The storage box under my bed is dedicated to gifts from well-intentioned friends who believe a writer must have many journals—bejeweled and gilded, lined and unlined, spiraled and perfect-bound. Because I’m unfocused and forgetful, I have starts and stops in several: a few lines noted in Mountain View, Arkansas, 2004; a sketch of a cave and where the river enters the ocean at Montaña de Oro on the California coast, 2008; efforts to describe an eerie hum of abandoned cables on a defunct ride at Coney Island, Brooklyn, 2006. Recently, on a road so narrow the van driver honked when approaching each hairpin turn, I found myself enumerating the vultures floating in circles above the arroyos. The van belonged to the tour company; the driver’s name was Antonio—driving this same route three times a week, a girlfriend in Ensenada a half day’s journey north, a baby on the way who would be named Enrique after Antonio’s father. It was February, 2011. Our destination was caves and the paintings other people had left—a three-hour journey from Guerrero Negro. Stopped to stretch legs, take a short break, I saw the jawbone of a dead goat or deer, molars intact, among the loose rocks on the down slope.
It wasn’t something I coveted. I have a similar jawbone, one of a fawn I believe, on my kitchen sill in Northern California. There is something about bones, found bones, bones whitened by weather and displacement which draws my interest. I can’t say exactly why, but perhaps a little bit like a tune, one I think I’m making up as I begin, then realize it’s a skewed version of something known for a very long time. With molars too large for a coyote, and jaw bone too slender for a cow, the remains seemed to say the animal had lived to maturity, had ranged these steep inclines for a time, perhaps even thrived. Back in the van, I made a note in my journal, “Chiva = goat. Zopilote = buzzard. Tony says puma live in the caves at the bottom. Did the puma drag the jawbone up here?”
Near the end of the curves and climbs up the mountain, we pass a collection of buildings with “hotel” printed on a sign. There are small cabins. There are corrugated-tin sided buildings. There are goats and some of the goats have bells. When I stand out from the little building where we sign our names and leave our ages, when I stand close to the edge of a relatively flat mesa where these people live, approximately two hundred people scattered here and there as a village, people with many times that number in goats who roam in small herds of a dozen or more, when I stand very still and listen beyond the wind whistling in my ears, I can hear distant clanks of more goat bells, the chivas trotting along their narrow paths, eating, Antonio has told us, even the fenders off old rusting cars.
Here one of the locals joins us. We pay fifty pesos for the right to use our cameras once we get to the caves, and the caves are not so much caves as they are abbreviated caverns. The local tells us there have been bones found in the area, and the femurs are of such a size and of such an age that the people who left paintings on the high wall were giants, a people much taller than any known—and perhaps all of this is true. The local says this is true; he says the bones are thousands of years old.
Thousands of years . . . Is the prong-horned antelope or sheep depicted in orange on the wall a distant relative of the jawbone I saw on the slope? Is the puma, painted in black and crossing the painted legs of the human figure on the wall an early inhabitant of the caves at the bottom of the arroyo where Antonio gazed down with binoculars for such a long time, hoping to sight the cave’s current occupant? Are the people pictured, one half of their bodies painted orange, the other half painted black, the head painted orange but the countenance painted black—are they, were they this aware of the dark side of human nature, the two sides of all natures, the good and the bad, thousands of years ago?
Of years . . . My journal is back on the van; photos are fast, easy to record the stories depicted on the rock walls: point and click, point and click. Simple. Yet I can’t help but wonder how much of what is there the camera will miss. Will the viewer of a digital photo have the sense that that dark splotch on the wall we studied was an indentation? may well have been a place where the hearth was kept? where someone stirred ashes in the morning, perhaps before light, to set blaze to a new piece of dead cactus, its woody remains as cellular in its outer construction as a beehive? will they picture a man? a woman? making warmth out of next to nothing? will they see him or her as the same general size as the locals who inhabit the scattered village of these mountains? Or imagine them of great heights, tall enough to apply the paints, the hand-ground dyes of rust-oranges and blacks needed to fill in the sketches made to stone? Will a viewer see the ghosts move across time, quiet in their steps if other members of family are yet sleeping, watch as they tuck a child’s arm under a hide blanket? Will the smoke of past fires sting a distant viewer’s eyes?
The local man walks back to his village and we climb back into the tour van, begin honking our way back down the narrow dirt road. Behind us, the figures continue to lift their arms, one orange, one black, above their black-faced heads. They are celebrating, Antonio has said. It is not necessary that I know exactly what they celebrate, yet I like to imagine. I like to imagine they celebrate a good thing, some event which has eased their life or enhanced their joy—enough food to sleep without hunger, enough water to wake without thirst. I like to imagine they celebrate their orange sides, orange natures. I like to think the dark sides stay dormant, in hibernation throughout their lives, that they merely recognize its presence and perhaps celebrate its long, long sleep with raised arms, open hands.
I’ve closed the journal with the notes about chivas and giants. Closed it before the sun went down and the street lights came on along the calle running parallel to the Pacific coast through the town of Rosarito Beach in Baja California Norte on this last day of February 2011. Tomorrow, I may try to find written evidence of the long femur rumored to have been found in the San Francisco de Sierra mountains, but not tonight. Tonight there are giants stirring an ember to flame in my kitchen, shoulders bent and necks lowered so they don’t bump their heads, arms lifted, celebrating all the gifts one journal keeper can imagine. We are laughing. We are adding fuel to the flames.
[after Bruce Berger, “Fernando and Marisela,” from In Short, ed. Judith Kitchener and Mary Paumier Jones]
