The Wind Spirit
You can see the ruins almost immediately. They’re the tallest thing in sight, even though they themselves are perhaps only twelve to fourteen feet at their highest point. A paved path winds toward them, following the small dips and valleys of the landscape, briefly bridging a sandy wash that perhaps is a creek sometimes—when there’s enough rain, if there’s ever enough rain out here in the northern corner of Arizona.
We’re at the Wupatki National Monument, on a daytrip stop as we travel between the Grand Canyon and Zion. My family and I, six total, are packed into one rental car. An aunt, uncle and two young cousins ride behind us in another. The drive has been uneventful. The terrain is sparse, scrubby with low-lying plants. My brother, a geologist, points out exposed rock faces, sandstone—from the ancient riverbeds that marked the area.
“A literal eon,” he tells us. That’s how much time has passed between when this land was a river and when the Wupatki peoples built their homes in this area. It’s hard to picture as a home, as lush or arable, as we’re whirring along with windows full of nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing—it’s like being lost at sea, if the sea were gray-brown, tufted with small shrubs. My sister remarks on the short, craggy bluffs.
“Very Pride and Prejudice,” she says. She means the film. It’s easy to picture Keira Knightly as Elizabeth Bennett perched there, staring moodily out across the landscape while her skirts billow around her.
When we first arrive, I’m surprised to note the row of small houses next to the parking lot. The rangers must live on-site. I suppose they have to, unable to feasibly commute to out here to nowhere each day, but still—I swivel, taking in the bleakness, zipping my coat higher against the unbroken battering wind. It’s not an assignment I would savor. A ranger stands under a canopy tent, Junior Ranger coloring books in an array before them. My father shows his park pass, offers a corny little joke. This is where my father and uncle excel. The quick-quipped small talk of winning over strangers, waitresses, grocery-store checkout workers. But the ranger does not smile, does not chuckle, or offer a rejoinder. I blink in shock. My “here-he-goes-again” grin of bemused commiseration that I’d been offering fades stiffly from my cheeks. This is uncanny, as eerie as the landscape itself.
We don’t comment on it, my father and I, as we head over to where my mother and siblings wait for us at the start of the path down to the ruins. My aunt, uncle, and cousins already strolling toward the ruins, ever faster to unload than us. My sisters shuffle around, shaking out stiff legs cramped from the hours in the car. That’s the hard part of these family trips, when we have to relocate multiple times. Transit is always more wearying than hiking itself. Of course, I can’t complain. Since I get carsick easily, I’m favored with the shotgun position in our giant black Suburban, so different from our family’s usual vehicle choices. I have to lever myself up into it like I’m rock-climbing. By default, this also makes me the “navi-guesser”—right hand man of travel. While Google maps does most of the actual work, being there as company, proffering passes and IDs from the purple folder my mother has organized in advance, searching for food along wasteland roads: these are all part of the job.
My sisters sit together in the back-back, ears blocked by headphones, iPads rolling movies they’ve queued up in advance, drifting in and out of slumber. My mother and brother sit side by side in the middle. He handles the physical maps, unfurling Triple-A Triptiks, reading informational asides. I’m glad this is his task. I find those maps almost impossible to make sense of—the abbreviated chunks, the scope and zoom that change with each flipped page. From my perch in the front seat, part of my job is to keep up a constant burble of chatter, no matter the hour, no matter how tired. If we are talking, neither of us are sleeping, then both of us have eyes on the road. My father is great at this, except for those rare occasions that 6pm rolls around and we never got a chance to re-up his coffee intake. You can tell when withdrawal hits: a tightening in the corners of his mouth, hunched forward shoulders, terse responses, a grimness in his eyes. He throws Advil down a dry throat.
Once, on a different trip, trapped in line at a road blocked by construction for nearly an hour, I manage to get the whole family singing along to Disney songs. Occasionally I’m able to finagle most of us into a game of Twenty Questions. But more often than not, it’s just my father and I, mindlessly prattling, pointing out things we notice as we pass them. A lot of travel is this—asking the people you’re with if they’re seeing the same thing you are.
The path at the Wupatki National Monument makes a loop, traversing along the front side of the crumbling structure, out to a small packed-dirt arena, and then up again along the back. It’s a relief to walk on the smoothness of poured cement after so many miles watching where I stepped. There are no loose, ankle-twisting rocks, no steep, plunging edges like there were at the Grand Canyon. Here, I’m able to look out across the terrain as I walk, instead of down. I feel an unanticipated appreciation for pavement, let my tired legs, heavy with hiking boots, slap heedlessly down.
How do you explain the impact of emptiness? How do you describe the weight of absence?
The land is flat, the earth rich, red-brown. In the distance is the horizon, unbroken except for the black mounds marking the ash of two long-quiet volcanos. The vegetation is some kind of shrub brush that looks white. Others might call it sage green, but the reality is, it’s grayish. And there in the center, lies the remains of a structure built about 800 years ago. The last testament to the people who once lived here, to a human history that spans 10,000 years.
It stands two-storied and open-roofed under the unvarying blue of the sky. Along the front are raised crop-beds with strategic drainage holes at the base of their retaining walls, constructed to catch the rainwater and pass it along to the next plot. There are at least a dozen rooms. High in the stacked-stone walls are notches for beams to cross overhead. These would make lofts, for sleeping or storage, I don’t know.
We cross a bridge over a long-dry streambed. I imagine how many people could have lived in the ruins themselves; how many more would have lived around it in tents. But there is nothing here. Some old part of my mind that seeks habitat, that searches for safe haven—food, water, shelter, resources—recoils at the prospect.
“Would it have looked different then?” my cousin asks, spindly and thin. Peter is newly fifteen and gazing around in shock—looking for more, as I did.
“Would there have been trees?” he asks again, eyes wide under his ball cap. Peter has never lived anywhere but where he was born: the quiet wooded hills north of Pittsburgh. Even my mother, who planned this trip, has been balking at the onslaught of so much open space. On the drive in, she loosed heavy, anxious sighs, nervously knotted her limbs together, as she took in a view that, hour after hour, mile after mile, offered emptiness.
“I don’t like this,” she’d said in a small voice, higher-pitched and quieter than usual. I’d asked her to explain, but she couldn’t. These things are hard to articulate. The ways that we are shaped by the places we come from, written into the nascent formation of our childhood brains. Coded images of “home”: lush forest, crumbling mountain, ferns, moss, wide flat rivers along abandoned railroads. Bouldered moraines for clambering, coal you can scuff out of the earth with your toe, grass deep and sticky green, thick as goose down.
“Could you imagine living here?” I ask Peter. He is my second youngest cousin, the older child of my mother’s closest-in-age-sister. In another life, in another timeline, he would have been the cousin to grow up with me. Instead, we are bookends. My brother and I first, Peter and his younger brother last. Both pairs of us hover slightly adrift from the rest of our cousins, the tight-knit cluster of them in the middle.
“Nooooo” he draws it out, like the whinny of a shying horse. He hooks his thumbs through his backpack straps and flaps his elbows. I don’t ask him anything else as we make our way past the edge of the ruins to a clearing marked by a placard. Behind the sign is a square of bricked stone with a hole in the center, built like a tiny one-foot chimney. We’ve reached the blowhole.
Normally when we think of blowholes we picture seaside caves, shooting geysers of water upward when tides and waves align. Land-based blowholes are rare. The placard explains that they’re made by disparities in barometric pressure between the earth’s atmosphere and an underground space. These subterranean passages are called “earthcracks,” and this one here, the signs tells us, has “size, depth, and complexity unknown.” When I look it up later, it’s estimated that the enclosed underground passageways at the Wupatki National Monument have a volume of at least seven billion feet. I feel once more like we could be in the middle of the ocean, contemplating the flat surface of the sea, unaware of the caverns or trenches beneath. Of course, this was all underwater once, almost everything was, if you look back far enough.
This earthcrack was formed by the movements of those two crumbling volcanos on the bleak horizon. Their eruption fissured the bedrock of Kaibab limestone. There’s a small grate across the hole, not too far down. I’m sure this is to prevent people from dropping things in. The wind continues to gust, unobstructed—tossing all my broken, flyaway hairs directly into my eyes—so I’m squinting at the small flue, skeptical of this random “blowhole” in this barren place. With a groan of reluctance, I hunker into a squat, my quads, back, hips, protesting the movement. Balancing on the balls of my feet, I adjust my backpack, laden with water bottles, sunscreens, protein bars, and lean forward, placing my hand over the opening.
I jolt—air does, in fact, rush upward against my palm. I peer down into the darkness. It’s absolute black; I can’t see anything. I press my face close and there it is again, somehow, mysteriously, a separate breeze, gusting gently up from within the earth. So different from the brutal, unceasing one, barreling across the plains. It exhales against my cheek like the snoring of some sleeping dragon.
All of a sudden, my thoughts are racing, trying to visualize the timeline of events that led to this moment. Place my life, place this one moment, this one trip, in a dot on the line. Now add the Wupatki people, add the formation of the earthcrack, the exploding volcanoes. Put another dot for when all this underground limestone was the bed of a great inland sea. I flail at the edges of an existential crisis. My knees burn from holding my squat for so long. That line from Heart of Darkness pops into my head unbidden: The horror! The horror!
So much of our family trips are spent firmly grounded the immediacy of experience. During our hikes, particularly with the rigor that my family approaches them—six miles, eight, twelve, fourteen—the mind is quiet, captured fully by the demands of forward motion. There’s just a silence of physical labor: panted breaths, throbbing feet, the burn of weighted backpack chafing at the strap across your hips. Water, the brain says on occasion. Rest, the body says always. It’s a rare thing, to “reflect” and “do” at the same time, yet here, on our little daytrip between National Parks, I’ve somehow plunged headlong. I drop to my knees in the dirt, unable to keep my balance. I feel like a flipped switch.
Look at this timeline we’ve made, at the reality of its reeling breadth. See how the plotting of it surged outward from the insignificant dot of your existence to that larger chronology which dwarfs your lifespan. Vast, unfurling like a ball of yarn you dropped unbeknownst on a hill, gaining speed as it shrinks in your field of vision, hurtling away from you faster and faster—you, who thought the threads were yours to weave. It zooms out even further, makes a mockery of blink-and-you-miss-it human evolution. See the evidence of it here, in these rocks, in this breathing earth. I didn’t expect it, and perhaps would have avoided it if I’d be able. This reminder, amid the buffeting, barren emptiness: the great indifference of time, so un-aging in its eternity as to be immortal.
Peter wanders away. I keep my hand over the edge of the hole and the wind pours forth against my fingers without cease. My sisters are further down the path, looking at a packed-dirt arena carved into the tundra. I want to join them, but I can’t. They seem impossibly distant, like ants marching over sand, like the infinitesimal grains of sand itself. Every cell, every sensor, every hastily cobbled together synapse of my animal-body’s unsophisticated functioning is alert, as if I’ve experienced some great shock to my nervous system. Blood and skin, nerve and bone—the whole of me tingles. My mind splits. The lizard brain balks. What is this?
Even as my thinking unspools further, telescoping away, contemplating millennia, contemplating billions, contemplating the depths of time contained within lightyears—even as this happens, I can feel the paltry span of my prehistory grasping at survival, clawing for significance. What is this? Is this danger? Is this threat? My conscious mind knows, even as my body stumbles to catch up: it is awe. It is something wholly outside our ecology.
I stand up and look around. Here I am, I find myself saying in my head, taking in the wasteland anew. The blankness that stretches far beyond my weak human eyesight. Nothing and nothing and nothing, I swivel. Nothing and nothing and yet—here I am, where somewhere, deep within the secret places of the earth, there lies an immense and uncharted land. One where, amid an echoey silence, it sighs skyward. It whispers blind murmurings of shadowed crevasse and petrified ash. It knows the stories of fossil and stone. It knows water that no light has ever touched. Here, beneath the dust-caked soles of my hiking boots, it breathes.
It breathed before me, when the Wupatki people lived here, through ceremony and conflict, life, and death. It will breathe still, after I am gone. After these crumbling remains have long since blown to dust. After the ozone thins to nothing. After the ice caps melt and rising waters make dozens of sunken Atlantis’s anew. After we destroy ourselves, choking on plastic and smoke, bodies filled with radiation. The earthcrack doesn’t care. Its exhalations are indifferent to suffering and joy.
The hair on my arms stands on end. I laugh a little wildly.
I return to my knees, lean close once more, and sniff hard, but the relentless wind has dulled my nose. I press my face to the crook of my elbow and inhale, a nasal palette cleansing trick. Then I lower my head far into the opening of the hole, even as my belly flips with nerves, the heft of my backpack pushing my shoulders lower, urging me down. I sniff again, still nothing.
An absence of scent, an absence of life, I imagine. The nearby placard notes that there aren’t any prehistoric structures indicating any particular “use” of the blowhole, a phrasing which has me gritting my molars. It’s everywhere, this awful Western idea, that “use” equates value. They say that the blowhole’s “connection to the Wupatki Pueblo remains a mystery.” However, they add, the Hopi peoples of today, descendants of the Wupatki, attribute spiritual significance to it, referring to the blowhole as the breath of the wind spirit, “Yaapontsa.” The air can reach speeds of 30 miles per hour.
My aunt reaches me, crouching down at my side. The vibrant orchid-purple of her puffy jacket floods my vision like an oasis. I’ve since retreated to my heels, preparing to stand again. She hovers her hands across the opening.
“Oh my god, that is so crazy,” she says in a hushed voice. And I’m certain she feels it too: the strangeness, the wonder. The breeze against our palms is ever-so-slightly warmer than the air around us. I match her pitch, softer.
“It’s crazy,” I whisper in agreement, knowing that when we say, it’s crazy, what we mean is: we are crazed by it. It stretches our feeble minds to their limits. Human brains are so wonderfully built for decision and adjustment, marvels in adaptation and snapped-synapse assessments. But this requires a simplicity of construction, survival skills are blunt, lacking nuance. We have only these most fundamental questions: Threat or no threat? Good or bad? And once we choose a reaction, we are terrible at changing it. Every so-called “destructive behavior” was once the best possible coping method and now we happily re-tread that same path, selecting the ease of pavement over the watched-step agony of an unfamiliar route. It is difficult work to navigate the slick emotionality of our minds, to parse out feeling from response, stimuli from reaction, to risk deciding something new.
Perhaps this is what the blowhole reminds us, that we are mad, mindless creatures. Gaze into this abyss, the earthcrack offers. The horror! The horror!—perhaps it lies not in the destruction of order, as Conrad implies, but instead in an acceptance that this “order” is its own madness. It’s an illusion, nothing but a flimsy construct fraught with meaning. How crazy we are, to live as we do. Those scientists who tried to systematically classify the entirety of the natural world went mad with it. They stared into the abyss too, felt the timeless indifference of eternity. They did not like it.
What is the nature of awe? Why is it that I flinched from the Grand Canyon for the first several hours I saw it? Why was it that I had to temper away the impact: dizzying, stomach-lurching, pupils painfully expanding and contracting in rapid succession? I had to fix my vision upon the trail, concentrate only on placing each slanting step safely, until I grew dulled enough by physical exhaustion to take it all in. Yet even then, when others marveled at the views, I found myself mostly struck by the eerie reality of canyon silence: absent of any rustling leaves, no droning bugs, no singing birds.
Why was this all hitting me now, and not there, in the Grand Canyon, where the sprawl of time is etched into the very walls we hike alongside, lean against, snap in a thousand photos? Why was I not shaken askew, knocked outside of myself, by the endlessness of our downward trek? Down toward the river, which remained so small and far away at the bottom, even after 10 miles. It seemed impossible to me that anyone had ever reached it and returned, had lived to tell the tale. A river that once burbled along the flat surface of the land and yet now there it was, a distant teal ribbon, eroding ever lower in an ancient, unceasing process that laughs at our own.
I move away from the blowhole, resettling my shoulders. I feel dizzy, almost ill.
“I bet they just plugged in a fan down there somewhere,” my uncle jokes, elbowing me with a chuckle as he sidles past. I am comically aghast at the suggestion. I’m not sure if he really means it, if he really thinks it’s all just a tourist trick.
“Oh yeah,” he grins wide, leaning into my startled recoil. “I’m sure there’s an extension cord run through somewhere under all that.” He flaps a hand at the chimney.
“Bet it pops right up by the Visitor Center.” I shake my head at him, losing a fight to a rueful smile. He’s kidding, I think. My uncle’s jests yank me back, each artifact of the mundane like an anchor. Return to your dot on the timeline, they say, to the here and now. White plastic fan, orange extension cord, familiar three-prong outlet.
We don’t all choose awe; we don’t all have access to it. We don’t all want to feel this titanic contraction of our existence, whooshing outward until we cower beneath its gaze, like ants, like sand, like flecks of cosmic dust.
We meander over to a packed dirt ring, interred about four feet into the ground. This was for sports events; the placard tells us. Spectators would stand above, around the ring, cheering and watching. The game was played with a ball, with a curve-ended stick. Field hockey, of a sort. Athletes would have been celebrated. Their matches a worthwhile excuse for community and travel, connections forged between this place of seeming isolation and other peoples in the area. I rotate slowly in the center, imagining it. Laughter and cheers, chanted sports refrains. I picture an athlete with a cocky grin, pumping his stick in the air to the delight of the crowd. I imagine feasts, the aromas of food cooking, merchants and visitors engaged in rapid back-and-forth barters over goods displayed on blankets. Exchanges of stories and beads, fabrics, and flirtations—humans haven’t changed so much. Life, it seems, will carry on anywhere. And suddenly, the desolation of the surrounding landscape doesn’t feel too grim and lonely.
Contributor
Claire Kortyna
Claire Kortyna's work has been published in The Maine Review, The Baltimore Review, The Jellyfish Review, and others. She reads for The Cincinnati Review and The Sewanee Writers’ Conference.