25 July 2024 I See You

Currently rereading, "Blue Highways: A Journey Into America," by William Least Heat Moon, pages 177-184, Least Moon enters the Chiricahua Mountains, while driving through the desert on a highway he only identifies as 'Blue Highway 9.'

"The pavement made another right-angle turn and a deep rift in the vertical face of the Chiricahuas opened, hidden until the last moment. How could this place be? The constriction of the canyon was just wide enough for the road and a stream bank to bank with alligator juniper, pine, sycamore, and white oak. Trees covered the water and the roadway and cut the afternoon heat. Where the canopy opened, I could see canyon walls rising ... hundreds of feet. "Who but an artist could imagine a cool wet forest between rock formations in the desert?"

'Portal' was a few rock formations and not a human anywhere. Three miles up the canyon Least Heat Moon forded 'Cave Creek' and decided to camp along it under some trees, parking his van so that the side doors opened at the edge of the stream. He had been traveling the desert for so long he just needed such a place to cool his heels. He made a small fire and cooked up some eggs and sausage, made some coffee laced with bourbon, and watched as animals came to the edge of his campsite; he watched the fragrant curl around him and raise into the sky; every so often an orange coal would pop and shoot into the stream ...

Moon had learned, "After Goyathlay's many raids in this desert, he often escaped to the Chiricahuas, -- to this very canyon, a sacred place where Apaches heard voices of the dead. He camped by and drank from this very stream. Like the outlaws of Tombstone who also hid here, Goyathlay was a desperado -- that is to say, a desperate man, who died aged and successful, although deprived of his old life and homeland, 'One-Who-Yawns' by name, the United States Army called 'Geronimo.'"

This secret place hidden away in the Chiricahuas intrigued me as other spiritual places in the country have, that made me want to visit if but briefly. For instance, the Jeffer's Petroglyphs before the Minnesota Historical Society started charging admission. Oh yeah. https://www.mnhs.org/jefferspetroglyphs

I thought to myself soon thereafter, "Aren't you living in a spiritual place? Aren't you standing by an ancient waterway where people have camped, eaten their meals, had their fires, told their stories, pondered their lives, held ceremony, and prayers? How do you know it didn't happen, or know it did if but by stories others have told you, or through books others have written?"

Don't you see the ancient history lying all around you in a recreated woodland atop circuitous sand and gravel creek beds, and below you in beaver dams buried ten-feet below the surface you stand today?

What of the circa 1840-1870 trade gun barrel, a genuine piece of HISTORY, you found 25 years ago beyond Mikinaak Creek, that "Track of The Wolf," in Elk River, Minnesota, https://www.trackofthewolf.com/Index.aspx recently speculated may have dated from the early 1800s and been converted to percussion. Octagon barrels have been used on muzzleloading guns for 200+ years. Trade guns and pistols were brought in by fur traders long before Minnesota was a territory or a state.

The barrel alone is proof that people have passed through here unseen by your eyes, unknown, except by your acknowledgement of their existence. You wonder who had handled it before you? Where had it come from? Where had it been? 

Why does its reality make you sometimes tremble when you think about the passage of all of them through here, as though you can hear their footfalls in your midst?