Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

The Rock’s a place itself besides where it is — a place then more three-dimensional than most places. It is its own place, he thinks, and, unaccustomed to such thoughts, he feels a slight exaltation threatened with being exposed or wiped out, knowing what he feels, holding together. And holds on to what he sees — that Ship Rock might be a fistful, a handful — might be terrain grabbed like material, a land grab, some heavy stuff like sandpaper snatched and yanked in one wrench upward where it stays stiffly, nobody’s going to hear the continental crunching sound he makes up, one hand touches the other finding a brown-and-green relief map at school in New Jersey thirty years ago swelling under glass so you wanted to run your hand over the crust of mountains, long before he knew Ship Rock existed, and if so, would it have been visible on that school map under glass?

This is Ship Rock in front of him. There it’s been since yesterday. It stuck up through its own rust haze at thirty-five miles and could be seen long before the journey to it was begun or thought of.

But now he is here, silently close.

Some two miles away, away but practically there, here on the desert-dirt track rutted down off the highway. A mile or so off, and then with a Navajo language talk-show in his ears he gently braked the car as if he’d reached the NASA Press Site for a launch how many moons ago and couldn’t get closer, and there was a white Saturn rocket, three miles away, quite a distance, but you give a monster space.

Now a rock.

He’s taken 5,648 (the plateau) away from 7,178 (the top of Ship Rock), figures on a survey map, to get 1,530 feet. Up off the plateau. The great continent of the plateau, that has a tilt, the faithful say, a long tilt as slight as time here was slow. He’ll feel the tilt this morning if he can.

The economist in Farmington could laugh quietly as if he knew where he was, and probably did, and didn’t seem to weigh his words and didn’t need to, besides some of the figures on coal and water that he handed over on a sheet of paper, also Mother Earth, Father Sky, helpmates in the song like white corn and yellow corn, the frozen reconstituted orange juice that the economist mixed with mescal like the Indian song’s music and words growing together; quoted the idea (not his own, he said) that a country is like a cargo ship where the load isn’t lashed down and when it tilts with the ship the load slips and the ship founders.

Oldest habitation in America. Desert floor is a phrase you hear. Prior words. He thinks up desert ceiling. And what falls if the ceiling tilts?

Geologists, of whom he is not one, say Ship Rock came here not across the land and sea but up from below; and the Indians, of whom he is not one, have a tale to match it, about monsters in the depths of the earth — heroic, perhaps memorable conquests of which this mass, once monstrous, is a petrified sign, for the long, miles-long dikes are the congealed blood of the Hero Twins; but he, hypothetical man, he came out to this region on business. Business that’s as visible from here — off to his right, four topless stacks hung from white smoke, twenty-odd miles off — as this Ship Rock was from there yesterday. This ship. From everywhere around here. Its draw is fathomless.

He’s at Ship Rock and didn’t mean to come. Detour this far, this close. Or has to see that he didn’t mean to come in order to guess that maybe he did.

Not that he could avoid seeing Ship Rock from where he was yesterday.

From the power plant and the strip mine beside it that were his job to see.

While Ship Rock twenty-odd miles west kept coming into sight over the shoulder of a white man in a hard hat showing him the great plant and the so-called Navajo mine. No, not the mine. He went to see the mine for himself, he passed the power plant’s distinct blue lake. "No Fishing, No Waterskiing, Keep Area Clean" — foreground against the four white smokes rising into Father Sky. They’ll tell you the strip mine’s a whole ‘nother operation; but it’s right there next to the power plant, stretching for dark hundreds and hundreds of acres beyond its own monopolized horizon.

The mine’s power plant? Well, it’s a different operation, you don’t have to dig for the mine’s power. The power plant’s mine? Well, sure — the Navajo mine. Electricity for California. Power to the People. But this isn’t California; this here is New Mexico.

"Ship Rock is distance," he jotted into his head beside some figures. But let’s not get soft-headed about the Rock out there, O.K.? your voice inside you like an inner peace attempts an inner drone.

But outside you the man’s voice in gear growls pleasantly. The man cites Navajos on the payroll. The question arises, How many, and are they in top jobs at top dollar? And what percent of the good jobs are filled by non-Indians brought in from outside?

Ship Rock sailed on in the distance like a touring hallucination. But right here Utah International’s got the black coal cars of the Navajo mine railroad hooked up behind a red-and-white-striped black locomotive.

How he first reached Ship Rock was through a book, a black-and-white glossy shot, and on the facing page an account of this supposed volcanic neck: the Rock photographed from a plane ten miles to the south, maybe more, the Rock sending off like a supermount two lesser chains, the dikes, the reptile tails. (The photograph is, among other places, two thousand miles east of here, near the three scattered members of his immediate family.)

Volcanic neck. The State of Montana boasts a volcanic neck famous from the proving grounds of New Mexico to the gales of Wyoming, but that volcanic neck doesn’t look like a ship and (courtesy of the geologist’s imagination) it’s missing a head. But wait, a voice says, we mean neck in the sense of throat. It doesn’t have to have a head on its shoulders. But the truth is that the throat is long gone; the neck is what’s left, the neck that was inside the throat, if you see.

The way the heart is inside the stomach at seven in the morning after a hard night. God, he recalls necks of land with plates of Little Neck clams on them, but not in the noise of last night.

The volcanic neck in Montana doesn’t seem to be climbing up out of the plateau like Ship Rock. He’s seeing things, he’s a victim of last night, last year, of what he’s read or been told; and he’s sick of it. And prefers to just look. Look at one object.

Prefers? The word weasels between yesterday and this coming afternoon so that they threaten to approach each other like yesterday afternoon’s business and last night at a motel, threaten to jam him between industrial information and, at the bar, boomtown big talk, two engineers from the Four Corners Power Plant, their evening Stetsons low to the eyebrows, both going home later to their ranchhouses along some street, but as for him — on a business trip — going out down the walk to his unit, past the still swimming pool, past two blondes who stopped talking as they passed him — never much on blondes — he was humming a song his first and only wife so long ago sang with a friend of theirs about a drunk husband coming home late to a bunch of wise answers — who couldn’t see or was encouraged to not quite see another man’s hat upon the hat rack — and so the wife sings,

You old fool, you blind fool,

Can’t you plainly see

It’s only an old chamber pot

My mother gave to me?

No. He prefers to just look; he’d rather.

The scraped flanks of dark and brown and ochre rising as if in a state of being set, constantly set to sail. Not set like the storyteller’s sun known as The Setting Sun beyond which was a narrow sea: but yes he would accept the narrow sea the Navajo crossed to land then among an unfriendly people from whom they had then to get away and so the Great Spirit sent a stone ship to help them, and it brought them here. Which was its object. And yet it seems to have been getting ready to move again while this hypothetical man in front of his rented car has been watching.