Where the Old West Still Lives

I have a rule against registering complaints in a restaurant; because I know that there are at least four billion suns in the Milky Way which is only one galaxy. Many of these suns are thousands of times larger than our own, and vast millions of them have whole planetary systems, including literally billions of satellites, and all of this revolves at the rate of about a million miles an hour, like a huge oval pinwheel. Our own Sun and its planets, which includes the Earth, are on the edge of this wheel. This is only our own small corner of the universe, so why do not these billions of revolving and rotating suns and planets collide? The answer is, the space is so unbelievably vast that if we reduced the suns and the planets in correct mathematical proportion with relation to the distance between them, each sun would be a speck of dust, two, three, and four thousand miles away from its nearest neighbor. And, mind you, this is only the Milky Way our own small corner our own galaxy. How many galaxies are there? Billions. Billions of galaxies spaced at about one million light-years apart (one light-year is about six trillion miles). Within the range of our biggest telescopes, there are at least one hundred million separate galaxies such as our own Milky Way, and this is not all, by any means. The scientists have found that the further you go out into space with the telescopes the thicker the galaxies become, and there are billions of billions as yet uncovered to the scientist's camera and the astrophysicist's calculations. When you think of all this, it's silly to worry whether the waitress brought you string beans instead of limas.

Start with the land, it was here first, and it will be here last. I have called it a great dry and wrinkled land. Those are the basic characteristics of the Southwest. Absence of abundant rainfall. Vastness of mountains, deserts, and distance under clear skies. Add color, and an abiding IndoHispano influence. Although it is hard to delimit the Southwest how far northeast does it go? it is easy to recognize. Sun, silence, and adobe is how Charles F. Lummis characterized it. He was its first booster, a tough little Yankee who came in the 1880s, walking all the way and writing letters ahead to the Los Angeles Times. It was he who gave the Southwest its generic name.

It is a fragile land of an interconnected ecology. The paucity of rainfall creates a delicate balance now threatened by man's thoughtlessness. Yet no culture lasts forever. Like its predecessors Anasazi, Salado, Hohokam, Mimbres our urbo-agri-industrial culture too will pass. To understand history is to concede that all cultures end. The poet writes, “The wave falls and the hand falls; thou shalt not always walk in the Sun.” Our time will probably last longer than any thus far because we are a clever technical people. If we can learn to exploit the Sun's energy, we might live by its heat and light for many millenia but even then not forever, for the Sun's life also is limited.

His name was known to two hemispheres, a name synonymous with stealth, with elusiveness, with the merciless midnight raids on farmers, ranchers, miners, travelers, and villagers on both sides of a border between two great nations. Today we can't imagine the sinking terror and cold crawling of skin caused by the warning shrieked in the night: Geronimo! Geronimo!

Yet the widespread respect his fearsome reputation earned him was largely deserved. Geronimo was a skilled war leader and ruthless guerilla captain and certainly no phony, nor did any of the frontiersmen of the last century believe him to be, no matter how they cussed him as liar, savage cutthroat, and a mighty troublesome impediment to tranquility and progress thereabouts.

It's true, nevertheless, that the Geronimo of the 1880s bore little resemblance to the fictionalized portrait of him we have today. He was never "Chief," nor was his following large; but they were to a man elusive as the desert wind, remorseless as the rattlesnake, and swifter than skilled horsemen. His colleagues, however few, generally proved loyal to him, and were dependable. Despite their small numbers, by their very evanescence they tied down and frustrated thousands of American and Mexican soldiers. Thus, in some sense, even our distorted concept of Geronimo is vaguely justified; it's been paraded across the screen and tube by dozens of movie "re-creations" that are about as true to Geronimo as the Odyssey was to the living Odysseus.

I write mystery novels set on the Navajo Reservation, and Etcitty accuses me of using him as the model for my hero - a Navajo tribal policeman. Therefore, since a listener is one of the characters in the book-in-progress, Etcitty wants me to talk to one of these shamans and learn for myself how they diagnose the cause of illness. Our hunt is for a cousin of his who practices this science. It had taken us from Moenkopi to Goldtooth, and hence to Coalmine Mesa, and from there to Ganado, and then northward to Many Farms. We had driven through a landscape as empty as any in America. The scenery has put Etcitty into a talkative mood.He talked of family ties, of values which reverse materialism, of the magnetic pull of ceremonialism, and of how a Navajo content on the lonely landscape of Dinetah learns the meaning of loneliness in the crowds of Phoenix.

While he talks, we top a hill on Navajo Route 8. Etcitty pulls the car to the shoulder and gestures through the windshield. Spread below us is the immense "sink" which drains the southwest slopes of the Chuska Mountains. It is a wilderness of sunbaked stone, gray caliche, wind-cut clay red as barn paint, great bluish outcroppings of shale, the pock-marked dingy white of old volcanic ash, and the cracked expanse of salt flats where the mud formed by the "male rains" of summer tastes as bitter as alum.

This is the ultimate in how erosion can ravage a land. Everything is cut and worn and tortured. It is axiomatic that the desert teems with life. But there is no life here. Not even creosote bush or cactus grow. It is a landscape totally without hospitality, offering neither food, nor shade, nor water. The white mapmaker would call it Desolation Flats.

"Our name for this," says Etcitty, "is Beautiful Valley."