The Middle Years

THE VISIBLE

THE VISIBLE has a special and irrepressible character. It is the character of the world itself, which is always there, always present, and which is always available for us to see. The visible is the world that we can see, the world that we can touch, the world that we can feel. It is the world that we can experience with our senses. The visible is the world that is always there, always present, and which is always available for us to see.

The visible is the world that we can see, the world that we can touch, the world that we can feel. It is the world that we can experience with our senses. The visible is the world that is always there, always present, and which is always available for us to see.

He has made the world visible for us, and he has made it possible for us to see it. He has made it possible for us to see the world in all its beauty and in all its glory. He has made it possible for us to see the world in all its complexity and in all its simplicity. He has made it possible for us to see the world in all its wonder and in all its awe. He has made it possible for us to see the world in all its peace and grace.

The Valley of Tsay-Bege is a tentacle of the larger depression known as Monument Valley.... Few people from the outside ever get there, and when once you do squat in the silent heat of the desert sand, you feel you have left our world behind, and discovered one wherein the centuries have not flowed back into the past at all, but are gathered invisibly here around you.Here live a sort of special brand of Navajo Indians... completely shepherds. You can come suddenly around the rocky angle of a butte, and there under the cliff will be a wood-and-mud hut, and darting through the door in shyness and fear a darkskinned woman in vividly-colored dress, and all around will be sheep and goats, grazing and bleating.

You feel you are a part of a Biblical scene. Your store-clothes seem strange and affected.... In these valleys there are weird and fearful formations left by erosive Nature. There are great natural bridges... and vast high-ceilinged caves where the Navajos herd their flocks for refuge. It is a country where white man, when he enters at all, can only feel himself an intruder.

Once I took a trip into the Valley of Tsay-Bege with a man who is... a spiritual sexton of the place. He is a white man, a cowboy, but he belongs there because he has an old affinity with the valley, and with its spirits.

We walked across the sand [and]... finally we stopped before a pile of brush. My friend said: "There is an old man buried under here, and he was a man I respected. He was a leader among the Indians. See what they sent with him."

We looked closely and found the brush-pile littered with the utensils of man. There was a coffeepot with a hole in the bottom; an old saddle, hacked with an axe; the bones of a horse. Everything left there had been damaged in some way.

"They knocked the horse in the head," said my friend, "so its spirit could escape and go with the old man, to provide him with comforts in the next world. Everything was knocked in the head, so its spirit could get out...."

From the summit of First Mesa's south tip, Walpi has looked out upon the northeast Arizona desert through the generations and the centuries, its walls standing gaunt against the sky.... to remind the onlooker of man's deepest hope, which is survival. the present village, one of six in the area, was built around 1680, but far earlier the Hopi people had their dwelling places at various points on this mesa. Before the time of Columbus... there was a village on the northwest slope of the mesa, still marked by ruins.... About 1629... increasing attacks made by Ute, Navajo, and Apache... forced the Hopi to a higher level on the west point of the mesa to a place known as Kisakobi, "the place of the ladder houses."

Below them on the desert floor are their fields and their sheep; and, being a progressive people, they have built their modern homes of late years near the springs at the foot of the mesa. But Walpi remains, both as a dwelling place and as a monument to human persistence.... Every stick and every drop of water... must come up the steep slopes of the mesa; and every bit of food and every necessary implement of living. Over the ceaseless roll of the years, the people of Walpi have climbed toward the sky with a burden in their hands or on their shoulders so that Walpi today is a testimonial to the stoic patience and the fortitude of generations running back through time.

(OPPOSITE PAGE) A Navajo shepherd and her flock in the Valley of Tsay-Bege were photographed by Esther Henderson and originally published in April, 1946. (ABOVE) The Christmas issue in 1946 carried a cover photograph by Barry Goldwater "Blessed are the Meek," a portrait made deep in Navajoland. (BELOW) Ansel Adams contributed this view of Walpi. His credit line for the photograph which ran in April, 1946, carried this addendum: "...one of America's truly distinguished photographers, will appear in these pages regularly from now on."