Talk about a woman multitasking: This account of a decade in the
life of a newly minted New Mexican weaves together a half-dozen strands
of activity—emotional, relational, professional, house-building,
archeological, activist.
And they’re all, in one way or another, “on the rocks.”
In 1992, Katherine Wells and her partner, Lloyd Dennis, decided to
move from Southern California to northern New Mexico. Wells had been
struck by the beauty and “primal” psychic connections of the place
after seeing her first native ceremonial dance, and Dennis yearned to
retire somewhere that wasn’t “entombed in asphalt.” They were 55 and 60
years old, respectively, with former spouses, children, job histories
and property in suburban California. They’d also known each other for
only a year.
Initially shopping for a house near Santa Fe (Wells is a mixed-media
artist and hoped to break into the Santa Fe market), they were shown a
188-acre vacant plot on Mesa Prieta north of Española that might
contain “some” petroglyphs. When Wells saw her first bedecked
boulder—it sported snakes, clouds, a crescent moon, a
four-pointed star and a “mysterious” bird—she was hooked. They
bought the property, moved in a 30-foot trailer and embarked on their
“adventures” as stewards of more than 6,000 petroglyphs.
Stewardship can have its down side, however.
One of the sobering revelations of Wells’ book is that “rock art”
(the term is debatable among scholars)—in this case, petroglyphs
possibly as old as Egyptian pyramids—can be “owned” by private
landowners, and are subject to minimal governmental protection or
oversight. At least in New Mexico in the 1990s.
Wells’ nemesis in this book is George Baker, a politically connected
owner of a mining business who owned adjacent property with as many
carvings as Wells’, but who exhibited none of her archeological or
cultural sensitivities. We’re introduced to him as one of his trucks
hauls away a boulder with a 12-foot Pueblo-period serpent on its
face.
After a few flashbacks (including Wells’ long-standing interest in
American Indian artifacts, and the discovery of a Cree
great-grandmother), Wells tells her story chronologically, interweaving
strands of her experience of the time.
The house-building aspect is significant. In order to carefully plan
their “dream house,” they initially decided to first live there a full
year, to get a feel for the location, views and seasons. That worked
fine for Wells, who busied herself hiking and discovering “her” glyphs,
but retired concrete-contractor Dennis needed something else to do with
his time.
Wells resisted jumping the gun on house construction, but she agreed
they could build a studio structure before the year was up, and Dennis
set about designing and planning it. Wells and Dennis had decided to
use the then-little-known technique of straw-bale construction to
create an organic Santa Fe structure. They read up on the process,
ordered the bales and hired their own crew, with Wells as the
(admittedly grumbling) procurement officer.
When living out dreams means inhaling peat moss from a faulty
composting toilet and bathing in the mosquito-infested Rio Grande,
nerves can fray. Add to that cabin fever in a single-wide over the
winter, and their young relationship began to experience growing pains.
Eventually, although they remain together, Dennis will reconnect with
Southern California—and then Baja by boat—as Wells dives
into her art.
After a rapturous opening, Wells takes off on a complicated story of
her and her neighbors organizing to force Baker to comply with
government ordinances. As it doubtless did in real life, the narrative
of Wells’ fight with Baker focuses more on complaints about speeding
trucks, noise and dust than on monitoring the glyphs themselves.
As a non-Native American lover of all things Native American, I’d
have preferred less about the Baker fight, and more about the
petroglyphs. But the other fight at the end of the book—Dennis’
battle against prostate cancer—had me reading well into the
night.
The aspects of the book, however, that will keep it in my possession
are the descriptions and illustrations of the glyphs: page after page
of figures, symbols, animals, signs and animal tracks, presented as if
they were pencil-rubbings or spray-stencils of the rock art. She offers
moving representations of what one Tohono O’odham tribe member calls
“long ago told” images.
It’s amazing that someone should be able to “own” such pieces of
history. But it’s not amazing—given what we learn of Katherine
Wells—that she should prove a tireless steward of it.
This article appears in Aug 27 – Sep 2, 2009.