Eating Stone (26 page)

Ken has been instructed to keep me in the far end of the Cosos
until late afternoon. “Today,” they told us at the base, “will be hot.” The forecast for temperatures in the high eighties does not bother me. I have hiked in more brutal temperatures and know the required cautions.

“Heat? No problem,” I spout to Ken with desert-girl swagger.

“It's a hot day on the base.”

Oh. That hot. A firing day. Behind us, on the flats, planes will be dropping scary plasmatic blobs. We cannot cross back to town until the all clear comes over Ken's radio.

Ken strikes me as someone who truly wants to know where he lives, to understand its bedrock and biology, its deep and its recent past. His official science often involved geology fieldwork in the military reserve's remote quarters. Unofficially, he was intrigued by artifacts, lithic sites, “house rings,” and other traces of native cultures, but especially by the astounding profusion of figures engraved on the Cosos’ basaltic rubble. The rock art drew him into a parallel avocation, archaeology.

He studied the Coso petroglyphs on weekends for over twenty years. In the sixties, he and two colleagues, Campbell Grant and James Baird, made the first systematic survey of the area, one that sited, recorded, and tallied by motif over fourteen thousand petroglyphs in thirty miles of canyons. Later studies suggest that, regionwide, this might be a considerable undercount. Although the theoretical bases of their work have evolved into other hypotheses (rock-art interpretation remains ground for what has been described as “academic tribal warfare”), the 1968 Grant-Baird-Pringle book about the survey, Rock Drawings of the Coso Range, remains seminal and invaluable.

From the salt flats, the road winds through a deep cleft in the mountains. Before reaching the canyon, we pass through a forest of Joshua trees. Almost to a fault, these tall, spiky yuccas prefer the gravelly slopes of specific moisture, a middle world between chaparral and colder altitudes. Each tree grows from a single
yellow-brown trunk into multiple branches with bayonet-shaped green leaves. Above the treetops looms an unusually tall Joshua tree that did not fork. It consists of a single trunk and topknot, like a giant electrocuted flagpole.

The Joshua tree woodland gives way to a high tableland with views of the snow-crowned Sierra Nevada on one side and the indigo ridges that enfold Death Valley on the other. The dirt road roughens to a two-track lane, then nothing. We park and start hiking cross-country toward a slash of jagged black rock in the distance: one of the petroglyph canyons.

Our pace is steady, unhurried. There is no shade, not even a disobedient Joshua tree. A low-growing cover of hopsage, salt-bush, blackbrush, and other drought-tolerant shrubs blankets the land's gentle roll. In their midst grows a splendor of late-spring wildflowers. Most startling are red mariposa lilies, delicate cups of fire-engine red on slender stems, and the royal blue flowers of chia, a sagelike shrub.

Far above the Mojave pastorale, a jet climbs, banks in a hard turn, then roars back toward the playa to send some scary plas-matic blobs into high order. The rumbling sound of the jet engine reaches us long behind the plane's trajectory. Ken is not worried. I am looking for rocket carcasses amid the saltbush. I am not looking for bighorns. The Coso Range bears thousands of their images but not a single living sheep.

We enter the canyon in its upper reaches, a shadowy fissure in the rolling green, buttressed by low cliffs of broken, tumbled boulders and lined with pale ecru sand along the dry streambed. Whereas red dominates the sedimentary sandstone of my home canyons, here the rock is volcanic, ranging from chocolate brown to black to a glossy purple-black where it is heavily patinated, a color like the skin of an eggplant. As soon as you describe the rock's color, the light changes and it is something else.

Even though I have never been in the Coso Range before, this
land is familiar land, desert that reveals water by its lack of water, a hand shown by the erosional force of ephemeral rainfall and runoff cutting through the bedrock. Nevertheless, I am unaccustomed to a canyon of volcanics, to wandering a gorge of fire rock. The black-wall, beige-sand palette stuns, then soothes me. It turns the bright magenta spark of a hedgehog cactus flower into a miracle.

The swathe of pale sand in the canyon bottom makes the easiest passage. Against several boulders in the wash, where runoff accumulated, then evaporated from the surface, feral burros or wild horses, maybe even coyotes, have dug pits in the sand in search of water. We see quail, hear chukars, and glimpse a towhee that is believed to be endemic to these lava gorges. The backs of the spiny lizards are the color of charcoal; the reptile makes itself local by matching the rock.

For nearly two miles, the jumble of rock on both sides of the canyon forms a long gallery of figures. Figures on outcrops, on flat slabs, in the cracks, beneath overhangs, on water-smoothed stones along the streambed, on the countless boulders of all sizes, from toaster to boxcar, that fall from rim to floor: a continuum of human imagination, etched into the skin of the Cosos.

More than half the region's rock-art motifs are bighorn sheep, overwhelmingly adult males. There are also dogs, lizards, snakes, mountain lions, birds, deer. Paw prints, hoofprints, handprints, footprints. Humanlike figures: clothespins with horns, stick figures with bows and arrows, elongated anthropomorphs with elaborately patterned torsos, ear bobs, pin-size heads, bird-claw feet, headdresses of quail feathers.

A procession of figures emerges from (enters?) a natural crack in the rock, a theme that is uncannily similar to an ancient Puebloan panel in my neighborhood, nearly seven hundred miles away. Dogs surround sheep. Hunters impale sheep. Two archers aim their arrows at each other.

Atlatls, projectile points, bag shapes, “shields,” or polygons with interior designs. Grids, spirals, chevrons, checkerboards, rakes, dots, meandering lines, curves that nest in one another, and grooves, sometimes a groove low on the canyon wall, up to thirty feet long. What is missing or rarely depicted: plants, baskets, home tools, shelters, women, rabbits, dead people, mountains, the moon.

The artists’ medium was the broken malpais itself. Pecking the basalt with a stone tool removed the patina of age and weathering, a natural varnish of iron and manganese oxides bound with clay minerals. The chipping away revealed the pale rock beneath the surface—a negative of light against dark. Newer etchings overlie older ones. On north-facing surfaces in particular, chartreuse, yellow, red, and orange lichens edge toward a group of sheep and hunters, obscure the upraised tail of a canid.

Despite his long acquaintance with Coso archaeology, my guide is not a loquacious one. He does not stuff my head with theories and chronologies. I hear no lectures about the complex cultural dynamics of Great Basin aboriginals. He rarely points out a specific figure or panel. I am left to find my own. I do not wonder what the images mean. Instead, I ask myself, Why are these thoughts in this place?

No one has visited this canyon in a long time. The sole sign of human presence is a bucket-shaped carapace of thick rusted metal lying in our sandy path, a chunk of missile dropped from the heavens. The rock art remains untouched—no initials, no scratch-over markings, no bubba glyphs (bullet holes). The metaphor of our millennium, the rare modern glyph inserted among the graffiti of antiquity, can be found in an adjacent canyon, where someone has pecked E = mc
²
.

The canyon widens to a broad amphitheater. The sky is more open here, a perfect spot for lunch once I am assured that large metal objects won't drop onto our heads. I am alert for jets but
pretend that I am not. My visitor badge is a kind of pledge to refrain from memorizing the behavior of contemporary naval aircraft.

We sit against boulders in the warm sun. Above us stretches a landslide of boulders covered with images of sheep, some of them life-size. The slope holds a band of bighorns on ledges of black rock.

Clayton Eshleman is a poet who, for various reasons, some of them wounded and dark, wanted to learn something. Learn something: In this regard, he quotes poet and polymath Charles Olson: “‘It doesn't matter whether it's Barbed Wire or Pemmican or Paterson or Iowa.’”

Eshleman chose to learn as much as he could about the Paleolithic cave art of Lascaux, Combarelles, Chauvet, Pech Merle, and other sites in southwestern Europe, underground chambers of polychrome frescoes associated with human existence from 9,000 to 35,000 years ago.

Eshleman believes that the birth of metaphor, the seed of narrative, came when “people began to separate the animal out of their about-to-be-human heads and project it onto cave walls.” Held in the hand of our species, tool and pigment created a line on stone. The hand curved the line into a horn or head or rump, the shape of the creature itself. Shading hinted at volume. Energy came from a thrust of neck, motion from the stretch of limbs.

Each stroke fit the perception of an animal form, the memory of a form. The forms were of those with whom these people had an unbearably deep bond. Was there not also aesthetic pleasure in this? The art was anything but clumsy. With stunning grace, the full bestiary of the Paleolithic was rendered: bison, horses, panthers, ibex, bears, reindeer, and other creatures. The art came out of the stone, Eshleman writes, “as if the earth was seen as a ripe pelt of animals.”

What I will give you, of course, are merely brushstrokes, the woefully incomplete distillation of others’ hard-won research, a bag-lunch lecture, let us say, heard while the boulder backrest roughs up your shoulder blades, prickles of saltbush stab you, and sharp pebbles pierce your butt.

Erudite perspectives have been brought to southwestern rock art, even to this slope of life-size sheep and processions of horned archers, the set of footprints leading up-slope. These drawings are by no means meaningless. They represent high metaphor and deliberate investment in the supernatural. With a kind of barmy delight in the idea that the drawings are ultimately indecipherable, I believe that the best experts on meaning are the experts who say, “We don't know.” On safer ground, however, context for the rock art can be described.

Here, as in the caves of Europe and the alcoves of Baja California, stone was a medium for thought. The earliest Coso images, including a motif of bighorn sheep, may be more than sixteen thousand years old, dating from the Ice Age. People had been in the region a long, long time, with changes in subsistence and culture as the climate changed, in a general trend, from wet to drier.

Rock engraving as a native idiom continued in and around the Coso Range throughout the millennia, then flourished in a concentration of canyons roughly from one thousand to fifteen hundred years ago. That the bulk of the petroglyphs are believed to fall within this span makes them comparatively recent, the work of the late prehistoric and the early historic periods.

Inhabitants of the Great Basin during these two periods are loosely defined as pre-Numic and Numic, respectively, not for a “tribal” nomenclature but for a common language stock. These hunter-gatherers spoke related languages, shared cultural similarities, and interacted with one another in this expansive region,
including the deserts and valleys of eastern California, where their descendants still reside.

Studies of regional native groups, as well as sophisticated dating techniques, tell us the who of Coso rock art and edge toward the why.

One school of interpretation falls along the lines of “hunting magic”: The people brought their desire to kill, eat, and wear animals, especially bighorn sheep, onto the rock. Weapons, hunters, dogs driving game to ambush—such motifs formed a literal reading of the hunt. They recalled, or urged, the procurement of food. In some eyes, the obsession with the desert ungulate, not an easy or frequent meat source, constituted a “sheep cult,” which (a long stretch here) contributed to the decline of the species.

Other theorists suggest that something beyond menu might be embedded in this extraordinary art. The animals depicted were not the animals that people often ate. The mainstay of the European Paleolithic diet, for instance, was red deer, yet artists covered the caves with bison. The Numic groups covered the stone with bighorns, but they ate seeds, pinyon nuts, and rabbit, so much rabbit that the middens around habitation sites are thick with their bones. Bighorn, antelope, and mule deer provided occasional additions to these staples.

A different interpretation of Coso rock art decontrusts the theory of hunting magic and links ethnography—accounts that describe native beliefs and practices from the past century—with the archaeological data. Drawing largely from the work of archaeologist David Whitley this angle of study speculates that Numic artists used the stone for drama, for dreams, for the animals’ source of vitality. Nearly all of this effort was directed at the weather.

The ethnographic record, Whitley tells us, supports the idea that the motifs of Coso rock art were the expression of shamanis-tic beliefs and visions. As a powerful functionary in Numic soci-
ety, the shaman treated illnesses, cured rattlesnake bites, and found lost objects. He (shamans were invariably male) was well practiced in the arts of augury and was sometimes called upon to change the direction of the wind.

In order to influence physical events like wind and sickness and social disharmony, a shaman had to tap other levels of reality, a world not overtly visible yet rich in dreamlike imagery. He put himself into trances, met and used spirit animal helpers, tapped their power. The shaman, Clayton Eshleman writes, acts as “a kind of magnetized psychic quagmire for his group.”

The bighorn sheep served a shaman with a specialty: “rain doctor.” Widespread native belief linked this animal with rain. When a sheep was killed, it was said, rain fell. Those who dreamed of killing bighorn sheep were particularly adept at affecting weather.

Rock-art dating suggests that the engravings intensified during a severe drought across the Great Basin and Southwest. A collective pull on rain, and its symbolic association with bighorn sheep, found its locus in the mountains of fire (Coso from a Shoshonean word for fire). The Coso Range became renowned as a center of rain shamanism. Whitley writes, “Not only did surrounding groups seek out shamans from the Coso region for rain-making ceremonies, but the last living Numic rain shaman travelled specifically to the Cosos to make rain.”