Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

In the lower half of that black-and-white page the gods filled in the scene ages ago. An authoritative drawing of vast layers of sedimentary terrain. Layers like colored sand. Erosion centuries deep turned into height in the cutaway segment, so the former plateau lies like a dammed sea hundreds of feet above the floor he’s standing on and, dwarfed in the towering corner made by the cutaway walls, a familiar shape haunts itself, a complete mountain unborn within the Earth, not a ship yet, while behind it the corner’s beveled geometry fans back upward like a slide upholstered in concrete — the cutaway restoration of the old volcano’s inner cone descending to the place where magma came burning up out of its underworld of pressure and bored its vent.

Ship Rock, then, if you believe the geologists, is not half what the whole scene was.

The volcano cools and becomes inactive. Last lavas inside the cone harden. Centuries of weather sweep the land. Wind wears down the plateau, the volcano has vanished.

But not what hardened inside; not the cloaked shape, the Rock down inside the now vanished cone. Shielded from the wind. Hidden inside a disappearing volcano.

Ship Rock, then, was not visible; it was inside a volcano that is not here now, a volcano visible now only to geologists with their cutaway restorations. All this is easier to believe with the discrete drawing in his friend’s book in front of him than here.

She’d looked at the drawing when he held her book out to her, and she’d said very softly, "Oh of course."

The Indians, too, speak of a time when Ship Rock was nowhere to be seen. Or are supposed to speak; or will if you can get them to.

A hundred years ago a governor proclaimed that Navajos caught off the reservation would be treated as outlaws. Well, look at how the Navajos not to mention the Apaches raided the Pueblo Indians in what is now northeastern New Mexico.

Navajos don’t talk much.

He believes them also when they say nothing.

And he tries to think where he is now. He listens to the cooler, stronger wind in that photograph two thousand miles from here, the Rock in front of him fifteen hundred feet high and rising. And it is there because it rose. In another form, if you listen to the geologists. Another life. An economist who’s lived here off and on for thirty years differs: he says as far as he knows the Rock is fourteen hundred feet high. So maybe it is settling.

Again, there’s movement, maybe it belongs to the beholder.

But while the southward dike is in the corner of his moving eye here on his left twenty or thirty feet high running beside the car track and in a minute he could climb the boulder-strewn rampart of the dike to the brittle-looking crest (and look back down to where he is or was and see only an empty car), still he is watching only the Rock, for there’s movement somewhere there.

From here the Rock is a gigantic, partly slumped thing, a sacred thing he might have to admit, until he thinks about it. Set adrift by its terrain, it’s no less on the endless Navajo reservation, and he has no plans to give it back to them, they don’t need it, but it’s theirs anyway, and not his to give, even at this hour of the February morning.

And what isn’t on the Navajo reservation? Just about everything except New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. Reservation ends when you get near the suburbs of a prosperous town with banks and bars. (The Indian women want no liquor stores on the reservation, they’ll trade the booze away, as far away as distance can contain the land, and in return they’ll take their men’s chances with car accidents.)

Did the Indians come here like him across the broad morning, watching the wind touch the dry land? When the Indians came here, they looked at this fifteen-hundred-and-thirty-foot-high berg of solidified lava shot through with hunks of sedimentary rock and granite torn from maybe nine thousand feet below and also from the volcano’s throat, and they told a story of how this deep-keeled Rock had brought them. As if it had not been here until they were. So they’re still at least tied for first.

He got off a better story than that last night in the motel bar. Multinational executive sent abroad to the wrong city and no one noticed. But other stories he’s not telling; some he doesn’t know; some he could tell without instinctively understanding.

Now moving goods he can follow — from electric power to paper products, from suds to spuds, white bread to natural gas. But funds traveling from phone to phone? from one nocturnal continent to another? from agribusiness through the congressional pocket via NASA to weather business, from insurance to war and back, the moneys finding their way into a faraway bank like a corporate thought confound him more than he ever needs to say in a report or in transcontinental gossip in a midnight saloon with a jukebox where he found he would not mention Ship Rock, didn’t want to, couldn’t.

(Well now you got it, how you gon’ move it?

Oh jes Chippeway at it.)

Not that he knew the Ship Rock stories in depth. Whose depth are they out of? his? theirs? What are those stories to him? A use the Indians put the Rock to. You can’t take that away from them. Not that the Indian Youth Council in Albuquerque guarding once-renewable land and water resources spend their time holding on to those myths. The Indians called this thing in front of him "the rock with wings."

Well, he can see wings all right.

Sort of folded.

If he’s looking at the right side.

But viewed from the west the Rock also has a prow — viewed from over there to his left toward Arizona, which is twenty-odd miles west of here. Seeing the prow, the Indians called the Rock a ship, and so its wings are also sails.

He flies to and from Ship Rock for a long moment on business, dividing himself between — well this rock has possibilities! — but such that he is one of them and is content to be hypothetical, a hypothetical man, if that’s not too safe. (Cochise Man began harvesting maize almost six thousand years ago; come on, make it an even six thousand!) He could rent a helicopter for two hundred bucks an hour.

But was he awake back in Farmington when he phoned from the motel and found he could rent one for two hundred an hour? Farmington — thirty, forty miles east of here, booming from the power plant and strip mine nearby in Fruitland. He believed the name but never found the town, didn’t look for it, found only what he was looking for, which was the plant, the mine.

Two hundred an hour to rent a chopper, fly over Four Corners Power Plant (think of flying under it), divide the labor, the chopper’s blind, throw in Ship Rock a few minutes west. And welcomes into his head now in front of Ship Rock a helicopter landing a girl on a craggy top to do an aftershave commercial, Indians don’t themselves shave, or do they? — a Hopi girl, Zuni, Pueblo, Ute, what’s it matter so long as she’s alone? to face the beast of height, be pumiced on the rough tip of rhino hide until the monster, its fading irritation pounding in its skull as the retreating aircraft sinks to the far corner of one eye, senses at last in its own renewable teeth the human gift perched riding it.

No headache took the place of that chopper, no pain the place of the girl — he saved her. He woke high and dry. The height of Ship Rock isn’t to be eroded by choppers dropping wrinkled yellow-and-black tape measures or taking soundings with a frequency that might erode the magnetic heart of the thing.

A sailing ship shrouded in power to the nomad Navajo in those generations before the plateau got to be more like desert, a wind that drew the elements together, and the earth was the earth and a supership could sail through it in those days. For was the earth not softer, subtler? has since become scrambled like the matter and/or energy of sample people two at a time standing single-file on a metal plate waiting to be turned/transformed/transported, drawn perchance (per couple) consolidated and economized into one person, a future nightmare of his (drop the mare, it’s a whole night) that only he has seen through, though he has asked if it may not be a dream while his question is a struggle floating upon a deeper struggle, which is to decide if the dream is bad or not.