“I looked down upon hillside after hillside of slopes clear-cut for their timber. Traversed back and forth by logging roads, the hills were deeply scarred and patterned. All I could think of were pottery designs. Beginning there, the entire flight was an aerial Anasazi visual feast of basket weaves made of farmland plowing, river ways drawn out like rock art, and cloud patterns resembling rock forms.“ — Bruce Hucko

I am writing this sitting at a desk that my dad made for my eleventh birthday. In the second drawer is an old pipe tobacco can—Captain Black—filled with Native American potsherds. My family moved to the Four Corners region in northwestern New Mexico when I was six years old. Many of my earliest memories of New Mexico involve the typical sight seeing outings families do; I remember going to Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, and seeing Chimney Rock on the way to the mountains of southwest Colorado.

At that age, the significance of these world-class archaeological sites did not really mean much to me, however, I would begin drawing connections to the ancient residents of this area one September day while deer hunting with my dad.After several hours of hiking through the seemingly endless piñon-juniper pygmy forest, we came upon an area filled with potsherds. I was probably a little bored and the potsherds made for an exciting treasure hunt.

Together, we naïvely picked up some of the nicer ones and brought them home. Since then, they’ve mostly lived inside the pipe tobacco can in my desk. I am not sure how old they are. Some are really lovely bowl rims, with simple triangular black-on-white patterns painted on them. Others are pieces of corrugated bowls.

Many of the archaeological sites in that area of New Mexico are Navajo—about 400-500 years old. However, the areas we used to visit do not lie far from Salmon Ruins and the Great North Road. So, it is entirely possible—probable even—that these pieces are much older Ancestral Puebloan (Anasazi) potsherds.

Archaeologists say that we learn best about ancient cultures by leaving artifacts in their place, admired but untouched. Indeed, we lose much knowledge by looking at these pieces of pottery ex situ. However, when I look at them, I think of the people who left them. What were they thinking when they left them? Did they walk away unflinchingly from their homes, or did they take a longing look back, thinking they may someday return? These fragmented pieces of pottery tell the story of a people who managed a living off of the land, who knew the landscape and probably felt a deep sense of place here.

Last summer, as an adult, flying from my home in southern California to Colorado at 30,000', I can easily relate to Hucko’s evocative impressions of the Western landscape. Looking out the airplane window, I not only see pattern, but I see landscapes that are familiar to me, so much so that I can recognize them without the aid of a map, or even having visited them in years.

The Mojave Desert, Grand Canyon, Vermillion Cliffs, Navajo Mountain, Cedar Mesa, Mesa Verde, the San Juans, the Sawatch; all of them pass below me before we touch down in Denver. Fragments of landscapes seen at 500 miles per hour.

Six months later, I am at Chaco Canyon; it has been over 25 years since my first visit here, but it feels like many more. It’s a sunny and warm December afternoon, and many of the other tourists have left, leaving the halls of Pueblo Bonito quiet, even a little lonely, and the moon is rising over Fajada Butte. I sit for a while, watching the reflected winter light bounce through the rooms, which are open to the sky.

I find myself again thinking about the the people who once lived here, and of their great road north toward my childhood home, near Salmon and Aztec ruins. Potsherds lie across the high desert for nearly 100 miles; the stories of these travelers are being told in fragments.

I think too about my flight earlier in the year. Two hours in the air, recalling scattered memories; in the same way these broken pieces of pottery in my desk drawer tell a story, I understand now that these recollections are potsherds of my own life scattered across the American Southwest.

This is where I have spent my life and have had adventures; these are the places I’ve retreated to heal from heartbreak.So it is that we tell our own beautiful stories in broken pieces. People in our lives discover potsherds of who we are here and there as scattered fragments, just as we do with them. In our luckiest relationships, we find an entire, unbroken, pot.