Massive cliffs overlooking the Colorado are just now turning rose in the morning light on the restaurant patio of the Red Cliffs Lodge in Moab. Daniel is our waiter. His dark eyes, blunt-cut, straight black hair, and distinctive profile project a look a movie director would cast as a Native American, and he is.
I can tell he hasn’t had the job very long. He has no idea what is in the Breakfast Pastry Basket for $18 and must look carefully at the menu to identify selections before he writes them down. I can’t give him back the land and the life that was stolen from his ancestors and therefore him. I can only think, I’m sorry. I will remember you.
At dinner, Logan brings the menus. Probably 21 if he’s a day, sun-streaked blond hair, jeans, and cowboy boots—he looks like an extra on the hit series,” Yellowstone.” I suspect he’s got a horse loosely tied to a rail in the parking lot, and that 150 years ago, he and Daniel would not have been in such collaborative proximity. I think what I always think when I interact with beautiful, vulnerable young people—My goodness, your mother must love you. Well done, Mom.
The bartender from the East Cape of South Africa is small and round, with a gap between her front teeth and a short afro. She speaks IsiXhosa, a very unique language with clicks for syllables. Her name is unpronounceable in her language, but in mine it is beautiful: River.
How on earth did we all get here? To this bend on the Colorado, in these canyonlands, on this continent, on the same day and time?
In Utah, the laws concerning alcohol are incredibly strict, so I get to know River well. Every time you sit down at the bar to order a glass of wine, your driver’s license must be scanned—even if the bartender has seen your documentation three (okay, five) times in the last few days. Recording identity and proof of presence are ancient themes in this geological wonderland.
When it is time to check out for our flight home, I run across the lobby to hug River goodbye. I wonder if when you get to the other side of the mountains, so to speak, you see everyone you ever felt something for–not just the major players in the screenplay of this life, but every single person whose energy touched and modified your own in a positive way.
Something tells me that you do—the man in the Ray Bans who lifted my carry-on into the overhead bin when I was too tired to hoist it over the lip; the Spaniard who got me onto the train to Barcelona when my newly-commissioned, naval officer husband inexplicably failed to meet my flight in Madrid.
I went to Moab to look for starry skies and prehistoric petroglyphs. Some of the most interesting images are etched into the canyon walls right along a major thoroughfare. You just have to pull onto the shoulder and get out to see them.
Initially, I can’t distinguish the figures from the crevices in the rockface itself, but we are innate pattern-seekers, and once I recognize the first one (a small deer the size of my palm), I start to see others on the dark rock surfaces.
Most of us standing on the shoulder of the road are on our own, helping each other see what is hard to see like birdwatchers—There! High up! To the left of that scrub growing out of that crack! See that horse? Then a woman pulls up with a driver acting as guide. He has long gray hair and rattles off the inside story of a local. We eavesdrop.
I appreciate the sheer mass of the cliffs themselves for a moment. We are indeed a rocky planet—it defies imagination that these massive formations plunge miles beneath the earth.
The woman with the driver has left—speeding on to the next natural wonder. Perhaps he’ll take her to “Birthing Rock,” where a figure undeniably human is giving birth, a smaller figure emerging from her body, head down, as humans have entered the world for more than 200,000 years. As if there could have been any doubt, just to the right of the etching, some ancient chronicler has scratched the tiny prints of newborn feet.
A barefoot mother bringing into the world her barefoot child. As we do. This rock is her story written into the book of eternity: I was here. I did this. I made this.
The others have left and drifted back to their cars; the road is quiet again, no traffic speeding by. I stand alone at the base of the cliff and look up. It takes a minute for my eyes to adjust, for the surface to separate shadow from line. There are deer and other four-legged animals that could be foxes or coyotes. There are two figures that look like humans wearing antlers, surrounded by six smaller bodies that appear to be children. And that’s when I see it.
Perhaps 25 feet above my head, a line of figures appears etched into the dark varnish of the rock. They face forward, shoulder to shoulder, like a string of cutout paper dolls, humankind chronicling our connection to each other 3,500 years before Christ. It is the way they stand arm in arm that moves me.
I can imagine Logan, Daniel, River, You. The chain of humanity goes on into infinity. Our children, our children’s children. Every day, a barefoot mother greeting her barefoot child as long as the planet exists.
The Archaic Puebloan who immortalized his people on this rock must have whispered to an unfathomable future, “We were here. Remember us,” and I will.
I will remember them as I recall all with whom I travel.
In the end, we all become stories.
