In Situ
As my fingers tighten around the plastic grips, I lift my hiking poles and drive the metal spikes firmly, decisively, into the red earth. Reverberating up through ancient layers of bedrock and pulverized sandstone, through hands, arms, and into my heart, is contentment. Home. Land. Here I am.
I smile, which some days surprises me. The physical sensation of smiling, I mean; how the uplift in the geography of my face changes not just my mood but animates my body. Breath trills inside my lungs, blood flutters with anticipation, feet twitch snugly inside lug-sole, well-worn boots set to ground.
Here I am. Away from my desk, out of the house, far from the neighborhood, off the highway, free of the car—in my beloved landscape. At the trailhead for the Western Gateway, known previously as the Cultural Park, and before that, the dump.
Forty-some years ago, about once a month, I’d help Gram pack the trunk of her Rambler with trash for a dump run. The population of our north-central Arizona town was 3,000 or so; mostly retirees with a few cowboy artists, business owners, a doctor or two—but growing. Filmmakers were still setting star-studded westerns within the majestic scenery, which in turn enticed tourists. Most drove. Some flew in via the airport, which opened in 1957 on the mesa behind Gram’s house.
Local ranchers or their descendants had begun selling their land to developers, including the brushy slope on which Gram’s house was built in 1958. The U.S. Forest Service did almost 20 land trades between 1945 and 1960, putting pristine high desert into private hands for construction. When the Spanish-Colonial style shopping village was built in the 1970s, along the creek in a cherished sycamore grove, the town had a commercial tourist draw second only to the jeep tours of the red rocks.
Still, most of the residential streets were dirt. Many of the one-level houses—log construction or of wood frame thrown up on a cement pad, sometimes with a wall of red rock—had their own septic systems, including Gram’s sage-gray L-shaped home. She’d bury her compostable scraps in holes she dug deep in the coarse red dirt of her garden, in an effort to make the desert soil more hospitable to tomatoes. She’d also toss broken bits of crockery along the edges of her yard, which now my cousins’ kids dig up and examine as treasure. In other words, the town didn’t have garbage pickup.
The municipal dump, located on the western edge of town, was surrounded by ranches, the monumental red rocks, and wilderness. Some 1,300 years prior, the land was home to the area’s first human inhabitants, the Sinagua, then their descendants the Yavapai, Apache, and Hopi. By some accounts, the dump is part of the Hopi Footprints Migration Area, kukveni or footprints being a powerful historical metaphor of Hopi heritage. The peoples’ footprints originally sealed a stewardship pact between the Hopi and the land; today archaeological remains such as pottery sherds, stone tools, and petroglyphs—evidence of their presence in the area—are understood as kukveni.
As a kid, then a teenager, I collected such evidence with Gram wherever we found it; maybe even at the dump, pot sherds being plentiful and free for the taking, as no one paid any mind to the 1906 Antiquities Act protecting in situ artifacts. As Gram’s garbage burned, plumes of acrid smoke billowed up toward the cerulean sky and into the craggy terracotta faces of the mountains. Ironic, as to preserve the area’s scenic beauty, the townspeople had successfully campaigned to eliminate billboards, and had established height codes and color palettes to blend buildings into the landscape. These days, smoke from the fires of climate change in dry beetle-ravaged forests to the north and west, fueled by escalating temperatures and ever-longer stretches of high winds, shrouds the summits with eye-stinging gray haze.
My feet curve along rocks embedded in the dirt, dodge mountain bikers coming in hot, step aside to let hikers pass, as I examine evidence of the dump days. Shards of green, brown, and clear glass, mosaic-like against their gritty red backdrop, glint in the sun; luminous debris. The rusted shell of a car—absent windows, doors, windshield—rests tire-less beneath a juniper, a path around it well-worn by curious tourists. Rusty flat-top cans (needing a church key to peel open), jagged sheets of metal, corroded bins, and heaps of roofing insulation, boards, and shingles lie amid the rocks, prickly pear, agave, pinyon pine, and cat claw. Resting in gray pine duff is a metal contraption with a flat base, holes, and a wheel-like handle; the skeleton of a sewing machine.
The Forest Service has designated this garbage historical. If it’s been lying in situ for 50 or more years, it’s an artifact, a relic. Not to be removed. Disclosure: Elsewhere, I’ve picked up flattened tobacco cans—ostensibly for art projects I’ve never started; and a textile artist divulged she’s gathered old cans for making rust dye.
A relic now, too, is the dilapidated wood and steel shell of the 5,500-seat amphitheater, built in 2000 when a philanthropist underwrote the development of a cultural park at the edge of the former dump. Cultural, as in white culture; classical ballet, chamber music, country-western bands. There was trouble. The project went bankrupt. But not before Dad and I, sitting on the terraced lawn, enjoyed the melodious strings of a live orchestra resonating with a sun setting between pink and purple swatches of almost-yesterday’s clouds above terracotta spires named for a rooster’s comb.
Because this place offers panoramic views of the town’s famed red rocks. Cream, shell-pink, and crimson mountains, pine-topped mesas, and eroded ridgelines named for bear, deer, and lizard, which front canyons bearing the surnames of white ranchers. Miles of ribbed and fluted peaks and outcrops called what their shapes resembled, from mittens to teapots to submarines. Weathered mounds dubbed amusement-park rides or comic-strip characters. Massive sinkholes and red-rock arches referred to as devil’s work. The colossal, free-standing, red sandstone formations in open park land named for government buildings and places of worship.
A nomenclature imagined by white Christian settlers, in the late-19th and early 20th centuries, who encountered this town encircled by red rocks; a naming free of reference to the ancient indigenous people whose footprints—shelters, potsherds, pictographs, petroglyphs—remain tucked along canyon walls, strewn across mesas, drawn beneath overhangs. Colonialist monikers that, with literality, enact and perpetuate a claiming. That evidence a child-like reduction of awe-inducing natural majesty to the quotidian.
As a kid, I loved those names. We had a map that identified all the rocks, which I’d pore over, enhanced by the novelty of it all, memorizing which behemoths were which as a point of reference, as a point of pride. The settlers’ gaze, instilled in a child.
Leaning on my poles at a trail crossing, I consult a different kind of map. Clearly, the Forest Service can’t keep pace with all the new routes underway at the former dump. Thirty miles of trails and counting. Instigated by mountain bikers who in the 1990s discovered the rugged, breathtaking terrain. With help from local mountain bikers, the interlopers began laying down tracks through the fragile ecosystem, drawing the attention of the Forest Service, which adopted and formalized their network into the town’s 400-mile trail system.
The mountain bikers create their own nomenclature for these trails, inspired in part by the area’s cowboy history—lasso, stirrup—and their own descriptive lingo—bottom out, ground control, ledge-n-airy. Many of those trails are already, as we say in my family, beat to shit. Widened by edges freshly corrugated with tire tread and hard-packed as cement. But they’re not as bad as the trails we’ve had to give up, to sacrifice to the tourists, as we put it.
Three million tourists a year before COVID; more than 3.4 million in 2020, and rising. Who arrive with a bucket list of hikes promising the most dramatic scenery for social media selfies; who pack the trailhead parking lots and roads with so many cars the residents can’t leave or return to their homes; who get lost without adequate food or water, or overestimate their abilities and need to be rescued; who will wait in line, more than 100 souls deep, for that Instagrammable moment. Disneyland.
Even five years ago, we enjoyed off seasons. Early morning climbs up the megaliths. Day-long treks to favorite sinkholes, tinajas (small rock pools), waterfalls, niches, alcoves, and mesas into wilderness. Stomach-jolting drives on old wagon roads to narrow trails along cliff faces. These places are now for viewing only, from afar, our attention turned instead to the mountain bikers’ playground at the western edge of town, née the dump.
Or we hike lesser-traveled trails behind Gram’s house. Where I can still discover stillness. That moment, when the plaintive barking from the dog pound, the sound of glass smashing at the recycling center, the rhythmic hammering or whining buzz of construction, or the drone of the highway recedes as the trail dips into a canyon or curves along a protective hill … and a profound quiet emerges within the landscape.
An enveloping absence of sound. In which the existence of air is audible. As are bees, buzzing the manzanita blooms in a resounding symphony. Juniper boughs releasing, in the breeze, a cascade of sighs. Canyon wrens trickling their descending notes into valleys. Lizards rustling dry acacia leaves. The cottonwoods’ heart-shaped leaves shuffling into a sound like rain.
I’m not the quietest hiker. I stumble-swear, out loud. My footprints stomp on top of others. The poles shush, ding, and puncture the soil. I have a nervous tic, related to constant post-nasal drip, exacerbated by juniper pollen, that involves sniffing, clearing my throat, and blowing out one nostril at a time cowboy style. A deer once acknowledged my chuffing by responding with her own, glaring at me, before bounding away.
So, I’m part of the problem. Of overuse. Of inserting into nature an indelible human presence. I almost always hike on trails, but love decommissioned paths for the quiet and solitude. In search of shrub cover for a bio break, I’ve disturbed a coyote taking a mid-day nap. I’ve laid a private nomenclature on favorite rock mounds. No, I don’t leave plastic bags of dog poop, used diapers or toilet paper, water bottles, snack wrappers, picnic leftovers, socks, underwear, or other trash on or off trail. While acknowledging my privilege as someone who, through quirks of fate, can actually live here, I mourn the evidence of disregard left in the landscape.
Because for the Chamber of Commerce and business owners in this town too many is never enough, just as the phenomenon of over-tourism is destroying natural and cultural heritage from Venice to our national parks, Croatia to the Isle of Skye. In my town, the consequences are ruinous. Corporations buy homes as short-term vacation rentals, eliminating housing options for the locals who service those visitors, and the subsequent drop in population nullifies our vote on community plans. Tourist vehicles jam roads, inhibiting ambulances, police, and rescue operations. Hikers and mountain bikers cram, expand, and pound trails. ATVs ravage desert habitat. The one-percent occupy fourth and fifth homes two weeks a year, luxury resorts fill the mouths of sacred canyons, and eco-hotels starting at $1500 a night are built in former wildlife habitat.
Like other residents, I protest, petition, write, volunteer. Time of day, day of the week, month of the year dictate the timing of grocery runs, roads taken, friends visited, hikes planned. Resentment chafes my sensibilities raw, then subsides into ardor, my fervent need to remain present among the high-desert red rocks and its denizens. As friends remind me, Tourists pay to visit. We get to live here.
Home. Land. Here I am. Attentive. Accountable.
Instead of returning to the trailhead, I walk onto a dirt road beyond a locked vehicle-access gate. The road is flat and wide, littered with newly broken glass. On either side, bike tracks and footpaths weave through juniper, prickly pear, mesquite. One of those paths leads to a crater rimmed with red-rock boulders and broken slabs of cement. Far below, dirt roads wind through mounds of displaced earth purpled with verbena. In the distance, the amphitheater’s rusted ribs arch between two junipers. Black-foot daisies bouquet the red earth.
To be human is to mark, name, claim. There is no pristine. Certainly not here. My memories, footprints, DNA layer in with all the rest. A desert hare sits in profile, ears tall and fixed, eyes gazing at what I cannot see. And last year’s datura leaves, edges curled and silvery, ghost the ground.
Camille LeFevre, of Northern Arizona, practices and teaches ekphrasis, and writes creative nonfiction. She’s the 2023 recipient of the Scuglik Memorial Residency in Ekphrastic Writing with Write On, Door County. Her work has been published in The Ekphrastic Review, Herstry, and Hungry Mind Review. She’s an avid hiker, cold-water swimmer, and pickleball player.
