A Morning of Vision
“To look at a thing is quite different from seeing a thing.”
— Oscar Wilde, The Ideal Husband
Story by Jules Older
There I stood on a stony escarpment outside Santa Fe, one foot gingerly resting on a piece of scalpel-sharp basalt, the other precariously balancing on a wobbly volcanic rock, my fingers just barely avoiding the barbed needles of a choia cactus, and my head contemplating the nature of seeing.
We’d driven maybe ten miles out of Santa Fe, switched from highway to gravel, gravel to dirt, and parked the Jeep on top of a dry-grassed mesa. There, we strapped on the water bottles, rubbed in the sunblock, and walked twenty-five yards to the edge. We looked out at the distant peaks of the Sangre de Cristos, round-topped thunderheads over Santa Fe, and a flat and fertile river valley below. A pretty scene, but for this splendor-filled region, pretty unremarkable.
We stood on the rim of a south-facing escarpment of tumbled gray stone which separated us from the green valley. My guide said, “We’ll start here.”
My guide was a ginger-haired, gravel-voiced ex-hippie named Murdoch Finlayson. In 1968, he and his ex-wife quit New York and headed out West. When he got here, Murdoch saw what so many others had missed: the strange beauty of primitive Indian art objects scattered all over the countryside. He spent every moment he could snatch walking the mesas and arroyos of the unfamiliar Southwestern terrain. What captured his soul was the rock art.
Southwestern rock art is of two types; pictographs and petroglyphs. The former are painted; the latter, scored and scratched in stone. And not just any stone, but stone that can take a cut without crumbling, stone that changes color once you scrape through its weathered surface, stone that stands vertically, like the side of a New York subway car just begging to be graffitied. And, ideally, it’s stone on an escarpment that faces south.
We clambered down ten or fifteen yards of our south-facing escarpment, hoisting ourselves around and over dark, cubist boulders. Then Murdoch signaled that we were to stop descending and to begin to work our way laterally. Between the choia and the prickly pear, we had to move with care, but if you took your time, the worst you’d encounter was a legful of barbed needles or a sunburned neck. The rattlesnakes wouldn’t come out to sun themselves for another couple of hours. So there was no need to worry.
But neither, from what I could see (or, as it turned out, couldn’t see), was there any reason to be there. That was until the moment Murdoch said, “Look up.”
I looked. I saw nothing.
“Further left. And a little higher.”
Oh, me, oh, my! There, scratched into the basalt, was a life-size outline of a human hand. It was like a hidden-figure drawing from Psych 1. As soon as I saw the hand, other figures began popping out. A spiral. What looked like a chess board. A series of steps.
As I stared, what had been a lifeless cliff turned into the wall of an extremely old art gallery.
In all likelihood, this gallery was 750 years old. The images, Murdoch said, were the work of the Anasazi, the Old Ones, the forbears of the contemporary Pueblo tribes of New Mexico. “How do you know?” I asked.
“The remains of a village are just below here, and scientists have identified both the residents and the time of residence, largely from pottery shards.”
“OK, but why did they go for south-facing escarpments?”
“For comfort. It’s a warm and pleasant to work in winter. The Anasazi were well aware of placement. Most of their dwellings were built facing for solar gain.
Archeologists, anthropologists, historians and anybody with a wacky theory — “ETs!” — have argued about the meaning of the Old Ones’ scrapings. No one even knows for sure whether the Anasazis considered their stone cutting as history or religion, art or graffiti.
But whatever their original meaning, a good guide can open your eyes to Anasazi petroglyphs that you (or at least I) would have completely overlooked. I figure that’s a pretty good use of a morning in New Mexico. And an excellent argument for hiring the right guide.
After a life filled with variety and boldness, Murdoch Finlayson died in 2019.
Jules Older is an award-winning writer.
His website is www.julesolder.com.
His newest book is Special Ed and the White Force.
