The Pot Thief Who Studied Pythagoras (14 page)

I hate alarm clocks; I believe we would all be healthier if we slept until nature woke us in a manner that is, well… natural. Schuze’s Anthropology Premise number eight is that schedules are incompatible with the evolutionary history of humans. Americans and northern Europeans love schedules, and we’re dismayed by cultures that don’t follow them. We joke about Mexicans saying mañana and Jamaicans talking about ‘island time’, but we are the ones who’ve got it wrong. We spent most of our million-anda-half year history living like lions, sleeping when we were tired, hunting when we were hungry, and running when we were threatened. These things don’t happen on a nine to five schedule. Pots weren’t made on an assembly line. We made one when we needed one.

But duty and digging sometimes call, so, although it is rarely set, I do own an alarm clock. It’s a special one. When the wake-up time arrives, a chime sounds ever so softly. Moments later, it chimes again with only a slight increase in decibels, and this pattern increases until you awake and press the quiet button. When all goes well, you become gradually aware of the chimes and wake up slowly as opposed to the rude awakening of a normal alarm. However, when the wake up time is midnight, even the gentle chime does “become as sounding brass.”

It was bitter cold, so I dressed in a navy blue watch cap and black fleece workout suit over insulated long johns. I put a long piece of rebar that I use for probing and four shovels in the 1985 Bronco I refer to fondly as my rust bucket and set off with a thermos of coffee.

If you want to visit Gran Quivera, and not many people do, you would normally take State Highway 55 south from the picturesque town of Mountainair, or you could take Highway 55 north from the town of Claunch, which is about as picturesque as its name suggests. That’s what you would do because you wouldn’t mind driving in right through the main entrance and past the ranger quarters.

I, on the other hand, desired to enter and leave undetected, so I took Interstate 40 east from Albuquerque to Moriarity where I turned south. This took me east of Mountainair. I stopped in the middle of the road a few miles south of Willard, no problem at that time of the night, or at most times during the day for that matter.

There is something decadent about parking in the middle of a highway, something almost regal about owning the road. Of course it wasn’t the Via Romana or even Interstate 40. It was a small state road in the middle of nowhere.

Actually, it was on the edge of nowhere. The middle would have been more crowded.

I stood in the middle of the road and observed the moonbeams bouncing off the reflective white strip between the two narrow lanes. Lean old ranchers in beat up old trucks drive this stretch of road, signaling the occasional colleague going the opposite direction with a nod or a lifting of two fingers off the steering wheel.

I breathed in the clear desert air, checking for scents. There were none.

I laid a strip of canvas in front of each wheel then drove the Bronco forward slightly and got out and lifted the canvas strips around the tires, securing them by lacing a cord through the grommets installed for that purpose.

With the tires covered, I turned off the pavement and the headlights and sat silently for a while until my eyes adjusted to the dark. Then I followed a rancher’s sandy road as it skirted the north end of a little portion of the Cibola National Forest which is cut off from the larger Forest of the same name across the Rio Grande, and I headed south into the fringes of Gran Quivera.

It was a beautiful still night, the cold dry air so clear the sky looked like a sequined shawl and the moon like a polished ball of ice hovering just above the dunes. A coyote peered at me from behind a mesquite bush. Fifty yards ahead a jackrabbit stood alert, ready to bolt if the coyote came his direction. The land rose slightly to the north and the distant ridge was crenellated by black triangular pines.

Gran Quivera was founded around AD 800 and at its peak in the thirteen hundreds had thousands of inhabitants. Unfortunately for those thousands, Coronado came calling in 1539. With the Spanish came diseases against which the natives had no immunity, and most of them died in a series of epidemics. In the seventeenth century there was a severe drought, and the few remaining inhabitants abandoned the pueblo to the elements.

The elements have not been good tenants; the place is pretty well beyond repair.

One of the reasons I’m a good archaeologist is I can read the land. When we students were on our summer dig in Gran Quivera, we would start at dawn and knock off early because it got so hot. I didn’t mind the heat, so I walked for miles in every direction getting to know the land. Driving by, it looks like a dry featureless arid plain, but when you explore it on foot, you discover subtle elevation changes, varying rock strata, patterns of plant growth, and other aspects of a faceted landscape.

I would try to imagine what life must have been like for the last few stragglers desperate to stay in their ancestral home. Where would they go for water? The small arroyos directly around the sprawling pueblo would have turned to powder during the drought. But I knew from growing up in the desert that after a rain, arroyos dry up in a pattern starting from the portions farthest from the mountains. So I knew the people of the Gran Quivera—the Spaniards called them los humanos but didn’t treat them like humans—would have walked toward the mountains. And they would have followed the largest arroyo. I already knew where that one was, so I pulled up a few hundred yards from it and walked the rest of the way guided by a moon so bright I could see my shadow in the sand.

I remembered that in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, a legislator from some conservative state had attended a conference in San Francisco and had later declared, evidently with some pride, that he had worn shower caps over his shoes while he was in his hotel room out of a fear of catching AIDS. The reason I remembered this bizarre story was that I was walking along with two disposable shower caps over my shoes.

I know I looked like an idiot, but what would have looked even more idiotic would be me in a mug shot. Tracking is a difficult skill, and the sandy soil in the wash would probably be unreadable within hours after the usual New Mexico spring wind blew over it, but I did not wish to take any chances that either my tires or my shoes would be identified.

The ruins of Gran Quivera are protected by the National Park Service, but not very well. While they take seriously their mandate to make sure no kid from Iowa leaves the park with an arrowhead in his pocket, the exposed adobes continue to erode. There are about eight million arrowheads and pieces of worked flint in the ground around Gran Quivera, so it’s not like they are scarce. Given the low visitor rate, every kid who wants one could take a piece of flint, and the supply would last until Gran Quivera melts back into the earth from neglect or the sun is extinguished, whichever happens first.

By looking at plant growth patterns and rock strata, you can tell where the course of an arroyo has changed in recent years and where it could be hundreds of years old, so it was not difficult for me to find the sort of place I was looking for. It was under an overhang on the inside of a curve in the arroyo and not close to the juncture with any tributary. I had to dig only three or four feet down until I began to find artifacts. I eventually found several small v-shaped shards of the kind I needed.

I love the high desert at night. The air is cool, clear, and dry, and the only scents it carries waft from creosote bushes and blooming cactus. Because there is nothing in the air, not even moisture, moonbeams arrive unspoiled. On this particular night, they washed the sand in light because the moon was full. Thanks to that and good night vision, I could sort out the shards I found. I took one that looked just right for my purpose and a couple of spares just in case. Then I put the others back in the earth. Professional archaeologists would have been proud of me. I filled the hole I had made, smoothed the sand, and departed. Or to paraphrase Kahlil Gibran, the digging hand digs and, having dug, moves on.

It’s difficult to describe the thrill of finding something a fellow human being made a thousand years ago. Suddenly you are in contact with the ancient past. Yet it remains a mystery; the artifact you have found is like the tip of the iceberg. Howard Carter put it more poetically when he talked about what it was like to dig up Tut and his treasures: “The shadows move, but the dark is never quite dispersed.”

The unearthed pot connects me to its maker, one potter to another. It has nothing to do with ethnicity, an accident of birth that we use as an excuse to treat different people differently. For some reason I don’t understand, we seem obsessed by our minor differences and blind to our vast commonality.

One of the commonest bonds is clay. Every civilization on every continent since the day we first started using our hands for something other than walking has made things of clay. And even though we have passed out of the agricultural age, through the industrial age, and into the information age, clay remains a staple in human life. From the tiles on our floors to the plates on our tables, we use clay every day. Some of us even make a good living selling clay pots.

In 1996, a nine-thousand-year-old skeleton was discovered along the banks of the Columbia River in Washington. It is a striking find for two reasons: it is among the oldest ever found in North America, and it appears to be Caucasian.

I’m Caucasian, but I feel no kinship with those ancient bones. As an archaeologist, however, I am fascinated by them. What was a Caucasian doing along the Columbia River almost nine thousand years before the Voyage of Columbus? Did the prehistoric Vikings sail to America and trek across the continent? Did Caucasian-like people, perhaps the Ainu of Japan, come across the land bridge that is now under the Bering Straight? Are the Mormons correct that there was a white race in America in prehistoric times? We may never find out because the Umatilla Tribe has sued to have the bones interred on their reservation under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Their view is that any human remains on their land must be of their ancestors.

This is one reason why I flout NAGPRA without compunction. One of the few certainties in the uncertain world of archeology is that peoples in all places and all times have moved and migrated—SAP number three. The skeletal remains from Washington are absolutely not the ancestors of the Umatilla. The ancient peoples we call the Mogollon are probably not the ancestors of today’s pueblo Indians. And if a skeleton is dug up under my adobe in Old Town, it will certainly not be my ancestor.

I walked back to my Bronco, took off my shower caps, took the canvas off my tires when I reached the pavement, and retraced my route back to Albuquerque, arriving in Old Town just as the sun peeked over the Sandia Mountains. I prepared a plate of huevos rancheros and served it to myself with Gruet Blanc De Noir. I was still hungry afterwards, so I fried up some sliced potatoes with bits of chorizo and finished those with the rest of the champagne. Wielding a shovel works up the appetite. After doing the dishes, I went out to my patio and climbed into the hammock strung between and in the shade of my two cottonwood trees on ground which I am fairly confident is skeleton-free. I fell instantly and deeply asleep.

I awoke as nature intends; namely, without the aid of any mechanical contrivance. It was late afternoon, just in time to shower, shave, don a pair of chinos and a blue oxford cloth shirt, and arrive at Dos Hermanas by five sharp.

29

“How was your weekend?” Susannah asked after we had settled in to our

little corner of Dos Hermanas.

“Well, Thursday night after you left, Kaylee showed up.”

“Let me guess. She was huddled on the ground in front of your door again, and you took her in.”

I shrugged and said, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”

“I told you she’d be back; you can’t keep taking her in.”

“I didn’t. I turned her over to Tristan.”

“Oh great. Even normal girls can’t keep their hands off him.”

“He can take care of himself. Anyway, he got a neighbor of his, a girl, to take her in temporarily.”

“So now what?”

“I have no idea.”

“Can’t the police handle it?”

“I’ve threatened her with the police, and it works somewhat because she doesn’t want the police involved, but in fact, I doubt there’s anything they could do. She’s twenty-one. It’s not against the law to travel around with no possessions and make passes at men.”

“Hmm. You don’t think she’s a criminal, do you? Maybe that’s why she’s afraid of the police.”

“If she’s a criminal, she’s very bad at it. She had a little over twelve dollars in her wallet. Can you try to think of something, Suze.”

“Yeah, I’ll give it some thought, but I’m not very optimistic.”

We got a refill and I told her I’d spent most of Saturday with Consuela and Emilio.

“How is she?”

“I don’t know. Her spirits are high.”

“And Emilio?”

“He’s a rock.”

“That’s probably why her spirits are high.”

I nodded.

“Hubie,” she said, “I know she wasn’t married when you were growing up, and she lived with your parents, so how did she meet Emilio?”

“It was an arranged marriage. He was the oldest son of a family her parents knew.”

She shuddered slightly. “I can’t imagine marrying someone I didn’t know.”

“It’s the most common type of marriage worldwide.”

“I know, and I guess if you’re raised in a culture that does that, it seems like the right thing to do. Still…”

“You’re a romantic, Suze. So am I, truth be told. And so are Consuela and Emilio. It was only semi arranged. She went back to Chihuahua to meet him with the idea they would marry, but if they hadn’t hit it off, she was free to back out.”

“And obviously they hit it off.”

“Yeah, and she wanted to marry someone from back home anyway.”

“Albuquerque is half Hispanic, Hubert; she didn’t have to go back to Mexico to find a husband.”