Dancing Away While Nobody's Looking

When the bluff was hot like this, the smell of the SAGE drifted up, enveloping the ranger in the odor reputed to be cleansing. She stood at the panel where, 700 years before, the Anasazi pecked pictures into the ROCK. The petroglyph she loved most was the bighorn sheep playing the flute. He stood on his hind legs, holding the flute to his mouth with his front feet. Tourists came, looked at the panel and asked her, "What does it mean?"

She answered always, "We don't know what it means. We have no way of knowing."

But when she stood alone, watching the traveling sun change the shape and colors of the figures, she asked the rocks, "What does it mean?"

Behind her flowed the San Juan. She thought of herself as the guardian of the river and the magical petroglyphs that lined it. Some sites put their panels behind METAL fences but her dancing sheep and his cohourts had no restraints. For all she knew, they could dance away while nobody was looking . Thousands of other pictures were gone where the sandstone flaked away. You could see an antler here, Kokopelli's hump there, but the rest of the bodies blew away with the eons. She thought she would be on the river forever, the strong guardian of the ancient world.

She woke up because the flute playing sheep was dancing on her lap. But when she focused, there was nothing but a worn afghan there. She looked around at the dark nursing home walls, Nothing on them but prints of pink Victorian houses. Nothing like anything from her life. No scent of sage. No musical bighorns..

"What does it mean?" she said. "There must be a way of knowing."



WC 290