My Way Is The Highway

Southwest: Photography + Archeological Trip: Cedar Mesa, Monument Valley, Antelope Canyon and Ute Mountain Tribal Park

Day 0: Seattle-Denver-Cortez

The Denver-Cortez flight set the tone of the trip; A tiny plane going to a tiny town for a backcountry vacation. I was expecting the plane to be small, but did not expect a twin-prop Beech 1900 with just two rows of seats along the windows - there is no bad seat in the house. After the pretty girl finished tucking us in and showing us the only emergency exit, she went to the flight deck, donned an aviator cap and sat besides the pilot, which is when I realized she was a pilot and not a air hostess. As we flew SWW, I craned through the starboard window to see large patches of charred ground where Colorado had burned a few days earlier.

Descending on Cortez, visible through the cockpit glass, was the landing strip, oscillating wildly. It was almost as if the tiny plane was being thrown around in the air. The pilot skillfully managed a touch down, the left wheel first, a good five seconds later the other wheel.

The Cortez airport is one room deep. I rented the last car at the terminal and point it towards Bluff, Utah

Musings on an Ancient Mind: Anasazi Petroglyphs

The Wolfman petroglyph panel near Bluff, Utah

The Anasazi, the ancient ones, left us clues – albeit unwittingly.

We know they lived in tiny adobe houses built in cavernous alcoves in the cliff of the Colorado plateau. We know they carefully stocked corn in high up recesses and how their women painstakingly ground it on stone metates all day long. We know they were accomplished rock climbers and how they could fearlessly scale vertical slickrock, often ferrying big loads to their village. Through the astronomical alignment of their buildings, we know they meticulously observed the sky and understood phenomena like lunar standstill that span decades. The careful mummification of their dead and the wonderful offerings of yucca baskets and glazed pots, especially for their young ones, tells how who they loved and how much. The trail of pottery shards and the mix of styles and colors tell us where they travelled and who they traded with and what they yearned for. Finally we know how deadly they eventually turned, killing and burning (and sometimes eating) their own.

But what went through their minds? Which language did they think in? Could they verbally articulate their emotions?

1887–A Vintage Year for Graffiti?

Graffiti at Karnak Temple, Egypt	Graffiti in a Buddhist cave temple, Kuda Cave, India	Graffiti in a ruin at Mancos Valley, Colorado, USA

Graffiti is utterly deplorable. Deplorable until the graffiti itself becomes old enough to assumes historic proportions. Other than defacing of age old monuments, the three pictures above, have one other thing in common. They were all inscribed in 1887.  I am sure statistically, there are hundreds of graffiti all over the world inscribed in a particular year in at least different three places of historical importance, except that I have witnessed them myself.

Ever since finding the second 1887 graffiti in Kude cave near Pune in 2009, I was on the look out for graffiti inscribed in that year and was blown away when I found one last month in an Anasazi ruin in the Ute Tribal Park in Colorado.

In this age of Internet, once you start looking for something, you invariably find “stuff”. For instance, two more examples of graffiti inscribed in 1887: one in Britain, the other in a high security prison of Alcatraz, SFO.

Then I found this law passed by City of Langford in California, USA; Law # 1887 that prohibits graffiti. Talk about coincidences.

P.S. If you happen to have a photo of graffiti inscribed in 1887, please send them my way.