It's hard for me to grasp that my amazing journey across the US is almost over. The countless things I've seen, learned, the people I've met and the history that is now like family to me...the miles, the questions, the egg mcmuffins and wine....the gorgeous campgrounds and not so gorgeous showers...the daily terror of driving alone in unfamiliar places and always seeing so much beauty out my windshield....it's been the most fulfilling trip...much more than I ever imagined.
Seems fitting to end it close to home in a place I never grow tired of with a story I've never understood. The Anasazi Indians came to the high plateaus of Mesa Verde around 475. They stayed, built some non permanent dwellings and moved on. 100's of years passed and the next group of natives came along and built more permanent dwellings and started planting corn on the mesa top. Then somewhere around 1200 the Anasazi decided that they needed to 1. get away from the heat and cold of the mesa top by moving under the rim 2. built incredible fortress like villages tucked into the most unreachable indentations of the mesa lip to protect themselves from......WHAT?? other tribes, Sasquatch, disease?????? We've never been able to put a finger on the reason these people put on their best engineering hats and built mega cities hanging in the air, unreachable by just about everyone. And then, within 100 years, they left it all. WHY??? Drought? Disease? sick and tired of climbing up those walls? Too many creeps to fight off? We don't know that either. But for over 600 years the canyon metropolis was left in silence til a couple of cowboys stumbled on the Cliff Palace in 1888. The rest is history. The last time I came here 30 years ago you could climb all over the dwellings. Now you have to buy a ticket with a Ranger (but even that is finished for the season now). Still, we saw plenty but never really felt like we understood why they did it or HOW? Pity the poor indian whose job it was to haul all those rocks up the cliff face! How did they do it???
Maybe that's the secret here. People can do the most amazing things when they want to.... like fight in the most gruesome battles for 4 years in the Civil War and somehow survive or build the most impossible structures high up in the cliffs brick by brick 1000 years ago or drive clear across the country learning about a whole new part of the world. YUP, THAT'S IT! People are only limited by what they tell themselves they can't do.
Hugs from the road. I will miss it.
No comments:
Post a Comment