As it happens, after tying my shoes in four states at once as a kid, I grew up to become a licensed land surveyor and thus more prone to geospatial reflection than most humans. Probably just a coincidence…
Perhaps we are called by urges deeper than we know
The Four Corners Monument, marking the common corner of four southwestern states, can seem perverse and arbitrary, memorializing nothing more than 4 invisible lines coming to a point in desolate country. There is little to do: no rides, no museums, just a few booths selling food and trinkets and the monument itself, a metal disk encased in a massive wheel of imported granite. And yet we do come, by the thousands, driving hundreds of miles out of our way and paying three bucks to stand on the smooth bronze disk, tie our shoes in four states at once, have our picture taken and then… well, nothing; buy some fry bread, perhaps, and then get back in the car and drive to somewhere else. It resembles a pilgrimage, a Southwestern Hajj, a ritual journey to be completed at least once in every American’s life.
Why do we come? Certainly it is beautiful country, empty and serene, punctuated only by massive islands of vertical red rock—and they too are monuments, curiously, of Monument Valley. But it’s like this for ten thousand square miles or more; what is it about this corner of the world – these corners – that so urgently require a visit from so many?
Perhaps it is the contrast between our puny conceptual world and the enduring world of rock and sand. To stand on the monument and spin around slowly is to laugh; the weighty legal lines are nothing to the desert, make no impression at all… and since they lie within another human conception, the Navajo Nation, even their legality is flimsy and attenuated. They barely exist at all…
Or perhaps we are called by urges deeper than we know. The ancient Native American ritual sites now known as medicine wheels were once actively maintained across a broad swathe of North America. They were built according to a simple, immutable formula: a central cairn, radiating spokes, and a circular rim as much as 75 feet across. The stone from which they were made was often packed to the site and the labor involved, stretching across generations, was immense. The Wheel builders are long gone, but here at the the Four Corners Monument we have what amounts to a grand Medicine Wheel, with a central cairn of bronze, a circular rim of stone and cement, and four radiating spokes that stretch for hundreds of miles.
We moderns don’t know, exactly, the use or meaning of the Medicine Wheels, or what role they played in the shifting religious observances of several millennia—that knowledge is lost to time. The same will be true, one day, of the Four Corners; nations, after all, last a few hundred years or less and the desert is forever. But what endures, what will always be as long as humans are, is the making of monuments… perhaps the meaning of a monument is the mere fact of its existence.
Did you like this essay? You’ll love my books!
{ 0 comments… add one now }