Postcard From Mesa Verde National Park

Mesa Verde

I'm a huge fan of the national park system and visit them every chance I get. If you haven't taken the opportunity to visit them whenever possible, I think you are missing out on one of the best things about America. For more information, go to http://www.nps.gov/.

About 1,450 years ago, a group of people living in the Four Corners region chose Mesa Verde (in the southwest corner of Colorado) for their home. For more than 700 years they and their descendants lived and flourished, eventually building elaborate stone communities in the sheltered alcoves of the canyon walls. Then, in the late A.D. 1200s, in the span of a generation or two, they left their homes and moved away, disappearing from history. Mesa Verde National Park preserves a spectacular reminder of this ancient culture.

Mesa Verde cliff dwellings

The first Ancestral Puebloans settled in Mesa Verde (Spanish for “green table”) about A.D. 550. Formerly nomadic, they were beginning to lead a more settled way of life. Farming replaced hunting and gathering as their main livelihood. They lived in pithouses clustered into small villages usually built on mesa tops but sometimes in cliff recesses. By A.D. 1000 the people of Mesa Verde had advanced from pole-and-adobe construction to skillful stone masonry. Walls of thick stone often rose two or three stories high and were joined together into units of 50 rooms or more. Farming accounted for more of their diet than before, and much mesa-top land was cleared for agriculture.

About A.D. 1200, another major population shift saw the people move from the mesa tops back into the cliff alcoves that sheltered their ancestors centuries before. Why did they make this move? We don’t know. Perhaps it was for defense; perhaps it was for religious or psychological reasons; perhaps alcoves offered better protection from the elements. Whatever the reason or reasons, it gave rise to the cliff dwellings for which Mesa Verde is most famous. Ancestral Puebloans lived in the cliff dwellings for less than 100 years. By about A.D. 1300, Mesa Verde was deserted.

Ever since local cowboys first reported the cliff dwellings in the 1880s, archeologists have sought to understand these people’s lives. But despite decades of excavation, analysis, classification, and comparison, scientific knowledge remains sketchy. We will never know the whole story: they left no written records and much that was important in their lives has perished. Yet for all their silence, these structures speak with a certain eloquence. They tell of a people adept at building, artistic in their crafts, and skillful at making a living from a difficult land. The structures are evidence of a society that, over centuries, accumulated skills and traditions and passed them on from generation to generation. So what happened to them? Why, in such a short period of time, did they leave the home they had known for 700 years? Perhaps we'll never know.

Fishy Tale - Part Deaux

I kept expecting to look in the pond one day and find one or both of the goldfish floating belly up, but to not find them anywhere was a bit of a surprise. There were a lot of critters in the woods by our house - raccoons, opossums, armadillos, coyotes, and although we never saw any, we kept hearing stories of one or more bobcats running around, so I thought maybe one of those guys had a goldfish dinner. I had built a little cave at the bottom of the pond with four decent sized rocks so to make sure they weren't dead and caught in "the cave," I reached in and removed the top rock. As soon as I did, Goldie came out swimming around like crazy. Now I know fish aren't exactly known for their high-powered brains, but I swear, that fish was acting very scared and looking for another place to hide. After checking under the rocks and all around for whats-his-name to no avail, I rebuilt the little rock cave and Goldie immediately swam back into it and stayed there. The only thing I could figure was that indeed, a critter had managed to snag himself a golden snack and Goldie had been smart or lucky enough to hide.

By the next day, Goldie was back to being herself again. I don't know how long a fish can remember something, but evidently not very long. She lived by herself for a couple more months and didn't seem to miss her buddy.

We used to ocassionaly tie up our dog on a long leash to a post on the patio if the weather was good and we were going to be gone for just a couple of hours. Little did we know that would lead to a freak accident that spelled the end of Goldie. We returned home one day from somewhere, out to dinner or shopping probably, and found Dottie had evidently walked around the pond and somehow had gotten her leash under one of those rocks surrounding the lip of the pond and managed to knock it into the water. Once again, I looked and found no trace of Goldie. Thinking she was hiding in the cave again, I reached in to remove the errant rock the dog had knocked in. And when I lifted it, up came poor Goldie, squashed. Rock 1 - Goldie 0. Another proper burial was conducted. And this time I actually felt kind of bad. After all she had lived through, she had proven to be a heck of a fighter and I admired her for it. Rest in peace, Goldie.

So what does this have to do with now? After all, that was about 6 years ago and we've moved to another home in a different state during that time. Well, guess who came home from the church Halloween carnival the other night with another plastic bag of water and a goldfish? Sometimes being a parent takes all the patience you can muster and that was one of those times. My first thought was to take that bag of water, fish and all, run back up to the church and do a very un-Christian thing with it to the guy who gave it to my daughter. But she still has those big beautiful eyes (my youngest daughter, not the fish) that look into mine and the words that come out of my mouth are, "OK I guess, but you will be responsible for feeding it everyday and cleaning out the tank." Like that's really going to happen for very long. "But Daddy, we don't have a home for Goldie Too."

So to the pet store we went. And now, one "free" fish and $30 later, we have a fish tank, with gravel and a filter and about two years of fish food - and we have 2 goldfish; Goldie Too and Sammy. Can't have Goldie Too getting lonely. But one thing I can assure you - I will not be spending $200 and a weekend of hard labor constructing a pond in our back yard to house them. Really.

I have to wrap this up now. My wife and youngest daughter said they want to talk to me about something they've been discussing; something about they love me and "the back yard?" "Be right there, girls!"