Maestro, a film by Bradley Cooper

This 2023 Oscar contender deals well for a while with the curse of biopics: life tends not to fit the narrative arc of a satisfying story. Leonard Bernstein was a colossus in music as in spirit, and as channeled by Bradley Cooper, he fills the screen. The first half is brilliant – one imaginative sequence, an exuberant dance by a trio of sailors, Leonard, and Felicia Montealegre, in a number from “On the Town” perfectly illustrates the attractions Bernstein has to his wife-to-be and to young men. They all dance together and apart, in this scene and in the rest of the movie. 

Bernstein is a man who leans into his appetites, at one point lamenting that his love of people prevents him from the level of composing he would otherwise achieve. The effervescent banter between Felicia (Carey Mulligan) and Bernstein (Bradley Cooper) is marvelous – we feel we are in a time when parties were populated by sophisticates who traded witticisms and opinions with confidence and a light touch. But the second half drags – not just the cigs (I hoped the credits would include Cigarette Wrangler, an essential crewmember for this pic – I looked in vain for a scene in which they weren’t smoking). We already know Bernstein swings both ways, and that despite being a loving husband and father, he is also unbridled in his appetite for men. But the music – the compositions, the conducting – the reason anyone would make or watch this movie – plays second fiddle (sorry!) to his fast living – booze, coke, young guys. 

And it’s here that Cooper and his co-writer Josh Singer fall into the biography trap: they feel compelled to tell more than we need to know (“Because it happened!”) to appreciate Bernstein’s prodigious talents. I would have cut twenty minutes. The fizz of the first half has gone flat, the story dutifully plods on. Between concerts and bouts at the keyboard, we have a lot of slack time filled with pickup scenes and parties. Cut! At Felicia’s command he lies to their oldest, their daughter Jamie (Maya Hawke) about rumors of his behavior at Tanglewood. Later, it’s clear she knows what is going on. Cut! 

Much has been made of Cooper’s prosthetic nose, created by the makeup artist Kazu Hiro. I don’t know what they are complaining about – I used to watch Bernstein’s Concerts for Young People, and Cooper channeled Bernstein brilliantly – I thought I was watching the man not the actor portraying him. If you’ve seen Frank Langella as Richard Nixon, or Liev Schreiber as Henry Kissinger, or, god forbid, John Wayne as Genghis Khan (in “The Conqueror,” best watched in an altered state), you would give Cooper very high marks. 

For me the actor who stole the show was Carey Mulligan, who deserves an Oscar. Understated vs. Cooper’s flamboyance, she holds her own without being pitiful.

They Shot the Piano Player, a film by Javier Mariscal and Fernando Trueba

I love the Denver Film Festival, now in its 46th year! Depending on their reception, some of these offerings go on to wider distribution, but most you'll probably never have another chance to see on a big screen. If you love film and there's a festival in your area, you should go!

They Shot the Piano Player, a 2022 animated film, is the story of a Bossa Nova pianist with a tragically short career. Tenorio Jr. was a gifted young pianist who pioneered some of the great new syncopated jazz sounds in the early 1960s that captivated Brazil then the jazz world. He played with some of the greats: Antonio Carlos Jobim, Joao Gilberto, and many others, but only recorded one album before he simply disappeared. A New York writer working on a book in 2010 about Latin jazz listens to that album then wants to know more. 

His curiosity, and love of Tenorio Jr.’s music, take him to Rio, to Buenos Aires, to the homes and haunts of many musicians who played with him and admired him; gradually he disentangles the story of Tenorio Jr.’s disappearance in 1976 while visiting Buenos Aires. At that time, all over Central and South America, military coups, funded by the CIA as a means of “stabilizing” their political landscape, were rounding up not only dissidents and Communists, but artists, students, musicians, anyone whether overtly political or not, whom they deemed threats. 

So we get our history lesson, but alongside it we enjoy some great music and captivating images courtesy of the film’s animation team. This movie is well worth seeing on a large screen in a theater with a good sound system, where you can enjoy it at its best.

The Catherine Wheel, by Jean Stafford

This 1951 novel recalls sharply Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, which I read about a year ago. The Catherine Wheel spans a summer not a day, but moves back along the remembrances and regrets of its characters as fully and poignantly as Woolf’s. 

Cousin Katherine, unmarried, and fortyish though with hair turned white by a bout of typhus, summers in a grand house outside a small town near the Maine coast. Though the book is set in the late 1930s – early 1940s, Katherine’s life is anachronistic, as if by resisting modernity she can keep time itself from intruding. Instead of a car she has a carriage and team of horses and coachman, as well as a gardener, a cook, a couple of maids, and a tenant on her land. She is the grande dame of the region, respected and appreciated and gossiped-over by the townsfolk. 

Every summer Katherine hosts her twin nieces and nephew, who under her indulgent intellectual eye are free to do as they will. Andrew, now twelve, has been best friends with the tenant’s son Victor, a rough character a couple years older than himself, with whom he would otherwise never cross paths. In summers past they have been inseparable, performing mischief, fishing and clam-digging, swimming and boating, and spying on the townsfolk of the nearby village. This year, however, Victor’s older brother Charles, a sailor, is home with some nonspecific ailment; Victor appoints himself nursemaid and confidante. Andrew is inflamed with jealousy – he has lost his companion, and the hours weigh on him. He longs for Charles’s death, or recuperation and return to seafaring – either would give Victor back to him. 

But this is not to be – Charles’s health waxes and wanes, Victor is under his sway, and Andrew wishes ever more fervently that Charles will meet some terrible fate. Katherine has her own secret, but while she and Andrew suffer and sense each other’s misery, they cannot confide. Yet, their dual distresses unbalance the household, so that instead of Katherine’s firm grip on her emotions and Andrew’s youthful nature steadying them, they only grow worse in tandem. 

Woolf’s visitations into the pasts of her characters are no less perceptive and pointed than those Stafford brings to bear, and we have to ask ourselves: which turning was the one that changed our trajectory from a steady and hopeful one, to disaster? Which thwarted relationship warped our future, crippling our capacity to live our ideal lives? It is too late for remedy – one can only plan for a fitting end.

Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer

This book, published in 1995, grew out of an article Krakauer wrote for Outside magazine in January, 1993, five months after its subject, Christopher McCandless (who called himself Alex, and Alexander Supertramp) died of starvation in the Alaska wilderness. Krakauer, an adventurer in the same mold as McCandless, dug deeper after the article was published – who was Chris/ Alex McCandless? Why did he end up alone in an abandoned bus, missing a couple of key opportunities to trek out? Was it hubris, ignorance, or the courage of his convictions, that compelled him away from the practical resources that would have saved him? 

Krakauer asks these questions and more as he retraces McCandless’s footsteps from his college days in Atlanta, to wandering across the south, the desert, nearly drowning in the Gulf of California, living on the edge of the Mojave Desert in the sort of rag-tag community that can only exist in such marginal places. Along the way, McCandless, with his combination of intellectual curiosity, adventurous spirit, and candor, made deep impressions on those he encountered. 

Perhaps because he was young, idealistic, and fixated on his quest for an adventure that would challenge him to the marrow, he evoked protectiveness and generosity from those who gave him rides, offered him jobs and shelter, and tried to temper his singlemindedness. They saw in him a roving son, grandson, brother, or in Krakauer’s case, a kindred spirit, and wanted to help him on his quest, advise him, or lay bare the folly of his pursuit. 

McCandless left enough of a record – in journal scraps, letters and postcards to those he met, and in the margins of books – to provide insight into his convictions. Here’s a quote from a letter he sent to a grandfather living in the Mojave Desert, who had provided him shelter for some weeks: 

“Don’t settle down and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon. You are still going to live a long time, Ron, and it would be a shame if you did not take the opportunity to revolutionize your life and move into an entirely new realm of experience. 

“You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.” 

If you have only the haziest memory of your own youthful follies, read this book. You may tell yourself, “I’d never do anything that dumb,” but if you’re honest, you might admit that you did your own foolish things – from curiosity, from a yen for what lies over the horizon, from an itch daily life could not scratch. We remember Chris/Alex McCandless because he was an extreme manifestation of the questing spirit that takes so many of us on our own adventures, away from our comfort zones to an edge where we can see further, and imagine more, and return (if we do) greater in spirit.

The Quiet American, by Graham Greene

Perhaps you have heard of this excellent 1955 novel. You are likelier to have seen a film version – the one from 1958 starring Michael Redgrave and Audie Murphy, or the 2002 remake with Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser. But if you have not read the book, you may be acquainted with plot and characters without perceiving the depths, which are the source of the book’s power. 

Vietnam, 1952-55. Thomas Fowler is a cynical and weary middle-aged English journalist living in Saigon, reporting on uprisings against the French colonial grip. Into his life comes Alden Pyle, the quiet American of the title. His attitudes are bookish and moral and clear-cut. In Pyle’s world there are no shadows. But Vietnam is all gray. He falls for Phuong, the young woman who keeps company with Fowler. He wants to save her, to elevate her from her life in Saigon. Because he is young, when he offers to marry her, Phuong sees better prospects, and agrees. Fowler, who depends on her, strives to recapture the equilibrium of the indifferent – Pyle has got under his skin. Fowler would marry her himself, except that his estranged wife in London refuses to divorce him. 

The plot is not the point. Pyle is murdered, and Fowler has his own reasons for being involved. Besides an undercurrent of rivalry, Fowler loathes Pyle’s methods, the young American’s clear conscience while he busies himself building up the Third Force which will usher in Democracy over the heads of the Communists and dictators. A bomb going off in a crowded square at the hour when the place is most crowded with women and children is simply an error of timing – the parade in which a few colonels would be blown up, was called off. Fowler is there, seeing the young mother holding her dead baby, the trishaw driver whose legs were blown off. Pyle arrives, complaining of the blood on his shoes and shrugging off maiming and death as an ancillary cost of his great cause. 

Greene developed a degree of cynicism over a career spent in places where his privileges as a white Englishman set him apart – alienate him – without grounding him in faith nor honesty. He regards himself as a fraud, and thus recognizes it in those around him. Greene is thereby able to present us both Thomas Fowler, who stands in for his own views, and Alden Pyle, who despite his strait-laced awkwardness, eschewing booze and prostitutes, wields death as the tool put into his hands by those who sent him to Vietnam. He does not apologize: he believes in it, just as American officers would say a decade later, “It was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.” 

When Fowler makes a trip north and rides along on a French bombing run, he witnesses the pilot making a “vertical raid” in which he dives the plane thousands of feet, strafing and bombing as he goes, repeats the maneuver a dozen times, then as they return to the airstrip, blows a sampan out of the water because his instructions are to shoot anything on the river. That evening at an opium house, he addresses Fowler’s appalled reaction: 

“You are a journalist. You know better than I do that we can’t win. You know the road to Hanoi is cut and mined every night… But we are professionals: we have to go on fighting till the politicians tell us to stop. Probably they will get together and agree to the same peace that we could have had at the beginning, making nonsense of all these years.” His ugly face which had winked at me before the dive wore a kind of professional brutality like a Christmas mask from which a child’s eyes peer through the holes in the paper. “You would not understand the nonsense, Fowler. You are not one of us.” 

Where the film versions fall short is in their inability to convey Greene’s masterful writing. Here is Fowler’s first impression of Pyle, in a café in Saigon: “Perhaps only ten days ago he had been walking back across the Common in Boston, his arms full of books he had been reading in advance on the Far East and the problems of China. He didn’t even hear what I said; he was absorbed already in the dilemmas of Democracy and the responsibilities of the West; he was determined – I learnt that very soon – to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world. Well, he was in his element now with the whole universe to improve.” 

Greene tells the story in reverse: almost the first thing we learn is that Pyle has been found murdered where he should not have ventured. Perhaps this is the novelist’s riposte to Pyle’s certainty – to start with his death, then explore what little of his life he spends in Vietnam, showing us what he might have learned and ultimately does not. Meanwhile, Fowler, his foil, tries to open the young idealist’s eyes. Fowler can’t hate him for taking Phuong – the Englishman already knows too much about impermanence – and can’t love him for saving his life during a Viet Minh attack in a rice paddy – he would have preferred just to die. But when Pyle accepts that the road to Democracy is necessarily paved with the innocent dead, that Fowler cannot ignore. Greene’s warning booms down the decades – have we learned anything? Can we? The Quiet American is as timely today as when it was written nearly seventy years ago.

Past Lives, a film by Celine Song

This 2023 Korean film concerns the long-term fascination of a pair of Koreans, initially 12-year-olds. Hae Sung has finally earned the highest grade on a test, usually Na Young’s spot. Her artist parents announce to Na Young and her sister that they are immigrating to Canada, and the girls should choose Anglicized names. She decides on Nora Moon. She grows up in Toronto, becomes a playwright, and we see her at a writing residency in New York.  Spoiler Alert – I'm going to discuss the whole film. If you don't want to know more before you see it, Stop Now!

Twelve years later, Hae Sung makes contact through her father’s FaceBook page, and for a couple of years the two have frequent video calls. She asks if he plans to visit, he says maybe in a couple of years, asks her about visiting Korea; she doesn’t see that on her horizon, and breaks off contact. Another dozen years pass. Hae Sung is an engineer. He still longs for her, and decides to travel to New York – and admits to friends that he hopes to see Nora. 

They are pleased to be together, but their lives have diverged: she’s been married 7 years to an American Jew she met during her writing fellowship; he recently broke up with his long-time girlfriend because, in his own estimation, he is too ordinary, and as an only child she deserves an extraordinary spouse. “Past lives” refers to reincarnation, and to the idea of Borges’ Garden of Forking Paths in which an infinity of options are reduced to our individual trajectories: “past” in the sense of “gone by.” 

Nora’s husband Arthur asks whether, if she’d become involved with a different man at the writing residency, she might now be married to someone else, and her life with Arthur would never have happened. But Nora quashes that – here they are, together, and this is the life they have chosen and created. There is no other. She does not see some could-have-been life in her memories of Hae Sung – she is who and where she is, wholeheartedly. 

But when she, Arthur, and Hae Sung sit in a bar and she and Hae Sung have a conversation in Korean Arthur can barely follow, they talk about the Korean concept of In-Yon, in which affinity is a result of thousands of years of reincarnations, and cannot be denied. He speculates: perhaps in a past life she was a queen and he was a henchman, and they had an illicit affair. Or she was a songbird and he was a branch she alit on, before she flew off. But affinity or not, she stands firm in her choices: she can only be who she is now, and to sink into regret is to abandon the present in favor of some past life she cannot live. 

The other layer explored here is the immigrant experience – she explains to Arthur that seeing Hae Sung reminds her how Americanized her Korean American friends are, and how the culture Hae Sung is part of is one she gladly shed. Arthur knows some Korean, and Hae Sung has learned a bit of English, but their limited knowledge is one more aspect of their discomfort with each other. Both are jealous: Hae Sung of the man Nora chose to build her life with, Arthur of the man his wife can so easily communicate with, who shared first love. 

And yet, there is no explosion, no fight – as adults they assess their positions and accept them. It’s good to see a grown-up film!

Inside Box 1663, by Eleanor Jette

On a recent trip into New Mexico’s Jemez Mountains, we visited Los Alamos, an almost nonexistent spot on the map until the Army commandeered the valley in 1943 for work on the Atomic Bomb. In Inside Box 1663, published in 1977 by the Los Alamos Historical Society, the story of life in the compound is  vividly recalled by Eleanor Jette, wife of a scientist and mother of a nine-year-old boy. The place was ill-suited for a rapidly-expanding workforce. Begun on the site of a boys’ school, the original dormitories and Bathtub Row, housing for school personnel, quickly overflowed into surrounding fields. Living space, allotted by status in the bomb-building effort and family size, was seldom adequate. 

Water, in limited supply to begin with, was soon a dire situation – springs that fed the source creek were clogged and during the dry months, dwindled. Constant exhortations to conserve water were unequal to the severe disconnect between population and supply. Eleanor Jette, on arrival appalled by housing conditions, was not a complainer but a doer, and soon employed her wit and native intelligence to the problems, battling frequently with Army officers whose hands were tied by budget constraints. She and a few women friends quickly formed a group that helped newcomers adapt, hounded the decision-makers, and found ways to blow off steam. 

This human’s-eye-view of the cloistered world of Trinity, the Los Alamos section of the Manhattan Project, is a useful addition to the biographies of famous men (Robert Oppenheimer, Leslie Groves, etc.) whose experiences have gained wider recognition. Without the pressure of women like Eleanor, it’s possible Los Alamos itself may have burned to the ground, its occupants poisoned by polluted water and alternately frozen in hard winters and roasted in hot summers (while the Army directive to stoke furnaces till May 15th regardless of conditions, rendered dormitories uninhabitable). 

She has fun with the secrecy – they were not allowed to tell anyone where they were going nor why. Her New Mexico drivers license identifies her as Number 44, her residential address Special List B, Santa Fe. “I had joined the secret society whose membership was closely guarded. Thus, I later became Number 9 for income tax purposes, and when the laundry service was resuscitated, I was Number 464. We were numbered for everything except our ration books, and the numbers were never the same. Our official address was Box 1663, Santa Fe.” 

As Robert Oppenheimer is in the headlines again in a new film, it’s worth considering the lives of those who toiled to make existence tolerable alongside the bomb-builders.

Finding the Mother Tree, by Suzanne Simard

Published in 2021, this fine book details the research of a Canadian woman whose family were foresters, and who in working with the Canadian Forest Service, conducted scientific experiments to determine why the seedlings planted in clearcuts were dying. Her studies led her to mapping the mycorrhizal (fungal) networks connecting root systems, helping her to see how the trees communicate, share nutrients, warn each other of disease – diametrically opposed to the notion of competitive growth, the zero-sum game, that the forestry old guard believed, which they have used to justify clearcutting and monocropping policies. 

Simard’s experiments and reports gained some attention, though the entrenched patriarchy gave her little credence. But she found unexpected allies, and the further she explored, the deeper her conviction grew that a forest is a network: cooperating, nurturing, protecting its members. And the Mother Trees are the great matriarchs of the forest, their mycorrhizal networks ranging furthest, their seeds scattered by birds and animals, by wind and water, nourished where they fall. 

In the face of climate change, with increasing stresses on plant communities, it is more important than ever to let the Mother Trees flourish, to retain old growth areas, to recognize their wisdom and awareness, their equality with humans. We assume we are superior to nature, which gives us the hubris to “manage” it – in many cases, to death – without needing to comprehend its capacities and vulnerabilities. Those days must end. Simard documents how forests heal, but that process cannot begin until we acknowledge the harm we are doing. 

She founded https://mothertreeproject.org/ to encourage broader understanding of these remarkable trees and the communities they anchor. It’s high time we fit ourselves into the web of life, rather than viewing it as something to be conquered. With a little humility, we just might learn from beings that have been around for centuries, and in preserving them, give ourselves a better shot at survival.

Tribute to Edwin Forrest Ward

Edwin Forrest Ward – a Tribute 

By NC Weil 

In every community, at its heart 

Is a person who either made it start 

Or took it on as their own commitment, 

To grow, sustain, to care what it meant. 

For writers and songsters in Denver here 

The man who stood in the middle is clear – 

Ed Forrest Ward set up a venue, 

Inviting us all to be on the menu – 

Stories, Stories spread the plate 

To write, to tell, to captivate. 

You and Marcia reserved the Merc 

And Imagemaker got to work 

To craft the invites to us all:

“Fourth Tuesday – heed the siren’s call 

Of voices varied, come and share. 

Creative sparks will fill the air!” 

So many have, for ten fine years 

Embraced assembly with our peers. 

Leading off with a Philly tale 

Or seventies Denver: he’d unveil 

A place we maybe thought we knew, 

But from Ed’s unique point of view: 

Gone in a Taxi to the Dark Side 

Or with Lucia on a Pow-wow ride, 

Or a ghost from a bygone neighborhood 

The man in the attic lonely stood 

And watched cops puzzling in the street – 

Where can he be? He’s got them beat. 

All through life your stories rose 

Insisting to you: Stop! Compose! 

Share your thought and incidents, 

Steep them in your eloquence. 

An impresario is one 

Who trades in the phenomenon 

Of gathering, and drawing out 

The storytellers round about – 

The songs, the memoirs, and the fiction 

Made us richer through depiction – 

The deadline looms to stand on stage 

Painting us all another page. 

Thank you, Ed, for the groups you founded, 

Those magic nights we sat astounded. 

And we remember, by the way, 

That aphorism you liked to say: 

“A contract with the muse is a contract for life” 

You kept her happy – she’s been your midwife!

The Ballad of the Grand Traverse, by NC Weil

The Ballad of the Grand Traverse

 By NC Weil 

I'll introduce our hardy team, 

Training for this since 2018: 

Page and Josh, equipment geeks, 

Skiing and suffering endless weeks. 

They’ve never made it all the way 

Crested Butte to Aspen, night then day,   

Forty miles of ice and snow, 

Hoping frigid winds don't blow. 

First attempt, turned back by weather, 

Then Page must pause to be a father, 

His son born the day of the second try, 

He had to let the race go by. 

In 2020 Covid hit, 

Every gathering stopped by it. 

 

So of this Grand Traverse I’ll tell: 

It didn’t start so very well: 

Early on, a ski pole breaking, 

Then Page’s hands commenced to shaking, 

Legs soon cramping – are we finished? 

Electrolytes those spasms diminished. 

Now to the slog they bend their wills, 

Up the dark and towering hills 

While moon peers down and pairs spread out, 

Spandex and plastic round about, 

Five hundred headlamps up the climb 

Laboring to make good time – 

The Brush Creek cutoff’s coming soon – 

Steady striding is your tune. 

Climbing more, up to Star Pass – 

Scarf those snacks, step on the gas, 

Make it to Checkpoint Number Two, 

Up on top with a moonlit view – 

High above the Taylor River, 

What a sight – it makes you shiver! 

A leg-burning grind to Taylor Pass, 

Knowing the Mutants are hauling ass, 

Up and over 12,000 feet, 

Lungs a-throbbing, thighs dead beat 

And mercifully, a downhill slope 

With sunrise greetings – sign of hope! 

Skiing across the top of the world, 

A vista of peaks in snow unfurled 

Down and up to Barnard Hut, 

The last check-in for your weary butt. 

Well past halfway – you’re going to make it! 

Not the record – you won’t break it,

Except the one you’re aiming for: 

Your body’s strength you must explore 

Why else be in this crazy race, 

Not just the distance but the pace? 

Eighty teams are turning back, 

Not fast enough where slopes might crack 

And avalanches take them down – 

Reversed, their path leads back to town. 

But you are fast enough to pass 

So on you go for your final gasp. 

Aspen Mountain, here you come, 

Having earned encomium – 

Wittiest team name convergence – 

You’re the Forty Year Old Virgins! 

Prize in hand, your bottle of rum,

On to a meal and beer you come.

But now that you’ve gone all the way, 

“Experienced” is yours to say. 

Way to go, you hardy mensches, 

Wowing those of us warming benches. 

Witnesses to long rehearsal,

We laud you for your Grand Traversal!

April 2, 2023

The Plague of Doves, by Louise Erdrich

This complex 2008 book has more characters than a Tolstoy novel. It is not one story but multitudes, with narrators of different generations, whose experiences intertwine and haunt and goad each other. Some are Native Americans, some are German or French immigrants, in a lonely section of North Dakota where reservation land borders failing small towns. Family trees interlock and divide and plunge skyward and earthward in a confusion the reader could either diligently list, or just flip back through to see which maimed branch this orphaned brother, this obsessed banker, belonged to. 

Or you could just read it for the stories, as rich and abundant as any Salman Rushdie could conjure – a violin that saves a hell-bent young man; a grandfather with many versions of how he lost half an ear; a baby that survives the murder of her entire family in an act that reverberates through the book; a preacher so swelled with spirit that none can withstand him – and more. Love affairs and vengeance and waywardness, the whole range of humanity with our fixed notions of the world, who cannot recognize what we’re doing even as we push it to its dreadful end, crowd its pages. 

Some of Erdrich’s work has plot. This one focuses on a place and its people; as with lives anywhere, plenty happens but not in furtherance of a tale so much as spinning out events and years, creating deep impressions of prairie and its inhabitants. As readers of Erdrich would expect, her characters span the spectrum of bigotry, intolerance, and delusion while tottering on the edge of absurdity, slowly releasing their secrets onto the page.

House of Rain, by Craig Childs

House of Rain is an archaeological journey through the American Southwest, starting with Chaco Canyon and ending in the northern Sierra Madre in Mexico. Childs, not himself a credentialed archaeologist, is a man driven by curiosity and imagination who, rather than bowing to the accepted narrative of ancient peoples, looks for himself at the ruins, the pottery patterns, the feathers and burials and architecture, and reaches his own conclusions. He works with and discusses with many bona-fide archaeologists his ideas, his finds, and his questions. 

Some discount his theories, others offer bolstering evidence. By examining not only maps but the land itself, he makes connections, observing for example the ruler-straight meridians connecting Chaco Canyon with other population centers, and standing on heights where signal fire remains are visible, communicating across distances to other groups. His writing is detailed and lovely as he conveys the inhospitality of the landscape, chronicling visits in the depths of winter, the scorch of high summer, in pouring rain and parching drought. He spends a lot of time climbing in and out of precipitous canyons, and the safety-maven in me is often annoyed by his lack of top-ropes, communication devices, and other rudiments of preparedness for dangerous climbs. But the people he is learning about surely made these same climbs and descents, sometimes supported by holds carved into rock or wood ladders, but other times likely using methods similar to his, to reach their destinations. 

Childs’s overarching question is about the Anasazi (a misnomer which he uses as representative of a vanished culture without applying further definition to it) – why did they “disappear”? The archaeological record suggests that they abandoned Chaco Canyon and its outposts in the twelfth century AD. Looking at the layers of use in ruins, he concludes that they were migratory people, moving in response to conditions, especially drought and the absence of game to hunt. He sees that groups left a particular site in cycles of several centuries, their descendants returning as conditions improved, then after a few generations, moving on again. 

It was not abandonment but a shifting – they took their culture with them into territories of greater abundance – of water, of game. In some cases they strongly influenced the groups among whom they resided – occasionally dominating, possibly enslaving, the inhabitants; in other cases they built their structures in the very midst of the locals’, as if thumbing their noses at what they considered lesser cultures. 

He goes out on a limb, making the case that the Anasazi culture and its successors extended from Chaco Canyon into the Sierra Madre, citing trade in tropical birds from Mesoamerica, turquoise, and pottery designs to support his thesis. Some archaeologists agree with him, but the prevailing narrative separates events and groups in Mexico from those in what later became the US, as though the boundaries we maintain now have always existed. 

I am struck by the respect with which he treats these sites: often he finds burial areas, pottery shards, weavings, feathers and other artifacts. He handles them with care and respect, then returns them to where he found them. This conforms to modern field practice, but it is also a choice we feel he would make anyhow: these things should remain where their makers left them.