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L’Art et la Réalité

The single museum I had time to visit during my days in Montreal was chosen because of its location. It was at 25 minute walking distance from Concordia University where the circus conference took place that day and thus could be explored during the lunch break. Turns out, it was the perfect choice, for the building alone.

Arsenal Art Contemporain is located in a former 19th-century shipyard, that measures over 80,000 square feet. The building was erected in 1846 by the entrepreneur Augustin Cantin for the Montreal Marine Works and by 1857 was deemed the biggest shipyard in Montreal employing between 150 – 250 employees and producing steamboats for close to a hundred years before closing its doors. In 2011, Arsenal Contemporary took over, making just minor architectural adjustments.

The vastness of the halls lets the art breathe, unfold without crowding and bathe in light at least in some of the halls. On offer was an exhibit called Alternate Realities which was in turn wickedly sarcastic and delightfully funny, at least for this viewer, who once again ignored the demands of serious art criticism and just had a blast with a crop of younger artists who went for the jugular.

These were the only other visitors in the entire space, happily taking pictures of each other inside art….

From their catalogue: “At a time where the virtual collides with the real world, reality multiplies itself. In a world of accelerated mediatization where images are everflowing, the truth becomes increasingly hard to decipher.”

Nathalie Quagliotto Friend, 2019
Says the curator…..

And here is someone we miss:

Many Obamas……
Eric Yahnker The Long Good Bye, 2017 Pastel on Paper

Here is something altogether different:

Xu Zhen Under Heaven, 2015

Same curator, I suppose. Note that this artist was already in the Venice Biennale in 2001, at age 24!

More wisdom from the curator:

John de Andrea Cierra, 2003

I was even drawn into a piece by Anselm Kiefer, who I usually don’t take to, given his loose relationship with the truth and his self aggrandizing. His painting fascinated me in this single instance perhaps because of or perhaps in spite of its German connotations and reference to religion. Here is an older review of Kiefer’s work that expresses some of my reservations in ways that are more eloquent than what I deliver.

Anselm Kiefer Der brennende Dornbusch, 2007 Mixed Media

And speaking of Germany:

Dorian Fitzgerald Haecker-Pschorr Bierhall, Oktoberfest Munich 2005 Acrylic and Caulking on Canvas

This is what it looked when you went closer to this humongous painting that went floor to ceiling.
———————-

Sculpture reigned on the upper floor –

David Altmejd Man with Black Sweater 2018 Too many media for me to write up…..rhinestones included.

My favorite was a piece by Corwyn Lund called 40 years that displayed seemingly identical round mirrors along a hallway, which, on closer inspection, reflected an ever more faded image of the viewer. My immediate question was, of course, how would it look by age seventy? And is the increasing vagueness an outcome of loss of vision, or lack of being seen?

I had no time to watch the videos, but given how much food for thought was already provided it did not seem like a big loss. I highly recommend visiting this museum if you are in Montreal – heads up, though, they have quite limited hours, 4 days total. As long as you supply the art interpretation/statement by yourself you should have quite an interesting time. That said, reading the official statements made for an amusing time as well. I certainly can’t quibble with the choice of what was displayed – a mix that made you think.

Music today is by two blind singers from Mali who have been romantic and musical partners since they met in school. Here they are describing a different reality:

L’état et la religion

The photographs today are encompassing the colorful diversity and creativity found on the streets of Montreal. My faithful readers who know my passions for all things graffiti will be glad to see I obviously scored! Again!

Behind the exuberant colors, however, darker issues are just as present in Canada as they are here in the United States. Loosely stated, they concern the relationship between state and religion, the role of religious freedom and the way in which dealing with religious issues can and has been politicized.

Just last month, for example, Bill 21 was passed in the province of Quebec, banning the display or wearing of religious symbols by public employees. That includes Jewish kippot, Christian crosses, Sikh turbans and above all Muslim women’s burquas and hijab. The bill also reaffirms pre-existing legislation that requires citizens to uncover their faces when accessing public services like municipal transit and the legal system.

Bills like these have been increasingly popular in Europe, but this is the first on North American grounds to be passed.

Bill 21 has been accused of fostering xenophobia and sexism and was opposed by the progressive government parties. It is feared to stoke the already increasing discrimination of religious minorities. Only two years after the Quebec City mosque massacre which saw six men murdered, the statistics of hate crimes have almost doubled, islamophobia being on top of the list.

Bill 21 also invoked the notwithstanding clause from the Charter of Rights and Freedom, allowing the provincial government to override the Charter for a period of five years. That means it can’t be easily dragged into court, although the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the National Council of Canadian Muslims plan a legal challenge.

Turning to our own country, we have of course the Trump administration’s special love affair with religious freedom. I highly recommend reading yesterday’s article by Matt Schwartz on how religious freedom interpretations are utilized not only in the restriction of national issues, including the criminalization of abortion and/or LGTBQ rights, but in pursuit of changes in foreign policy. The goals of this week’s Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom might as well be found in dystopian novels that we used to read for entertainment rather than for their predictive power.

Some of the graffiti I saw tries to address political issues, but for the most part it just made the city beautiful. Which is a good thing in its own right, I guess. We need distraction from the dark worries.


And here are Canadian children singing the Alhamdoulillah!

Vieux et Nouveau

My time to explore Montreal proper was limited. I walked during the lunch hours of the conference, and in the early evenings before attending circus performances. Happily, hat limitation ensures that I will return soon to this enchanting city to do some serious exploration.

That said, here are some pictures of the modern core of the city, including a museum district that also has performance halls.

Next are the distinctive gables that you find in the older neighborhoods, including the one where I lodged in a lovely if slightly dilapidated apartment near Square Saint Louis.

Finally, there are the circus-related buildings in the neighborhood of Saint- Michel. Cirque de Soleil has its (architecturally truely uninspired) headquarters there.

It is the most diverse neighborhood of the city, and indeed one of the poorest in Canada. 40% of the adult population do not have a high school diploma, nearly half of children live below the poverty line, unemployment rate is 14%, and half of the residents are immigrants. Cirque de Soleil used to be a generous neighbor, supporting many local causes until it was bought out by US and Chinese investors. Here is what’s reported to be happening now in the name of profitability.

What happened before, though, was a stroke of creative genius: 20 years ago, Cirque du Soleil and other major circus players, the National Circus School and the En Piste circus arts national network, city and community partners came together to build the Cité des arts du cirque with TOHU, a non-profit organization whose aim was to create the world’s biggest international circus community. “The goal was to build a critical mass of infrastructure for creation, training and dissemination in the field of circus arts in the same location. The name was chosen to represent something dearly intended: It is derived from the French expression tohu-bohu, which alludes to the chaos and energy that precedes renewal and transformation.

Tohu’s building is a green building, LEED certified, surrounded by vegetable gardens. The 360 degree hall is a marvel, with a capacity for 1200 spectators; the building also has spaces for art exhibits, meetings and so on. TOHU puts on the annual Circus Festival that presents circus activities throughout the city, on the streets and in different venues.

And here are glimpses of the circus school.

Music today features Snarky Puppy, a jazz collective slated for the International Jazz Festival at Montreal. I chose a tune from their new album Immigrance, in honor of the the Saint-Michel neighborhood.

Rouge et Jaune

Talk about a color-coordinated city: Montreal, Quebec has a distinct preference for red and yellow. Or so it seemed to my eye when getting glimpses of the environment outside of circus world where I spent most of my hours last week.

The houses are red and yellow, or yellow and red, take your pick.

So are the decorations.

Or the bikes.

Or the public parks and playgrounds.

The subway sports these colors,

and people do their best to coordinate.

Some wear yellow,

some wear read,

some wear both.

It all makes for an exuberant environment, symbolic for the city’s feel during the summer festivities as a whole.

I’ll report about more detail this week! We’re back to normal…..

Music today is from the currently slated Nuits d’Afrique Festival in Montreal. The fabulous Almeida wears, who would have guessed, yellow and red in alternation in the clip… music starts at around 1:30 in the video.

Strength and Flexibility

In case you think I’m going to report on my exercise class and its goal of providing me with attributes I thoroughly lack, think again.

For you vicarious pleasure I am instead providing images of those in true possession of strength and flexibility, the student of Montreal’s circus schools.

I am in Montreal to photograph TOHU’s International Circus Festival which puts on various professional shows and different acts every night in pedestrian zones that allow families to wander and enjoy the entertainment. The mood is ebullient, the streets ring with laughter and shouts of admiration, a sense of shared excitement creates community.

It is joy squared.

I will write in detail about the shows I saw when I am back. Today are just some glimpses of what is going on in the streets in the evening.

On the roof tops
Not just the public the follows the act with rapt attention….
All clear!
Phew

And then there was Audrey Hepburn, who got steamy very fast…

That’s foot in hand

A visual feast, if there ever was one.

More in the next few days!

For music, here is another kind of carnival:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2RPKMJmSp0

Jacksonville Medley

I fear all those nice folks who recently signed up for the blog expecting political discourse are in for a rude (if temporary) awakening. It’s going to be “Things I did during summer vacation” yet for a while. No worries, the catastrophic thinking always returns… but in the meantime let’s celebrate the glory that is the Pacific Northwest while I work on some longer pieces.

Jacksonville, Oregon, for example is worth a visit, as I found out last week when I was there for something like 12 hours. 2 of those hours were pleasantly spent in a German Biergarten, where the menu spelled the essential terms not always correctly, and had peculiar recommendations for preferred dishes by the Frau. The Mrs., for example, favored Fisch und Chips, you know, that famous German dish.

The duration needed for my beer and Schnitzel sandwich in 95 degrees heat was determined by the fact that throngs of revelers for the Britt Festival got a liquid start at the beer garden, to be then repeatedly picked up by a bus blasting loud Beatles music for a sing-along in anticipation of the concert, ferrying them to the amphitheater. The summer-long festival puts on an impressive array of music, classical and otherwise, seating over 2000 outdoors in a town that counts barely more people as its citizenry.

Founded in 1851 during the gold rush, Jacksonville flourished until the 1880’s when the diminishing returns of mining and being by-passed by the railroad slowed the city’s growth. As an unintended result, the historic buildings of much of old town have been preserved, and have been designated a National Historic District in 1966. The buildings might be historic, but their contents are surely gentrified. A lot of money from the area’s vineyards, horse breeding and tourism is showing up to connect to expensive things, antiques included.

The banner on Jacksonville’s website claims: The historic small town that never gets old. That motto is closer to the truth than one would wish, as a short visit to the historic (and still active) cemetery reveals. So many graves of baby, kids who lived but for 15 days, lovingly maintained since the 18oo’s.

The sections were designated into Jewish, Catholic, Masons and City (the last one perhaps an indication of too many denominations along the protestant branch to be spelled out.)

Spelling remains difficult

The sign that caught my interest was that for the Redmen. Ever heard of them? Me neither.

It is one of the oldest fraternal organizations in the US, dating back to 1765 and was eventually named the Improved Order of Red Men. Their remaining count nationally is 15.000 these days. It is a fraternity for White men only, structured after what those White men believed to be tribal Indian government and rituals – here is Wikipedia:

The Order has a three tiered structure. Local units are called “Tribes” and are presided over by a “Sachem” and a board of directors. Local meeting sites are called “Wigwams“. The state level is called the “Reservation” and governed by a “Great Sachem” and “Great Council” or “Board of Chiefs”. The national level is the “Great Council of the United States”. The Great Council consists of the “Great Incohonee” (president), and a “Board of Great Chiefs”, which includes the “Great Senior Sagamore” (first vice-president), “Great Junior Sagamore”, “Great Chief of Records” (secretary), “Great Keeper of the Wampum” and “Prophet” (past president). The headquarters of the Order has been in Waco, Texas, since at least 1979.[9] They maintain an official museum and library in Waco

One of the founders in both the organization and local dairies. One wonders what the puddle is underneath the cows.

Led me to associations of milk jugs…

And these are the order’s goals:

  1. Love of and respect for the American Flag.
  2. Preserving our Nation by defending and upholding the principle of free Government. 
  3. America and the democratic way of life.
  4. Preserving the traditions and history of this great Country.
  5. Creating and inspiring a greater love for the United States of America.
  6. Helping our fellow men through organized charitable programs.
  7. Linking our members together in a common bond of Brotherhood and Friendship.
  8. Perpetuating the beautiful legends and traditions of a once-vanishing race and the keeping alive some of the traditional customs, ceremonies, and philosophies.

I couldn’t decide If the last bit on the “vanishing” race or the fact that the order’s auxiliary women’s group was named Pocahontas was the irony that killed me. Luckily I was revived by sights like these, an acorn woodpecker, a bird I had never spotted before.

Music today is also new to me: The Britt Festival commissioned a piece by Christopher Cerrone played by Third Coast Percussion. You have to travel to the Britt to hear it, but here is something from an earlier work:

And here is a tiny desk concert by Third Coast Percussion:

Bandon Rocks

While my husband communed with the DA in Coquille, I communed with the dead in Bandon. The dead seals, that is, found on the beaches. Upon excitedly reporting my photographic ventures to him he responded with a laconic “Ah, Heuer heaven!” It’s nice to know, 37 years on, you’ve married the right guy.

Heuer heaven it was, starting with the evening light when we arrived late the day before. In the morning, there was fog that made the air undulate in soft waves, light that was a shimmery veil, and temps that allowed me to breathe again after the heat during the drive down.

The rocks along this stretch of coast are spectacular.

As are the formations of wood, drift or otherwise, almost petrified.

So are the fields of wildflowers covering the steep cliffs descending to the beaches.

It is also by all reports a birder’s paradise during migration season. For me, in that regard it was slim pickings. Seagulls, a few adventurous crows, an unidentified seabird, and plenty of vultures.

First I thought they were waiting for him,

but then realized they feasted on the dead seals.

I soon turned my attention to the live ones…..

Bandon is a city in Coos County, Oregon, United States, on the south side of the mouth of the Coquille River. It sports about 3000 inhabitants, and on its list of attractions you find: Bandon Bait and Tackle, Tony’s Crab Shack and a variety of guide services for deep water fishing, Rogue river rafting, and estuary paddling.

Old town is a hotchpotch of stores hat supply the fishermen and process the catch, as well as venues that offer touristy kitsch. There is a working marina, plenty of eateries, and a pleasant boardwalk.

And then there is Henry the Fish, reminding us with detailed whim about what we’re doing to the oceans.

Yup, Heuer heaven.

Made even better with a rare piece of music by one all but forgotten:

Sausage Tales

I have to give this to the men in my life – in addition to making me happy, they expand my culinary repertoire. My youngest is always good for a 5-star meal, my oldest has introduced me to stuff I didn’t even know existed, and my Beloved can be counted on to drag me to out-of-the-way dives that provide memorable lunches.

So it was yesterday when a boring drive on I-5 down to Medford was briefly interrupted because we HAD to grab a hotdog in Albany. Am I glad we did.

The joint was a little shack at a dreary street corner. The proprietor, looks and temperament bearing some resemblance to Bill Murray whose portrait was lovingly pasted on the entrance door, has served sausages here for decades. The kitchen where they make the sausages is right next to the counter, a few chairs allow people to eat if they don’t want to bring the stuff home.

You compile your own condiments on a bun, with plenty to choose from, and then he puts your freshly cooked/grilled/roasted sausage on top. The selection is huge and the quality amazing, the German Bratwurst (what did you think I’d get?) matching the real thing from back when it was home.

The guy flirted, the guy joked, and was happy to explain when I asked about one of the things on his wall, a plaque applauding him on his photography in France. He had been visiting his brother-in-law there who worked as a cartoonist/graphic designer for a local newspaper. Photographs that he took of local children at a playground where picked up by the newspaper and the plaque was its thank you.

Then we got into a most interesting conversation about how it was possible to do not just street photography but photography of children many years back before all the fear over privacy or, worse, suspicions of nefarious motives, took over. Once again I met a truly interesting and thoughtful character in a most unexpected setting. I love my life.

Art on the Road: Where Tough meets Tuff

Double dipping today – this will be up at Oregon Arts Watch as well.

IT HAPPENED TO ME AGAIN. That’s twice now, in just two years. I had to revise my assessment of an artist once I got to know the history and environment that was essential to their work. The first re-evaluation took place both on an intellectual and an emotional level – where I truly disliked Frida Kahlo before, I came round. https://www.heuermontage.com/?p=5790

Gerald’s Tree I, 1937 – Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

And now I have to admit something similar is happening for Georgia O’Keeffe. I was never a fan of the endlessly repeated desert skulls or foreshortened flower paintings, imbued with sexual metaphors or gender-specific markers – references, it turns out, mostly peddled by the men in her life in the beginning of her career and appropriated by many a feminist at some later point. O’Keeffe herself rejected these interpretations just as much as being co-opted by the feminist cause. (For a thorough analysis of her relationship to feminism read Linda M. Grasso: Equal under the Sky: Georgia O’Keeffe & Twentieth-Century Feminism University of New Mexico Press, 2017)

I was also not particularly taken by the way the oil paintings were rendered. Even though the landscapes use saturated colors, there is often a dullness that does not capture the intense brightness of New Mexico’s high desert. Laura Cumming, reviewing the 2016 O’Keeffe retrospective mounted at the Tate Modern, says it better than I possibly could:

But by now, what strikes is the stark disparity between the sensuous imagery and the dust-dead surface. O’Keeffe’s oil paintings turn out to be pasty, matte, evenly layered. They have no touch, no relish for paint, no interest in textural distinction. They are as graphic and flat as the millions of posters they have spawned worldwide; in fact, on the strength of this first major show outside America, they look just as good, if not better, in reproduction. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/jul/10/georgia-okeefe-review-tate-modern-retrospective

From the River – Pale, 1959 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

Mostly I was put off, though, by her ways of perfecting a persona, here too some semblance to Kahlo. She paid a lot of attention to how she looked (perhaps to be expected in one so often photographed) down to having a beloved piece of jewelry recreated in a different metal that better matched the color of her now white hair. She insisted on – often self styled – black and white clothing when being photographed, although she appeared usually in quite colorful clothes. The environments she lived in, particularly later in life when fame also brought fortune, were carefully arranged with designer furniture – Mies van der Rohe and Saarinen pieces among them. It is unsurprising that we now have traveling exhibits dedicated to her style, her clothes, her surroundings. https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/touring/georgia_okeeffe_living_modern

Cottonwood (Detail), ca. 1952 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

And above all there was that myth making of the independent, strong, lonely recluse seeking solitude in the acrid Southwest after life got too complicated on the East Coast. I had trouble squaring my images of recluses with someone having a house keeper, a gardener, a staff, and a coterie of friends, neighbors and endless groupies while floating on ever growing fame as a true American modernist. She objected to be associated with anything commercial (allusions to the fact that some of her paintings foreshadowed pop art infuriated her) but her ascent was driven, in part, by the commercial aptitude of her husband, photographer, artist and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz, a much older man.

SO WHAT SHIFTED? Why have I started to see the artist and her art with new eyes and a certain appreciation? It was a combination of three factors during my recent visit to Santa Fe. I saw her early work in the lovely museum dedicated to her (https://www.okeeffemuseum.org).

Black Lines, 1916 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
Abstraction with Curve and Circle, 1915-1916 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
 

I watched a documentary movie that the museum offers, in which the artist ruminates on her own life, and I experienced the landscape of New Mexico for the first time.

Black Place III, 1944 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

The museum offered the usual biographic time line. Born in 1887 to farmers in Wisconsin, O’Keeffe teaches school in rural Texas after training at the Art Institute in Chicago. She takes up with Stieglitz, a leading promoter of modern art, and becomes part of an influential intellectual circle that catapults American art out of the dark ages, including names now extremely familiar to us, among them “Make it new!” Ezra Pound and “The Local is the Universal!” William Carlos Williams. She is close friends with another photographer and protégé of Stieglitz, Paul Strand, as well as his wife Rebecca and later Ansel Adams and Todd Webb. When her husband turns to even younger women and their marriage falls apart she moves to the Southwest, having visited every summer previously for many, many years.

All that I knew. I now learned, that this path was also riddled with disease and breakdowns (psychiatric wards included,) not as extreme as that of her friend Frida’s, but enough to stress how strong she must have been to go her independent ways. I was also drawn in when she talks about happiness in the documentary. She said something along the lines that happiness is insubstantial and short-lived for most people. What counts is being interested and that she was. She also took, she insisted, throughout life what she wanted.

In the Patio VII, 1950 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

INTERESTED SHE WAS: it shows in her ways of learning and applying principles developed by other artists – and then giving those principles her own rendering, taking what she wanted, whether that meant sticking to abstraction, or emulating strands of Neue Sachlichkeit. Being able to see her early abstractions, not painted in oil, made that particularly clear to me. These lovely watercolors herald later form and point the way to her insistence on 2-dimensionality, even in her landscapes.

Black Mesa Landscape NM/Out Back of Marie’s II, 1930 – Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

Interest helped her to extract what she could use from all these photographers around her: endlessly modeling for Stieglitz, Strand, Adams and later Webb did not stop her from taking from this art form what made her paintings part of the American Avant-garde: she zoomed in and out in her depictions, as if she had those different lenses, shifting from macro to wide-angle renderings, making things big that were small and vice versa. Lessons of scale drawn from photography clearly influence her during most of her career.

                                                   Ram’s Horn I, ca 1949 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

(And talking about photography – it drives me to distraction that every exhibit of her work that I have ever seen or read about, is paired with photographs of her by all these famous men in her life. It really has the viewer focus on her as a subject rather than her as the agent of her art.) But she took what she wanted: she left when it suited her, she stood by her artistic vision even when pressed to adapt to that of those around her and she experimented with relationships at a time where it took even more courage than it does today.

Interest made her a world traveler – particularly later in life when she went all over the place, always to return to her home in New Mexico where she finally settled in 1949, three years after Stieglitz’ death. And this landscape, as I now understand having seen it, provides a superb match to anyone with photographic sensibility. The thin air and the way it affects vision upends our usual ability to judge distance; in this way her paintings are quite literal depictions, only intensified by her proclivity towards abstraction. It is also a landscape in which anything incidental disappears when trying to brave the harsh elements, the dryness, wind, dust, heat or cold. That, too, is captured in O’Keeffe’s work, with its singular focus.

  A Piece of Wood, 1942 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

The ground she walked and worked on in NM consists of compressed material from volcanic eruptions called Tuff. It is a soft substance, crumbly, easily destroyed – everything the artist was not, even though she had to endure one of the worst nightmares imaginable for a visual artist: macular degeneration. It appeared first in 1964, and her last unassisted oil painting was finished in 1974. She died in 1986, 98 years old. She might have been self-absorbed, vain, single-minded, but she also was vulnerable, thoughtful and above all, tough. Can’t help but like that, and allowing it to color the assessment of her art.

Church Steeple, 1930 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

INTERESTED SHE WAS AND INTERESTING SHE REMAINS. If you are curious to learn more about O’Keeffe, here is your chance: The Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust education presents Carolyn Burke on Tuesday, 4/30 at noon. The renowned author will discuss her book,  Foursome: Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, Paul Strand, Rebecca Salsbury. 

http://www.ojmche.org/events/2019-brown-bag-with-carolyn-burke

And if you are lucky, you will have a chance to listen to a new opera about O’Keeffe wherever it will next be produced. Today it rains with music by Laura Kaminsky and a libretto by Mark Campbell and Kimberly Reed just saw its world premiere in San Francis late March. It is staged as a train ride that O’Keeffe and Rebecca Strand take to NM, where they play drunken games and talk about their lives. https://operaparallele.org/today-it-rains-2/

The only musical excerpt I could find is late in this clip, start at 25:00: And yes, it’s modern chamber opera. You know what that means.

Photographs today were taken completely independently of the paintings in NM and only later matched up. Talk about translations of a landscape….


A Change of Weather

On my last full day in New Mexico I drove to Frijoles Canyon to explore the Bandelier National Monument. It is located within the Pajarito Plateau which was formed by two eruptions of the Jemez volcano nearby, more than a million years ago.

Each of these eruptions were about six hundred times more powerful than that of Mount St. Helens in 1980. Just saying.

The rocks you are seeing in the photographs are actually volcanic ash, compacted over time into a crumbly rock called tuff.

It can be easily eroded by the weather or human tools – and indeed the Ancestral Pueblo people living here more than 10.000 years ago made their homes in the rocks, enlarging existing holes and caves and building in front of them.

Both petroglyphs and pictographs can be found here

A small, seemingly innocuous creek runs through the canyon, bearing water all year long, so important for human habitation, and even more so in this arid climate. The regular 10 cubic feet per second (cfs) occasionally converts into flash floods.

A horrid one in recent history followed the 2011 Las Conchas Wildfire, that completely destroyed the upper watershed of the stream.

The creek surged with 7.000 cfs of water; in 2013 it got even worse with a flash flood of 9.000 cfs – the piles you see in the pictures are the left overs of the uprooted trees and rocks and other debris that haven’t been cleared by the National Park Service. At the time they came down the mountain in waves reportedly three stories high. The clip shows the flood coming into the parking lot of the site.

https://www.nps.gov/band/learn/photosmultimedia/flood913.htm

These kind of weather-related events probably happened across the centuries but are now increasing in frequency. They would have cost many lives during the times people actually inhabited the canyon. In general, their life expectancy was short, 35 years on average, women regularly dying in childbirth and almost everyone suffering from bad teeth and arthritis. Men were responsible for hunting, constructing and weaving, while women did the farming, (grid gardens and scattered fields all across the mesa in hopes that localized rains would water at least some of the crop of beans, corn and squash), took care of the children, cooked, made pottery and regularly plastered the outer walls of the buildings.

I fiddled with my own life expectancy by deciding to dare climb into the restored cliff dwellings. It was worth it, but, honestly, a challenge. Some kind woman spontaneously offered to take a picture of me, so here is factual evidence in case you don’t believe me.

You had to do several of these, some longer than others, interspersed with staircases

I envied the ravens and the swallows who sail seemingly without efforts between the canyon walls.

Inside the cliff dwelling looking out into the canyon

Not much bird life to be seen, overall, although I did luck out with two owls, closer to Albuquerque, one sitting on the nest and her partner guarding them from across the path.

Her head is peeking out of the hole

Also spotted were quails, a curved beak thrasher and an occasional woodpecker. And here you thought you’d get away from bird pictures…