“The thing you and I were talking about. Something for you to do while Carm’s at the rock gym. Something that’s just your thing and no one else’s.”
She rocked in her seat. “This is a thing?”
“It is when you do it to a beat.”
She rocked harder, straining against her seatbelt. “Bop, bop, a loo bop, a bop bam boo!” she sang out.
“That’s it.” Chuck grooved in his seat along with her. “I was thinking of dancing. You wouldn’t have to climb up high on a wall and across ceilings or anything like that. Dancing is about staying on the ground and moving to the music.”
Rosie swayed from side to side and tapped her foot on the floorboard. “I like that idea.”
“Plus, you’d get to do it with other kids, which would be fun for you because you’re such a people person. You like people, which makes them like you back. It’s a good trait to have, a smart trait, one I’m trying to learn from you.”
“You’re trying to learn from me? Wow.” Rosie settled back in her seat. “But somebody killed Barney. I don’t like them. I hate them.”
“The police will get them. I’m sure of it.”
“Or we will.”
“That’s why we’re on our way to the park—to see if there’s anything we can learn that might help the police do their work.”
He turned south off the highway and drove past the Mesa Verde Visitor and Research Center, which rose from a broad sagebrush flat beside the highway. High above the center, the crest of Mesa Verde was rimmed with the dark green piñons and silvery green junipers that gave the plateau and park their shared Spanish name.
The Visitor and Research Center was constructed of sandstone blocks and exposed beams to resemble a traditional Ancestral Puebloan housing structure. A wall of windows on the building’s east side provided a commanding view of the La Plata Mountains north of Durango. Groves of aspen trees blanketed the upper slopes of the craggy peaks. Many of the trees were yellow with fall as the crisp, cold September nights ushered in the change of seasons.
Rosie pointed at the building as they passed. “We’re going there on a field trip after we learn everything.”
“I’ve been meaning to take you there myself,” Chuck said. “You’ll like it. There’s a museum where they explain how Mesa Verde was the first national park ever established to protect the works of mankind instead of nature. Plus, there are windows to watch the curators do their work in the research side of the building. That lets visitors know Mesa Verde was created specifically to help preserve the indigenous history of North America, which is to say, it’s all about what I do for a living—archaeology.”
“And it’s what we’re learning alllll about in school.”
Chuck nodded. “You got that right.”
He showed his national park pass to the ranger in the entrance booth and began the winding climb up the park road to the top of the plateau, swinging the big pickup around the road’s tight turns as they ascended. Cars and recreational vehicles streamed by in the opposite direction, descending from the plateau toward the park’s sole entry-exit point as the end of the day approached.
Rosie wet a tendril of her curly hair between her lips and pulled it straight with her fingers. When she let go, the tendril tightened back up like a spring beside her ear.
The scene unfolded out the windshield as they climbed: the gray clay face of the plateau rising to the green border of the mesa top, the Mancos Valley spread below, a patchwork of alfalfa fields and grass meadows broken by rocky ridges. In the middle of the valley sat the small town of Mancos, its handful of streets set close beside the Mancos River.
The park road reached the crest of Mesa Verde four miles from the entrance station. As he always did at this point, Chuck slowed to take in the stunning view. The green-carpeted plateau slanted southward away from them, a tilted tabletop of piñon and juniper trees thirty miles across from east to west and twenty miles from north to south. The mesa fell away to the brown, high-desert scrublands of the Ute Mountain Ute reservation on the Colorado-New Mexico border. Canyons cut deep into the mesa top every couple of miles. The canyons ran from north to south, their vertical walls of buff-colored Cliff House Sandstone aglow in the afternoon sunlight. Puffy, white cumulous clouds sailed across the blue sky overhead.
“Why are we slowing down?” Rosie asked.
Chuck pointed through the windshield. “Look.”
“At what?”
“Just look. What do you see?”
She shrugged. “Nothing.”
“That’s right. There’s nothing here—no houses, no shopping malls, no skyscrapers—which means there’s everything here.”
“Like what?”
“Like everything that made me want to be an archaeologist.”
He waved his hand at the canyons, worn over the eons into the sandstone surface of the mesa. The gorges began near the top of the slanted plateau as narrow fissures a few feet across. Eroded by runoff from thunderstorms and melting snow, they widened and deepened as they wound their way south, walled by cliffs that sliced straight down into the sloping mesa. Out of sight in roofed alcoves at the bases of the cliffs, long-abandoned Ancestral Puebloan villages faced out to the flat canyon bottoms.
“I first came here, to Mesa Verde, on a school trip when I was a kid, just like the one you’ve got coming up,” Chuck explained to Rosie. “When the school bus came up over the top of the mesa to where we are now, I remember being blown away by the view—the piñons and junipers covering the top of the mesa in dark green, the light brown desert to the south, and, best of all, the shadowed canyons hiding their secrets.”
“Secrets?”
“You’ve been learning about how the canyons here were home to thousands of people a long time ago, right? Just think what it was like back then—smoke rising from cooking fires deep in the canyons, farmers tending their crops, teams of workers building earthen dams and digging irrigation ditches to capture the little water that fell from the skies. There would have been potters firing clay urns in red-hot coals, flint knappers chipping away at chunks of obsidian, jewelry makers stringing necklaces with turquoise beads they’d traded for all the way from the Sonoran Desert.”
“Ms. Jarvis says this place was a totally happening scene,” Rosie concurred.
“Your teacher, right?”
“Yep. She says it was like a big city, except spread out in all the canyons.”
“Until just like that—” Chuck snapped his fingers “—it wasn’t. No more smoke from cooking fires. No more farming or building houses or making jewelry. The Ancestral Puebloans abandoned everything they’d built here, everything they’d created. Imagine how heartbreaking that must have been for them. How devastating.”
Rosie stuck out her jaw. “It would have been really sad.”
“I agree. That’s what hit me the first time I came here as a kid. Mesa Verde seemed like it would have been such a cool place to live. When I learned that the people had left everything behind, and that they had just taken off, I couldn’t believe it. Why would they leave such a beautiful place? It made no sense to me. I had to find out. As an archaeologist, that’s the kind of question I’ve been trying to answer ever since.”
“Ms. Jarvis says they left because it stopped raining.”
“That’s part of it, for sure. Probably the biggest part. The drought stressed the Ancestral Puebloans and other peoples living in the area, which led to fighting between them.”
“Wars, you mean?”
“Not