Uravan was spontaneously generated as an inorganic growth of the Manhatten project, which was in the pursuit of fusion and fission for a nuclear industry that never flourished, and finally died in the 1980s. Not much of a boom, punctuated by an unnoticed bust, Uravan became a ghost town, turned back into dust, and more dust. But when it was alive, it lived like an outlaw, like James Dean, for nearly two generations of scientists and company men and their wives and children who didn’t even know how far off the grid they were. Uravan was a Payton Place in the bottom of a lonely canyon playing to the sound track of a river in the desert.
But before Uravan became a ghost town, it was a company town. It was also an acronym for uranium-vanadium which eponymously described the town’s purpose. It was owned and managed by the Union Carbide Corporation from the early 1950s to the late 1970s. Uravan had a post office, a liquor store, a grocery store, a swimming pool, an outdoor basketball court (with lights), a bunk and boarding house, all owned by the company that hired the employees who worked there, shopped there, lived, ate and drank there, providing the money and goods that came and went in a small, tight, closed loop system that kept the company’s costs as low as possible. If you lived there, you were the property and chattel of UCC, a slave to the atomic industry.
Miners, truck drivers, engineers, geologists, accountants, managers, security personnel, and all their wives and children were part of the microsystem. All of them lived together in a town that sprang out of the dirt of the Unaweep Canyon along the banks of the San Miguel River, which split the town asunder. It was born shortly after the end of World War II, as a step child of the Oppenheimer era. Before it was a town Uravan wasn’t even a wide spot in the river, although it did have some hieroglyphics discovered by the crews who built the hanging flume which hung like a ghost above the community and stood sentinel over the collection of farmers and ranchers, and of course, the Indians.
On one side of the San Miguel, the company had it’s mill and operations along with the offices used by the professionals who came from across the country, and around the world to work in that remote and inhospitable place. On the other side, about a hundred small, 2 bedroom, clapboard houses with no lawns and only the Cottonwood trees close enough to drink from the river that got big enough to cast a shadow on a few lucky homes. Jesse’s parents lived in one of those and they were very popular because of it. They had barbeque outings beneath the tree, all summer, providing a little shade and the promise of some cold beer, and of course plenty of shop talk, and small talk, and whispers and shrugs, and winks and hugs.
A swinging bridge connected the two worlds of work and family and a number of the professionals would walk across the river in the morning, where sometimes their wives and children would accompany them to the stairs that preceded the span on the family side. The bridge itself was made of four heavy cables anchored to a block of concrete on each side that provided a small suggestion of safety and strength, but in the spring the San Miguel could make the steel look as frail as twine as it washed across the planks with its angry white water, shaking and swaying it wildly, like clothing on a line in a wind storm. No one used it in the spring, or after a summer thunderstorm when the San Miguel could bulge and swell to nearly twice it’s normal size within an hour after the rain, and roar it’s throaty sounds at the canyon walls. The echo and cacophony of water was eventually followed by the river’s relative tranquility, but it had made it’s point, el jefe. It deserved respect, even reverence, and most of the uravanites lived by that rule.
Wild West Side Show
America was at peace and enjoying a post war honeymoon of expansion and unfettered development. The world was at it’s feet and the country was still learning how to fit into its new role as leader and super power, heady stuff for such a young culture, and maybe too much, too soon. It was 1955 and it was still the wild west. James Dean was Jesse James was Jesse’s daydream.
Jesse’s parents were some of the first generation migrants spawned from the Ivy-league and almost-Ivy league schools ‘back east’ . They drove their station wagons stuffed with kids and kitsch from across the country, moved in and lived next door to other professionals from similar backgrounds under the protective rim of the steep, yellowish sandstone canyon that saw sun from 9 to 4 during the summer. (Less in the winter). That was enough to thoroughly bake the settling ponds and fry the few grassy areas near the recreational center so that by July 4th of every year, the only green thing seen was the eutrophic algae and unrepentant pollutants near the edges of those ponds, stacked back to back to back. The highly educated parents and their young families were thrown together over night where they cobbled a community that shared their lives in the hot shade of that little western Colorado-middle-of-nowhere place. It was a place where no one ever asked “is it hot enough for ya”.
Most of the men worked underground, or in the laboratory, or drove pickup trucks across the high desert looking for the geological suggestions of uranium and vanadium mineralization. A battalion of young men in khaki pants wearing hand-lens’ around their necks, carrying Geiger-counters, Brunton compasses, and field hammers in their belts, marching into the future in search of the past, less than ten years after the greatest war the world had ever known. Perhaps it was an unintended consequence, but the development of atomic power simultaneously started a nuclear arms race that had a dubious end, if Japan was any indicator. But as Jessie’s father used to say, ‘with all that horse shit, there’s got to be a pony in there somewhere’. Jesse supposed he was talking about the rocks he pursued, but maybe he was just trying to make the best of a bad situation. Perhaps the irony was too close to see and the pony was, after all, not to be ridden, but his father continued to look for it for the rest of his life.
A Long Time Ago
Millions of years before, the entire region was a shallow inland sea that rose and fell through time, giving life to dinosaurs and occasionally precipitating and depositing the juice of the universe, the energy of the stars, radioactive uranium along the rivers and streams that fed into the seas. Often enough, the dinosaurs were found right next to and interred with the mineralization. A bone would often lead to a closer look and somehow the two, dinosaurs and stars, were connected, glued together with uranium-vanadium mud. A radioactive risotto ala tyranusaurus.
Jesse’s father was a pick-up geologist, a navy veteran of WWII where he served in the South Pacific, and fresh out of graduate school, paid for by the GI plan, he wandered the great Uncompahgre Plateau in search of the next source of energy that would fuel the future. Jesse had wondered years later what kind of plan his father could have had to end up in such a forsaken and desolate place. What demon, or ghost, or god had driven him here, packing his family with him. The future wasn’t what it used to be and it dragged Jesse’s father across the landscape as if he had fallen from a horse and his foot was stuck in the stirrup.
Almost all of the professionals in Uravan were veterans and everyone, including their wives, smoked. Camels, or Lucky Strikes, for the men, and Virginia Slims, or some other appropriately coined product name for the women. Cigarettes were provided by the big tobacco companies to all the “boys” overseas during the war. Clever tactics. The addictions stuck and spread like a virus from soldier-sailor to girl friend-wife so when the war ended the business was just getting started.
Nearly all were former fraternity and sorority members and many shared those heritages, as well as the mugs (steins) that went with them. Alpha, Theta, Gamma, Beta and all their respective isotopes. The community was tight, even incestuous, but they took care of each other and embraced the strange, weird wonder of the Unaweep Canyon, shaped by the San Miguel in arcuate sweeps of sandstone architecture and sultry summer days.
Upstream
In the early 1960s, Grand Junction was a hub of agricultural and mining interests with many thousands of diversely employed people, but it was in every measurable way, a very small town. Just a lot bigger than Uravan, which wasn’t a very high bar to measure against. Baseball was still the national past time, and every body, that is to say, every man and boy, either played or coached, or attended games and it was the local past, present, and future-time, for a few.
Mothers and daughters were only absent from the field of play, but essential and vital to the game and the culture around it. Mothers drove players, made sandwiches, applied bandages, removed stitches, suggested tactics and made observations which seeped into every player’s mind and made them better than they were without them. Mothers were always there, often times when fathers weren’t, and formed the matrix of the community and culture, silently keeping all their shit together.
Jesse and his brother grew up in uniforms, Dodgers, Twins, Cubs, even the dreadful Yankees. Jesse had developed a pretty good curve ball that one day didn’t curve, and broke a kids face in two. “Oh man, I’m so sorry, but you didn’t even try to get out of the way”. The kid said “I thought it was a curve ball”, and Jesse shook his head, but said nothing to the boy, who’s mouth hung open like a garage door, partly from the injury, and partly because he couldn’t believe it wasn’t a curve that he knew ‘was going to break’, which it did: both top and bottom jaws. After that, Jesse didn’t have confidence in the pitch and not long thereafter started playing shortstop, where he was pretty average and he began to lose interest in the game. Another major leaguer never realized, but it was a story told thousands of times all across the country where one thing, or a random other, would intervene to redirect a young life to a different end but, often usher in the beginning of a new dream.
Jesse gave up on his hopes of being a baseball pitcher, and as his coach told him at the time, “well, you’re really too small to play anyway”. Inspiration could be found in many places, he thought, but not from this guy. “What a cul-de-sac!”, he said to no one in particular as he walked out of the coaches office. Which, ironically was exactly what his baseball career turned out to be. So Jesse opened his eyes to other avenues and saw his father’s expanding career and he began to think about the “family business” of being a geologist. So instead of baseball, Jesse took a summer job as a geologist’s assistant and moved back to Uravan to live in the infamous boarding house. It was 1969, he was 16 and according to the New York Times, god had recently died, or moved to the Paradox Valley, between Cortez and Nucla.
The High Desert
Slickrock might be an onomotopoeia, but when it rains on sandstone cliffs that make up the western corner of the those canyon lands it is the first word that comes to mind. From desolate, bleak, abrasive, and hot, to warm and slippery in seconds after the first rain drop falls and back again just as quickly, as if nothing happened, washed and unwashed, holy and unholy. There were, of course, the ubiquitous potholes filled with water which invited the birds and insects and other living entities to come out of the shadows to drink for days after the storm and it was on one of those post-rain events that Jesse realized he was being watched as he gazed into his reflection in one of the potholes filled with rain.
Like his father before him, he was tasked with setting stakes for drill holes, although Jesse was not the geologist, just the stake holder for a geologist who had directed him to a ridiculously remote place somewhere out on the plateau of sandstones left baking in the high desert. As he walked across the scrub oak littered outcrop of a Jurassic limestone, he could feel it, someone was watching and it wasn’t his boss.
Slickrock wasn’t a town, and Bedrock, approximately 2 miles down the road was even less so, although it had a trading post. Bedrock was more of an intersection of two dirt roads in the high desert where geologists and Navajo, and the few cowboys who worked the area could escape for a temporary cool-off. It would be hard to find three more disparate cultures converging at such a crossroad, but they were all men of the earth and perhaps it was that unspoken truth that provided a deep undercurrent of shared values that allowed them to congregate harmoniously in the high desert. There were only two tables, a small counter, but no stools, three rows of eclectically selected groceries and hardgoods, a mail drop, and a gas fired grill for meats and eggs, a 5 gallon coffee urn that was always on during the day, and in the corner, on that particular day, an old Navajo man who called himself Chiid, who sat with his hat tipped down, hiding his face, as he was reading.
Chiid wore a big cowboy hat and boots, it was said of him that he was a silversmith in his youth, but he had moved into the desert decades before and lived somewhere ‘out there’ with a mutt-dog who sat at his feet like an extra pair of shoes. No one knew him, but everyone, it seemed, knew of him. He was as seldom seen as a snow leopard, and yet when Jesse walked in, there he was. He was occupied by his book and didn’t look up or shift or move in any way, as far as Jesse could tell, but he felt watched. There it was again, that feeling.
Chiid wore a squash-blossom necklace that perhaps he had made himself when he was a young man and for over 50 years put it on in the morning and carefully removed it at night in a ritual that was accompanied by quiet chants and soft singing which over time, put his old mutt to sleep near his feet, or so goes the story. Man and dog were welded together in a silhouette of silence and darkness each night as the weather swarmed around them, through summer and winter, no one knew how old the dog was, but the rumor was “just as old as Chiid”. Of course, no one had first hand knowledge of this song and the dance, and the dog, but everyone seemed to know a tale or two.
The trading post was the only place he had been seen; that is to say, that Jesse had ever seen him. Other’s had claimed to see him near Spanish Arroyo, or the Uncompaghre caves, or near Gateway, or over near the Naturita falls. But today, he was here. He didn’t order anything, smoked, sat, read, and with no other patrons, not even the post master-store keeper, Jesse and Chiid were the only ones around. And the dog, of course. The dog’s name was ‘Boy’. Everyone seemed to know it.
While he sat at his table, Chiid never looked up and Boy didn’t move from his feet unless one of the cowboys or geologists, or other of his tribe transgressed the aura of protection at which point the mutt would suddenly rise, ears back, eyes bright, but without a sound unless the warning wasn’t recognized for what it was. At least that was the reputation. On this day, however, there was no need for protection or intervention by the formidable canine. They were the only ones there, which struck Jesse as odd, but then again, “this is Slickrock, or to be more precise, Bedrock”, he thought to himself.
Jesse felt that familiar sense of being watched as he shuffled around the trading post, and wiped his clean shaven chin in a nervous manner. He walked down one of the three aisles and found orange flagging, sample bags, and a candy bar and made his way back toward the register to leave money. Jesse had never smoked, but he suddenly felt like having a cigarette so he grabbed a pack of Lucky Strikes and stuffed it into his sleeve, rolled up like his father did, and walked past Chiid and Boy without looking at either.
As he walked by, Chiid said “I knew your dad”. Jesse wasn’t even sure he’d heard the words, or who had spoken them, but he paused and carefully turned to look at Boy, who hadn’t moved, and Chiid said, “You look like him”.
Jesse could feel the sweat suddenly well up on his forehead, he brushed his hair away and reached for a cigarette from his sleeve and offered it to Chiid, who took it without pause. Somehow Boy had allowed Jesse to pierce the connective veil between the pair without warning or consequence. Jesse stood and watched as Chiid reached for a match and with a gnarled thumb nail, scratch the match into flame. That same smell as his father, sulpher and rocks, clean and tangy with a half life of 10 seconds. The cigarette arced red and a swirl of blonde smoke curled around Chiid’s face, so his eyes were blurred from Jesse’s view, but he could feel the assessing glance and Jesse winced, and shuffled his feet while searching for a reply. Nothing came to mind.
“Chiid”, he said.
“Jesse”, with a nod.
“Yup”, figured. “I’ll meet you outside in about two minutes, I’d like to show you something if you have time”, said Chiid. Jesse looked down at his work boots and nodded his head, he still hadn’t spoken to Chiid except to tell him his name, which he already seemed to know. Jesse walked outside and stood by his truck digging a hole in the dirt with his toe, putting a cigarette into his mouth, but not lighting it, and a few minutes later Chiid stepped out from the post and walked toward him with a package under his arm, Boy never more than a step behind, actually lifting his head at times to avoid catching a heel to his chin. Man and dog seemed to move as two links in a chain of kinetic harmony. It was over a hundred degrees, the handle of the truck was perhaps 25 degrees hotter, so the door stayed closed and Jesse leaned against the side of the fender as Chiid walked up. The mutt sat within inches of his left foot, looking out at the horizon, occasionally blinking but otherwise silent and still.
In the bright daylight, Jesse could finally see Chiid’s face, deeply wrinkled, darkly tanned with eyes that sank behind a prominent brow of Navajo skin and bone. One iris was nearly black, or so dark that it seemed like a single large pupil, while the other eye was yellowish brown, nearly golden and made him look, in profile, like two different people, or that he wasn’t facing you directly. It was distracting and Jesse blanched, looking down at Boy instead. His black and grey hair was pulled into a thick ponytail that was braided and fell over one shoulder when he bent down to touch the dog and whisper something in their clicking tribal language. His cowboy hat was sweat stained and old, but custom brimmed from years of manipulation and kept his face covered from direct sunlight, although not enough to keep him from being as brown as bark.
Chiid reached into the package he was carrying and dug out a well folded piece of paper which turned out to be a map with topographic lines and features that had been drawn and redrawn, but legible and detailed. Chiid pointed to a location without ceremony or further explanation, and asked Jesse if he could meet him there in three days. Jesse asked him why and Chiid simply looked at him without a word. Jesse concluded that this man doesn’t suffer fools easily and Jesse, after an uncomfortable interlude of silence, nodded his head and said “sure, what time?”. Chiid said “any time before sunset and anytime after noon, but not before then”.
Jesse awkwardly reached out to shake Chiid’s hand and it was swallowed up in a dark calloused grip with a turquoise bracelet at the end of his wrist and a huge malachite ring on one of his fingers. Jesse could feel the strength of this old man standing before him and felt disarmed. In an unexpected and kind gesture, Chiid’s other hand came over and rested on top of their grip showing yet another bracelet and on this hand, a deep blue azurite ring that looked like the sky just after a rain had been captured in it. Jesse felt Chiid’s 2-eyed gaze measuring him in a way that he’d never been looked at before and blurted out “how did you know my Dad?”.
Chiid smiled and said they could talk at the rendezvous, apologized for his brevity, but indicated he and Boy had to get going. Another truck was kicking up dust off on the horizon, but Chiid and Jesse’s vehicles were the only 2 trucks in the dirt lot and again, that seemed pretty odd to Jesse, but both men, one old, one young, pulled out of the parking area and went different directions with dust trails co-mingling and clouding each other’s departure. Jesse thought to himself about whether he’d actually met the man, or just made it up in his heat dazed imagination, but a well-worn map next to him proved otherwise, and he drove away slowly glancing into the rear view mirror.
Meet Me in Spanish Arroyo
Jesse roomed in a boarding house, near the swinging bridge and just across from the millworks at the intersection of 1st Street and Neutron Ave. Three other young geologists’ assistants were there for the summer as well and the four of them bonded with each other for all the obvious reasons, and represented the entire population of young, white, men with summer jobs and all were “on their own” for the first time. Jesse was the youngest and the only one of the four who hadn’t yet been to college; he was bound for the University of Colorado in the following fall. The other three were from back east and had, like Jesse, father’s who’s influence or position had gotten their son’s summer jobs in the backwater town of Uravan. Each morning the four “college kids” took their place at the breakfast tables where up to 20 other miners, drillers, drivers, and other blue collar workers ate before a long day in the pitch dark, or the solar spotlight, depending on the job.
The boarding house had been in business since the town began and had earned a reputation for a no-holds barred breakfast. Each of the 4 long tables was attended by an equal number of large, farm-fed women who quadrupled-up as cooks and servers and afterward, the cleanup crew. The ladies were just as focused and business-like as their boarders and they ran a tight ship. Coffee was self-serve and there was a pecking order which was not to be trifled with. College kids were at the bottom of the list, unless they got their own cup before anyone else was in the hall, which they learned quickly was their only opportunity at the black, hot, brackish brew. Once gone, it didn’t appear until the following day, no exceptions. And like the rest of the food, if you missed your heat, you were SOL, and the regulars liked to make sure the college kids learned how the system worked.
It was just the way it was, an initiation of sorts, and food was power, weaponized by access and location at the table. It was all about a fast fork in the right direction as the steaming platters of bacon, eggs, and pancakes, diminished without benefit of a depletion allowance, slowly making its way toward the boys at the bottom. It didn’t really matter where they sat, they were always last and they hadn’t learned that “boarding house reach”.
The place was packed and a cacophony of loud conversation and rattling plates and cups and saucers made the din easy to hide in. The boys were somewhat ostracized anyway, so they talked amongst themselves without much notice from the locals unless they were discussing prospects and potential mineralization in which case, everyone wanted to know what they’d seen. Jesse was telling the table that he was working in an area near “Chiid’s camp” above Slickrock, near Spanish Arroyo, which got a dismissive scoff from one or two of the miners at the table. Except for that, it went otherwise unnoticed by the others, but Jesse thought it was an odd reaction, if it was that at all, and he decided not to invite any more scrutiny from the regulars so he didn’t mention the rendezvous again.
“What the hell was that about?” Jesse thought it was just more of the hazing process that the blue collars’ gave the college kids, but it felt more sinister than that. He decided to drop it and got up from the table and left. As he walked out, he saw one of the scoffers stare at him from the reflection off a hanging picture map which made the hair on his neck rise.
Vanadis, the Norse Goddess of Beauty, Fertility, and Love
Vanadium took its name from Vanadis, a Norse Goddess of Beauty, although that little known fact came up only once during Jesse’s summer stint in the Unaweep Canyon and ironically, it came from Chiid. It was the first thing Chiid said to Jesse when he looked up to find Chiid staring at him. Not hello, not ‘yut-te-heh’, or “hot enough for ya”, or any small talk, but Vanadis…….
This, Jesse’s first field rendezvous with Chiid, was mid afternoon, it couldn’t have been hotter (to answer the unasked) and the no-see-um’s were thick and nasty. Jesse wasn’t a hat wearer so he suffered the annoyance of bugs in his longish hair and dealt with it by constantly shaking his head, like a horse. He was bent over and roughly slapping his head of bugs and as he stood up at the end of this particularly violent head-shaking moment he saw Chiid’s cowboy boots in front of him. “what the hey……” he muttered, and Chiid chuckled. “That sounds remarkably close to our way of saying hello”, said Chiid.
Unsolicited, Chiid began to tell him about Vanadis, the landscape, its minerals, animals and spirits that roamed the region and left gifts for those who were open to the sky. Chiid, apparently had decided that Jesse was such a person and burst into an unrequited soliloquy as the two men stood shoulder to shoulder looking into the desert. From the first time at the Bedrock run-in and then the only other time after that, Chiid just seemed to show up. Both times, in the heat of the day, when the sun would distort light and turn it into mirages of aqueous vistas that transformed the plateaus and cliffs into plasma. Chiid raised his hand across the horizon and slowly moved it from one side to the next as he spoke, Jesse was transfixed. He wobbled slightly in the heat, but caught himself.
There’s A Hole In The Sky
“I’d fallen through a hole in the sky”. Jesse had asked the question about how Chiid and his father had met, but he didn’t know how to interpret the answer. So he didn’t. He just figured it was a metaphor for something and let it go.
Chiid shrugged and continued, “yeah, he found me in one of the box canyons where he was prospecting. He didn’t even notice me at first, maybe because he was wearing the headphones for his geiger counter, but when he finally did see me, I’m pretty sure I startled him because he dropped the instrument and stumbled trying to catch it. Sorta like you did when you were beating yourself up, or whatever you were doing up there.”
Jesse himself looked startled too, but didn’t say anything. Chiid continued, “It was the first time I spoke to your dad. I was completely dehydrated so he gave me all of his water and walked me out on his shoulder. I had a broken nose, two sprained ankles, a sprained wrist, and my lip was so swollen, I couldn’t say much other than to tell him my dog was coming too. Anyway, he led me out of the salt wash to where his truck was parked and he found his first aid kit and fixed me up……I’m pretty sure I would have died in that arroyo if it wasn’t for your dad. He was actually the first guy I met.”
Jesse said “Yeah, I guess he was in the right place at the right time.”
Chiid looked at Jesse and nodded in agreement, but seemed to be assessing anew the young man before him. “So you’re following in your father’s footsteps…..literally”, he said. It was Jesse’s turn to nod.
Between the two of them, they had roughly half the conversation one might expect under the circumstances, but they seemed to have an understanding, so Jesse asked Chiid why they were there. “What do you want to show me out here?”, asked Jesse.
“Well, your father said there was a correlation (Jesse thought, “this guy doesn’t talk like a guy from the reservation”) between the mineralization you’re looking for and organic matter sometimes associated with fossilized dinosaurs.”
Jesse said ‘he was just a grunt’ and was told where to go and what to do, and mumbled something about not being the guy Chiid needed to talk to. He said he was mostly flagging drill sites and road grades for others to figure out, he explained. He also told Chiid he was not a geologist, but offered to bring the information back to the office for the right person to take a look. Chiid stopped him…..”no, this is for your dad. I didn’t get to tell him about this one when I met him out here so I had to wait for you.”
Jesse felt very weird suddenly. The last time his father was in the field as a geologist in Uravan was more than 20 years earlier. Three children and a move to the big city-ago. A career-ago.
Chiid told Jesse that he knew nothing about geology but knew where there were a number of big dinosaur skeletons and indicated he could take Jesse there. Jesse was surprised that this was what he was there for and somewhat relieved as well, so he enthusiastically told Chiid to lead on.
For the next 2 hours, they made their way through a maze of salt washes, box canyons, arroyos and finally to a cliff face where they could go no further. Jesse had lost all sense of direction and with the sun invisible from the canyon bottom, had only a rough idea of where south was. At first, Jesse didn’t see anything in the face of the wall, but as his eyes adjusted to the shadowy light, an entire skeleton of one, and then another dinosaur, and then parts and pieces of others began to appear before him. Beneath him, a yellowish strip of sandstone formed the lower layer of the entire bed before it plunged into the ground and under the plateau above them.
“Stardust”. Chiid said, pointing at the sandstone.
Bag It Up
Jesse was speechless as he stared at the theatre-sized face of bones and stones of yellowish brown. “I should bring some samples back to the geologists”, he finally said out loud, not really speaking to anyone but simply talking out loud. He immediately started digging at the bottom of the cliff-face and, as he was instructed to do, placed orange flagging at each sample location, carefully wrote the date and sequential numbers for all the bags and for nearly an hour, as the sun began to set and dusk seeped into the bottom of the canyon, didn’t realize that Chiid was no longer there.
A moment of panic flashed through his mind, but he immediately collected himself and the sample bags and an unmarked one that he couldn’t remember bagging, but tossed it into the backpack and all the others on top of it. It was beginning to get dark and he was concerned that without Chiid, he wouldn’t know the way back. But as he made his way through the first sequence of labyrinthian washes, Chiid had left sticks piled with an arrow-ish direction and Jesse, after ignoring the first benchmark, began to recognize them and followed them out.
By the time he reached his truck it was completely dark, a full moon began to rise and the plateau was cast into a silhouette of light and shadow further disorienting him as he threw the gear into the back of the truck. Exhausted, he called out for Chiid but heard only a slight breeze in the scrub oaks, owls echoing in the canyons and the clatter of rocks in the distance. As the moon rose and his strength returned, he resigned himself to drive back without finding Chiid, or leaving some sort of note for him. After all, Chiid lived out here, somewhere, so he drove off toward the boarding house, where he turned in after midnight.
The next morning he overslept, missed breakfast, didn’t even get coffee, and ran across the bridge to the office for the morning meeting, which was already in process. By the time he’d gathered himself to tell the head geologist about the day before, everyone else had gone. Bob, the grad student field supervisor from Boston College, listened to the story and without much enthusiasm, told Jesse to bring in the stuff and leave the samples on his desk, and told Jesse “to leave out the part about the old Indian showing you where you found it. Everyone on staff had heard stories about old Chiid, even though none had met him, and there seemed to be some discredit, even disdain for the continuance of that ‘geologist’s myth’.
The next few days were busy and Jesse, as well as Bob, had forgotten about the samples which Jesse had left in the back of his truck. When he remembered, he retrieved the backpack and its contents and began to lay out the bags and his notes on his bed. One of the bags, the unmarked one, was near the bottom of the pack and had torn open to reveal something of color. Jesse untied the cloth bag to pour the contents onto his bunk and out fell three large pieces of jewelry, a turquoise squash blossom necklace and two very large rings, one azurite, the other malachite……..Chiid’s. “Jesus”, said Jesse.
Coincidence and Causation
Over the years, Jesse’s father had given his wife, Jesse’s mother, a couple pieces of jewelry that Jack said were from the reservation. Not gaudy, inspired and beautiful, clearly master-crafted and artistic, the same kinds of jewelry, a squash blossom necklace and two bracelets, azurite and malachite. Shortly after each of the gifts were made, although the connection or coincidence, unnoticed until the third piece was received, the couple had a child. 3 pieces, 3 children, and during that same period of time, and not so unnoticed, Jack had been credited with three significant finds of mineral deposits and his career had also blossomed.
Jesse brought the rucksack full of rocks, sans one bag of jewelry, to the office the following day and proceeded to tell the other college kids about Chiid and the meeting in the desert where Chiid brought him to the sample site. They chided and kidded him about making up the Chiid shit because some of the miners, Navajo, had told the boys to stay away from Chiid, just a few days before. They had made it seem like ‘Chiid’ is who and what you saw after you’d been in the sun too long and your mind began to hallucinate. Chiid was a two edged joke among the Navajo, a laughable tale to tell the college kids but, something else amongst themselves. The latter was darker, sinister and not to be taken lightly so they buried it in disingenuous laughter.
When Jesse and the other assistants worked at the Deremo mine, between Dove Creek and Cortez, which was a profoundly deep hole in the middle of an endless soybean field, the miners would set the boys up for practical jokes and invoke Chiid as the one who did it. One morning the Navajo miners had filled the boy’s rubber safety boots with mud, so when they put them on in the locker room, all of them were stuck in the mud……and they were rained on with chants of “Chiid did it”.
No one was allowed in the mine without their boots, so the entire day was spent slogging through the underground to the joy and laughter of the Navajo miners who could hear the boys approaching like suction cups. The more tricks played, the less Jesse was willing to bring up his own experience with Chiid for fear of being derided. The final straw was when one of the Indians had smeared graphite on the receiver of the office phone and when it rang, Jesse was told to go answer it. Without knowing it, his ear and hair were covered in the black grease and for the rest of the day all of the miners who saw him said “looks like Chiid got in your ear, kid.”
So Jesse kept his meeting with Chiid to himself after telling Bob the first time, and never mentioned the three pieces of jewelry, and Chiid didn’t come up again with any of the men from Uravan.
Weeks after Jesse had submitted the samples and had more or less forgotten about them, Bob called Jesse into his office and asked where Jesse had collected them. Jesse told him vaguely where the location was, somewhere in the Spanish Arroyo area but wasn’t able to identify it on the map Bob had spread out in front of him. Bob then proceeded to tell Jesse that most of the samples had returned with one of the highest vanadium/uranium percentages ever recorded from the field. A few days later, Bob’s boss and one of the head geologists asked Jesse to take him to the sample site and to describe the circumstances under which he had collected the rocks.
Without mentioning Chiid, he told him that the location was pretty remote and that it was dark when he finally got out of the area, so he wasn’t sure how to get back to the location. Jesse explained, however, that once you got into the right slot canyon, the sample site would be easy to distinguish because of the wall of dinosaur bones above the mineralized zone, and of course, the flags he’d left. Now, Bob, his boss, and a few other geologists were involved and poured over maps of the area to estimate the location. Within a few days, two trucks, six geologists, and Jesse were driving through the desert on one of hottest days yet of the summer so by the time they reached the place where Jesse had parked weeks before, it was well over a hundred degrees and one of the geologists had already resigned from the walk into the canyon because of heat exhaustion.
As the remainder of the party descended into the slot canyons one by one of them dropped off, and when, after a few hours, Jesse told the only geologist left that he was unsure of the location and then finally, that they were out of water, Jesse and the geologist turned back, unsuccessful.
Before the end of the summer, a few more attempts were made at finding the bone-face, as it became known, but without success and Jesse was leaving for school. He never returned to the slot again.
Summer’s End
Jesse left Uravan for school and spent the last day packing in his parent’s home when he remembered the jewelry. Jesse told his father about the encounter with Chiid and Jack sat silently listening to his son talk about Chiid and Boy, and the bone-face prospect. There was a long, uncomfortable pause between the two. To Jesse’s complete surprise, Jack began to talk about his own encounter with Chiid. Jesse was slack-jawed, like the kid who walked into his curve ball.
Jack continued to tell his son about the second time he ran into Chiid, and where he finally saw his dangerous looking mutt (for the first time), at the Bedrock trading post, similar to Jesse’s run in. Jack said he was walking around the corner and was headed for his truck……and standing in the shadow of the building, Chiid asked him for a smoke, face hidden under his hat, with two eyes that seemed to be coming from different directions, but both unblinking.
Jack continued: “We both nodded in recognition of each other, and I broke out the cigarettes. I asked him about his injuries and mostly we just made small talk until he said he wanted to thank me for my help and he told me he left me something in the truck. So I walked over, got in, looked on the seat and turned back to ask him what it was, but he was gone. I never saw him again, but I remember that the map nearly blew out of the truck, which wasn’t the only time that happened and I also remember it was from one of those dust devils that came out of nowhere, and that’s when I saw the squash-blossom. It was under the map.”
Jack continued, “and that’s how it started. Like I said, I never saw him again, but he left me three maps and three gifts over the years, which I gave to your mother.” He sat back and reached for a Lucky Strike.
Three times, three finds, three mineral deposits (named the Lucky Strikes 1,2,and 3) that were being developed into mines and each time, a single piece of jewelry was found in one of the sample bags. Jack told his son about the first time he’d met Chiid and how he’d found him nearly dead at the bottom of a slot canyon he was prospecting on one of his first explorations in the desert. Jesse nodded, like he’d heard this already.
Jack remarked to his son, “I’ve never mentioned Chiid to anyone before and I remember that he left a fourth map and note for me in my truck, on one of my last prospecting jobs just before we moved to Grand Junction. Anyway, on my way to go look at the area it blew out. I lost it, but I know approximately where the area is and if your flags are still there……..”
Jack and Jesse, father and son, sat in silence for a moment, and both said at the same time, “that’s weird”. Both men were willing to acknowledge that they had met a man named Chiid and even though both Jesse and Jack had spent a number of hours walking along side him in the slots, one coming in, the other going out, neither could describe Chiid, or his dog in any specific way, but referred rather to a feeling they had about the man and Boy. In retrospect, Jesse couldn’t remember what, if anything was said while they were hiking through the canyon together, but he was sure, or at least he thought that he was sure, that he wasn’t alone on the walk.
Neither the father, nor the son, were particularly spiritual in any conventional sort of way, and neither of the men was comfortable talking at length about the mystical man in the cowboy boots, but the shared experience was too much for either to simply dismiss and they both sat next to each other thinking of its significance. Finally, Jesse took out the squash blossom necklace and said “this is real, isn’t it?” Jack looked at the necklace, he’d seen it before. And for the first time, Jack noticed that Jesse was wearing one of the rings, an azurite gem on his hand that looked like a piece of sky had been captured in it and glissoned, as if it had just been rained on.
Jesse slipped the ring off and handed it to his father along with the other pieces. “Chiid said this was for you, and that you would know where the bone-face could be found if you looked on the back of the necklace”. There, a small map had been inscribed as only a master craftsman could do in intricate detail. He said you should go ‘back to the right place at the right time’ and you’d be able to find it from there.
He also told me to tell you that ‘you’ll know it when you get there, but that you should just drop these pieces back through the hole that he, and they, had fallen through’.
“whatever that means”. said Jesse.
Epilogue
Jesse returned home for the holidays after his first semester in school to discover his father had been credited with a new find in the Uravan Mineral Belt. Apparently associated with a large dinosaur find as well, which resulted in an epic litigious archeological stand off between the state and the company, which outlasted the industry and the company, and at last, his father. In the ensuing aftermath, his father was told that he’d contracted cancer, exacerbated by the exposure too much radon and too many years of radioactivity plus way too many cigarettes; three unlucky strikes and he only a few months to live.
When the family cremated Jack, at his request, they included the necklace and bracelets in an envelope on which he had hand written “return to sender”. Jesse finally went back to the Uravan area decades later when the town was completely wiped out of existence buried beneath a mountain of soil from a superfund project to return the site to its natural state. The hanging flume was barely hanging on, but was the only thing Jesse recognized from his time in Uravan. Like a ghost, it swayed with each breeze and creaked to its wooden core. As Jesse stood in front of the two paragraph sign which spoke of the history of the vanadium-uranium boom and bust and the little town of Uravan, he thought he heard a dog bark in the distance, echoing up the canyon, the canine sound carried on a warm zephyr and then that same smell as his father, sulphur and fresh cigarettes, clean and tangy with a half life of 10 seconds. It was very hot.
The End
