Life & Death in Bears Ears

I sat on the rim of Arch Canyon, a 1,000-foot-deep crevice in Bears Ears National Monument, watching sharp evening light and shadows play out along the cliffs and stone pillars. Crisscross layers in the rock showed the patterns of windblown sand from Sahara-like dunes that existed here some 280 million years ago. In the shifting light, one of the namesake arches suddenly became visible against the cliff. Two hundred feet below me, I could see a small masonry dwelling with intact roof timbers that had been securely built into a ledge of the cliff, a remnant of the flourishing community of Ancestral Puebloan people who lived here over 700 years ago.

As I gazed over the scene, I was flooded with confusing feelings of guilt, relief, awe, anger and grief. It was surreal to witness this spectacle just two days after sitting by my dad’s side as he slipped away.

I almost hadn’t made it to the hospital in time. My dad was unconscious, but my daughter, who had flown there from New York, had kept a monologue going, telling him that Ernie was on the way. Just 15 or so minutes after I arrived, the nurse watching the monitors said, “I think this is it.” He took his last gasping breaths, and then all was still. He had waited until his firstborn was there.

My first visit to the Bears Ears landscape was on a junior college field trip in 1978. This extraordinary corner of southeast Utah, which was designated as a national monument in 2016, now protects 1.36 million acres of breathtaking canyons, arches and monoliths. The monument encompasses everything from dry desert washes to lush aspen forests in the highlands. It’s overlaid with a rich layer of thousands of years of cultural history and fascinating archaeological sites.

Over the course of a week, our busload of students camped, hiked, climbed, visited ancient sites, and clung to the back of a flatbed truck as we bounced up an insanely steep and windy road to nearby Natural Bridges National Monument. It was the first time I had ever seen cliff dwellings and the artifacts that give clues to the lives Ancestral Puebloans had lived. Those experiences made a lasting impression that undeniably altered the course of my education and career.

In the time since that first journey, I have worked to protect these important lands, and I’ve returned many times to guide trips, learn and play here. This place has become a touchstone for me, almost a second home. It is a landscape that never fails to inspire, stir my curiosity, and bestow a sense of serenity and sanity. Three years ago, when my dad fell sick, I thought I’d have to cancel the trip that my wife and I had planned. But after he died, just a few weeks later, Bears Ears called to me even more urgently.

A good friend who is Diné talks often about the spiritual power of this landscape. In the 1860s, Bears Ears was a literal refuge for Diné people attempting to escape U.S. aggression. While hundreds of Diné died on a brutal forced march known as the “Long Walk” and some 1,500 others perished during their subsequent incarceration, many hid out in these wild and remote canyons. Today the Navajo Nation, along with several other Tribes and Pueblos, sees Bears Ears as a sacred place of healing.

I didn’t know it at the time, but healing is what I went for.

My relationship with my dad was turbulent. He’d married right after high school and became a father to me nine months later. As an angry young man, bitter that he had missed out on adventures and opportunities, he blamed his eldest son. I knew he felt this way because he made sure that I did.

I was not an easy teenager, and there were plenty of police arrests and serious offenses to tick him off, but it didn’t take much to provoke him. It could have been something as minor as shoddy work cleaning out the bathtub. He struggled to support our family and was very sensitive to complaints or lack of appreciation for the meager food or clothing we had access to in our household. When he raged, I took the brunt of it. I was ungrateful, he’d say. I was not worthy. Violence was not unfamiliar in the world I grew up in, and it was how he expressed his disappointments in life. Though I wasn’t fully aware of it then, I shielded my three younger siblings from the physical abuse, if not the emotional trauma.

In one unforgettable incident when I was around 14, my dad threw me down the basement stairs, then after I cried that I might have broken my leg, he came down and kicked it. As I grew older and stronger, I started defending myself, and our conflicts turned even more vicious. In my later teens, one of those fights escalated to the point of throwing kitchen chairs at each other, and I couldn’t take it anymore — I had to escape. I ran as hard and fast as I could down the street, sobbing. When I returned an hour later, it was like nothing unusual had happened, and we never discussed it.

That’s just the way it was, and I did not realize how I had normalized that destructive behavior until much later in life. After he died, one of my aunts told me, “Your tío was so concerned about the abuse.” The word “abuse” startled me. Neither my father nor I had considered this behavior to be abuse — I thought it was just discipline. Whatever it was called, it never occurred to me that the violence had been common knowledge in the family. I thought it was all my dirty little secret.

Yet looking back, I realize that that kind of family dysfunction is not an easy thing to hide and that they all knew. After the basement stairs incident, my parents brought in my mother’s macho brothers — all of them strict military vets who believed in corporal punishment — for an intervention. Sitting around the kitchen table, my uncles lectured me about respecting my elders and the Ten Commandments. But then they all went silent and looked uncomfortably at each other when I described how my dad had treated me that day.

The father-son relationship became particularly heated after I dropped out of high school, and my dad’s older brother — the one who my aunt said was concerned — invited me to live with his family in northern New Mexico for several months. A sociologist and Chicano activist, he not only helped calm the situation but inspired me to finish school. He later became one of my most important professional mentors.

Immediately after I graduated high school, an experience as a minority scholarship student on a three-week Outward Bound wilderness course set me on a new path. Just over a year later, I was at Colorado Mountain College in an experiential outdoor leadership program. I ended up working for Outward Bound and other outdoor education programs, and I spent many seasons as a national park ranger, including at Mesa Verde National Park, where I gave tours of cliff dwellings and shared the stories of the people who had lived there. I studied cultural anthropology in graduate school and traveled and adventured and pursued anthropological studies around the world.

Through it all, I unexpectedly found myself eager to share stories with my dad of the latest wilderness trip or mountain peak or exotic cultural escapade. I suppose it was my unconscious desire to please, and for him to experience some young-man exploits — at least vicariously. And to my surprise, he relished it. We still had hostile moments occasionally, but by then he was mellowing into middle age and, like a dark and destructive storm, our violent fights had passed, even if a shadow lingered on the horizon.

One story that particularly interested him was about an expedition up Pico de Orizaba in Mexico, the third- tallest peak in North America. I told him about our summit day, when one of our three rope teams got lost in the snowy mist, and about how I had pushed on solo after the rest of my team had called it quits. I described peering into the crater of the volcano and finding a large metal-girder cross at the summit that was studded with icicles blown horizontal by the wind. The adventure had continued into that night at a smoky little cantina in a nearby village where cross-cultural misunderstandings got heated, and we ended up fleeing with some drunk and rowdy locals shooting at us.

My dad hung on every word and wanted details. I remember a wistful smile on his face and a softness in his eyes, and something that looked like pride in his son. Wild places and adventure can be healing and fortifying, even secondhand. It was good tonic for us both.

I thought about those exchanges after his death, when I watched the sun set from the rim of that canyon in Bears Ears, and again the next day, when I hiked to a site called the Citadel, located under an overhang on a remote knob of rock. Even in his younger days, he probably could not have handled the steep, exposed route across a narrow neck of sandstone required to get there, but he would have loved hearing about the dicey scramble and the commanding view. I can picture him even now — how he would have shaken his head with a distant stare as he imagined the scene.

As I experienced more of my own tests and conflicts as a young brown man making my way in the world, I began to empathize with the challenges my dad had faced. He grew up in a small village in the mountains of northern New Mexico at a time when it was an isolated, anachronistic world unto itself. My Hispano family roots in New Mexico go back to 1598, and the Indigenous blood much further. An archaic form of Spanish that is still widely spoken in the region was my dad’s first language, and he never quite took to English. My parents actively discouraged us from speaking Spanish to mainstream us, and I never became fluent, but relatives often said that he was eloquent in his native tongue. Soon after marrying, he and my mother moved to San Diego for a brief time, hoping to establish residency for free junior college tuition. But once there, an environmental allergy triggered a mysterious illness that partially blinded him, and they had to return to New Mexico. He had hoped to follow in his father’s footsteps and attend seminary to become a Presbyterian minister but never had another opportunity to go to college.

At 28, after running into employment dead ends at every turn, he and my mom packed up the four kids and a U-Haul trailer to move to Denver because relatives in the area promised that there was plenty of work. He found a series of jobs, but as a visually impaired foreigner from another culture, his options were limited, and he never climbed beyond low-wage labor and menial service work.

As I became more secure in my own life direction in my mid-30s, my dad’s reality came into focus. I began to see him differently and better understand how ill-equipped he had been for the challenges of raising a family in a poor barrio in a big city. He had missed out on the good life he might have lived in a different time or place. This became clear one night in a mountain village when I was traveling in the Himalayan foothills. I had a dream of my parents as sturdy and confident mountain goatherds, living a hard but happy life chasing livestock up and down the steep slopes, instead of as hapless, displaced villagers just squeaking by in the city. I don’t remember a lot of my dreams, but that one stayed with me.

In their 60s, after retiring from their various jobs in Denver, my parents had the opportunity to move into a house my sister had bought in the village where my dad was born, not far from where I live. This is an agricultural community in a verdant valley off the main road. It’s still primarily Hispano but has embraced the hippies and other creative, alternative newcomers who arrived in the ’60s and ’70s. My dad slipped right back in without missing a beat, fluently speaking the local Spanish at the senior center with friends he had grown up with, irrigating and mowing the orchard, and finally realizing his dream by becoming a lay minister in the Presbyterian church. I’m sure those were some of the best years of his life.

While he was still mobile, I made an effort to share real — not just vicarious — outdoor experiences with him. Once, we whitewater rafted the Río Grande, which he had never had the chance to do even though he grew up right next to it. After the first couple of rapids, the boat guide decided that my elderly dad would be safer sitting in the middle of the boat instead of paddling from the outside edge. It was a splashy, raucous ride, and when we reached the takeout, it took a few minutes to help him unfold his creaky, stiff joints and get him out of the boat. He said, slightly disappointed, “I thought the rapids would be bigger.”

I was taken aback by his sense of adventure and realized maybe I got some of that from him. A year or two later, I took him to explore the archaeological sites at Chaco Culture National Historical Park. By then he could not walk far, but he pushed himself to tour the massive sites and gazed at them with awe. He was riveted by the canyon, the buildings and the petroglyphs, and fascinated by the few potsherds we saw along the trails. It was a full day for him, and I think he slept all the way home.

Despite some healing moments, my relationship with my dad was still uneasy and unresolved. It is surprising how the years pass, and you never get around to those difficult conversations. But the day he died, I had one final opportunity to say my piece. After he passed, the nurses removed all the tubes and wires from his body and cleaned the adhesive from his skin, and he lay peacefully in bed. My daughter and wife had gone to wait for me in the car, and after all the bustling activity around a hospital death, it was suddenly quiet. Just the two of us were in the room. Many believe that the soul can still hear our voices for a short period of time after death, so I finally told my dad the hard truths that I had been too nervous or guarded to share before.

I asked why we had never talked about the violence I’d suffered when I was young. I told him that I had spent a lot of time and money on therapy, grappling with my past and my own inherited temper, and even after all these years, I carried emotional pain from my childhood. I said I understood his lament that he had missed out on his own young adult adventures, but it was not my fault. I told him that I had come to empathize with the challenges he had faced as a young man, but that that was no excuse. People talk about forgive and forget, which sounds liberating. I told him that I was still working through forgiveness, but I knew I could never forget.

I carried all this with me later that week at Bears Ears. Over the years, even as I sought to make peace with my dad, I told myself that after suffering his brutality, I did not have any obligation to feel grief when he died. But grief has its own agenda, and mine was strong, if muddled.

Bear Ears contains possibly 260,000 archaeological sites, some dating back 12,000 years to the days of mammoth-hunting, and everywhere I turned, something spoke to me about the scale of history, and the passing of generations. It dawned on me that even the etched and painted rock images decorating alcoves and cliff walls may have been part of the Puebloan recognition of mortality and their effort to leave something behind to last.

At one site with an intact subterranean ceremonial chamber called a kiva, crooked poles of a wooden ladder sticking through the opening in the roof connected the darkness below with the vivid light of early morning sun, which made me think of death and life, grief and joy. For Puebloan people, the kiva’s juxtaposition of light and dark represents the journey from the womb of the Earth to emergence and life, and the cyclical nature of life and renewal.

Though I can’t explain it exactly, that time in Bears Ears helped clarify and shift my feelings for my dad. His story and life challenges are part of who I am — and I realized that my story was also part of him. Whatever damage was done, I credit him and my mom with raising four good people despite the hardships. In that wild landscape surrounded by the magic and mystery of remnants of another time, I felt a measure of solace. That dream from 30 years ago flashed before me; I could picture my parents living a happy life off the land, herding goats in some steep mountains somewhere, and a kind of peace descended.

Looking across a canyon at a cliff dwelling appropriately called Eagles Nest, because it appears completely inaccessible from the ground, I thought of the generations who toiled and lived there. Entire lifetimes possibly spent constructing a single small village had come and gone. Sons carrying emotional scars had grieved fathers who bore their own scars. Life went on, families and communities persevered. The cliff dwellings and farmlands had passed from parents to children to parents to children over centuries.

All turned to dust now, but somehow still alive.