A few years ago, my older brother had graduated high school. He had been accepted into a college on the west coast, and the whole family was delighted by this: Dad had told us that we would all get to drive out to California to drop the first kid at college. This wound up, incidentally, becoming a tradition: whenever one of the kids went to a new college, one at which we hadn't previously had a graduate/student, it was into the Big Van with us. In this manner, the younger kids have gotten to see both coasts and a heaping helping of the heartland.
On this particular trip, our first college voyage, Dad had it all planned out: we would go to California via the south-western desert and return by the lunar landscape of Nevada. Our trip led us through Albuquerque, which many of us would later become familiar with in "Breaking Bad." That first time, all we noticed was that Duke City had only one central street - Yale - and only one interesting section of town. It was the Old Town, the one which had once been a Pueblo.
After we'd left, and entered the honest-to-God barrens that confront anyone who wants to one day see the ocean, we didn't often stop. We took things slowly, though: the Continental Divide, which raised us closer and closer to the arid severity of the desert sky, was not kind to the Big Van. At last, when we'd been kicking around together for a few hours and the Van was wheezing like a geriatric olympian, Dad brought us to a stop.
Anywhere around there, you were likely to be surrounded by canyons and arroyos. The highway in that particular place was no exception: you pulled off the road onto a ledge that overlooked a drop of at least a hundred feet. Perched on the edge of the cliff, there were several umbrellas. The shade they cast was precious, and was fraying at the edges from the brilliance of the sun. As we pulled to a stop, we looked out and could see people sitting in the shadows. There were a few other cars there, and every now and then people drift from one patch of darkness to another. They looked like raindrops sliding down a windshield.
We got out into a baking oven. The heat had already consumed every twist of moisture in the air, in its lust, and it met our exposed skins with passionate advances. Right away, I had the double feeling of revulsion and delight: I had never been to a place like this before... but then again, I had never been to a place like this before.
We dispersed from the car in tight groups, clinging to the shade when we reached it. The people under the umbrellas turned out to be vendors- Native Americans, mostly women, sitting in lawn chairs. They had blankets spread out before them, covered in trinkets. I went out to the edge of the cliff and looked into the desert; when I turned around, most of the family had moved on.
The lady under the umbrella wasn't looking at me. She wasn't looking at anything, actually. Her face was lowered, and her eyes were resting on her lap. Her clothes were nondescript and looked like the desert. Her hair was gray, where it might instead have been a shocking white. People approached her and looked at the flotsam she had on offer, which was mostly arrowheads and jewelry made of wire and turquoise stones. They were all probably hand-made. She didn't look up at them while they perused, and no one made any move to buy anything. For all she was concerned, the window-shoppers were not there. The lady was alone in the high paint of the barrens.
To my knowledge, she never saw me, and I never met her eyes. But while I was there, watching her, I was struck by the situation. This woman was old, not quite as the hills, but certainly old enough to be my grandmother. This was not what her dignity demanded of the world; she had deserved better than this. I looked at her blanket and her hand-made baubles. Now that I have the words to say it, I think back to her, and I say to myself: "If anyone wants to see what prostitution really looks like, here it is." What she was showing could easily have been the treasures of her people, something precious to her, history and myth and the sap of her ancestor's bones, distilled into blue stone and wrapped in copper wire to be hung amid the white folds of the white necks of those who never knew what it was they had done to this woman and her people.
As I said, she never saw me. I didn't have the words or the thoughts, then, to realize anything; I just looked at her, and she looked at nothing while she waited for the sun to go down around her, as it had already done around her world.
After a while, we judged that the Big Van was probably rested, and so we piled back in and made our laborious way up several hundred more miles of twisting desert back roads. We eventually made it to California, and my older brother and I got lost on the highway in the middle of a traffic jam. We went north from there, to a town at one remove from the arterial freeways of the golden state. North from there, into a mountain pass, we made our way at last to a shining emerald of a campus, a watered oasis in the middle of rolling hills silent in their shabby splendor, crisp and umber and drought-defiled. There we were, on a lawn of which a country club would have been proud, looking at the native land around, behind, and above us. Dry it was, dry indeed, and old.
Beneath the splendid grass, there had once been a burial ground for the Indians, which was only discovered when the college made overtures to the earth to shift out of its way. Meaning no disrespect to the bones, the administration had a medicine man come, in all his painted glory, to remove the remains. He said he thought he'd probably gotten them all.
Bones can be very small, though, and how can you detect them from the surface? It's possible that some, perhaps only some small ones, endure there, down where the dirt is one with the surrounding hills and forms a single, golden, patient, quiet whole.
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