The PHurrowed Brow

This is the fourth post in a series, one daily from Dec. 3rd to the 24th.
If you are coming to the series late, I’d encourage you (for continuity’s
sake!) to go back & read prior posts in the order of publication.

The drought-choked Green River at the Sand Wash launch area. Photo by the author, July, 2022

Not every day, week, or season is suited for an actual journey. Weather, workload, wildfires, weariness, or wounds from recent mishaps can frustrate one’s best laid plans. Woe is me! All these causes (and a few others!) have led to unwanted cancellation or postponement of adventures that I’d hoped to take. Thank goodness, however, that there are resources and strategies to keep us on the path to our goal of getting out into the wider world!

Sometimes the strategies are simple, purposeful, and focused: refine route options, prepare or repair gear, change bookings for lodgings or campgrounds, or call family and/or friends to reschedule your time with them. Trust me, just moping is far inferior to using enforced delay to reset for a second or third attempt at one’s travel goal.

More haphazardly and more broadly, though, I find myself filling no-go time by steering my ears and eyes to books, films, and other media that present new methods of getting out there, or throw into consideration new places which I might want to include in future explorations. I find and benefit from guidebooks, podcasts, and websites that offer how-to tutorials or other practical tools to master safety practice X, fitness tip Y, or the features of the trail to the summit of peak Z. But I also thoroughly enjoy the serendipitous discovery of media which bring into captivating view some new (to me) area of the natural world or of human culture. I can go there too, I inevitably think! Or as I metaphorically dip my toes in the stream a podcast or a documentary film, I see and feel that the channels of its content flow to places I have been, enriching the understanding that I’d come away with from some earlier adventure.

One example of this latter phenomenon followed my catching part of a special program on Colorado Public Radio. Quarterly or thereabouts, CPR’s Turn the Page series encourages listeners across the state to read a chosen book that spotlights some dimension of life in Colorado. Some weeks after, CPR’s host interviews the author live in a public venue, and the interview is then broadcast. In September, 2022, the featured author was Craig Childs, an adventurer, guide, writer, and teacher whose work on the desert southwest was previously unknown to me. The Turn the Page episode, which I later streamed in its entirety, features readings from and discussions of his latest book, Tracing Time,a collection of observations and experiences interpreting the ancient rock art of Indigenous Americans in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona. For several reasons, the interview suspended me in rapt attention. You might feel similarly if you stream it, too. Here is the link again.

It was during the most worrisome months of the COVID-19 pandemic that Mr. Childs had conducted visits to the petroglyphs and pictograms and his own consultations with tribal experts and academics. Many of the consultations were via Zoom, or masked and at biosafe distances, precautions which were especially necessary as the virus exacted such a devastating toll from America’s indigenous peoples. This pandemic rhymed with earlier plagues that had come to the tribes of the southeast. And all such plagues had been exacerbated by long periods of dispossession, deprivation, and neglect. And yet the tribal people persist, as do the carved and painted images which serve as the matrix of communication through centuries and over their ancestral lands. The insights shared by Mr. Childs in the interview made me crave knowing more, and so I bought and have twice read Tracing Time, which is far richer both in breadth of content and in beauty of expression.

Some two months before Mr. Childs’ interview, I had made the shortest of stops (perhaps three 15-minute walkarounds) to see some of the petroglyph panels in Utah’s Nine Mile Canyon. My itinerary that day had me starting in Vernal, UT, and ending the ride in Baker, NV, with about 30% of that 350-mile ride off pavement. My goal in the trip was to visit dear friends, breaking my pandemic bubble for a first stay with non-family. The pictures above are more a less all that I had experienced of the southwest’s rock art. As evident in the pictures, I could see that it is often horribly defaced by the egotistical scribblings of people who horribly misunderstand what it means to make one’s mark on the world. But the meanings of the ancient art had eluded me. The art abounds with meaning as markers of eclipses and other celestial alignments, as signals of the paths to water or to good hunting grounds, as memorials of terrible battles or of happenings in indigenous religious traditions. Much of it still poses a mystery to me, far removed as I am both from the lived experience and traditional knowledge possessed by the descendants of the indigenous artist or from the expertise gained by academics and authors, like Mr. Childs through years of scrutiny, research, and debate. Yep, I’ll never be an expert, but having waded in this far, I am eager to visit more sites, buoyed by my reading and listening so that I deepen my acquaintance with the forms and meanings of the southwest’s petroglyphs and pictograms.

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