Explorer of the Month: Douglas Preston

     While wandering up and down the musty smelling aisles of the local public libraries I have passed a certain book more than a few times. I love to read very much but am a heinously slow reader so no matter how much my curiosity was spiked I always passed this particular volume by. The tome is thick, somewhere around 400 pages tiny printed text, bound in a large hardcover with a water color painting of Coronado scrawled of the front. The book jacket is yellowing clear plastic and with the library bar code placed in the upper left corner. This particular book is titled "Cities of Gold" and is written by this months Explorer, Douglas Preston. Douglas Preston is an author from Cambridge, Massachusetts and is a bestselling author of both fiction and non fiction. He got his writing career off to a start when writing for the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He wrote his first book, Dinosaurs in the Attic, in 1986 and continues to write today.
   Having lived and fell in love with the deserts of the southwest I was drawn to "Cities of Gold" simply by title alone. I did not really know what to expect from the book but upon my completion of the book what I found is quite possibly the greatest nonfiction story I have ever read. Mr. Preston, once a product of the city and described as a Yankee by many people throughout his book, decided to move to New Mexico on a whim. Eventually he decides that he will trace the trail of Francisco Vasquez de Coronado through the American Southwest; from the Mexican border, through Arizona, and up to Santa Fe. For Coronado and his men, this was an excruciating, arduous trek that led them across most of the American continent. For Preston and his companions this would prove to be just as difficult as the original search for the seven cities of gold.
     The quest of Douglas Preston and his companions I feel was many things, one was the search for what it means to be American which I feel is a very important question for those of us from this country. Another reason for this journey was to simply prove that they could do it. Throughout the book Preston often expressed frustration when people told him that we was just a "Yankee" and would probably die along the way. The writing of this particular book really conveyed the sense of wonder, danger and awe that he must have felt as he traveled through the desert southwest. One of the most compelling parts of this book are the interactions with the myriad of people that he met along the way. Preston also conveys a deep sense of respect for the land and its people, especially the natives that lived there before us. There is a stark contrast between the "once was" and the "is now" and it is very interesting to see the changes and how rapidly they came. I have literally only glanced over what is contained between the covers of this book. I do need to say that after completing it I was brought to tears by the shear beauty and poignancy of this "Cities of Gold". I am probably not considered an expert on literature, but I feel as though this is one of the most important books I have read.
    Enough about the book, I need to say a little as to why Douglas Preston has earned this Explorer of the month award! Firstly, it is well known that Coronado did not have an easy time with his journey, scholars are not even sure of the exact route. Having the courage and the grit to take up the challenge of following in the footsteps of one of the great conquistadors is merit enough. Secondly, he has not only done this once but continued to seek adventure throughout the world by following other historic trails on horseback. Very soon I will be reading a follow up book of sorts about another one of his adventures. I will be sure to post my thoughts on what I am sure will be another excellent read. I think most of all I appreciate Mr. Preston's ability to leave everything behind and pursue something different, something of the beaten path. That is what has earned Douglas Preston my explorer of the month award for February of 2013.

Here is a link to Preston and his partner's website: http://www.prestonchild.com/

Here is a link to the Douglas Preston Amazon page: http://www.amazon.com/Douglas-Preston/e/B000AQ0AWW

Discovering the Undiscovered

   The air was crisp but I knew that it would rapidly warm as the desert sun rose above the jagged peaks  to the east. There had been frost lining the edges of small, leafy plants nestled in the shade of tall desert trees not but minutes earlier. The sand beneath my feet was cool and damp from the rain and melting mountain snow from the previous days. As I walked slowly through the lowland desert landscape, weaving between huddles of dense Mesquite trees I felt alone. The only other footprints were those of small white tailed deer that crisscrossed the barren sand where the dry, golden grass refused to grow. The morning sun reflected  from small pieces of white and rose quartz that dotted the red, gritty earth. It is hard for me to walk in the wilderness with my head raised to the horizon, years of archaeology training has forced my eyes to scour the ground for signs of past inhabitants. Hundreds of years ago, men from Portugal and Spain came to this desert as well as many other lands, claiming it a "New World", an entire continent now discovered and ripe for the taking. One after another, my steps led me through the low canyon; something caught my eye and I stopped. The distinct rust red of an ancient fragment of Hohokam pottery stood out just enough from the sand and rock to be noticeable to anyone who was looking. I had somewhat of a revelation just then...perhaps not so much a revelation as a realization; a sinking in of sorts. I had known for some time that there have been people here far longer than we know. I suppose being involved in archaeology had led to a kind of disassociation with the world. Maybe this was something I had thought before, or known all along, or some repressed notion hidden away by my romantic ideas of discovery. Whatever it may have been, it was apparent now that there was no real discovery here, not even when the Conquistadors and colonists came. Thousands of years ago this land had already been seen and settled and tamed. It had all been stamped out or forgotten and now I realized what I was discovering was no more a discovery than the New World. It is but a rediscovering of the lost. Maybe this is the true discovery.
    The question of who the first "discoverers" of the "New World" has always been a point of contention.  It has been taught for decades that those that would become what we call Native Americans traipsed here over the frozen Bering land bridge during the the thick of the last Ice Age. Popular opinion would have you believe that these people migrated from Asia by following giant Mega -fauna, mammoths and their ilk, through a convenient ice free corridor that existed in modern day Canada. Over the decades their has been numerous pieces of evidence that place people in the Americas long before 10,000ish B.C., when this corridor "would" have existed. Now it appears that there were multiple waves of colonization from Asia. It has been proposed that it one wave made their way along the western coasts and finally settled in South America long before North America became inhabited. This is shown in a number of artifacts found in the southern jungles that date well before any artifacts in the United States. These people would have been the first men and women to see these new continents, they were the first discoverers.*
      Not far from where I stood, perhaps only half and hour's walk, I knew that that long ago, maybe one thousand years or more someone had stayed for a night, I had seen it before. A few years ago, my wife, good friend Abraham and went hiking down a canyon while researching the legend of the lost Escalante Mine in the Santa Catalina Mountains. The trek was quite arduous, their were spots in the path heavy with deep sand, in other places large boulders blocked our way. Abraham and I scaled the northern slope of the canyon in order to see if we were still continuing on our intended path and on the way back down I slipped and nearly slid into a large diamond back rattlesnake that did not take kindly to the handful of loose rock I had just kicked his way. We eventually came to the end of the canyon as I we hoped we would, although unfortunately it did not perfectly fit the story we were following. Here we were met with a very steep and well worn cliff where water cascades when the winter snows are melting. Pools of green tinged water where clusters of wasps hovered and drank. Atop the dry falls we met a couple of women who had followed a trail alongside the canyon and had been watching us. This was rather disheartening as we had thought the canyon would have led farther into the mountains or would be more remote. Never the less, we talked to the duo and offered some insect sting ointment from our first ad kit to one who had been bit by some crawling thing or another. Before we parted, one of them told us we should investigate a small area jutting out above the canyon. She claimed she "felt an old energy". I am not one to readily believe claims of being psychic but what we found there left me thinking.

      Nestled between rocks and dry desert grass was a small ring of stone. Abraham was curious as to why I was so interested in the anomaly. I explained to him that it this was what archaeologists call a rock circle; this had once been an ancient campsite. Upon further investigation we found a great deal of pottery sherds* and lithic* fragments scattered about the area. Abraham expressed that he would have simply written it off as an abandoned hiker's camp site. By that time, I had seen many features such as this during archaeology field school and the evidence here was enough to say with a great deal of certainty that this site was left behind by the natives of Tucson River Valley quite some time ago.
      This is not the only place in the world where the sands of time have washed away memories of the past. Humans have been on this planet for over 200 thousand years; while a mere blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things, this is a massive amount of time and during that time span humans have walked over nearly every place on Earth. Again I stood amidst the desert landscape, the spirit of ancients, settlers and legend danced on the winds around me, the high granite peaks loomed above and at my feet lie the shattered memories of a forgotten people. Now I fully realized that I was not discovering the undiscovered but in fact remembering the unremembered. That is not to say that there is nothing to be found that hasn't already been seen; the woodlands of Canada, the Amazon, the Himalayan Mountains, all fortresses still resisting the advance of man...or are they?

 

*For more information of the pre-contact Americas, check out 1491 by Charles C. Mann
*For whatever reason archaeologists deemed it necessary to say pot sherd instead of pot shard
*Lithics are simply worked stone tools

Hearts Dreaming in the West

    In honor of my excitement for once again being able to see the western skies I thought I would write a special post about what exactly the west is, or perhaps what it is I see in the west. Before starting, like any good academic drone, I must define my terminology. The West: a land both real and mythological, residing somewhere between the pacific ocean and the Appalachian Mountains; a land both alive and in throes of death. Above all, I feel that the idea of "The West" is a metaphor for adventure, freedom, and the unknown. I started my day off by Google-ing pictures "The American West" and I was greeted by beautifully rendered paintings of cowboys on cattle drives, plains natives in full regalia, a stop along the Oregon Trail and photographs of men and women of that misty age shrouded in a haze glorification and popular culture. The West is all of these things, but also none of them and more than them all at once. In the Golden Age of Western cinema, crowds were treated to larger than life characters portrayed by the likes of John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper. Here were heroes, good to the core, taming a savage land. Later, the revisionist western was born with Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone, culminating in the epic Once Upon a Time in the West. These depicted a melodramatic, dark, and gritty west where there was no black or white. Later viewers would be treated to sympathetic westerns like Dances with Wolves, where the heroes we once cheered for were now the enemies and the Native Americans were the "Noble Savage". As much as I love all of these films, and the western genre as a whole, none of them are all that accurate. And so here it begins...the West.
     There is much more to this land than cowboys and Indians as any true historian will know. For eons, the North  and South American continents were separate from the rest of the world. Then, sometime before the end of the last great Ice Age, man found this undiscovered country, when to them it was the East. In waves people came in boats and on foot, across the land bridge and skirting the pacific coasts until eventually they would be driven inland by a want for more. These people would give rise to the Toltec  the Inca, Olmec, Maya, Aztec, Anasazi, Hohokam, the great states of the Mound Builders and all other peoples that we call native. Just the first set of immigrants to this wayward place. Natives are often portrayed as skin and feather clad nomads that roam the country on horse back and sleep in ti-pis. This vision most accurately depicts a variety of Plains peoples on middle America at about the time of the 1800's. In truth, the people that populated the Americas were diverse in many ways. Some built great cities of adobe or stone, some were farmers of cotton and the first to tame corn. Many of these cultures are long "vanished" and remain mysterious. Only small clues left in the dirt give us small hints of a greater history. The Maya were the first people to understand the concept of zero, and did so long before the Chinese, Muslim philosophers or Europeans. Many of these cultures had a firm grasp of high mathematics and astronomy, things that are still not fully understood today. The mysteries of these people are the first layer in the allure of the West
     The West was first conceived by Europeans as a place across the Atlantic Ocean, for where did Columbus sail but West? What they found there was not the Kingdom of Prester John, or the Garden of Eden but a place where those things, and much more COULD be. Here was the first glimmer of that mythic place I call the West. Upon their return they told stories of a land untouched and ripe for the taking as so came more. The conquerors, the Conquistadores, the explorers, the pirates and colonists, all searching for something more. Orellana search the jungles of South America for El Dorado, Cortes destroyed the Aztecs and the Triple Alliance, Coronado pressed further into New Spain in search of The Seven Cities of Gold. What he found there were the Zuni and their pueblos; he was the first European to see the Grand Canyon, the Rio Grande, The Great Plains, The Arkansas River. With all this discovery came death as well. These were the first step in the destruction of the first peoples. Eventually, European colonies would be established on the Eastern Seaboard and the the West would shrink. Now beyond the ancient Appalachians was this land undreamed.
     Mountain men and trappers would cross the vast expanses to the Rocky Mountains and beyond. People would slowly trickle west searching for fame and fortune and a freedom long unremembered. With each step the West grew smaller. Then came the great trails, the Oregon, the Santa Fe, the Mormon; mass migrations from the east to the west that brought men and women of all sorts. They would fill the valleys, farm the lands, and mine the mountains and destroy the world that was here before them in their wake. The natives and the Europeans would become enemies, one atrocity after another afflicted both sides of the battle. However, in the end the war was one by Europeans. I by no means am attempting to dismiss decades of brutality inflicted upon the natives, but there is much more to the story than that. What happened here was two, very different worlds meeting for the first time, two worlds that vastly misunderstood each other and what ensued was a long, bloody conflict fought by some of the dirtiest means possible and neither side was innocent. Unfortunately when someone wins a war, another side loses. That is part of the cycle of man's life interaction on Earth and so it will be till man is no more.
     What is left of this land called the West? Now we see movies and books that depict a glorified time where good was good and the bad were loathsome, a few were just ugly. We see mysteries of a time that we really know little about and think of what it would be like to ride across an untamed land on horseback eagerly anticipating what is just over the next ridge. There are stories of lost gold, badmen and gun fighters that give us a sort of half fantasy. The West has long departed from our world. Now cities spring up where once there was only desert; the tops of mountain peaks are adorned with crowns of cell phone towers. When I think of this time I think of the adventure, the excitement of seeing things for yourself for the first time, of treading a land untrod, of that freedom they must have felt. I know there are places out there still, silent and longing, where there is still a shade of that time, that place. I have a longing for such places, where the air still blows clean and fresh, where the spirits of the past still roam and where that freedom still waits for the one who has the drive to find it. It is a bitter sweet quest, for if it is found, it is simply another bastion destroyed. Whether we can find them or whether we ever do is not the point however, it is simply the knowing that someplace, somewhere, it is still out there in the West of every man's heart.

Gaily bedight,

A gallant knight,

In sunshine and in shadow,

Had journeyed long,

Singing a song,

In search of Eldorado.

But he grew old--

This knight so bold--

And o'er his heart a shadow

Fell as he found

No spot of ground

That looked like Eldorado.

And, as his strength

Failed him at length,

He met a pilgrim shadow-

"Shadow," said he,

"Where can it be--

This land of Eldorado?"

"Over the Mountains

Of the Moon,

Down the Valley of the Shadow,

Ride, boldly ride,"

The shade replied--

"If you seek for Eldorado!"

-Edgar Allan Poe