The Presence of Place

I'd forgotten the power the ruins of Mesa Verde hold.  Thirty years ago, on my first cross-country trip, I finagled a side trip north to the ruins expecting to behold an architectural wonder.  I found that and more.  Much more.  There is a presence to Mesa Verde that is hard to describe.  I now know that the presence isn't limited to only those ruins, but to other pueblo ruins as well.  But nevertheless I was once again introduced to that presence at Mesa Verde during our two-week trip to Southern Utah.As a landscape photographer I know that some landscapes have a sense of place.  Some places simply feel special, spiritual if you wish to look at it that way. For some inexplicable reason the place feels alive and  somehow draws you in.  Often, I’ll feel that people have lived there, worshipped there, died there.  At puebloan ruins, you don't feel it, you know it.

There is a silence to these places.  Perhaps it was mere coincidence that Ann and I had listened to the audio book of Patrick Rothfuss's "The Name of the Wind" with it's prologue "A Silence of Three Parts" [worth reading if even only the prologue], but the silence at the pueblos is not simple, it is not settling.  It digs deep and leaves a discomfort.  It borders on haunting.

I've been to other places that have a presence and a silence – Dachau, Roman ruins, castles – but those have a different presence and a very different silence.  I would like to say I could imagine people living among the pueblos, hear the sounds of children playing, the grinding of corn, people laughing – but I can't.  Those types of imaginations appear in movies, and while they may appear at other locations, they don't there.  What you're left with the sound of the wind and a silence.

I've thought about why that is so, but don't have a firm answer.  The only thing I can think of is that these places have no history.  Yes, they have a history, but we do not know their story.  We know what happened at Dachau, the fall of the Roman Empire, and the ruin of many a medieval lord, but we do not know what happened here.  If the information panels near these sites are accurate, at least five different Nations claim these ruins as ancestral.  They can’t all be right.  None provide a clear story line from then to now.  Even the associated name for the peoples who inhabited these places has changed – from Anasazi to a more uncertain "puebloan".  What remains is silence and the presence of place.  That and artifacts to provide hints about how people lived, but tell little of their story.

When it all hit me yet again, I told myself that I had to try and capture that presence in images.  I knew that more than likely it would be a futile gesture, but one worth trying because mere records of the structures don't do justice to the presence of these places.  That and because, as Minor White said, "One should not only photograph things for what they are but for what else they are."  I had to at least try.

So I tried to go about photographing something without form.  Trying to make photographs that go beyond the photograph.  I can't say I was successful, but I have a start.  I made a few steps in a couple of different directions and now have something to guide me in the future if I decide to return and pursue a project.  And, of course, I have something for the blog.

We wound up at Mesa Verde because of rain.  Like all good road trips, things came up and flexibility became the mantra.  We were hoping to explore ruins in some canyons but, based on the knee-high weeds and grasses plastered down to the ground like some 50's greaser's hair that we saw a couple of days later, made the right call to go somewhere much less dangerous.  That wound up being Mesa Verde.  It was cold, wet and windy that morning with too many people around to focus on photography, but the presence was evident and touched me.  The one thing that struck me was the environment around these dwellings.  And that is what I decided to try and capture – the pueblos in their environment.

When we left Mesa Verde I didn't have much. Distant, flat images of pueblos because of the overcast skies and the distant views of most structures - at best, efforts to frame the pueblos in their environment.  However our next stop was Hovenweep National Monument and there we were met with much better weather and fewer people.  Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on how you looked at it, we had rain that night too and returned to Hovenweep the next day.  I'm glad we did.  Strangely enough, even though we spent several hours there and the loop hike is only about 2 miles long, we still didn’t manage to photograph from all the possible locations.  Yes we circled it, but our friends were ready to leave well before we were done.

I won't flood you with images from those two trips and instead will simply include a panorama I made on the second day.  I know it doesn't read well on the blog site, so double click on it.  Hopefully the software doesn't compress it too much and you'll begin to see some of the detail of not just the buildings, but of the surroundings.

Yes I said buildings. There are 6 sets of ruins in that image, which is a compilation of 10 overlapping vertical images. There were two more that you can't see down in the canyon (one built there, one that has slid down), and two more that are off to the right of the frame – a 180 degree panorama just looked odd. Oh yeah, and lurking somewhere off to the left was a baby rattlesnake I almost stepped on a few minutes after taking this shot.

Hovenweep is somewhat unique among the ruins. Instead of being built into the cliffs, the structures were built on the land with no major effort to conceal them. Why they are so different than most of the other ruins is anybody's guess, but they are. If you ever have a chance to visit Hovenweep National Monument do not pass up the chance. It is intimate in a way Mesa Verde cannot be, somewhat like comparing Bryce Canyon and the Grand Canyon.

That was our last full day (so to speak) of photographing. The next day we had to begin our trek back to Salt Lake City. But before we did, we took advantage of a rain-free night to make an early morning trip to some of the canyons we had to skip the previous couple of days. I'm glad we did.

Our plan was to hike to Tourist Ruin and then to travel about half-a-mile down the road and go up another canyon to see Target Ruin. Our excursion that morning was only partially successful because we wound up walking past Target Ruin twice, and turned around just in front of another ruin we should have seen, but didn’t - but that’s another story. Let’s just say it has something to do with the flooding that wiped out any real signs of trails or indications of structures outside your line-of-site (recall my mention above of plastered-down-knee-high-weeds), that sounds better than I’m losing my land navigation skills. Still, the misadventure of Target Ruin doesn’t take away from the fact we got to see Tourist Ruin. And what a gem it is:

Despite the fact that it looks as if the pueblo is far away in the photograph, it isn’t. That appearance is the result of another panorama using a wide-angle lens. Tourist ruin is actually located in a very intimate and confined depression (canyon?). You could hear the sound of water dripping by the ruins (see the black stain on the right of the image) and easily understand why people would choose here as a place to be. Yet, it has that silence and presence of place that all the pueblo ruins have.

For me at least, it’s inescapable.

Ann and I have a lot of material to work through from our trip. Not as much as we would have if we’d been on our own and photographed with our type of schedule, but then again we wouldn’t have thought to go to many of the places we went to. So the trade-off of traveling with others who knew the area was worth it. Still, we have some decent images, a long list of places we want to see on our own terms, and - for me at least - thoughts about a more detailed project I may want to work on. Not bad for a trip.