when it could be built around its trails with little picnic spots scattered through the mountains to lure the hiker, the Boy Scout — and, yes, the horseman.” She went on: “Our mountains are to Phoenix what the beaches are to Florida. They are our ‘natural resources,’ and they are everybody’s scenery.” In conclusion, Gilbert apologized to the mayor for appearing to be against progress in the usual sense of the word. “I am really for ‘progress’ in the long-range sense of preserving for the Phoenix of the future as much as possible of this delightful and unique spot.”

The particular spot she was writing about was the foot of Piestewa. Now, looking down into its darkness, I was thankful she succeeded. But her move for preservation was not the end of the story. Time changed, new questions arose. The name of this mountain was no longer enough, and “Piestewa” eventually replaced “Squaw.” I wonder if Gilbert would have resisted the change. I imagine she probably would have. I resisted it, too. When I first heard it, the name reeked of political correctness, which is why I began asking around Hopi, and why I came here tonight. I needed to understand this new name for an old and beloved peak.

I moved up 120 stories of rock and hardpack, theaters of crickets and lone posts of saguaros striking against the sky. At the summit, I found a familiar jag of bedrock, not much of a comfortable place to sit. I fit my butt down into a crevice, knees higher than my hips, and pretended to recline over this elegant and feverish city. The metropolis formed a circular sweep of light, swirling rings of industry and life.

Thunderstorms rimmed the horizon. Flashes of lightning boiled over the suburbs. Storms are always a good sign in this city. You want precipitation. Only fools complain when weather moves in. This is a desert, and water is most precious in any form. Come on, I thought, rain.

I whispered, Piestewa.

The word did not sound at all like “Squaw,” not the carbon mass of a mountain that I knew, but it did have a ring to it, and so I said it, a little louder.

Piestewa.

How it is spoken at Hopi, you pronounce the “t” with your tongue almost touching the back of your teeth — nearly a “th” sound — and you draw out the “wa,” as in “want.”

Like many Hopi words, saying it out loud, it almost sounded like water. It actually had relevance here. As I said it, I thought of the history gathered in the word, much more powerful than the mere squaw it was before. Now this mountain’s name bore new definitions: Dark-eye-of-rapturous-city; Prayer-for-rain; Mother-of-two-found-buried-in-the-desert; Warrior-sent-far-away.

I said the name as I sat, telling it to the air. I got up and hopped to another nick of rock, whispering it as I went. I climbed down off the summit, monkeying across ridges into steep, loose ravines below. I let the word fall from my mouth, memorizing the sound, Piestewa, a slow chant descending into this city so lovely tonight.