song of the ancients
I went to Chaco Canyon on Saturday with my cousin. I drove, and she spent most of the trip breaking New Mexico’s open-container laws with the help of a bottle of OJ and a half a fifth of Grey Goose. It was a fun trip, though I managed to lose a pair of sunglasses my cousin lent me.
Chaco Canyon is a very odd place. For one thing, it’s very remote. The nearest town is a good 70 miles away. There are two roads to get there, and they’re both dirt. Strangely, a lot of people can be seen there on any given day. The other odd thing is, of course, the Anasazi ruins that can be found there. 800 to 1000 years ago, at least 10,000 people once lived in this dry, remote, desert canyon. Of course when they lived there, it wasn’t a desert. It was a valley through which a river flowed.
It’s strange how transient things can be, especially when it’s something that the average person thinks of as permanent. Mountains and Rivers are not as permanent as we like to think, and these people found that out first hand, much as the people who lived around Mt. Saint Helens in the 80’s did.
They did alright for themselves after all. The theory is that the Anasazi left Chaco and the various satillite villages they built around it, and moved east to the Rio Grande Valley. It was there that they met the Spanish for the first time. It was there that the Spanish gave them they name that they go by today; Pueblo.
After walking around the ruins for several hours, and then going on a nice little four mile hike, my cousin and I jumped back in her truck and headed home. As we crested the last hill on US 550 and began the drop down into Bernalillo, it occured to me, that someday some future people might be walking around in the decayed ruins of our civilization.
I hope we make a good impression.
P.S. My cousin took some pictures. I will upload them when I get copies.