Disturbances in the Field by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Author:Lynne Sharon Schwartz [Schwartz, Lynne Sharon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4532-8755-2
Publisher: Open Road
Published: 2012-10-14T22:28:00+00:00

Mother

I DISCOVERED, TAPED TO the side of Alan’s desk that faces the closet, a picture postcard of some white stone structures in the Mesa Verde, in Colorado. The card showed a tall ladder connecting two levels of the Indian settlement nestled in an enormous cliff against an azure sky. Alan had drawn a circle around the ladder in red Magic Marker, then drawn an arrow going across the card and the light maple of the desk to another circle, where he wrote, “7/13/76.” More than once I had told him that he could write on his desk in pencil, but please not with Magic Markers, which is why he did it on the hidden side.

Millennia ago, perhaps while Thales across the sea was pondering how to measure the pyramids, the Mesa Verde was the site of a thriving, self-sufficient Pueblo Indian community, eventually conquered and abandoned. Early in this century, two men on horseback happened upon its remains. Imagine their surprise, to round a bend and find extant, in those vast copper-and-ochre-colored cliffs, white buildings tucked in the cavernous hollows dug by wind and rain. The cliffs themselves are separated by deep ravines, creating a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle split apart. The stone dwellings, in their linear, geometrical groupings, foreshadowing Euclid, are lucid and harsh, with rock for floor and rock for ceiling. Above on the mesa, their roof, the Indians cultivated crops, scaling the cliff by an obscure path of carefully bored finger- and toeholds, a path indecipherable to outside marauders.

We climbed that perilous ladder, 7/13/76—Victor and I and the little ones, off on a three-week jaunt while Althea and Phil were back East in camp. Below us was a bottomless chasm. “Don’t look down,” the forest ranger warned. “Keep looking straight ahead, at the person directly in front of you.” Directly in front of Vivian was a retarded boy of about fourteen who moved clumsily, and I feared he would make a false move and topple us all. I saw us hurtling through the cubist landscape like falling rocks. Earlier, the boy had tossed a rock down and we never heard it come to earth. He lumbered up one step at a time like a young child, unwilling or unable to go on till he felt each rung of the ladder firm beneath both feet. With every step the ladder trembled. But he didn’t make a false move. He managed as well as anyone else, and up on the grassy mesa at last, I felt like falling to my knees and thanking him, as you might thank an indifferent god who has spared your loved ones out of pure caprice.

In the pottery and artifacts of the Pueblo Indians recurs the motif of a serrated line. After much study, said the forest ranger, archaeologists have concluded that the motif represents teeth. Because of their particular diet (and with no dentists, she added coyly), the Pueblo Indians must have suffered greatly from decaying teeth. So the image for their intractable pain finds its way repeatedly into their art.

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