Canyon Voices
By Greer Chesher
Long ago, I lived in what were then the wilds of New Mexico. Only an hour from Santa Fe, the Pajarito
(Little Bird) Plateau’s thick ponderosa forests concealed from the unsuspecting world not only the Los
Alamos National Lab, but native tribes, their ancestral tufa-built homes, and living traditions. My best
friend, a young native runner from nearby Jemez Pueblo, was the second-youngest son of a man old
even then. One afternoon, sharing a bowl of posole and deer meat scalded with more red chili than my
Michigan-bred mouth had ever encountered, my friend’s father told me how, if a hunter does things
right, the deer will offer itself to the hunter. Puzzled, I took a much needed break from my tongue-
blistering to look his way. He, looking at the floor, continued, “when the animal gives its life for the
hunter, he should be there, breathe in the deer’s last breath, give thanks.” I looked from him to my
friend, unsure if this message was meant for me or his son. “If you don’t honor this gift, it will be taken.
The deer won’t come.” He rose then, headed out, but before leaving reached into a pottery bowl next to
the door, pinched a bit of its powdery contents between weathered fingers, and nonchalantly tossed it
into the corner fireplace. The pollen offering streaked golden through filtered light. I sat motionless,
silent, eyes wide.
This memory returns unbidden as I sit beside southern Utah’s Virgin River watching pollen, the color of
sunlight, puffed brightly by the wind. It is as if the trees, knowing we’ve forgotten how to honor the
land, do our work for us, without asking. A perpetual offering. Overhead, Canada geese honk their way
downriver, sounding like ungreased wheels or a swinging door’s rusted hinges. Yellow warblers call from
riverside willow winding down like a spun dime. Unexploded cottonwood pods swell and cliffrose
flowers unfurl beyond our hearing. Fish swim, owls glide, rodents burrow, microbes reproduce—so
much of this canyon’s daily life goes on beyond our keenest perception. Yet where would we be without
it? Our physical and other-than-physical lives depend on so much we cannot see, smell, or taste, on the
canyon’s unheard voices.
But perhaps, in ways still beyond our understanding, we can feel them. Richard Nelson, in his book, The
Island, wrote, “As time went by, I also realized that the particular place I’d chosen was less important
than the fact that I’d chosen a place and focused my life around it. Although the island has taken on
great significance for me, it’s not more inherently beautiful or meaningful than any other place on earth.
What makes a place special is the way it buries itself inside the heart, not whether it’s flat or rugged, rich
or austere, wet or arid, gentile or harsh, warm or cold, wild or tame. Every place, like every person, is
elevated by the love and respect shown toward it, and by the way in which is bounty is received.”
Gibbs Smith said in his book, Blessed by Light, “the Colorado Plateau chooses its people.” Although not
from here, these writers remind us of our place, of what we forget to hear; they toss the pollen.
U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass wrote, “Thoreau read Wordsworth, Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt
read Muir, and you got national parks. It took a century for this to happen, for artistic values to
percolate down to where honoring the relations of people’s imagination to the land, or beauty, or to
wild things, was issued in legislation.”
Four influential people speaking, writing, changed the world. But it took a century. We don’t have a
century to protect what’s left. But we do have thousands, millions of people who can be influential, if
we speak of what the land tells us. Barry Lopez wrote, our job “…is to undermine the complacency of
how most people relate to the landscape.”
The canyon speaks for itself, but quietly and of paintbrush in bloom, the drip of springs, the shockwave
of rockfall. It’s ours to speak in a language the canyon can’t, to beings who may not hear. The canyon
cannot protect itself. Only we can do that. We are the canyon voices. Are you one of the chosen? Do
deer offer themselves? If you are lucky and this place proffers itself to you, the question becomes, what
will you do with this gift? Speak.