“When was this?”
“About an hour before you came in. Sorry, I forgot. I wanted to tell you about that forest ranger guy, and I didn’t think—”
“And he didn’t leave a name?”
“No, I asked, but he didn’t want to leave a message.”
“Did he say he would call back?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t remember.”
“Rosa, you didn’t write anything down?”
“What was I supposed to write down? If the guy don’t want me to know who he is, then I don’t know who he is! I don’t know what to write.”
5
Medicine Woman
I left the BLM at noon, and the rest of the day was wide open. I didn’t want to go home, didn’t want to have to go back through the command post on the east rim of the gorge, didn’t want to have to go back across the bridge.
To pass the time, I decided to go visit my medicine teacher. I drove five miles north across Grand Mesa. At the Tanoah Falls Casino, I turned off the highway and headed in the direction of the mountains along a winding, narrow road through the tiny village of Cascada Azul, almost deserted now with ski season over. Tanoah Pueblo took a backseat in tourism to the larger Taos Pueblo, with its massive adobe architecture. The little walled village of Tanoah had its own ancient earthen apartment-like structures, but was smaller, off the beaten path, and less well preserved.
Anna Santana, an elder of the tribe, lived in a small adobe home outside the walls of the main part of the village. She had taken me under her wing at an art show just a few months before, at Christmastime. I helped her prevent a calamity when her display of handmade jewelry, dreamcatchers, and pottery almost collapsed. On that first day, moments after we met, she had asked me about my mother. When I told her that my mother had left when I was very young, the Pueblo woman had insisted that I call her “Momma Anna.” And she invited me to share the Christmas feast with her and her family at Tanoah Pueblo, and later, King’s Day and yet another Pueblo feast day. Soon I began coming to her house now and then just to pass time with her as she cooked or made pottery or performed any of the dozens of hardworking endeavors that filled her life. A month or so ago, Momma Anna had announced that she was my medicine teacher, and that she was called to teach me “Indun way.” However, I had no sense that any formal training had begun. At least not yet.
When I pulled up in front of her house, I noticed a plume of blue-gray smoke coming from the back, on the side nearest the acequia, the irrigation ditch that carried water from the rio to the tribe’s fields. A pack of mutts came to greet me, and I stopped to pet heads and scratch ears. I walked around the house and saw a small brown woman bent over, scraping live coals out onto the ground from the floor of the
horno
—a beehive-shaped outdoor adobe oven used for baking. Momma Anna straightened when she heard my footsteps. She turned, looked me up and down, and then gestured for me to come to her. “You come. We bake pies.”
On the table under the
portal
behind her house, four trays of folded and crimped, prune-filled pastry pockets huddled under cotton dish towels. These little triangle-shaped pies were a favorite of the Tanoah, and Momma Anna made some of the best I had tasted. Her dough was always crisp and flaky; the filling, which she made from wild plums that grew along the acequia, was chewy, tart, and sticky, never too sweet. I brought the trays over, and we shoved them into the horno, then closed the door almost completely, leaving just enough of an opening so that the heat inside would not burn the pies.
Anna Santana drew up straight after the door was in place and again looked me up and down. “Today we start,” she said. With the shovel she had used to remove the live coals from the horno, she scooped up a burning ember and carried it carefully before her as she made for the back door.
Inside her house, Momma Anna laid the shovel with the glowing coal in its blade on top of the woodstove. She took a pinch of cedar tips from a pottery jar and sprinkled the green buds over the red coal. The cedar began to smudge at once. Momma Anna lifted the shovel handle in one hand, and in the other took up a hand broom fashioned from foot-long stems of ricegrass bound with thread into a short tube shape, the fibers spread on one end for sweeping. She used the broom to fan the smoke over me in a ritual of cleansing and preparation. As she bathed me with the smoke, she mumbled a prayer in Tiwa.
After the prayer, she returned the shovel to the top of the woodstove and left the room without speaking. I stood where I was, inhaling the clean, sharp scent of the purifying smoke. Momma Anna returned with a folded blanket, atop which rested a large elk hide bag. She spread the colorful Pendleton on the floor of her living room in front of the sofa. “Sit down.”
I sat cross-legged on the blanket, and so did she, placing the bag beside her. She reached inside and brought out a small drum made in the Pueblo tradition—from a hollowed-out log covered at both ends with stretched and laced rawhide. This drum was no bigger than six inches in diameter, and not as tall. Next, she brought out the beater—a peeled aspen stick, wrapped on one end with a wad of padding covered with deer hide and tied with sinew. Once more, my medicine teacher reached into the bag, and she drew out a small hand-sewn deerskin pouch, tied with a leather thong. When she had arranged these items between us on the blanket, she looked at me and smiled. She picked up the drum and began beating on it in a steady rhythm. After a minute or two of drumming, she set the instrument down and reached for the pouch. “Hold out hand,” she said.
I extended my palm and she took it with one hand and, with her other hand, turned the pouch upside down and shook it. I cupped my fingers to catch the smooth stones that fell from the bag. I looked down to see what I had. Seven or eight small flat ovals of river rock rested in my palm.
“Choose,” Momma Anna said.
I used my finger to sort through the lot and selected one of the smallest, a smooth black disc. “I like this one best.”
She snorted. “Maybe you not like best, next other time. Best teacher not always one you like. That ancestor,” she said, pointing to the stone in my hand, “got big lesson for you.” She snatched up the other stones and put them back in the pouch, tied it with the thong, and returned it to the elk hide bag. She straightened her back, her legs folded in front of her, and she put out her hand. “Now we see about that lesson. Let me see Old One.”
I handed her the stone.
She closed her fingers around it and then held her fist against her chest. She looked at me and took a deep breath, as if she were drawing air through the stone. Time passed, but she did not breathe out. Her eyes remained fixed on my face. Then she let out a blast of air and extended her open palm to me. “Now, you.”
I took the stone and did as Momma Anna had done, holding it to my chest and watching her as I did so. I drew in air and held it.
Momma Anna’s eyes did not move. They were like the stone—shiny and black and smooth.
I felt my chest tightening, wanting to release the air, but I held on for as long as I could. Finally, I let my breath out.
Momma Anna picked up the beater and began playing her drum again. When she stopped, she said, “Now, we got pies ready.”
We removed the trays full of perfectly browned pies from the horno, and the delicious smell of the warm fruit and the crisp pastry reminded me that I hadn’t eaten that day. Momma Anna took one of the cotton dish towels she had used to cover the pies before baking and put two of the little tarts inside. She tied the corners of the cloth, creating a hobo pouch. She handed this to me, and when I took it the contents felt warm in my hand. “You need forgiveness,” she said.
My mouth came open. “What?”
She frowned. One thing my medicine teacher had taught me was that the Tiwa considered it rude to ask questions. Even one-word questions. She softened her expression. “Ask. You ask forgiveness, everyone you care about.”
“But . . . I don’t know what I’ve done. I don’t know what to ask forgiveness for.”
“You are human being. All people need forgiveness.”
“But, I mean—”
“You go now,” she said, picking up my free hand and placing it over my cloth bundle and patting it, like one might pat the hand of a child. “Go ask forgiveness. You need that. You take Old One with you.”
I had tucked the stone in the pocket of my jeans when we had gotten up from the blanket. Now, I reached my fingers in the pocket and started to take it out.
“No!” Momma Anna said. “Keep him there.” She reached out and took me by the shoulder and started shepherding me to the corner of the house so I could go back around front.
“But Momma Anna,” I protested, “I’m confused. I don’t understand.”
She stopped and let out a blast of air. “This your lesson. When you do your lesson, then you understand. Not this time, but next other time when lesson finish. Now go. Do.”
6
The Book
Before going home that evening, I decided to get in the exercise I had missed earlier that day. I drove past the small tent that had been set up for a command center on the east side of the gorge bridge and saw a sheriff’s deputy sitting on a folding chair, outside its entrance, reading a magazine. He looked up and waved as I drove past. I proceeded slowly across the bridge, my eyes drawn to the center viewing balcony from which I had seen the man on the cross descend that morning. The bridge was deserted, and the canyon below lay in shadow. Once across, I drove into the west rim rest area and took the roundabout road to the back edge of the circle. I parked my car near the trailhead and got out. I looked back at the five-hundred-foot-long silver steel structure that spanned this fracture in the earth’s crust—where a vein of a river had worked its way through sheer rock and carved a deep and jagged crack in the high desert mesa. To the east, the rugged blue Sangre de Cristo Mountains stood guard over the Taos Valley. The sky was cloudless; amber light from the late day sun flooded the miles of lonely sage and piñon flats between here and the mountains.
Because no one was around, I didn’t even bother to go in the restroom to change. Instead, I opened the rear hatch of my Jeep and sat on the back deck to remove my boots, then quickly slipped off my jeans and pulled on the running pants that I kept in my backpack. I laced up my running shoes and set out on the trail. I couldn’t help myself—I kept looking back at the bridge, as if I needed to be sure that another travesty wasn’t about to take place. Almost no traffic. A car passed over from east to west. A few minutes later, a car headed east. The next two times I looked, nothing. I started to relax my vigilance and focus on the run. I breathed deeply, the smell of sage and sun-baked earth rising to my nostrils as I ran the long portion of the loop that crossed open, flat ground. I felt the day’s grip on me loosening as I jogged at a steady tempo, the rhythm of my footsteps reminding me of Momma Anna’s drumming.
Where the trail turned and circled back, it skimmed along the canyon rim, then dipped below the edge onto a fifty-yard stretch of narrow path bordered by a sharp precipice. I slowed to a brisk walk, intending to savor the shady hues of the rock face on the opposite side of the canyon. But the dark walls of the gorge seemed sinister to me now. I tried to shake the feeling, and I stopped to look down at the Rio Grande rushing beneath me, hoping to experience the feeling of awe and inspiration that usually accompanied this view. But the memory of the cross with its naked passenger being carried off in the rushing water flashed across my memory screen, and I no longer wanted to look at the river. Instead, I suddenly longed to go home to the comfort of my little cabin, and I felt as if I couldn’t get there soon enough. I picked up my pace again and headed up the path to the boulders above, then pushed hard as I chugged the last quarter mile of the loop.
As I neared the end of my route, the sinking sun had turned the mountains pink and the light softened to a rosy glow. The temperature was dropping, and I felt the chill air against my arms. I slowed to walk the last hundred yards to cool down. When I came over the rise just before the trailhead, I spotted three guys in the parking lot, two of them going through my Jeep and the third standing nearby, looking in the opposite direction, toward the bridge. I stopped, my mouth falling open like the doors of my violated vehicle. Without thinking, I yelled, “Hey!”
They froze for an instant, all three of them turning to look at me like startled antelope.
And then I charged.
They took off.
My long hair, still damp with sweat, was flying into my face, my open mouth. I pumped my legs harder, ignoring the ache, the fatigue. The lookout darted across the asphalt, up the curb, and around the left side of the restroom building and disappeared behind it, presumably toward a getaway vehicle on the opposite side of the roundabout. But the two who had been bent over searching through my Jeep got a slower start, and as I closed on them, they both broke to the right, toward the gorge, where a row of concrete picnic shelters overlooking the view lined the loop road. The lone man was gone, out of sight now—I’d never get him. But these two were in range, and I knew I could overtake them if I just kept running.
I had surprised them when I gave chase—maybe they hadn’t expected that of a woman. As I ran, I chided myself for having yelled at them and blown my opportunity for a stealthy approach. They soon realized they were headed for a dead end and the lead man started to correct course, cutting left and back through the center of the roundabout, making down the right side of the restroom structure.
The second man followed suit, but he was starting to slow, and I pushed myself and maneuvered to close the gap. His thin jacket flapped around the sides of his arms as it blew open. He nearly tripped over the curb that divided the road from the center grounds, then struggled with his footing, recovered, and went on. But it slowed him down. I could almost touch him now; I was just two yards behind him, and I could smell the stink of fear blowing off of him as the cold air hit his sweating body.