Ship Rock

From any distance it is all by itself. But he is not thirty-five miles away now. But what is he?

Risen alone off the dry plateau, this rock or mountain of a rock has seemed as alive as it is dead. Now nothing stands between him and it. Upwards of fifteen hundred feet of ancient gross height, it is as much before him now as the great morning is all around him.

Look, he’s not a landscape man, and here the Indians have given this thing back to him.

Ship Rock: he doesn’t know what he feels—he feels that much and more. And then knows that if now nothing stands between him and it, nothing ever did.

There’s a word for it, there always is, he thinks, for the Rock all by itself. It is all by itself—is this the huge thing about it?—as grand as its name, Ship Rock.

From far off, it is like a mountain let go by some landscape it once belonged to. But close up, two miles away now, two and a quarter, it has him all to himself. (Well, now you got it, how you gon’ move it?) What was moving out there on the Rock? An eye that swept through him unseeing, leaving him what he is. He’s what he is, no more.

Ship Rock is great and natural, a mount freaked out of nowhere so you can see it from anywhere, that shows a rock can be greater than a mountain. It’s doing something he can’t get away from. Stately monster-craft bound always in some direction other than his, as if it has no memory of prey, has only his memory.

Look, he’s not a landscape man, he didn’t plan to be here. Yet having stopped, he feels how long he’s been going. And so he looks and looks, and for several minutes doesn’t look into other spaces of this New Mexico morning. As if he’s made a discovery. Though he and discoveries are as much beyond each other as the curls of taste in his mouth are too close for contemplation if not comfort. But they’re not the taste, the touch, of raised numerals on credit cards but of cigarette smoke, of bacon, buttered toast, yolk of fried eggs, last night’s booze at a motel he’s checked out of that’s thirty, forty miles away, coffee with all the creamy chemicals that went into it to give you a send-off where you stayed seated at a breakfast table that comes with all the furniture on top of it in front of him that makes you love America, a table chosen for the window it is near, your shoes on the carpet, thumb and finger on the cup handle, waiting for the—smiling toward the—waitress in her cowgirl outfit far away across the motel’s sparsely populated dining room. There’s a painting of Ship Rock by this window that looks out on the aquamarine swimming pool. But it wasn’t the painting by the window that brought him to where he is now. And where is that?

The Rock rises upwards of fifteen hundred feet right up off the plateau. Half again that long at its base on this south side, it still seems less massive than lofty, for it is alone. That’s what the local Navajos call it—the Rock. Pretty much one rock (mono-lith) with craggy crops lifting towards two westward peaks with a massed steady shift against downward veins of long, vertical sharding and against the backward pull of what starts two-thirds of the way up, a slow climb beginning at the top of what looks like sheer cliff and climbing from there so that, notch by notch, the eye that is taken along these splits and levels takes his whole crazy body into what he’s witnessing, until something is an event.

What is?

Is it his desire to change?

To be going nowhere for a change? But he has been.

His desire is to be here—that’s it.

But he already is.

But he would like nothing to witness. Not here in the stillness of the morning wind. Not Sandia Man crossing the strait from Asia twenty-five thousand years before they thought of Christ.

Yet what is moving? Something is moving.

For him the Rock and where it is are also an aerial photograph, black and white, in a friend’s complete book two thousand miles east of this great morning of the plateau. The picture shows Ship Rock and two reptile tails running out from it south and west like low ranges. They’re called dikes.

In the lower half of that black-and-white page the gods filled in the scene ages ago. An authoritative drawing of vast layers of sedimentary terrain. Layers like colored sand. Erosion centuries deep turned into height in the cutaway segment, so the former plateau lies like a dammed sea hundreds of feet above the floor he’s standing on and, dwarfed in the towering corner made by the cutaway walls, a familiar shape haunts itself, a complete mountain unborn within the Earth, not a ship yet, while behind it the corner’s beveled geometry fans back upward like a slide upholstered in concrete—the cutaway restoration of the old volcano’s inner cone descending to the place where magma came burning up out of its underworld of pressure and bored its vent.

Ship Rock, then, if you believe the geologists, is not half what the whole scene was.

The volcano cools and becomes inactive. Last lavas inside the cone harden. Centuries of weather sweep the land. Wind wears down the plateau, the volcano has vanished.

But not what hardened inside; not the cloaked shape, the Rock down inside the now vanished cone. Shielded from the wind. Hidden inside a disappearing volcano.

Ship Rock, then, was not visible; it was inside a volcano that is not here now, a volcano visible now only to geologists with their cutaway restorations. All this is easier to believe with the discrete drawing in his friend’s book in front of him than here.

She’d looked at the drawing when he held her book out to her, and she’d said very softly, "Oh of course."

The Indians, too, speak of a time when Ship Rock was nowhere to be seen. Or are supposed to speak; or will if you can get them to.

A hundred years ago a governor proclaimed that Navajos caught off the reservation would be treated as outlaws. Well, look at how the Navajos not to mention the Apaches raided the Pueblo Indians in what is now northeastern New Mexico.

Navajos don’t talk much.

He believes them also when they say nothing.

And he tries to think where he is now. He listens to the cooler, stronger wind in that photograph two thousand miles from here, the Rock in front of him fifteen hundred feet high and rising. And it is there because it rose. In another form, if you listen to the geologists. Another life. An economist who’s lived here off and on for thirty years differs: he says as far as he knows the Rock is fourteen hundred feet high. So maybe it is settling.

Again, there’s movement, maybe it belongs to the beholder.

But while the southward dike is in the corner of his moving eye here on his left twenty or thirty feet high running beside the car track and in a minute he could climb the boulder-strewn rampart of the dike to the brittle-looking crest (and look back down to where he is or was and see only an empty car), still he is watching only the Rock, for there’s movement somewhere there.

From here the Rock is a gigantic, partly slumped thing, a sacred thing he might have to admit, until he thinks about it. Set adrift by its terrain, it’s no less on the endless Navajo reservation, and he has no plans to give it back to them, they don’t need it, but it’s theirs anyway, and not his to give, even at this hour of the February morning.

And what isn’t on the Navajo reservation? Just about everything except New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. Reservation ends when you get near the suburbs of a prosperous town with banks and bars. (The Indian women want no liquor stores on the reservation, they’ll trade the booze away, as far away as distance can contain the land, and in return they’ll take their men’s chances with car accidents.)

Did the Indians come here like him across the broad morning, watching the wind touch the dry land? When the Indians came here, they looked at this fifteen-hundred-and-thirty-foot-high berg of solidified lava shot through with hunks of sedimentary rock and granite torn from maybe nine thousand feet below and also from the volcano’s throat, and they told a story of how this deep-keeled Rock had brought them. As if it had not been here until they were. So they’re still at least tied for first.

He got off a better story than that last night in the motel bar. Multinational executive sent abroad to the wrong city and no one noticed. But other stories he’s not telling; some he doesn’t know; some he could tell without instinctively understanding.

Now moving goods he can follow—from electric power to paper products, from suds to spuds, white bread to natural gas. But funds traveling from phone to phone? from one nocturnal continent to another? from agribusiness through the congressional pocket via NASA to weather business, from insurance to war and back, the moneys finding their way into a faraway bank like a corporate thought confound him more than he ever needs to say in a report or in transcontinental gossip in a midnight saloon with a jukebox where he found he would not mention Ship Rock, didn’t want to, couldn’t.

(Well now you got it, how you gon’ move it?

Oh jes Chippeway at it.)

Not that he knew the Ship Rock stories in depth. Whose depth are they out of? his? theirs? What are those stories to him? A use the Indians put the Rock to. You can’t take that away from them. Not that the Indian Youth Council in Albuquerque guarding once-renewable land and water resources spend their time holding on to those myths. The Indians called this thing in front of him "the rock with wings."

Well, he can see wings all right.

Sort of folded.

If he’s looking at the right side.

But viewed from the west the Rock also has a prow—viewed from over there to his left toward Arizona, which is twenty-odd miles west of here. Seeing the prow, the Indians called the Rock a ship, and so its wings are also sails.

He flies to and from Ship Rock for a long moment on business, dividing himself between—well this rock has possibilities!—but such that he is one of them and is content to be hypothetical, a hypothetical man, if that’s not too safe. (Cochise Man began harvesting maize almost six thousand years ago; come on, make it an even six thousand!) He could rent a helicopter for two hundred bucks an hour.

But was he awake back in Farmington when he phoned from the motel and found he could rent one for two hundred an hour? Farmington—thirty, forty miles east of here, booming from the power plant and strip mine nearby in Fruitland. He believed the name but never found the town, didn’t look for it, found only what he was looking for, which was the plant, the mine.

Two hundred an hour to rent a chopper, fly over Four Corners Power Plant (think of flying under it), divide the labor, the chopper’s blind, throw in Ship Rock a few minutes west. And welcomes into his head now in front of Ship Rock a helicopter landing a girl on a craggy top to do an aftershave commercial, Indians don’t themselves shave, or do they?—a Hopi girl, Zuni, Pueblo, Ute, what’s it matter so long as she’s alone? to face the beast of height, be pumiced on the rough tip of rhino hide until the monster, its fading irritation pounding in its skull as the retreating aircraft sinks to the far corner of one eye, senses at last in its own renewable teeth the human gift perched riding it.

No headache took the place of that chopper, no pain the place of the girl—he saved her. He woke high and dry. The height of Ship Rock isn’t to be eroded by choppers dropping wrinkled yellow-and-black tape measures or taking soundings with a frequency that might erode the magnetic heart of the thing.

A sailing ship shrouded in power to the nomad Navajo in those generations before the plateau got to be more like desert, a wind that drew the elements together, and the earth was the earth and a supership could sail through it in those days. For was the earth not softer, subtler? has since become scrambled like the matter and/or energy of sample people two at a time standing single-file on a metal plate waiting to be turned/transformed/transported, drawn perchance (per couple) consolidated and economized into one person, a future nightmare of his (drop the mare, it’s a whole night) that only he has seen through, though he has asked if it may not be a dream while his question is a struggle floating upon a deeper struggle, which is to decide if the dream is bad or not.

Two thousand miles east and north a red convertible appeared between a blighted elm and a wide green maple. Two thousand miles east and north but at a minutely altered angle from where the friend’s book with the black-and-white photo lies. Angle of six months from the photo; six months/two hundred miles. A red convertible with flared sides—pontoons like the old running boards his father in a formal coat and top hat was photographed riding on from church to hotel at the wedding of a best friend. Pontoons now, not running boards. And the red car—the red car left the dirt road, rolled down the grassy bank into a lake and, honking at a small sailing craft, a Sunfish, that his own sun-dark daughter and son in bathing suits and only one life preserver were just coming about in, the car crossed to the far point of land and slowly went behind it honking, low in the waters of a New Hampshire lake doing eight knots instead of eighty miles an hour, the state where you’re in the shadow of Mount Monadnock which is no special respecter of the increasing complexity of family moving from the sub-Ur-father’s role as mere fertilizer (to be ploughed right in), to civilization, where the father spent much more time with his family.

Six months gets him to August, but what’s his direction? But this is also maybe six years ago. Time travel isn’t all magic; it can be hard overland work, minutes into hours into worm-geared days of a long division of labor as strung-out as a string of mistakes and as specialized as the stone of which the Ship Rock ship was made to hold together.

For a great stone ship was what the Indians observed Ship Rock to be, long before concrete hulls. The Great Spirit had sent such a ship to carry them. A vessel which he has no plans to give back to the Indians, for this is their ground anyway, all twenty-five thousand square miles of authentic Navajo desert, as full of mystery for some itinerant folklorist as for a farmer told to go ahead and plough, harrow, sow, and reap here. And here the ship is, supposedly.

Well, if it’s a ship, what does it draw?

From the west it is a weathered prow made partly of the seas through which it has come: but from here, from the south side, it’s a dark berg, gray-brown, relieved by sun to a dun ochre here and there. Which is very different (as someone importantly says, very different) from the far side, the opposite or north but not necessarily dark side, from which the Rock is a detached Alp but redder than on this south side; and on that north side high up a trough of snow with distant brevity runs down like a valley tilted vertical, and it leads down to a sheer face.

He tried to come at it from that side; didn’t get closer than about three miles, steering some cross-country dream into a gully, scraping the gas tank, the muffler—he hasn’t looked, the car’s not losing fuel, just burning it unleaden into Father Sky—but yes, smoother sailing in some early daydream he had before an alarm got him up in the motel this morning; he’ll get back to it, it’s in some limitlessly fueled motion inside a familial voice; Mother Earth’s? or an Anglo grandmother’s American voyaging in her grandson’s mind, her tales of the East Far Eastern Princess who flew over the deep land and the long waters to visit the Indians of another century—but now here on the south side looking roughly north he sees Ship Rock furled and unfurled, and slumped left-to-right down from the profiled prow. And its motion if you dig it in the faint rush of a mild wind and against a jukebox song in a motel lounge thirty-odd miles away about a "hy-po-thet-i-cal"—man, he thought—(half-heard last night beyond his own voice and others telling stories, two others, two big hats as if on one face, two voices he was with)—yes, the motion, Ship Rock’s, the motion of the ship, is all the more marked by the absence of motion in the sky, no clouds.

Oh other Ship Rock stories. Handed down (he can see them doing it), sung, unsung. Fellows around a fire—probably a painting of it on the motel dining-room wall. Handed down by women too. Do women think about ships, do they make up myths, what freedoms do they take, do they believe what men say? He’s dumb. He doesn’t know. Once there was a New Jersey grandmother who gave news of an Eastern Princess, angry, without appetite, hopeful, palely proud, riding over dry land and deep water on the back of her hungry bird.

Well, on the way out here on business he must have passed her going the other way, long dead, touring some other latitude of the dead.

Stories that weren’t hers, quite, but were stuff he carried now on him. The Indians had theirs; he had his. He liked her—his grandmother—and so he took the tales she gave him. Of this Eastern Princess whose "Father-kin" as she called him had shown her all the sights and great deeds of his country which was as far away as the mountains of Manchuria and the noises rumbling at the bottom of the world, and had introduced her to all the young nobles he and his loyal wife could muster, and he’d given her, in that country of theirs far away, an age away from the western Indians, a young and growing bird of a giant kind noted for its traveling powers and its generous appetite for large, moving animals, galloping camels in Egypt, cows in its smoking beak when it came upon them, young elephants curving their trunks back like horns, and she flew past the pyramids, and the long-elbowed mammoth goats beside the hot, lofty waterfalls of Iceland, and she visited the ritual slaughter places of five continents not to mention a healer in the Dark Continent who with a painless razor-thin whisper of a knife parted the skin of a patient’s back from neck to waist to let out the smoke and fat of difficult messages her middle-aged grandson now in contemporary New Mexico daydreamed as a boy in New Jersey that he must speak aloud, not just hand over sealed, because these words and tales he knew in his sleep, how the Eastern Princess went among crystal labyrinths decreed by the chieftains of the Chicago tribes—O.K., that’s got to be the 1893 World’s Fair she visited, but what about the unheard-of flowers growing down out of haunted ceilings that for all her humor and calm may have haunted the Anglo grandmother who once evoked them—but when her stories stretched out to the western Indians, they were other than your authentic tales given from age to age about, well, Ship Rock: if not made up by an ethnologist tape recorder in Albuquerque in collusion with the Indian Agency (stumped by unemployment), handed down to a generation of geologists (some in collusion with the energy interest—though geologists and true) who concluded, who saw, under the moon of September or here under the morning sun of February, that the Rock looks like a sailing ship.

Its sheets and shrouds hauled full. Its speed a myth unclouded and un-tackled by any measure except here this hypothetical man’s shallow anchor where he stands in front of his rented car in extreme northwest New Mexico watching Ship Rock.

It’s been there since yesterday, he couldn’t get away from it, getting closer to it, going away, coming back, scale constant, size negotiable, alone, hence receding.

He’s not sure if no one knows he’s here.

Across the red slope of beach at the base of Ship Rock about two miles from where he stands, something moved a long time ago. Too fast not to be a vehicle. Then he didn’t see it—and is there a road out there across the Rock’s sandy-looking foundation?

Who goes there in the February morning? He’s heard from an economist in Farmington thirty, forty miles from here, of lovers with pitons, hammers, climbing boots, who didn’t make it. Who went up there together and came down separately. (Permission needed to climb the Rock.) Or were never seen again, together or separate—drawn into the Rock or into themselves like newlyweds who stand on the plate twenty-some miles west and a bit north where the corners of four states—Arizona, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico— meet at one point and you and your lover can celebrate a boundless troth by being in several states at once. In 1906 the people of Arizona vetoed joint statehood with New Mexico. Maybe two stories slide together, the Rock that absorbs, the Ship that transports. The stuff breaks off; it’s volcanic tuff, a lot of it—ash—it crumbles. And people do more damage than the wind. But to themselves too. The lovers got high enough to fall but not to leap. It rises while you climb. Designed to.

The Rock’s a place itself besides where it is—a place then more three-dimensional than most places. It is its own place, he thinks, and, unaccustomed to such thoughts, he feels a slight exaltation threatened with being exposed or wiped out, knowing what he feels, holding together. And holds on to what he sees—that Ship Rock might be a fistful, a handful—might be terrain grabbed like material, a land grab, some heavy stuff like sandpaper snatched and yanked in one wrench upward where it stays stiffly, nobody’s going to hear the continental crunching sound he makes up, one hand touches the other finding a brown-and-green relief map at school in New Jersey thirty years ago swelling under glass so you wanted to run your hand over the crust of mountains, long before he knew Ship Rock existed, and if so, would it have been visible on that school map under glass?

This is Ship Rock in front of him. There it’s been since yesterday. It stuck up through its own rust haze at thirty-five miles and could be seen long before the journey to it was begun or thought of.

But now he is here, silently close.

Some two miles away, away but practically there, here on the desert-dirt track rutted down off the highway. A mile or so off, and then with a Navajo language talk-show in his ears he gently braked the car as if he’d reached the NASA Press Site for a launch how many moons ago and couldn’t get closer, and there was a white Saturn rocket, three miles away, quite a distance, but you give a monster space.

Now a rock.

He’s taken 5,648 (the plateau) away from 7,178 (the top of Ship Rock), figures on a survey map, to get 1,530 feet. Up off the plateau. The great continent of the plateau, that has a tilt, the faithful say, a long tilt as slight as time here was slow. He’ll feel the tilt this morning if he can.

The economist in Farmington could laugh quietly as if he knew where he was, and probably did, and didn’t seem to weigh his words and didn’t need to, besides some of the figures on coal and water that he handed over on a sheet of paper, also Mother Earth, Father Sky, helpmates in the song like white corn and yellow corn, the frozen reconstituted orange juice that the economist mixed with mescal like the Indian song’s music and words growing together; quoted the idea (not his own, he said) that a country is like a cargo ship where the load isn’t lashed down and when it tilts with the ship the load slips and the ship founders.

Oldest habitation in America. Desert floor is a phrase you hear. Prior words. He thinks up desert ceiling. And what falls if the ceiling tilts?

Geologists, of whom he is not one, say Ship Rock came here not across the land and sea but up from below; and the Indians, of whom he is not one, have a tale to match it, about monsters in the depths of the earth—heroic, perhaps memorable conquests of which this mass, once monstrous, is a petrified sign, for the long, miles-long dikes are the congealed blood of the Hero Twins; but he, hypothetical man, he came out to this region on business. Business that’s as visible from here—off to his right, four topless stacks hung from white smoke, twenty-odd miles off—as this Ship Rock was from there yesterday. This ship. From everywhere around here. Its draw is fathomless.

He’s at Ship Rock and didn’t mean to come. Detour this far, this close. Or has to see that he didn’t mean to come in order to guess that maybe he did.

Not that he could avoid seeing Ship Rock from where he was yesterday.

From the power plant and the strip mine beside it that were his job to see.

While Ship Rock twenty-odd miles west kept coming into sight over the shoulder of a white man in a hard hat showing him the great plant and the so-called Navajo mine. No, not the mine. He went to see the mine for himself, he passed the power plant’s distinct blue lake. "No Fishing, No Waterskiing, Keep Area Clean"—foreground against the four white smokes rising into Father Sky. They’ll tell you the strip mine’s a whole ‘nother operation; but it’s right there next to the power plant, stretching for dark hundreds and hundreds of acres beyond its own monopolized horizon.

The mine’s power plant? Well, it’s a different operation, you don’t have to dig for the mine’s power. The power plant’s mine? Well, sure—the Navajo mine. Electricity for California. Power to the People. But this isn’t California; this here is New Mexico.

"Ship Rock is distance," he jotted into his head beside some figures. But let’s not get soft-headed about the Rock out there, O.K.? your voice inside you like an inner peace attempts an inner drone.

But outside you the man’s voice in gear growls pleasantly. The man cites Navajos on the payroll. The question arises, How many, and are they in top jobs at top dollar? And what percent of the good jobs are filled by non-Indians brought in from outside?

Ship Rock sailed on in the distance like a touring hallucination. But right here Utah International’s got the black coal cars of the Navajo mine railroad hooked up behind a red-and-white-striped black locomotive.

How he first reached Ship Rock was through a book, a black-and-white glossy shot, and on the facing page an account of this supposed volcanic neck: the Rock photographed from a plane ten miles to the south, maybe more, the Rock sending off like a supermount two lesser chains, the dikes, the reptile tails. (The photograph is, among other places, two thousand miles east of here, near the three scattered members of his immediate family.)

Volcanic neck. The State of Montana boasts a volcanic neck famous from the proving grounds of New Mexico to the gales of Wyoming, but that volcanic neck doesn’t look like a ship and (courtesy of the geologist’s imagination) it’s missing a head. But wait, a voice says, we mean neck in the sense of throat. It doesn’t have to have a head on its shoulders. But the truth is that the throat is long gone; the neck is what’s left, the neck that was inside the throat, if you see.

The way the heart is inside the stomach at seven in the morning after a hard night. God, he recalls necks of land with plates of Little Neck clams on them, but not in the noise of last night.

The volcanic neck in Montana doesn’t seem to be climbing up out of the plateau like Ship Rock. He’s seeing things, he’s a victim of last night, last year, of what he’s read or been told; and he’s sick of it. And prefers to just look. Look at one object.

Prefers? The word weasels between yesterday and this coming afternoon so that they threaten to approach each other like yesterday afternoon’s business and last night at a motel, threaten to jam him between industrial information and, at the bar, boomtown big talk, two engineers from the Four Corners Power Plant, their evening Stetsons low to the eyebrows, both going home later to their ranchhouses along some street, but as for him—on a business trip—going out down the walk to his unit, past the still swimming pool, past two blondes who stopped talking as they passed him—never much on blondes—he was humming a song his first and only wife so long ago sang with a friend of theirs about a drunk husband coming home late to a bunch of wise answers—who couldn’t see or was encouraged to not quite see another man’s hat upon the hat rack—and so the wife sings,