In another of my short stories, Rock Man Medicine, I’m conscious of a somewhat different treatment of place. Different and I think in many ways more deliberate.
The sense of place and its importance to the development of Peter, the protagonist in this story, is paramount. Place here is considered on a wholly spiritual level and serves as a means for Peter to not only connect with the land and the people who claim it as their ancestral home, but more than that as a means with which he might heal himself.
The story centers around a particular journey to a location far up a desert canyon and deep in the mountains where Peter has decided to enact a purifying sweat in the way of the indigenous people, the Hentellii. Throughout the story, from his initial hike across open desert to the mouth of the canyon, up its series of increasingly watered ledges, at the glen where he decides to construct his sweat lodge, and amongst the other mental references working through Peter’s consciousness, it is his awakening sense of place that provides him a strength and assurance. He is doing his best as a ch’oon, an outsider, to draw from the spiritual awareness of the Hentellii, a deeply held consciousness that sources from and resides within the very rocks of this desert landscape.
Peter initiates his hike in the dark of very early morning and at one point, as he pauses to rest, is distinctly aware of the effects the expansive and utterly still and silent landscape exerts on him.
Just perceptibly, the predawn air touched his forehead. Though silent, the movement was sound to him. It filled the otherwise hushed atmosphere. While Peter stood, his ragged breathing slowed until the stillness surrounding him became that within him. In the serenity of the transition he thought of the land that engulfed him and of the people who had for so long called it home.
And he is reminded, as he is with every visit to this place, of the inherent potency of such a landscape.
In a way held privately, the desert here cleansed him, filtering whatever darkness clung to his spirit. Only here, where he was in full possession of the scale of his life, could he find escape from the sickness that had attached itself most tenaciously to him.
Peter had timed the start of his hike to experience on the desert flats the first cresting of sunlight at dawn, a child to the Hentellii, called polasuhl.
A shaft of brilliant light crested the peak and fanned out over the sky. A sharp yellow, it pierced the flattened dome of lapis above him like a flame. Other streaks soon joined it and then slowly lowered earthward as the sun broke free of the land. Polasuhl, the dawn child, had arrived. Flowing across the land the enthusiastic youngster awakened all and colored the soil and the brush a vibrant saffron.
That event, though in many ways no different than any other morning at this location, triggered within him an even deeper sense of place and the power it held over him.
Transfixed by the dawn’s dramatic arrival, he had not noticed the tranquility that accompanied it. What little trace of breeze had existed in the predawn had now vanished and with it any sense of movement, of sound. An even deeper stillness settled over the mesa and Peter felt the inescapability of its presence. The settled calm was as indigenous as the desert light.
This sense is reinforced later on his hike when Peter is treated to the sight of two golden eagles soaring and tumbling entangled in a courtship display in the sky high above him. Transfixed by the rare sight he is also initially plagued by melancholy as it reminds him of just what he is missing in his life and the spiritual sickness that has resulted and grown within him. But in this place the negative effects are more easily managed.
A wave of self-pity encompassed him. The faces of the real-ghosts came and he nearly succumbed. But the endlessness of the land around him, the inhuman purity of its silence, fortified his resolve. He used it to push the evil thought from his mind and was pleased by the ease with which he was able to do it. Even here in the isolation of the desert the ghost-sickness retained some power, but its endurance suffered….With the escape that the desert offered him, he had found a powerful defense against the creeping influence of the sickness. If only he could live under its direct influence continually, he had often mused, he could surely purge the illness completely.
Peter is keenly aware that the personal strength and healing that this place offers him is dependent upon his genuine understanding of the Hentellii worldview. Though a resident of this location, he is a new one, and knows that the appreciation of place that the Hentellii have developed over generations exists at a level he can scarcely comprehend. But as his knowledge of Hentellii worldview increases so too does that which he is able to glean from his visits to this place.
The first trip he had made into the desert following his discovery of the Hentellii texts had been a revelation. The land was suddenly new to him and infinite in its healing powers. Subtleties revealed themselves to his awakened perceptions and spurred him with a desire to know even more.
This idea speaks to something like indigenous location awareness and its potentially unique manifestation as a particularly strong sense of place. Something I’d like to explore in a future blog.
Peter continues on and makes his way up a canyon that grows increasingly significant as a waterway as he ascends its entrenched course further into the mountains.
With the walls on either side of him having risen to a level exceeding his own height, Peter experienced the comforting sensation of being within the earth, protected by these folds of its skin. The walls themselves changed, from crumbling scarps of terra cotta sandstone and loose scree to a hardened precipice of reticulated, varnished rock. The sand under his boots grew denser, its firm surface littered with determined lines of spoor; a desert expressway, he mused, leading to the reward of water.
He is after a particular place, one he had stumbled upon during his last visit to this area and one he sensed intrinsically would serve his needs.
He needed, most importantly, a proper location. To enact an effective healing he knew required a place where the power of the rock, where the presence of Henthinlo, was most evident. During the ceremony he would need to draw of that power and the more readily available, the better.
Thinking back now to the palpable sense of place this location had exuded on that first visit, he was convinced his journey there had been no accident. It had been designed, he knew now, to open his awareness to the power of the landscape, which in turn would serve him as a source of strength with which to successfully conduct the difficult sweat ceremony.
When he locates the place within the canyon he was seeking he knows it with certainty; its inherent beauty, its physical presence, strikes him just as noticeably as it had the first time.
From where he stood, at the lip of the pooled water above the smooth slide of rock, the cañón opened into a delicate glen that curved gracefully around a brooding wall of dark, igneous rock. The scene lay before him now half bathed in the bold light of the waning afternoon. A sparkling creek wound away from the edge of rock at his feet and hard against the bulk of dark stone, until it vanished around the arc of the cañón. Opposite the dark wall, along the north bank, a row of cottonwood and tamarisk saplings shimmered, moving tenderly in a shaft of sunlight.
From the base of the trees near the water, a packed, sandy bank climbed gradually until it ran against a varnished wall of sandstone, stained with streaks and artistic curves of mineral deposits. In the glow of the late afternoon, the wall presented a satiny face as the light pulled transient colors – coppers, saffrons, red umbers, peaches – from within the swirling form of the stone. Where the sun did not reach, the sandstone resonated with aqueous textures of browns; from pale, tawny hues to deepening sepias and walnuts, all of it alive, circulating under his gaze.
Peter notices too the strange absence of birdsong, in this riparian zone where he would have expected much of it, especially in the late afternoon of his arrival. He concludes that the inherent spirituality of this place is the reason. Sound then, an important component of place, is seen to shape the sense, the perceived meaning, of a physical landscape either in its presence or absence.
Because of its particular location, this place is something of an oasis in an otherwise arid landscape and it is that unique element, the presence of what Peter understands as water spirits, that plays a crucial role in his activities. As he conducts the sweat, it is the interplay of rock and water, in some ways opposing forces in this location, that allows him to proceed in an appropriate way. Even the composition of the canyon itself, on one side sandstone, laid down as sediment within an ancient lake or sea, on the other igneous rock, forged by heat in the depths of the earth, speaks to this duality but also to the coexistence and important interplay of these two elements.
It is moisture in fact, first in the form of steam from the heated stream rocks and then in the form of his own sweat as it drips off of his body and down towards the bedrock beneath him, that conveys the power of the rock spirit Henthinlo in a way Peter can manage.
Following a successful ceremony and the dismantling of the lodge, Peter has not only found a level of peace, but is clearly even more closely connected to the place in which he finds himself. That sense has fully permeated him and in doing so has afforded him a new level of clarity and awareness. It had been a difficult and arduous path to this place at this point in time, but that effort had rewarded him.
Lying in his sleeping bag, considering the array of stars in the wedge of night sky above the high canyon walls, he reflects that he will now be able to take this place, its meaning, with him in the morning as he returns from the desert.
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