Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle by Peter Coyote

Author:Peter Coyote [Coyote, Peter]
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619026247
Publisher: Perseus Books, LLC

I don’t remember now how many days we stayed—long enough to hear David sing often and tease us about white people’s music, which, according to him, is only about “love.” He observed that the Hopi have many songs about water, which they consider the rarest and most precious of resources, and then asked, with feigned innocence, if white people sang so often about love because it was equally rare in our world. He did wicked and witty parodies of cowboy songs and seemed genuinely pleased that I had written songs about owls, the hills of Olema, and other forms of life.

One day, shortly before we left, he walked me around the mesa, offering me precise directions to the sites of abandoned Hopi villages, explaining to me why and under what conditions each had been built, which had good water, and which did not. As he marked each site he asked me to be sure to remember. I did not understand why he was being so particular.

We left with his blessings, rested and full of energy. It was hard to acknowledge and comprehend all I had learned. At the time, I felt that he had offered us these empty villages as bomb shelters for some future Armageddon, places to hide our people if we needed them, and I was flattered and touched. Today, I realize that the most important gift we received was the opportunity to witness and participate in an ancient, ordered spiritual life, for our bodies to experience what such an existence felt like. We were afforded a glimpse into a self-sufficient system that had taken thousands of years to develop. The lightness of their personal lives, the absence of demands they made on the environment and each other was chastening and elevating. For all its hard lessons and physical difficulties, the trip had succeeded. We had a high-water mark to aspire to, and I returned to California with that fixed as firmly in mind as my mind could fix anything then.

Fosmo and I drove hard, excited by what we had learned and anxious to begin the work of renewing Olema. We entered the front yard of the main house just as Maryanne Pickens entered the third day of a total nervous breakdown. Everyone had been sleepless for days, jarred by her nerve-wracking screams, afraid to leave her unattended. People were strung out and exhausted. Maryanne was a babbling wraith, laughing, trying to seduce the women, and occasionally standing stock-still and shrieking at the top of her lungs. People were too distracted to do more than react to our return as an opportunity to transfer the responsibility for Maryanne into fresh hands. By the end of the next day, it was apparent to all that the Pickens would have to move. Maryanne, in the only way available to her, had finally created a condition that forced J. P. to pay attention to her.

My last wrenching image of their departure was J. P’s two-and-a-half-ton house-truck lumbering off and Maryanne’s pale

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