I’m up for a morning walk among the juniper trees, the dry cool air suddenly warmed by a rising breeze as the edge of Frijoles Canyon gathers and reflects the sun’s heat. My tennis shoes are scuffing up dust into the yellow, gray, and green ankle-high brush the mule deer and elk eat like candy. All I get is stickers.
I’m walking early and alone because I’ve developed the annoying habit of waking up at sunrise, then going in and out of my wife CJ’s and my 19-foot camper trailer multiple times as I cook my breakfast. Which causes the door to squeak. And no amount of WD-40 can silence it. So about the third time I come back in from the outdoor grill for, say, butter, CJ wakes up before she’s ready. And the morning could begin on a brighter note for both of us.
So this morning I grab a Diet Pepsi and take a couple-miles walk on the edge of Frijoles Canyon as shadows ooze like dark chocolate over the milk chocolate volcanic rim, only in reverse—like a video shown backward. The drips are being swallowed by the cliffs as the sun rises and illuminates the leaves of the cottonwood and scrub oak that lines the Rio de los Frijoles in the oasis 500 feet below me on the canyon floor, where dazzling shades of red, orange, gold, and green burst from the disappearing shadows. A subdued soundtrack—the soughing of the wind through piñon needles—accompanies the scene as I reach the promontory they call Tyuonyi Overlook.
Below me a few other early risers are strolling the sidewalk out of the visitor’s center at Bandelier National Monument, reading the signs about the ancestral Pueblo people who built these dwellings into the cliffs more than 1,000 years ago and maybe trying to imagine what their early mornings were like before that civilization disappeared. At least that’s what I’m wondering when I notice, not yet within the tourist’s field of view, a herd of nine mule deer making its way down the rocks to drink from the stream. Near the bottom, they step onto the Frey Trail, the most revealing and beautiful way to enter the canyon, as it zig-zags downhill along the cliffs and into ruins. The people don’t see the deer yet, but the distance between them is closing. The herd moves skillfully, cautiously, and close together down the trail, then breaks from it before it joins the path the people are walking on.
I watch the hide and seek game from above. A man hears a rock clatter from a fawn’s misstep and peers up through the juniper for the cause of the commotion. The deer freeze. The man walks on. A half-second later the deer continue. Now a young man has seen one and runs up the path toward them. Another man sits down on the sidewalk, pulling his camera out to capture the pursuit. But the deer
disappear into a small grove of juniper and the boy runs right past them. The man waits, but nothing seems to happen. His shot is gone. He has no idea the deer is within 20 feet of him, slowly making their way pinned between the bushes and the red rock wall as the boy continues to look in the wrong direction. They have to be making some noise but I can’t hear them up here, from my raven’s-eye view. I marvel at their stealth. Even up here I lose them in the trees for a moment. Then I see one by itself, a yearling? Then the others return to retrieve it, a drama the trees and low bushes screen from the tourists. The herd trots off together through more juniper, bound into a small clearing, making their way toward the stream, now behind the early arrivals, crossing the walk only seconds before the next group comes along. Like they’ve timed this thing, and maybe, in their own way, they have. And they never leave one of the herd behind.
I think of all the times I’ve walked in places like that grove of trees looking for wildlife and seen nothing, heard nothing, yet sensed something had to be there. And it probably was. I’ve just had the wrong angle, the wrong perspective, missing this bird’s eye view where I could watch the dance.
The shadows are nearly gone with the deer as I turn for the hike back to camp and pass by a circle of stones. ‘The Anasazi were an agricultural people,” the sign says,” and this place overlooking the valley where they farmed was probably a shrine and place to give thanks for the abundance below.” But it’s not exactly a circle—more an oval. The shape of an eye. A holy place for Anasazi, certainly, but also for those passing 800 years later—a place of seeing and understanding, a reminder of how many ways there are to see. And this is a gods-eye view—I grab a pebble from the center of the eye for a photographer friend and to remember that being able to see this way, even for a moment, is an extraordinary gift.
I want to show this place to CJ so we’re back that afternoon. I’m hoping to see the deer again, though I know it’s unlikely the same deer will be back. And they aren’t. The shadows are dripping back over the cliffs now. The October sun is low in the sky, so the colors that burst from the leaves this morning are muted by shade. We don’t have much time here—we need to get back to camp to get the truck and pick up our granddaughter in White Rock—but I want to spend a moment or two here, hoping for some kind of action. Then my wife’s phone rings. I’m irritated at the disruption of our time together in this beautiful place, mad that the sing-song ringtone has probably frightened away any wildlife around us. But we have six kids and 13 grandchildren, and CJ always answers the phone.
I turn away, miffed, listening to her talking to one of our sons when I hear her snapping her fingers to get my attention. I turn, she points to the cliffs, and there not 50 yards away is another mule deer herd making their way across. I have my
camera this time and snap away. She remains on the phone, talking to our son John, who has called to tell us he has a new job close to home, that for the first time in 4 years he’ll actually be able to live in the same house with his wife and three kids. This coming only months after their fourth child, our granddaughter Izzy, died after a very hard first three years of life. They’re still grieving, they need this, they need to be together if they’re going to get through all the harsh work and pain they’ve been through. Now he’ll be with them—now there’s a chance.
The four deer nimbly negotiate the cliffside and are nearly out of reach of even my 400 mm lens when CJ points out another deer closer to us, moving quickly, trying to catch up with the herd. He calls out. The rest of the herd stops and waits. It takes a few minutes but he catches up, and they continue on together.
So big deal, right. Four deer, one missing, catches up, they move on together. Three kids and a mom in my son’s family, my son having to work 100 miles away from home for 4 years, now he’s coming home, they’ll be together. So it’s a cool coincidence. Thanks to my wife we paid attention, noticed something. A writer can’t help but look for connections, and sometimes we stretch things to make those. But there doesn’t always have to be a lesson, an epiphany. Sometimes it’s enough just to be there, to watch, to marvel. So I leave it alone,
On our walk back we pass an older woman and her husband. “There’s a family of mule deer on the cliffs,” I tell them.
“I see deer all the time in my backyard,” the woman says. “Not like this,” is all I can say.
The next day late in the afternoon we’re hiking down the Frey Trail into the ruins with my daughter, Joy, and I have my camera again. So I’m dawdling behind, slowing Joy and CJ down, photographing everything, including them, which they’re used to and mostly tolerate. It’s 4:30, golden hour, and everything is beautiful.
After we reach the sidewalk and look at the ruins for a while, CJ points out something I strolled right by—another yearling, this one not 20 feet away from the walk, staring into the grove of cottonwood and Ponderosa pine trees between it and the stream. Definitely looking for something, seemingly oblivious to us. I snap away and then we walk on, and on the other side of the grove and stream a female mule deer waits, perhaps the mother of the yearling, maybe just another member of the herd. Clearly visible to all, and clearly not going anywhere. It’s almost closing time at the park. Perhaps she’ll wait until everyone is gone before retrieving the other, or until she calls it over to her. Either way, they’ll be together when the time is right.
So we walk on.
People talk about 2020 as the Year of Covid like it’s a disease; I think it’s a prescription: a way of helping us see with 20/20 vision what really matters. In the
middle of this tragedy, we’ve been given a new perspective, and a new way to see, a raven’s-eye view.
I’ve spent much of the year of Covid-19 traveling as safely as possible to be with people I love wherever I need to be to be with them. Sometimes down the street, sometimes across the country. I had taken a year away from working hoping to spend time with my little brother as he dealt with cancer and ended up helping take care of him until he died in March. That raised the stakes; made me a little crazy.
When death separates you from someone you love it’s pretty hard to allow anything less to get between you and your loved ones again. So I’ve tried to find a way to be with people I care about in whatever way they’re comfortable getting together with me.
And I’ve found many fellow travelers. CJ and I spent the last month or so on the road, living out of a camper in campgrounds and RV parks. We’ve run into dozens of people doing what we’re doing, in one form or another. The woman in a teardrop camper on her way from Nebraska to Phoenix to see her son. The man, a teacher, who had lost his wife and a son this year, on his way to live close to his daughter in Montana. The man and his wife with three kids out for the first time in their Airstream Flying Cloud watching the sunset, the dad showing little ones how to climb up between rocks—catching up with each other, sharing who they are and what really matters, aware that the clock is always running.
Our need to be together equaled even our need to survive, or maybe those two needs are inextricably linked. Think of the most moving tragedy of the Covid pandemic— people dying alone, cut off from their loved ones in hospitals and nursing homes for fear of spreading the disease. Yet who among us wouldn’t be tempted to break down those hospital walls to be with a friend, a father, a mother, a child, in those final moments, wouldn’t take that risk for ourselves, as long as we wouldn’t spread the disease to someone else? I know, we’re crazy, but we’re not ourselves without one another. Even the masks we wear to help not spread the virus we wear not for ourselves, but for others.
My favorite photograph from that last day in Frijoles Canyon is of CJ and Joy posing in front of a Ponderosa pine after having a 5-10 minute conversation about god knows what while I photographed the rocks, the trees, the petroglyphs, and more rocks. I love that shot because all that time I had been listening to their voices, the music of that unexpected conversation that only happened because we had traveled 1400 miles to be there. My second favorite photo, though, is of that mule deer yearling standing at the edge of that cottonwood grove, oblivious to us and intent on one thing only, knowing that on the other side of those trees was a stream to drink from and a mother or a friend. Both of them are at risk, out in the open, and just waiting to be together again.