Land of the Lost

formulanone from Huntsville, United States, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

By Geoff Carter

As I mentioned in last week’s post, my wife and I recently took a long cross-country road trip from the mean streets of Milwaukee to the enthralling natural beauty of New Mexico. Part—most of—the trip was spent on Interstate Highway 80 and I-25 buzzing past McDonald’s and Subway fast-food stores, Sinclair, Marathon, and Love’s gas stations, and other flotsam and jetsam from America’s huge tidal surge of urban sprawl. 

If I had dozed off in the car and then awakened to the sight of thirty-foot Conoco, Exxon, or Taco Bell signs off a a highway exit, I would have had no idea of where I was; it could have been anywhere—Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, or Nebraska. This sort of sprawl is (excepting for localized chains like Chick Fil A’s), identical nationwide. Our highways have become murals for corporate graffiti—monetary tags claiming their roadside turf—except for the fact that calling them graffiti is a bit insulting to urban artists. 

Entering New Mexico (nicknamed the Land of Enchantment) was refreshing in that, instead of gaudy neon and LED gasoline price listings, we were surrounded by vast plains punctuated only with sharp buttes and giant mesas. All signs of corporate civilization had—as quickly and inexplicably as the Mayan migration—disappeared. As we made our way around the southern edges of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains into Santa Fe, I braced myself for a resurrection of American roadside art. But there was none. I never did discover why that was, whether it was state law or local ordinance or plain good taste that had limited the sprawl, but it was refreshing. 

Over the course our week-long visit, we visited Plaza Blanca and The Bandeliers National Monument. Plaza Blanca is an isolated formation of massive white sandstone spires and columns in the Jemez mountains near the town of Abiquiu. The canyon was a favorite of artist Georgia O’Keefe, who used one of the formations as inspiration for her work “White Palace”. The land is owned by Dar al Islam, a Muslim educational center that generously allows free access to the site. Unfortunately, recent incidents of trespassing and vandalism have forced the owners to have visitors register in advance. 

The formations are made of spires of towering white sandstone worn away by eons of wind and rain and seem otherworldly, almost surreal, in some places resembling cathedrals, steeples, and towers. In others, they look like a series of gigantic faces peering down. It’s easy to imagine some sort of mystical power resides in this canyon, watching over the land. There is no sign of civilization there, no gift shops or snack trucks or restaurants. There is no road into the canyon. Visitors also must enter on foot.

We also visited The Bandelier National Monument near Los Alamos in Frijoles Canyon. This monument is an historical site of the ancient home of the ancestors of today’s Pueblo Indians. Ruins of a settlement lie on the floor of the canyon as the steep cliffs. Ancient dwelling places that had been carved into the soft stone can be entered and explored by visitors. The National Monument is massive, covering over 33,000 acres, most of it still wild. As we walked the trail, a herd of unconcerned mule deer grazed not twenty from us. Our guide showed us a photo of a bobcat he had taken as it chased a squirrel across the very spot where we stood.

No one knows for sure why the ancient inhabitants of Frijoles Canyon abandoned their homes, but the consensus seems to be that a prolonged drought forced them to move. Still, their caves, petroglyphs, and the skeletal ruins of their adobe homes remain as testament to their presence. As I scaled ladders into some of these abodes and entered these ancient homes, time seemed to stand still. It wasn’t hard to imagine what it was like to live in these beautiful cliffs, to exist alongside a natural world that—for once—I didn’t need to imagine. 

Frijoles Canyon has not changed much in hundreds of years. Visiting there is—no cliché—just like stepping into the past. Time barely exists in that place, or, for that matter, in many of the surrounding canyons. Like Plaza Blanca, the rugged beauty of these mesas and canyons is—as of this writing—unsullied by man. Their very ruggedness and remoteness, as well as the guardianship of those wise enough to preserve these lands, protects these lands and the legacy of the people who lived there. 

What will be the legacy of our own twenty-first century civilization? What will archeologists of the distant future make of decayed Exxon signs and millions of indestructible plastic bags and six-pack rings in our streams and oceans? And what of those giant landfills, those man-made mountains of trash? 

Perhaps future anthropologists will wonder at our propensity for cutting down and paving over the natural world. They might see the glut of roadside signs and theorize that these are shrines to the gods we worshipped in a global religious sect. They might believe that instead of living in harmony with and appreciating the beauty of places like Plaza Blanca, Bandelier, or our great plains and forests, we chose to worship those plastic and metal deities while exploiting or ignoring the natural world, and eventually destroying it—along with ourselves. 

As we headed back home, driving through the sparsely populated high plains and rolling hills of Colorado, more and more of the gigantic road signs began to crop up, like tall and noxious weeds. We were going home.