Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Now I’ve traveled this wide world over,

Ten thousand miles or more,

But a J. B. Stetson chamber pot

I never did see before.

Or was that only the little movement at the base of the Rock, someone’s camper, pickup truck — do Navajos go on picnics on a weekday? For a price the vessel will take your car, you must tell it a story it hasn’t heard.

He’s looking at the south side, looking north along this car track that runs for a way beside the jagged dike rampart marking a fissure where lava broke out but not with the push that came up at the main vent, the pipe, the throat that Ship Rock finally filled. For the volcano that was once here is here only in the last lavas that came up the pipe, up but not out of the throat, never made it out but hardened. Like a photograph of something you know is moving.

The volcano having blown slowly away.

Like brush; like chaff. Like grasses that money over a period of twenty-five years (just begun) will strip away in order to mine low-sulfur "surface" coal that can be turned by the power plant on the far side of the vivid, implausible lake into power for which the cities are hungry.

Give us a ball-park figure for what this is costing. He’s not a businessman, maybe a cut above, certainly a pay cut below — by chance thrown up separate enough to hope that while he’s no engineer in Thorstein Veblen’s elite crew getting the most out of Machine Process against Businessmen whose profit taking gets the least out of it, he might yet sneak in as a Workman, but in only the wake of what’s become of Veblen’s hope, Veblen’s Process machined to serve survival: well, a divided Workman laboring to grasp and bring together the dynamite loosening the surface, the colossal dragline unveiling the seam, the 375,000-ton shovel that picks up 120 tons of overburden from the coal seams and transfers it to "spoil piles."

"Overburden," did you say? And is that the Ship Rock over there? And how far away is it?

As far as tomorrow — thirty-odd miles from this business of first things first, a mine where spoil piles have been graded and regraded by bulldozers into hills whose contours aren’t like white elephants or great flashing birds because they’re dark as dust-dulled licorice, as a dreadful old story, dark as the coal they slice out by accelerated geo-logic — and aren’t like anything except those hills far off where pinon trees grow here and there and two other kinds (two or three). Except that on these spoil piles of overburden you have only the contour, like a dark sea of dunes — say it, a black sea.

The Tribal Council down in Window Rock couldn’t say no to the royalties — was that it? — even if as yet Utah International (with the collateral end-run of its good will) can’t figure out quite how to re vegetate.

But the manager on duty did not perhaps read his visitor’s face with its little skeptical twitch any more than the hard hat did who said goodbye and disappeared, while he, hypothetical man (unearthed by converging teams of archaeologists at the site), saw Ship Rock across the blue lake miles beyond the lake across the full shimmer of desert miles; and thinking not that Utah International had sent a plane to collect him (which he is not quite eligible for) but that he’d been asked how he liked his work — traveling so much, etcetera — he thought but did not reply that to tell the truth investigating this operation was a respite from his highly involved personal life ("if you know what I mean," he also would not say).

But the manager was pointing at the stacks now to their left across the lake and to the left of Ship Rock twenty-odd miles in front of them westward saying did he know that the plume from the Four Corners plant was the one man-made thing the Gemini astronauts had been able to make out from space; to which this hypothetical man, this ad hoc man with a pocket notebook in his pocket replied, What about industrial haze? Wouldn’t they — the tightly sealed Gemini heroes — see the industrial haze? — while he actually thought, Why not Ship Rock — wouldn’t they see the Rock?

Glad, though, not to utter the words. Thinking also that he’d like to know what collateral Utah International had to put up — if any — to build Four Corners: that is, how the thing was done. But Utah International did not build Four Corners, they put together the package, wrapped up water, coal, tribal acceptance, and the participation of the power companies. And he’d like to know what the Utah stock, preferred or common, is quoted at (if there is any stock), and recalls someone’s words he probably did not finish, that, through the division of labor, the whole of each person’s attention is naturally directed toward some one very simple object.

Across the plateau, Ship Rock would be a respite from the information he could extract. Respite — for Ship Rock he thought then yesterday gave no answers (though mind you you could never get it to face you) and yet now (having to his surprise come), he sees the Rock rushing imperceptibly through landscape and he is distracted from all other respites and places, because the Rock is close enough now to show him people all over it. Everywhere clinging to the edges of the ship like stowaways whose salvation has been turned inside out. Indians coming from behind the sunset; now you can’t quite see them, they go with the Rock; they seem the picture of some necessary blindness, theirs and the Rock’s working together. Why, is this how the Indians are giving it back to him? (Think you’re funny.) People everywhere cling to handholds, wedged in notches, immigrants nested like blind lookouts or passengers of a ship that has been turned inside out and could not see where it’s going but for the Great Spirit’s knowledge of the route which the Rock feels as its own, which in turn seems to inform the ship’s complement of this event.

Arrived, however, these hundreds and hundreds of Indians have come alive in their eyes and are climbing, not coming down. He sees them now in the Rock, through it, a Redman’s trick of color, the light, the volcanic ash, but what’s ash and tuff, and what’s lava, lava was molten but didn’t burn, he’s even less geologist than maybe Indian; but then there’s perhaps their time and his time, they’re more eternal than he, you can bet, yet this is a multiple operation, as the man back at Fruitland said of the mine cum power plant; for the Indians, female and male, both climb and descend and they come off and come out, both up from within the earth (having turned the monster that was bugging them to stone) and down onto dry land which, like the volcano and its ancient lands, shrinks from their feet until (though he’s no mentalist) they tell it to stop and then they stand, no more alone than a man in front of a rented car, upon which they turn to see what brought them and see not some lava mouth below them within a cone’s throat, nor any old big rock, but the stone ship: so though he’s no authority on Indians he has to see that, sure, the Great Spirit sent the stone ship, but sent it from here. (So two stories meet.)

Sent it while the volcano was still here and the resulting absence inside it would be unknown. So that, to take the story further and bring Indians and geologists together, the volcano’s erosion, its wearing down, corresponds to the return of Ship Rock to this place. Here it comes, it’s ploughing the seas, Indians manning the crags, the mind of the Rock harrowed with women and men lookouts speculative as any rock man with his cutaway restorations. But full of some stone’s-throw dream of monsters done for.

Head of a rhino, arms of a spider, torso of a cactus, legs of a linebacker.

But wait: the Navajo story tells of individual heroes, not a communal attack on the ogres.