Terry Tempest Williams - Red

Pieces of White Shell

Earthly Messengers

Coyote's Canyon

Refuge

An Unspoken Hunger

Desert Quartet

Leap

For
The Coyote Clan
and
America's Redrock Wilderness

EYEGLANCES, whose winks
no brightness sleeps.
Undebecome, everywhere,
gather yourself,
stand.

Paul Celan,
Threadsuns

CONTENTS

I t is a simple equation: place + people = politics. In the American West, the simplicity becomes complicated very quickly as abstractions of philosophy and rhetoric turn into ground scrimmageswhether it's over cows grazing on public lands, water rights, nuclear waste dumps in the desert, the creation of the Grand StaircaseEscalante National Monument, or the designation of wilderness. This territory is not neutral. The redrock desert and canyon country of southern Utah provokes powerful divisive opinions.

How are we to find our way toward conversation?

For me, the answer has always been through story. Story bypasses rhetoric and pierces the heart. Story offers a wash of images and emotion that returns us to our highest and deepest selves, where we remember what it means to be human, living in place with our neighbors.

I came to the stories in Coyote's Canyon through a question: What stories do we tell that evoke a sense of place? I had just finished a long inquiry into Navajo oral tradition and had been working on the reservation in various public schools. It was clear to me, both the elders and children alike had deep ties to the land through story. Whether it was Shiprock, Window Rock, or the ruins at Hovenweep, each landform, each significant site, seemed to have a name accompanied by a story. The stories they told animated the country, made the landscape palpable and the people accountable to the health of the land, its creatures, and each other. This is not to romanticize the Dine (as they call themselves), only to voice my profound respect for their intricate and complex cosmology.

How do the stories we tell about ourselves in relationship to place shape our perceptions of place? Is there room for a retelling of our own creation stories, even Genesis?

In the Colorado Plateauroughly the Four Corners region of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and ArizonaI believe we are in the process of creating our own mythology, a mythology born out of this spare, raw, broken country, so frightfully true, complex, and elegant in its searing simplicity of form. You cannot help but be undone by its sensibility and light, nothing extra. Before the stillness of sandstone cliffs, you stand still, equally bare.

These redrock canyons in southern Utah are an acquired taste. They are short on water and, as a result, short on green. Green recalls pastoral comfort, provides a resting place for the eyes. There are moments when I long for the canopy and cover of a forest to hide in, to breathe in, to breathe with, and delight in the growing shades and patterns of green. I never forget I inhabit the desert, the harsh, brutal beauty of skin and bones.

Although we have mountains here of extraordinary stature and elevationsthe LaSals in particular, rising to twelve thousand feetthe high points of excursions into the Colorado Plateau are usually points of descent. Down canyons. Down rivers. Down washes left dry, scoured, and sculpted by sporadic flash floods.

It's tough country to visit. It's even tougher country to live in. So powerful is the sun in summer, one adopts a perpetual squint. Summer can bring biblical periods of forty days of heat well over one hundred degrees, reducing you to a lizard state of mind, no thought and very little action. You sleep more and you dream. It is a landscape of extremes. You learn sooner or later to find an equilibrium within yourself; otherwise, you move.

Desert as teacher.

Desert as mirage.

Desert as illusion, largely our own.

What you come to see on the surface is not what you come to know. Emptiness in the desert is the fullness of space, a fullness of space that eliminates time. The desert is time, exposed time, geologic time. One needs time in the desert to see.

As the world becomes more crowded and corroded by consumption and capitalism, this landscape of minimalism will take on greater significance, reminding us through its blood red grandeur just how essential wild country is to our psychology, how precious the desert is to the soul of America.