Petrified Forest Residency, Day15, Oct. 10, 2010

A raven flies across the rock face at Canyon de Chelly.

My residency contract ended yesterday, but we talked the Petrified Forest into giving me another week. However, we had already made arrangement to go to Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field Land Art, in west-central New Mexico, so we are on the road for a couple of days.

Various changes of plans happen once one is engaged in a project. We had not expected that the PF internet service would be readily available, so I set up motel reservations in Gallup, New Mexico for the night before we were due at the Lightning Field and the night after. It’s  70 miles from the Petrified Forest to Gallup, but we figured we would need as much time on a proper high-speed server as possible.

This morning, we realized that was an unnecessary precaution, so we decided to become tourists ourselves, heading north from Interstate 40 to the little town of Ganado, where the Hubble Trading Post is located.

The Trading Post is a National Historical Site and has a Visitor’s Center (in Park Service Rustic style), where I bought a book about  Maynard Dixon, a painter of the area who also painted in the Amargosa Valley in Nevada. We also saw a video that had some things about the Hubble Trading Post, but contained a great deal of gorgeous footage of Canyon de Chelly.

So we checked out the Trading Post, composed of a combination of old and newer buildings, many lived in by those who work the cash registers and farm the gardens.

The Hubble Visitor’s Center.

The side entrance to the Trading Post.

The Post has a host of Indian tourist goods — rugs, jewelry, baskets, pots — but is also the local grocer to area residents. Its floors creak like a host of squeaky violins and the collection of goods for sale is mingled with the collections of beautiful items collected by the Hubble family over the years. It’s charming and eccentric and well worth the stop.

But, having seen the video with the Canyon de Chelly photos, and being very close to the Park (albeit getting further and further from Gallop), we decided we had to visit Canyon de Chelly.

I won’t do a travelogue — there far better photos online than any I got  on —  the Park Service’s  gallery of photos is a good place to begin .  But walking on the rim overlooking the canyon was weird, because the surface is a flat scored hard rock, which suddenly ends and the canyon is upon one. Luckily the Park Service has put up stone walls and iron railings for the knock-kneed among us.

The canyon bottom is farmed by Navajo, and the Park is unique in that it is owned entirely by the Navajo Nation, which lives, farms, grazes various animals including goats, both on the mesas above the Canyon and within the Canyon itself. So it’s a living landscape, mingling tourists and residents. Very unlike the usual vacant spaces within National Parks where human are seen only on the prescribed walkways.

That said, the Park and the Navajo Nation carefully control where and how the tourists have access to the Canyon bottom, particularly as it contains priceless ruins and petroglyphs, both from the Anasazi, who were there close  to 1000 years, until around 1400 and the Navajo, who appeared about 1700. The two groups are not related; the Anasazi were Puebloan, like the Hopi, and lived in communal villages. The Navajo live in independent quarters and were more nomadic in the earlier years.

I decided to include this Park excursion in the Residency Journal because of the curious mingling in this park of habitants and tourists. It’s a continuation of my thinking about what “landscape’ is and what landscape painting might be. All fodder.

There will be no Journal tomorrow, because the Lightning Field does not allow electronics or photos. And the next day is a blank in our schedule. So perhaps something, perhaps nothing. Regardless, I’ll be back Wednesday, when I can return renewed for the last days of painting at the Petrified. Forest.

Writing from a motel room in Gallup, New Mexico —-June