We had set out to explore a bit of the Little Florida mountains outside Deming when a voice boomed from somewhere above us. "If you're lookin' for a trail to Needle's Eye," it said, "there ain't none."
A figure emerged from a rock outcropping just upslope, a bear of a man in a biker's vest with a beer in one hand and a funny cigarette in the other. He shambled toward us. Uncertain if he meant us good or ill, I took a few hesitant steps in his direction, extended my hand, and introduced myself.
"They call me Big John," he said. "Me and my lady's out here just settin' on the mountain and enjoyin' another beautiful morning." He said he worked part of the year as a truck driver to earn enough to spend the rest of the year enjoying the natural wonders of the area "while they're still here."
He told us how to bushwhack up to the nascent natural arch above us. He rhapsodized about other great places in the area. "Have you seen The Petroglyphs?" he asked. And this would be our introduction to the vast outdoor art museum that is the American southwest.
Big John took my wife's notebook and sketched a map that proved remarkably accurate (I still have it, some 20 years later). It took us to a tract of public land, otherwise unmarked, that contained a profusion of native American art that absolutely entranced us, beginning an addiction that continues to this day. This and better-known rock art sites like Three Rivers have become shrines, our Louvre, if you will, not just for us but for our children and now, their children.
Once, while we hiked aimlessly in Broad Canyon, my son Dave explored a dry waterfall. In a few minutes I heard him hallooing excitedly. I followed his voice. In a shadowy niche in the rock, hidden by vegetation, he'd found a centuries-old representation, by some native artist, probably Mogollon, of a celestial event. A humanoid figure - presumably the artist himself - stood by looking as awe-stricken by what was happening in the heavens as we now were by his own artistry.
In my opinion, this picture alone justifies Broad Canyon's inclusion in the wilderness proposal now being bandied about in Doña Ana County.
I hear Big John's plaintive "while they're still here," and thank the wisdom of those who protected sites like Three Rivers, Chaco and Mesa Verde for our generation and our progeny.
"Folks take for granted what they got out here," Big John had said that day in the Floridas. "And then one day it's gone, and they wonder what happened."
After he introduced us to the rock art of the southwest, we made many expeditions in the Four Corners states, first to known repositories of Anasazi, Mogollon, Fremont and Ute artistry, then freelancing in more remote areas. Out first independent find - a modest cluster of handprints and traditional animal depictions on Comb Ridge in Utah - thrilled us, in our humble way, as Mesa Verde must have once thrilled a cowboy named Richard Wetherill.
Utah contains some of the finest rock art in the world. We got our first view of nearly life-sized Fremont pictures on a cliffside in a remote area north of Moab and it took our breath away. Naturalist-mountaineers have found countless art treasures in the hazardous teeth of Comb Ridge. Butler wash is awash in native American ruins and rock art, including, in a tiny niche a few feet from what's left of an Anasazi granary, the most exquisite little kokopelli I've ever seen.
Inevitably, here again come the plunderers of public land. The richest corporations on the planet, greedy for ever more riches; the very same faceless monoliths that rip entire tops off mountains in West Virginia, poison streams in the magnificent San Juans and operate giant "thumper trucks" on the very borders of Arches National Park; the same companies that routinely report record profits while farmers, ranchers and common folk go broke buying their products; those arrogant monuments to unregulated corporate lust, now want to go after oil and gas in yet another gallery of our great outdoor art museum.
The latest target is a place called Nine Mile Canyon (actually it's 40 miles long) in east-central Utah. Named one of America's Eleven Most Endangered Places in 2004, it contains more than 10,000 specimens of Fremont and Ute rock art, as well as the remains of ancient dwellings, arrowheads, potsherds and other relics of a bygone civilization.
Turning loose the exploiters on this gallery of our outdoor museum would increase chemicals and pollutants known to damage the antiquities by 416 percent.
We've got to start drawing lines in the sand.
Support the local wilderness proposals.
Oppose the BLM's oil and gas giveaway in Nine-Mile Canyon. The agency is obliged to take public comments until May 1, at UT_Pr_Comments@blm.gov. Give 'em an earful.
Thomas Wark was an editor with the New York Times and Philadelphia Inquirer before retiring to Las Cruces with his wife Lois.
