Ship Rock

Places that really strike me have features in common. Harsh powerful grandeur, graduations of colors, tortured eroded shapes…

All are empty and lonely. They invoke a sense of both space and strangeness. All have a fierce inhospitality, an infinite variety of desolate beauty…

Man is not himself only, but a changing pattern of immediate experiences. He has all he sees; all that flows to him from a thousand sources; half noted, or noted not at all except by some sense that lies too deep to name. He is the land, the lift of its mountain lines, the reach of its dusty, dry valleys, the subtle delicacy of its pastel evening colors. If there is in this country of his abiding, no more than a single resplendent color, such as the splendid wine of sunsets built along Ship Rock, he takes it in and gives it forth again in directions and occasions least suspected by himself, as a manner, as music, as his wind song, as a prevailing tone of thought, as the line of his camera’s eye, and, finally, the pattern of his personal growth.

This sense, always at work in Man, takes up and turns into beauty the stuff of his sensory contacts. It works so deeply in him its only notice of perpetual activity is a profound contentment in the presence of the thing it most works upon.

By land, I mean all those things common to a given region: flow of prevailing winds; legends of ancient life; and the scene ~ above everything a magnificently shaped and colored scene. Operating subtly below all other types of adjusted experience, these are things most quickly and surely passed from generation to generation, marked in the face of all daunting or neglectful things a land can do to its human inhabitants, by that piece of inward content, the index of race beginning.

By ancient life, I mean both planetary origin and life lived on the land. Ship Rock was formed as the throat to an ancient volcano 30 million years ago. A volcanic ray - thirty or forty feet high but only about three feet thick - wanders like the Great Wall of China southward from Ship Rock. Molten magma squeezed up through the cracked earth. Up the wall to the north, the core of old Ship Rock volcano rose a thousand feet against the sky, like a free-form version of a Gothic cathedral. Gothic, too, was the color — the stone reflecting soft sunset umbers. Balanced on the wind just over the wall, a red-tailed hawk hunted a rodent to kill. A million years of frost and heat cracked this dike as chunks have fallen out.

Before that, from 700 AD to ~ 1300 AD, the Anasazi lived all over this land. Their time honored legacy of remarkable stone dwellings is legendary!

I would want Ship Rock to look exactly like this. The Navajo call it Tse’ bit’ a’i – Rock with Wings. What about deeds done by Monster Slayer here in the time of Navajo myth? Monster Slayer, climbing the vertical stone of Ship Rock toward the nest of the Winged Monsters to kill them and make this landscape safe for the Navajos. Monster Slayer, at the nest, taught the Monsters' chicks to become the eagle and the owl. Monster Slayer rescued from his impossible perch by the sacred Spider Woman.

On a day I most like to remember, gusting wind pressed me against the dike’s west wall. This wind was advance guard of a front sweeping eastward out of Arizona and Utah. It bombarded Ship Rock with long tendrils of cirrus clouds against blue sky, sending dust devils skittering across the prairie. Ship Rock, the dike, and sunset's pastel hues provide a truly evocative memory of the West.

It’s been such a deep pleasure to read Hillerman and traverse his Beloved Land! Adapted from Tony Hillerman’s consistent influence on the Southwest; his Spell of New Mexico is well known for its portrayal of New Mexico’s contribution to the Four Corners. Mary Austin, cited in Spell, wrote a provocative piece on man which gave me much pause for thought.