T
he drive to Mesa Verde, with Zachary lurking in the corners of my mind, was through terrifically mountainous country, one staggering view after another. Colorado is completely unlike New Mexico, and I'd never realized before how each state differs from the other in terrain, flora, and fauna, to be scientific-sounding about it. In New Mexico the mountains are bare, and suddenly in Colorado they're green. It's like two different worlds. We didn't see any animals for Suzy's notebook in New Mexico except lizards, but in Colorado there were lots of sheep. One lovely thing about having started our trip so early in the season was all the adorable babies: lambs, ponies, piglets, fledglings. One funny thing was that every day we would see at least one white horse, starting with the one Rob won Animal Rummy with the first day. It began to be a good luck sign with us, to see a white horse, though I think I took it more seriously than the others, dope that I am. I wish I didn't worry so much about omens and things. I don't do it aloud because Suzy and John are
both scientific and they think I'm nuts. If we hadn't seen a white horse by near to camping time I'd begin to peer anxiously out the window, pretending I was just looking at scenery, but we always found one, and Suzy would jot it down in her book.
The road up to the Mesa Verde campgrounds was a hairpin job that made the road in Palo Duro seem like the infant's section in a playground. They were working on the darned road, too, and there were sheer drops at the side going down into forever, and I found that looking down gave me a very uncomfortable feeling in the pit of my stomach. Mother said this was called acrophobia, or fear of heights, and that I was too young to have it bother me. But Daddy reminded her that the only instinctive fear in a newborn baby is that of falling, so perhaps I wasn't growing into acrophobia but just had to learn to grow out of it.
When we signed in at the Park Headquarters the ranger must have seen that we had a Connecticut license, but he didn't say anything about a note for me, and I certainly didn't ask. Maybe Zachary was just leading me on when he said he was playing hares and hounds with me all over the United States.
This was by far the most crowded camp we'd been at, and already, so early in the day, a lot of the campsites were occupied. We found a nice one, though, set up, and had lunch.
While we were eating there was a familiar sweesh of tires, and then the black station wagon swooping on by us. Then its brakes were jammed on, it was backed up, and there was Zachary, standing by our picnic table and grinning. I grinned back but nobody else looked terribly happy to see him. John looked as though a scorpion had just come prancing up to our campsite. I could have swatted him one.
Zachary was all very polite about speaking to everybody,
though there was a general freeze when he said “hi” to John. It was obvious those two were never going to hit it off. He told us that they were staying in one of the lodges because his mother really didn't feel like camping and wanted to spend the afternoon resting. “So if you're going to go on one of those guided hikes to the Pueblo cliff dwellings this afternoon I wonder if I could string along with you? I'd honestly try not to be in the way.”
“We'd be glad to have you, Zachary,” Daddy said, though rather coolly, “if you really think you want to come.”
“Oh, I really do, sir. Anthropology's one of my
Things
.”
I knew that Zachary meant what he said, but I think Daddy thought there was an edge of mockery to the words, though all he said was, “We'll be leaving in about half an hour.”
“Thank you, sir. I'll be ready. May Vicky come for a walk with me till then?”
“Sorry. She has jobs to do.”
“Oh. I see. Very well, sir. I'll just sit in the car and read Ruth Benedict's
Patterns of Culture
till you're ready.”
I guess he
was
showing off then. I mean,
Patterns of Culture
is about American Indians and all, but he didn't have to
say
it. I thought John was really going to let loose, but all he did was turn to Daddy and mutter, “Why'd you say he could come with us, Dad?”
“What'd you want me to do, John? Turn him down?”
“OhâI suppose not. As long as he doesn't hang around me.”
“I don't think he has any intention of hanging around you.”
We got things tidied up and organized, and I sneaked off to the lavs to put some lipstick on. Suzy followed me. Well, maybe she had to come to the lav herself, but she stood and looked at
me putting on lipstick, and said, “What on earth are you
do
ing, Vicky?”
As if she didn't know. “I got a piece of bacon caught in my teeth.”
“Bacon, hah. It's that dumb Zach. I suppose you'll be wanting to make out with him next. What've you got all that lipstick plastered all over your face for?”
I tried to answer with dignity. “In the first place it isn't plastered all over my face. I happen to have put a small amount on my lips. In case you've forgotten, Mother told me to use it when we were in New Mexico so my lips wouldn't get so dried out. They were cracking.”
“Yah, real hot and dry here. I heard the weather report and it's supposed to turn
cold
tonight.”
“So if I want to put on lipstick it's my own business. I'm older than you and I started wearing it when I went to Regional.”
Suzy scowled. “I agree with John. He's a jerk.”
I stalked out of the lav and went back to the tent.
At Mesa Verde there are quite a few rangers instead of the single one we'd got used to at other camps, and bulletin boards with lectures and hikes posted. We chose a hike with a lecture that took us on a climb right down the cliff side, down sheer precipices with narrow steps cut in the rock, down wooden ladders that dropped straight over nothing. While we were climbing I couldn't think of Zachary, who was behind me. All I could think of was not getting acrophobia and getting down in one piece. It was a descent that no elderly person could possibly have managed. About half way down, as we were trotting along a narrow path that for a few yards was almost level, John
mentioned this, and Rob asked anxiously, “What about Mother and Daddy?”
Daddy assured him that they weren't quite that elderly yet. But I couldn't help wondering what some of the elderly school teachers or people like that who went camping, or even stayed in the cabins or the hotel, would do. It would be an awful shame to miss the Pueblo remains. After all, they're the
reason
for coming to Mesa Verde. I was sure Zachary's parents couldn't manage it, and wondered what they were doing. Zachary didn't seem to pay much attention to them.
As I reached the bottom, just behind John, I let out a “Phew!” of relief, and turned around to Zachary. His smile was somehow very tight, and I thought he seemed even whiter than usual. Also I caught Daddy giving him a sharp kind of look.
When Zachary spoke he sounded even more winded than I felt. “Let's stop and talk for a few minutes, hunh, Vicky? We'll catch up during the lecture. I can tell you anything the ranger can, anyhow.”
He talked gaspingly and Daddy looked at him again, saying, “Stay with Zach, Vicky. You can come along when you get your breaths.” He and Mother and the others went with the ranger. There were about a dozen people on the hike, all asking the ranger questions about the Pueblo remains. Zachary squatted down on a rock, and I sat by him. He just sat there, sort of panting, and I felt a little funny about it, but I thought it would be best if I didn't say anything, or seem to be worried, so I looked over at the cliff houses.
We were on a level now with the cliff dwellings themselves, and Zachary began to talk to me about them, at first breathless, then seeming to relax. Boy, did he ever know about those Pueblo
Indians! Maybe he was putting on side when he talked about Ruth Benedict, but I'm sure he really
was
reading her, and I bet he's read everything Margaret Mead's written, too.
“Look at that honeycomb of buildings,” he was saying. “It was built for about five hundred Indians and it's as complicated as a New York skyscraper, only everybody in the cliff dwellings knew everybody else, and what you see here was built into a natural cave in the side of the mountain. See, I told you New York was zuggy.”
“What do you want me to do, go back a couple of thousand years and be an Indian? Anyhow, why don't you be an anthropologist instead of a lawyer?”
“It's all right for a hobby, but there's no money in it.”
“Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead did all right.”
“They're dames, and anyhow they didn't make the kind of moola I'm thinking about. Look at this place, Vicky.
Look
at it. You know what you're doing? You're
see
ing it. You're not just
read
ing about it in some zuggy school. You know what these Indians were that lived in these caves? They were
peop
le. People like us. I can just see one of those Indian braves, sitting right here on this rock, with his quiver of arrows and his bow beside him, sitting here and snowing some Indian girl. Only she'd have shiny black hair, coarse as corn silk, instead of soft silky browny stuff like you. You've got very pretty hair, Vicky-O. Whyn't you let it grow so I can run barefoot through it some moonlight night?”
He kind of snuck his arm around me then, and I said, “Well, I don't know much about anthropology, but I do know the Pueblos haven't lived here for ages. I mean, it wasn't us moving out west a hundred years ago or anything. It didn't have anything to do with Americans, the cliff dwellers were history way back then.”
“They
're the Americans, we're not. We're just thieving, murdering, genocidal upstarts.”
“Yah, I know, but why did they stop living here?”
“It was drought, Vicky-O, a long and terrible drought that drove them out of their caves.” When he told me this Zachary sounded as sad as though he were talking about people he really knew. He cared more about those dead Indians than he did about anybody alive today. He looked straight at me as though it were my fault. “They prayed for rain in their songs and dances and rain didn't come, and the crops up on the mesa withered up and there wasn't enough to eat, and finally they had to leave their homes, the land and the cliffs and the caves that had been theirs for generations, and go find another place to live.”
When he talked about the Indians Zachary was completely different from when he talked about anything else, that awful song, for instance, and what he had to say scared me, almost as much as the song did. People lived here and had families here and were happy here, just the way we were in Thornhill, and suddenly they were gone, and we were gone from Thornhill, too. Though of course everybody else would be there. It was just
us
who were being like the Pueblo Indians, driven from our homes.
“I was talking to a friend of mine who's an Indian last night,” Zachary said, “and he's afraid that a new drought, as bad as the one that drove the Pueblos from their homes, might be starting now. All the omens point to it. The funny thing, no, it really isn't funny, is that some of the meteorologists are afraid so, too. You want to go join those other dopes now?”
“We'd better.”
When we got to the others they were looking down into a sort of circular room. The ranger was saying that they knew that
only men were allowed in the round rooms, but I didn't hear
how
they knew it because I missed the beginning of the lecture.
“What'd they
do
in the round rooms?” I whispered to Zachary.
“It was something to do with their religion; they even had
religion
and all, the goons. That ranger's a pretty good guy. He teaches trig or something at some university in the winter.”
One man, standing near our family, asked the ranger, “You say this was all around 600 A.D.?”
“That's right,” the ranger said.
“How come you know so little about them, then?”
The ranger turned to John. “What was happening in Europe about six hundred A.D. fella?”
“Well, it was the Dark Ages, sir,” John answered. “It was monks, wasn't it, who were keeping civilization alive?”
“Tell me, don't ask me,” the ranger said.
“It
was
the monks, then,” John said. “And feudalism was beginning. Let's see, the Visigoths and the Vandals were the four hundreds, Theodoric of the Ostrogoths was five hundreds, and, oh, yes, it was Frankish kings of Gaul in the six hundreds, but there wasn't any strong central government. And wasn't it in the six hundreds that Jerusalem was taken over by the Mohammedans?”
“Right you are. The point is, that we know more about the monks in their cells in Europe than we do about the Indians right here in our own country. Why?”
A woman who turned out to be a first grade teacher called out, “Because of the way we treated them.”