When the moon first slides its slenderest rind of lit curvature above the stony crest where we're
all staring, it is almost invisible; for that precise moment, it is the essence of the ephemeral. Since we arrived some 15 minutes ago at the modern fire tower atop the mesa, we've been
gazing at the point of high land just between Chimney Rock and its not-quite-shadow-shape,
Companion Rock. Some of the assembled, volunteers and scholars who've been documenting
this year's lunar events, have really been watching for months.
It's been just under two decades since researchers rediscovered the moon's precise
behavior here in southern Colorado, its celestial conjunction with the monumental world of
uplift and erosion. Since midsummer 2006, the moon has risen once or twice each month
between these sandstone uprights. It began in July with a tiny crescent appearance and,
throughout the following half year, steadily grew in size, waxing its way toward tonight, the
second of January, 2007, when it will be full as a moon can be as seen from Earth.
I envy these people, women and men who have been monitoring their local wonder and
who come out tonight as guides for the visitors, people from Massachusetts, Kansas, California.
One visitor said that more than 20 years ago he worked here as a volunteer, walking all over this
landscape, but that was before anyone had recalculated the moon's timely marvels here.
A ranger from Mesa Verde, Tammi Corchero, begins our visit in the late afternoon with a
brief talk. First she tells us that the ancient people, the Anasazi or Ancestral Puebloans, built here
two centuries before the more famous cliff dwellings were constructed at Mesa Verde to the
west. Nearly a thousand years ago, those farmers would have noticed the bright conjunctions of
that traveling moon with the stationary spire we call Chimney Rock.
It's now believed they raised these buildings on the mesa to mark the patterns of celestial
events, and perhaps thereby to house them, hold them, in communal space. Later, when
worsening climate or other factors drove them from Chimney Rock in the 13th century, it's
likely that those migrants were among the builders of the more inaccessible Great Houses at
Mesa Verde.
Corchero swings her arms in exuberant arcs as she describes the patterns of the far-ranging moon; how widely it ventures across the sky's apparent dome. As the Earth shifts on its
tilted axis to favor first one hemisphere, then the other with the sun's more direct rays, we move
through the seasons, counting our way with night and day until we reach the major midpoints of
the year: the equinoxes, the solstices.
Though the moon is seen, from our earthbound perspective, to move across our sky from
east to west each night, and to rise and set in shifting positions on the horizon, the patterns for
repetition are more complicated than that. As the ranger talks, she makes spinning motions with
her hands -- first the Earth's rotation, then the moon's. We nod: we all have memories of
classroom models where the planets spin out their own days and nights, circled by their own
moons, while our own natural satellite swings its way around a facsimile Earth and its own
pattern of rotation.
The lunar standstill
We're here for what is called the major lunar standstill, when the moon is seen to rise in
its northernmost position, 28 degrees above due east. Only every 18.6 years will moonrise mark
this northern extreme, unlike the northern standstill of the sun, which happens annually and is
called the summer solstice. It's another neat variation on the repetition that this northern lunar
standstill takes place in such nearly intimate proximity to the southern solar standstill that was
the winter solstice, just over a week ago. If one has any proclivity at all for spotting significance,
particularly the significance of what might come clothed as mere coincidence -- well, the pieces
are here assembled, and the world's forms draw about, attentive and alert with potency.
When we first arrived, a prairie falcon was perched on Companion Rock; it lifted and
circled, then flew between the dual spires to regain its seat. Through binoculars I can see that the
bird, still perched in the day's last, high-cast light, is gazing south and east, as if it, too, is
watching the cusp of land at the spire's base where the moon will rise. From the angle where I
sit, the spires almost seem to face one another, the low bulge in Chimney Rock corresponding to
a curving gap in Companion Rock. Higher up along the spires, the pattern is reversed, with a
bulge in the Companion echoing a concave curve in the Chimney.
These correspondences remind me of when, in college, I gazed at maps of Africa and
South America, wondering why there had ever been such skepticism when geologists first
proposed the ancient shape of the once-fused continents, Pangaea. I like this point of
comparison, even though it seems a little far-fetched since we're looking at erosion, not sea-floor
spreading, high above the edge of the Colorado Plateau. And I realize that's part of what keeps
the attention focused here, or anywhere, long enough to find whatever pattern is incipient or
hidden or just now rising into illuminated view. There's still a flush of pleasure, carried forward
from earliest childhood, a visceral thrill when we say, Yes, I see it now. That's it, exactly. That's
what it's like.
This afternoon we all feel dazzled by fortuity; after two tremendous snowstorms along
the Front Range and several days of overcast, the skies are brilliantly clear. Only a few long
bands of cloud lie to the west, like fine scarves that turn from gray to fuchsia as the sun drops
lower; to the east the air is only blue. Last night another group was gathered here, "and you
couldn't see a thing," Joan, a local woman, tells me. Snow still clots the roads farther south, in
New Mexico; more than one intended pilgrim hasn't been able to get here at all. On the hike up,
we stepped gingerly over the hard-packed trail, already icing over in places. Once we passed a
small windbreak of juniper where deer had obviously bedded down, the bare ground free of
snow where the animals' warm bodies had lain companionably together.
It's still several minutes before sunset, and the translucent moon could almost be a faint,
thin cloud itself. A guide named Jerry has come to where we sit and urges us to move farther
north. "You can't see it very well from here," he says. So I move out in front of the fire tower,
nearer to where the photographers have set up tripods in the snow. One is perched on a stone
outcrop, and I can see that he sits very still and seems to concentrate on his breathing, on staying
in place.
The Ancestral Puebloans
The moon stays low, much lower than I had imagined, before it begins to slide behind the
lowest bulge of Chimney Rock. It's lower, too, than is depicted in a little illustration I've seen,
an "artist's rendition of Ancestral Puebloans" watching the moon as it seems to hang between
the rocks. Three figures stand or squat there, one holding a torch aloft. They're atop the highest
promontory of the mesa, a flat-topped point just beyond where tonight's photographers are
clustered. Of course, I want to scramble out there for myself, to imagine the viewpoint as it was
long before the Forest Service built the fire tower, even before the Anasazi or Ancestral
Puebloans began lifting walls and roofs -- now all in ruins -- farther back along the mesa.
Those ancient builders' cultural center at the time lay 90 miles to the south, in Chaco
Canyon. Besides several Great Houses in the canyon itself, the social world of the people
extended throughout 130 or so "outlier" communities scattered across the Four Corners region of
the Colorado Plateau, an area spanning more than 77,000 square miles. This one, at Chimney
Rock, had been in existence as a farming pueblo since about the year 1000. It was unusual, being
a high-elevation, conifer woodland location, unlike the other outliers to the south and west.
Apparently in response to drier, warmer conditions, the people had moved up from the lowlands
along the Piedra River and its nearby tributaries. At higher elevation on the mesa's slopes, they
could rely on the winter's snow pack, so that even in years with little growing-season rainfall,
the beans, corn and squash could draw on that soil moisture.
The Great House on the mesa top seems to have undergone construction or addition twice
in the 11th century: in 1076 and 1093 A.D., as indicated by tree-ring dating. Both these dates
would have corresponded to major lunar standstill events like this one. Perhaps, when the sliver
of moon first appeared in July, there was a flurry of activity in the woods beyond the fields and
pueblos below. Perhaps it was even earlier, in the cold months after the solstice, though I
imagine work would have been difficult in snow and ice. Surely noise and excitement echoed off
Peterson Mesa, to the west, while workers hustled up the slopes with stone and wood to expand
the Great House in time for visitors and residents alike to climb to the roof and watch the
luminous rhythm of the moon's return to its northern way station, its self-ceremonial
announcement of another completed cycle in the celestial order.
Another fortunate circumstance of those decades has been revealed by tree-ring and
pollen studies. The years when the astronomically aligned construction went on were unusually
wet ones. According to Frank Eddy of the University of Colorado, during the entire period when
Chimney Rock mesa was inhabited, more years were dry than were wet. However, an entire
generation at the pueblo knew wetter-than-normal conditions from 1060 to 1090. With
flourishing crops and surplus stored food, the people had sufficient time and energy to devote to
their architectural projects and even took time off in the summer, usually their busiest season, to
cut timbers used in the building.
This seems logical, and yet it's the opposite pattern from what Robert Leonard and Heidi
Reed have found for Chaco Canyon. There, the major building periods correspond to drought
periods, suggesting that refugees or migrants came to the region's cultural capital to pool their
labor when climatic downturns meant smaller farming communities failed. And there were other
remarkable astronomical events to celebrate, besides the lunar standstills.
Sunrise, supernova
As in other locations in the southwest where mesas and canyons create specific, textured
horizon lines, people at Chimney Rock could have marked solsticial and equinoctial sunrises.
One spot on the mesa holds a neat bowl shape carved into the bedrock, which researchers refer to
as the "bedrock basin" or site 5AA88. From here, the double pinnacles of the rock formation are
visible (though they're not from just a few hundred feet away). And from this particular location,
the summer solstice sunrise first appears along the north wall of Chimney Rock Pueblo, the
largest architectural building on the mesa.
In addition to these annual conjunctions of sun and stone, in the middle of the century
when the community flourished at the mesa, an unprecedented light appeared in the sky. In July
1054 a star appeared just before sunrise, brighter than any star should be. This was the supernova
that became the Crab Nebula; in midsummer, midcentury, a millennium ago, it was a star bright
enough to see in daylight for some three weeks. When it first appeared, the supernova would be
seen to rise at the corner of the mesa extending from Chimney Rock itself, just south of where
the sun rose shortly afterward. From the bedrock basin, the sight line to that heliacal point lies
parallel with the wall inclosing the Pueblo's kiva, its sanctum of religious ritual.
What an intriguing cluster of celestial events were seen to take place during those lucky,
rain-blessed decades on the mesa top. Beauty, wonder and rarity might seem like reason enough
to celebrate the sky through painstaking architecture, but that's not what archaeologists suggest.
Instead, they emphasize how important the predictive power was in establishing agricultural and
ritual calendars. In a world where the frost-free growing season barely exceeded the minimum
number of days needed for a corn plant to mature -- by less than a week, most years --
agricultural precision was deadly serious.
The spring equinox was an especially important date to get right, in order to begin
counting carefully to planting time. And the psychological, emotional power of the sun's
concurrence with prediction, midwinter, would be a great comfort as cold gripped the dark, ill-heated rooms made of stone and plaster. Also, suggests the astrophysicist J. McKim Malville, for
a region-wide culture to whom pilgrimage and ritual must have been important, as indicated by
their celebratory architecture, "To arrive at a festival one day late means missing the essence of
the experience." He points out that this particular "outlier" community at the far northeastern
border of the Chacoan world constructed the kind of public building that could have
accommodated influxes of guests. In one room of the mesa-top Pueblo, he notes, 29 metates --
stones used to grind grain or nuts -- were "stockpiled," suggesting "intensive food-preparation
for festivals."
What about the moon? It's easy to see the fundamental importance of the solar calendar
to these agricultural people, scratching out their existence with digging sticks in an arid world
plagued by frequent droughts. And the ritual importance accorded to corn continues in the
Chacoans' distant descendants, today's Pueblo Indians. But despite the many other astronomical
elements of the Chimney Rock Pueblo, it seems that the major building periods coincide with the
lunar events, those northern standstills that took place only once a generation, or maybe twice in
the memories of the few surviving grandparents. Why was keeping track of the moon so
important to agricultural people?
Lunar cycles
Well, counting by the moon is important to women. Or, throughout earlier times, was important to women. Menses, menstruation and month all derive from the same Latin root as
moon -- they are all words whose etymology says, "measure." Though most modern women
likely see no conjunction between their periods and the lunar cycles, that may be because we live
in such artificially lit environments. Even my parents, who live in the Appalachian countryside
and whose electric lines to the house are buried in the soil, have installed bright security lights
and rarely see the stars.
All this light pollution may have confused our inner photoreceptive patterns, which in
times of darker skies would likely have kept us in far better time with the moon as well as the
sun. Humans' diurnal rhythms keep us active in daylight and quiet at night (though teenage boys
seem especially reluctant to embrace their diurnal heritage). When the days grow shorter in
winter, I find myself wanting to go to bed progressively earlier, while the early light of high
summer draws me more quickly from sleep. The hormone melatonin helps establish this
photoperiodicity in our circadian rhythm. Secreted by the pineal gland, melatonin helps induce
sleep, and its release is, logically enough, prompted by darkness.
Beyond its role in establishing sleep, melatonin is also associated with the menstrual
cycle: its levels peak during menstruation and drop during ovulation. Among Scandinavian
women, melatonin levels are especially high during winter, when daylight hours are countable
on just one hand.
Researchers have found that the likelihood for women to fail to ovulate during a cycle
increases during the winter months, and that women living above the Arctic Circle may ovulate
more than once a month during the light-filled summer. Birth records suggest connection
between the lunar cycle and women's reproductive cycles. Significantly higher numbers of births
have been found to occur around the time of the full moon, even in modern New York City
hospitals. In contrast, very few were observed to coincide with the new moon. Researchers
concluded that these results point backward to the time of ovulation and conception. Not only
did the birth itself occur with a full moon, it suggested that nine months before, the ovulation
which resulted in that particular baby also took place at the time of the full moon's light.
About time
The concept of time, the ability to imagine the future -- these are hallmarks of human
cognition and are generally thought to distinguish human from animal intelligence. But when I
think of the basic phenomena of cyclicality, I'm struck by the link between units with which we
measure time and the events that carry on utterly independent of us, like those theoretical trees
that, crashing to earth, send out sounds heard by no one. A month, a year -- both are
measurements of biological time.
All this leads me to think of William James' famous statement, "The intellectual life of
man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the perceptual order in
which his experience originally comes," but I see a pun gleaming its subversive-toothed grin
from behind the masculine pronouns. Conception -- that conceptual order -- is embedded deep
within the perceptual realm.
Once, in talking about the luxurious time I sometimes take to travel in the American
West, dogging the steps of scientists or following the published path of other scholars, I laughed
together with my father. "You're living the life of someone wealthy in the 19th century, or even
earlier," he exclaimed.
"Yes. A 19th-century man," I told him. Though I can tick off a few examples of women
adventurers, I realize with a shock which shouldn't be quite so pronounced that even here in the
21st century it's still true: part of the circumference I'm calling luxury, which rings me even now
with its broad bands of light and leisure, is in fact an absence. I have no children. While men of
many centuries would sally forth in search of boundaries, borders and what lay beyond them,
returning later (or not at all) to their children and the mothers who were engaged in raising them,
women have held the bonds of family tightly in their fingers' grip.
Because I'm no one's mother, I can assume the greater freedom of motion that has been,
perhaps since time immemorial, the prerogative of women's brothers. My friend Susan talks
wistfully, conflictedly, of the times she travels without her three children and her husband -- she
misses them with the sharpness of the body's close attachment but also craves the time alone.
Oh, I feel connected to my loved ones, even when I roam alone. By phone or letter or
email, we stay in touch -- a person can be off the grid for only so long, after all, before she
comes back for a hot bath and a good chat. But because I'm a daughter, a sister, a man's
beloved, but not a mother, the gravitational pull of others is less diurnal, less insistent in its
rhythms of their needs.
In the new year, I can stand in snow some 700 miles from home, the day's last light
brightening the planet's crusted surface, while the fine, translucent-looking moon takes its
appointed place between the Chimney spires. The moon is a traveler, too, I think, one of the
most obvious sky-journeyers. Each night she moves from east to west along the familiar ecliptic,
the same arc traced in daylight by the sun. Her motion is less complicated in its apparent
wanderings than the visible planets, which sometimes seem to reverse their direction, doubling
back before they move forward once again. She travels through the field of the so-called fixed
stars, which appear to pass above us in unchanged relations, as if attached to the once-theorized
Celestial Dome.
Shifting widely, assuredly, in her precise rhythms of highest and lowest declination,
north and south of the celestial equator, the moon moves, counting time month by month as she
goes. I wonder how she figured in the thoughts and self-imaginings of women standing on this
mesa 1,000 years ago. I wonder how many such women might have walked, for several days,
maybe, to come to the lunar festivals at the mesa-top. Did they come with their children, the
entire family making the pilgrimage? Or was this a journey for the young, the childless, to bring
them closer to the moon's quicksilver power, to stand still beneath her bright ascendency and
coax forth their own fertility, an astro-biological call and response?
By now the moon has arced and lifted from the narrow foresights of the towers, and
continued rising in the darkening sky. It is surprising how fast this motion is, measured against
the stationary objects of our near horizon. Look away for a moment, and that moment has gone. I
don't see any stars yet, though within minutes one or two will begin to appear in the deepening
evening. In the meantime, the moon has left the terrestrial niche appointed as her northern home,
and now moves brightly, unfalteringly, along her own invisible path.
Elizabeth Dodd teaches creative writing and literature at Kansas State University. Her most
recent book is Prospect: Journeys & Landscapes, winner of the William Rockhill Nelson Award
for nonfiction.
(January 2008)
