The pinyon and juniper are thick and deep around me, glowing with health after a summer full of rainy days. I can tell the new growth, a slightly lighter green than the older needles, and there is much of it. The pinyon branches are full, and most have small cones perched at ends. Upright and attentive, the ephedra seems buoyed by having its thirst finally quenched, and the sagebrush is tall, its leaves soft like sueded leather. The recent rains also have washed fresh rocks to the surface, making it a great time for spotting chert, so I walk out from camp facing the sun and amble around the amber bench of tricolor Kayenta Sandstone.
Within minutes, the sunlight catches shimmers of silica in an elongated triangle-shaped stone the color of maple sugar. Chert. I pick it up and immediately see that it is a fine example of an arrowhead with only the tip missing. It is centuries old, a relic of the ancestral native people who lived here and hunted the deep green valley below where the two largest rivers on the Western Slope of Colorado converge to become the mighty Colorado.
I hold the piece for a while, caressing it with my thumb and enjoying the feel of the worked stone. There was a time many years ago, when I was new to looking for chert and didn’t have an eye for it, that I would have been elated by this find. At that time, I found very few artifacts, and I might have taken it, but I don’t anymore and haven’t for a long time. I still feel excited when I find sherds and lithics, but now I enjoy the feeling of the artifact and the figuring of its story before I return it to the land like I would any other rock or stick that caught my eye. I know people who take chips or points or potsherds sometimes, but I don’t personally know anyone who takes them all the time, who goes looking for them to take. To hoard.
In addition to arrowheads or chips or potsherds, which are the most common, I have found handles, knives, scrapers, spear points and other things out hiking around. To be clear, I am looking for them, but not to take them; more in the same way I am looking for collared lizards or bighorn sheep or claret cup blossoms or how many cones the pinyon trees have this year.
If you spend enough time hiking around the Colorado Plateau and you are paying attention, you will stumble, at the very least, on chips of chert, a staple stone used by Native Americans to make arrowheads and a mind-boggling array of other tools. They used other types of stone, but chert was the most prevalent because it works easily and holds a nice edge. You probably also will find a potsherd—a piece of clay pottery. I did not start out with any kind of eye for these things. It took me years to be able to regularly spot chert and sherds among the uncountable array of rocks beneath my feet.
I was seldom moved to take chert chips, but when I found my first intact arrowhead, I took it, and I didn’t really think twice about it. I was so excited. My husband and I have never taken much, but in those years, if we did, it was a unique rock or a crystal we found hiking. Still they added up until we had a large bowl full of them: cool green rocks, blue rocks, heart-shaped rocks, rocks with quartz crystals in them, amethyst, small drops of obsidian, brown-and-black striped rocks that looked like they were made of glass from Dolly Varden; ugly but sentimental rocks from the top of peaks we had climbed. Just a lot of rocks, because most of the hiking we did took us above treeline, and that is where the rocks are. I never had an ethical issue with this, because, well, they were just rocks. Pretty soon, though, I had a storage issue, which led to a cease-and-desist treaty with my husband: no more rocks.
“We don’t have anywhere to put them.”
“What if we build a sample case and identify them, like a museum?” he offers.
“Well, that would be cool to have when we build the museum wing of our house. Until then, though, let’s just stop with the rocks.”
In truth, though, it wasn’t just rocks we found. If there was mining where we were hiking, we found other things: fancy buttons, intact newspaper from 1897, glass bottles, pieces of denim fabric–and I have taken a few of them. When I consider how much I have seen and not taken, the percentage is very small. To quantify, I have about a baker’s dozen non-rock things I have taken from old mining sites, and they are in a display case with other natural oddities I have found out walking around: a tuft of mountain goat fur, an elk’s ivory tooth, you get the idea.
At that time, when I was newer to hiking around, seeing something human-made in the wilderness was an absolute thrill, a postcard from the past that connected me to people from the past who were there, right where I stood, doing the very same thing I was doing. Drawn to it like bugs to light, my husband and I, and later my kids, would get to camp, head to the tailings pile or grassy basin or mining ruin and start poking around. We still do. But even when I took those first few items, no matter what I thought in my head, it didn’t feel right in my heart.
Colorado Plateau writer Craig Childs has written an entire book on this topic called Finders Keepers, and it ponders and pokes at all sides of this conundrum. Firstly, it is illegal to take things from any National Park, so there is that. The Antiquities Act is a little more vague, but for me, legality isn’t the crux of the issue. At the heart of pocketing from public lands, at least for me, is how I feel about acquiring things and how that leads naturally to ownership. In the moment, acquisition feels good, and science has shown people get a happiness hormone surge when they get something new. After that, though, it is a case of diminishing returns.
A few years ago, when my family moved from a 1,200-square foot home with a 1,000 square foot garage on acreage to an 1,100 square foot condo with a couple of small sheds, we downsized. A lot. In that process, we were forced to make choices, selling a little and giving away a lot. Many things were easy to get rid of because they had served the rural lifestyle we were leaving behind—rain barrels for the garden, feeders and water contraptions for the chicken coop, tools, shelving units to store the tools, archery targets, backup this and extra those.
It was also fairly easy to identify what we knew we wanted to keep; the stuff that really mattered—work tools and all the play things: boats, bikes, and gear for camping, skiing, hockey, and backpacking. We kept the things we used to enhance our lives and our passion to be outdoors, which was a manageable amount.
In between what was clearly staying and clearly going were some harder decisions, and I still miss some of things: my grandmother’s heirloom furniture, a set of inherited dishes, a beloved old Tacoma truck we used for plowing. And then, near the end of moving, we had to decide what to do with the bucket full of rocks.
My husband and I both had spent time living out of backpacks—him hitchhiking around America and me backpacking around Europe–and through that we learned the same lesson: how little you actually need and how liberating it felt to live that lightly. In our younger years we both moved a lot, and stuff was a burden, but even when we settled we had so little. I lived for years in a 12 foot by 12 foot cabin and, other than clothes and gear and cooking items, I never needed much. When we had kids and chickens and gardens, then the accumulation started. It happened so gradually that we hardly noticed.
Getting rid of it all felt glorious. I was so glad to see it go because with every thing we gave away, a chore went with it. No chickens to tend, no garden to maintain, no driveway to plow, no landscaping to maintain. Poof. Gone.
When all that stuff and chores were gone, what remained was time. Time to hike and read and ski and sit and visit and do the things that make up a life. When I think about taking artifacts from their sites–whether to stick them in a bloated museum or to hide them away in some looters’ panic room—I wonder, “What would the first Native Americans think if they traveled forward in time and watched us taking their potsherds or arrowheads or intact pots or items they put in their burial chambers?’ This is impossible to answer, but leads to another question: “What do we really want when we put that artifact in our pocket or pack?” Some want the money it will bring, some want to brag to their friends, some take it because they consider themselves“amateur archeologists” whatever that even is.
For me, though, I think back to a particular phase of my life when I collected books, almost compulsively. Usually I got them from thrift stores, but it seemed I would see a book I wanted to read, and I would not be able to stop myself from getting it. It would lay around for a time on a table by a chair representing a hope that I would sit down some morning with a jug of coffee and read for hours. In those days of small children and large chore lists, I rarely sat down, and if I did I was eating or I had a kid on my lap or both. Days would pass and, sick of seeing it laying on the table, I would put the book on the shelf with all the other books I hadn’t read, getting more frustrated each time by the number of unread books filling my bookcase. And, I would move on with my life that was filled with doing and not much reading.
I did this until one day I realized that I didn’t want any more unread books. What I really wanted was time to read, and the book was just a symbol of that intangible and elusive thing: time to myself. I think the same is true of artifacts, at least for me. What I really want is to connect with people who lived where I live but in such a different way. I want to connect to that more natural existence and understand what it was like. I want to experience their relationship to the land; to time travel through the few things they left behind to a simpler way of living.
This realization leads me to a possible answer to the question of what I think they would say if they traveled to our time and saw people with small tokens or large private collections of artifacts stored in their homes. I think they would be pretty miffed about the desecration of their burial sites–as we would today–but I also think they might look around at the entirety of what modern day life is like and ask, “Why do you have all this stuff?” I think they may see modern Americans as hoarders and looters of the earth and suspect that we took a wrong turn somewhere.
An Anglo friend of ours who has spent time participating in modern Native American ceremonies said he feels like the ancient people imbued things they made with their own spirit. How can it not be so when every object they used was made with their own hands? Other than the dinner we may cook from food other people have grown, I can’t think of anything the average person uses that they make with their own hands from earth-gathered elements. We have no experience of a lifecycle that begins with gathering stone or clay or fibers from a yucca and using our incredibly capable hands and brains to fashion that raw material into a useful thing, to decorate it so it is more lovely, to use it until it is no longer fit for that function, to thank it for its gift of service and return back to the earth it came from. Is the spirit of the maker and the user interwoven into the object? How can it not be?
Marie Kondo, in her book The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, reintroduced this notion to modern life by encouraging people to consider that things had spirits. She invited people to hold objects in their hands to see if they sparked joy. If not, she counseled, thank the object for what it has given you and set it free. For a hyper industrialized society, this was a very primitive and reductivist notion. But the accumulation of objects—purchased or plundered—has an impact on a person’s spirit. Imagine the quality of spirit in things that were made by people who gathered the clay and the water and used their own hands and skills and souls to make a pot to hold the food that their very lives depended on. Maybe we no longer can. So we take.
Just today, a few steps from my camp in a national park, I find more relics among the rubble: the tip of a chert knife blade with an edge still sharp enough to cut a stick, a possible fragment of dinosaur bone, a scraper. I pick them up, then put them back, and immediately feel better when I return them to the ground. Every time.
I feel better because I really don’t want to take the fossil or relic home and stick it in that box I never look at only to be saddled with the owning of it all, a burden that weighs so heavily over time. I have read tragic news stories of pot hunters–looters in southeastern Utah who had huge collections of artifacts that they pillaged from sites–who were murdered or committed suicide. Was it the spirit of the artifacts that got to them or did they arrive at the inevitable end of the unchecked accumulation of stuff that tempts all modern Americans, whether it comes from Wal-mart or Wall Street or the natural wall of Comb Ridge?
Growing up I remember hearing the musty maxim, “You can’t take it with you,” as a caution to a money-centered life. The phrase entered the mainstream through a popular depression-era Frank Capra film of the same name. In the movie, a son of the “haves” wants to marry a daughter of the “don’t wants.” In a key scene, the “don’t want” granddad tells the “have” dad, “What if all your deals fall through? Might be a good thing for you. … I used to be just like you and then one morning when I was going up in the elevator it struck me I wasn’t having any fun, so I came right down and I never went back. That was 35 years ago. … I took up the harmonica and even found time to notice when spring came around. … Maybe you ought to take [harmonica] up again. Maybe it would stop you trying to be so desperate about making more money than you can ever use. You can’t take it with you, Mr. Kirby, so what good is it?”
Maintaining this balance can be tricky–working so that you have enough but not sacrificing so much for work that you look back on a misspent life. My friends, getting older now, see their mortality or that of friends and family we have lost, will exclaim, “Carpe diem! Get the camper! Take the trip! Life is short!”
Yes, I think, take the trip. Take a walk. Take in that sunset. Take the time to spend with the people you care about. Take care of your body and your spirit. Take in all you can with your senses. Let the spirit of the thing and the place and the possibilities fill you up. And leave as much stuff as possible right where you found it: in the store, on the website, under that cool rock shelf in the desert, leaving no trace that you were ever there.
