roadtrip 2019     

Precipitation has been above average this Spring. The result is a proliferation of blooming in the desert, just a delight in a place that does not seem hospitable to much life of any kind.

These people knew how to build. How many of the buildings of our time will survive as long, or more importantly, how many of them have been built with the same sense of sacred calling undivorced from ordinary life that these ancestral peoples seem to have lived with and lived by? Salmon Ruins is an outlier community originally built by the same people who built Chaco. It is just a few hundred feet off a six-lane commercial corridor between Bloomfield and Farmington, New Mexico. The highway is being upgraded and expanded, it is noisy, and the signs advertising everything from motels to restaurants to "adult stores" have a singular purpose: the promotion of buying and selling. The sense of inherent sacredness that seems to have infused all of Chacoan life is spectacularly missing from the Highway 64 Safety Corridor where fines are double.

I am not romanticizng ancestral life, there were plenty of problems that went along with pre-rational worldviews. But I do think it is way past time for us to reclaim the sacred, the spiritual, in ordinary life because if we don't, everything in our lives will be reduced to nothing more than commercial value, nothing short of the crass commodification of all that is good and beautiful and true.

By our stadards, these rooms are small. They are more the size of a monk's cell than anything else. But because they are built of the same rock wall construction as the outside walls, I cannot imagine that Chacoan parents werewe much bothered by their kids playing their music too loud...

The building style here is absolutely typical of Chacoan construction. Mortared stone construction, each stone well-fitted, with the exquisite detail of small stones in the mortar joints.

These round constructs were communal gathering spaces that were large enough to accommodate everyone who lived in the pueblo. This one was actually a mirror to a tower kiva only a few hundred feet away.

Look closely, there are stones protruding from the wall making a stairway to the top of the wall. The next photo gives a closer view. These are inside steps leading up into the tower kiva, an unusual configuration as kivas are usually built into the ground with the roof at ground level.

Probably would not pass building code today...

Text and images copyright 2018 Thomas D'Alessio and Jocelyn Boor