The Ghosts in the Canyons Have No Names by Harper Howze

I remember learning of the Roman Republic for the first time as a child and being utterly captivated by the knowledge, wholly novel to me at age five, that there had been entire civilizations that began and ended long before I stumbled into the world. In some ways, it was the mystique, the strange unknowableness that millennia bring, but that was not unique to Rome; I’d already become plenty obsessed with dinosaurs, and they have a lot more than mere millennia in that department. What Rome brought was the astounding knowledge that these ancient beings were not immense scaly lizards (birds?), but people. 

It was a book that jump-started my Roman obsession, discovered in my elementary school library and eagerly begun on the bus ride home. ___Thieves of Ostia___, it was called, and it swept me from the rattling seats of that narrow yellow bus, across the Atlantic, into the thrilling frontier of time.

As a child, history felt like reaching out into the corners of the map labelled “here be Dragons” and finding the most extraordinary treasures. 

The history I study now rarely musters the guileless awe of childhood. It is a messier affair, of humanity’s flaws and the bitter, senseless gusts of economic and social winds. Erik Jacobs is a wonderful professor, but far more Socratic than Homeric in his lecturing. These are not bad things: history should not be unduly glorified. The people of the past were rarely demons or angels, but people, and the things they did should be treated as such. Nonetheless, just as modern life should occasionally conjure awe, so should the past.

That awe, most unexpectedly, was resurrected this summer; not within a classroom or lecture hall, but in a windy canyon in Colorado. It took far too much convincing on my part, but my family had decided to drive west at the end of summer, fleeing the oppressive, flat heat of the Midwest for the rejuvenation of blissfully cool elevation. On the third day of our trip, we packed up our tents and rolled down the mountain, past the Subaru-thronged roads of the San Juan region and into the desert frontier. Passing the wild-west town of Durango, now ringed by cloverleaf interchanges and nondescript housing estates, we found ourselves on a nearly empty Highway 160. Our destination, Mesa Verde, dominated the horizon, its dramatic stone slopes gleaming white under the noontime sun: a veritable Minas Tirith in its grand bulk. 

We left the highway and passed a stone sign declaring in the inimitable font of the Department of the Interior that we were now entering MESA VERDE NATIONAL PARK. The park's greatest wonder is not in the proud heft of the Mesa itself, but in the twisting canyons behind it. There, under russet overhangs of long-eroded rock, sit perched the most extraordinary ruins, cliff cities of winding alleys, grand temples, and peering towers, fashioned centuries before any Spaniard walked there. 

In the “Old World”, such ruins might not be the most remarkable; they date from about the same time as the Domkerk. But in the context of North America, where the native civilizations’ physical landmarks have been so thoroughly destroyed that their memory often only persists in place names, such a solid masterpiece of stone shatters the myth of an uninhabited wilderness. It was like reading of Rome again for the first time: something vaguely known and conceived of suddenly taking on startling vibrance. 

I spent the rest of the trip voraciously burning through a book I found in the park gift shop, having finished my other book by the campfire the night before. Entitled ___The House of Rain___, it wove a spectacular story of attempting to figure out who these long-gone cliff dwellers were. Their civilization seems to have ended, or moved, centuries before the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, making them a rare instance of indigenous history in the US unmarred by the horrors of colonization. What it also means is that we have nothing written about them; there are no names for who they were, only the terminology of those around them. The Navajo, who arrived just as these people were vanishing, called them the Anasazi: the Ancient Enemy. 

Knowing of them imbued every place I passed through with even greater mystique. Their land was that of the western deserts, where the boundaries of the world are firmly defined by rings of snow-tipped mountains shrouded in haze, looming on the edge of sight, the expanses between them dotted by sheer buttes and mesas. Suddenly, all of the constantly visible landmarks took on new significance as I read of the archeological sites found around them. Rome had given new meaning to all the signs of the ancients in my childhood city, Washington, D.C., where those marks were readily available. The Anasazi did the same, filling the pine-coated valleys and purple-tinged peaks with stories: of art, migration, trade, and of war, holocaust, and abandonment.

It is astonishing how much more depth a place takes on when you know a little of who walked there before you, an experience all too rare on a continent which was so brutally cleansed of its first peoples.

 After I opened that book, the canyons became full of ghosts, and even though we know not their names, their whispers changed the sound of the wind.