The Last Word On Nothing

I went up to a rock art panel in southeast Utah the other day, one known as the Desecration Panel. The sandstone wall is long and repeatedly marked by petroglyphs of animals and human-like characters about 1,500 years old, what is called Basketmaker tradition. Several are terribly defaced, the damage relatively recent. One figure, which once looked like those to either side, has been transformed into a monster of its former self, rising from the rock as if the past were not over, no sharp line saying when it wraps up and the present begins.

Stories vary, but this panel was altered by a hatchet in the 1950s or 60s. You could call it vandalism, but that is too simple a term. The act was highly intentional, perhaps desperate. The most reputable sources tell of an illness that struck Navajo families around the middle of the last century. They went to a medicine man who said the solution was defacing this rock art, taking out certain figures. They must have been connected to the illness, having some bearing on it, an echo or a power from long ago.

A friend was with me at the panel, John Tveten, an ER doctor who works the Navajo Reservation in Arizona. His region is ramping down from being one of the more severe coronavirus hotspots in the country. Tveten said he hadn’t had to intubate anyone from the virus for the past week, a big change. He showed up straight off his shift, a plunge into the desert. 

What we saw at this panel isn’t random scrawl, someone owning the rock art with a name and date, or lovers leaving crude initials. This was ritual. It was done for a purpose. Look at the figure to the right of the ghostly desecration. Smaller blows from the same time period were delivered to the head, chest, hands, torso, groin, hips, knees, and feet. You can only imagine what it means, but that specific, you know it means something.

Tveten had been here before, one of his favorite stops. He calls the panel disturbing and enchanting. Canyons and rock walls in all directions are decorated with unmarred rock art, some panels so crowded you see layers of storytelling, a palimpsest of human epochs. It is an encyclopedic desert, a record of clans and rituals, people returning to the same places over thousands of years. Why, of all the hundreds of panels, was this one chosen? What had they known about these images? Was there possibility of a cure, or at least breaking the chain that led to illness?

Starting in 1951, nuclear detonations at a Nevada test site sent fallout across Utah, dusting the Four Corners with ionizing radiation. More than a hundred blasts were set off over the next decade, their effect felt across the continent. Especially hard hit was rural Utah where people are called downwinders for being in the direct drift of fallout. Illness followed: cancers, non-malignant thyroid nodular disease, parathyroid adenoma, posterior subcapsular cataracts. The list is long. People, especially those on the reservation far from news of the day, probably would not have known the cause. The Atomic Energy Commission downplayed hereditary risks, while concerned scientists in the mid-50s rallied and challenged the AEC’s assertions.

Mysterious and widespread illnesses fit the bill for whatever happened at this panel. It is easy to imagine the destruction of these petroglyphs being tied to downwinders and bombs going off in another state. Who could have known the source? It may have seemed like curse, and it may have been one.

Tveten and I have talked about magic before. I believe it is possible. He thinks not so much. Sometimes he eggs me on. He once told me a rock is just a rock, and I said sometimes it’s a stone. At the panel, I don’t ask him if he thinks the desecration might have worked to banish illness. He’s a doctor. He deals with real world problems, putting people’s bodies back together, lifting out bullets and tumors, sewing injuries closed. He doesn’t talk much about his work. Out here, he’s getting away from it.

Tveten is also a writer. He published a heartbreakingly beautiful piece recently when his ward clerk at the hospital died after contracting the virus. He sat masked and gloved beside her to the end. Not much later he found himself sitting beside the next ward clerk who contracted COVID-19, not sure if she would live or not (she lived). Same bed, same illness, same fear. He wrote, “Double masked and gloved, armor in place, I sit on your bed and hold your hand. It is the best medicine I can offer. There is no distance. I remain hopeful. You remain strong. We make a pact to hug.”

Hope is magic, isn’t it? You’ll do anything to protect the ones you love.

Below the ghostly central figure that had been hacked with a hatchet is a line of bean-shaped prints, a rendering of bare feet walking right to left. They lead to another line of barefoot petroglyphs moving left to right. The two come together as if meeting. As Tveten and I walked along the wall with its many pecked figures, time felt inverted, not going forward or back, but looking at itself in the mirror over thousands of years. The hatchet work may have severed a line, closed a door. Placebo or cure, it is what the doctor ordered, a destruction of history, a reinvention of it. I never heard if it worked.

Photo by Daiva Chesonis