origin stories

how we love our awful little town

Once I asked Gerardi how the world began. She said there are many different stories of how it began but there’s no point arguing over which story is right because we could be talking about totally different worlds and who’s to say how somebody else’s world began. 

	In one story, the world came from shafts of light shooting in a cosmic pattern and finally descending into matter. In another story, the world came from an old man commanding it to begin. In another, Spider Woman wove our earth into being. In another, space-matter shrunk together and then exploded apart into stars and planets and galaxies. In another, an egg cracked open and the world spilled forth. In another, a god opened his eyes and the world was born; every time he closes his eyes that world ends and when he opens them again, a new one begins. 

	I asked her if which story you believe affects what world you end up living in, and she said that was a very good question indeed. 

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According to the geologists, Skelling, NM began seven hundred and fifty billion years ago when the continental tectonic plates came together to form a single landmass. Then they split apart, then they came back together, and then they split apart again. 
	The next time they merged, a great sea grew in the center of what is now called North America; fish once swam where I now sit. Then the earth quaked and the mountains rose. The sea retreated and eventually disappeared. The great fish and the underwater lizards died. 
	Life crawled to land—first lichen, then moss, then plants with flowers and fruits. Then insects, reptiles, birds, and finally the great land lizards. 
	Asteroids fell from the sky and firestorms spread across the earth. Some small plants and lifeforms survived, but the great lizards choked on the smoke of the asteroids smoldering in their dusty coffins. 
	The land in and around Skelling is pockmarked by the scars of fallen stars. We’ve been molded by seas, glaciers, and the slow tear of the land’s crust. The mountains shrug and stretch as new rock emerges through cracks in the lithosphere and springs burst forth. 

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According to the Jicarilla Apache, the story of this land began underground. In the lower world, it was dark. The people held a council to devise a plan to light the world. They painted a yellow circle upon the ground and placed it into the sky. It became the sun. Then they drew a white circle on the ground and set it in the sky. It became the moon.

	But in the lower world there also lived a sorcerer and a sorceress, who were annoyed at the peoples’ presumption and personally preferred the dark. The sorcerer and sorceress tried to destroy the sun and moon, and the sun and moon fled in fright from the lower world, leaving it dark again. 

	The people held a council in the darkness. They danced and sang and made medicine. The dance caused four mountains to rise, growing and groaning upward toward the opening in the sky where the sun and moon had escaped.
	The people journeyed to the tops of the mountains, but they did not quite reach the hole in the sky. 

	A ladder was brought and a badger was sent up the ladder to investigate. He reported that the entire middle world was covered in water and totally uninhabitable. His feet and legs were covered in mud and to this day the badger has dark legs and feet. 
	The turkey was sent up the ladder next. She reported that indeed there was no land to be seen. The water had gotten on her tail feathers and to this day the feathers of the turkey are iridescent. 

	The people were very anxious. They did not know what to do about the water. Then the Wind came to the people. 
	The Wind said, If you want change, I will bring change. 

	And so the first prayers were addressed to the Wind. The Wind blew back the water and there was land beneath. The people were glad and they thanked the Wind. They climbed up and onto the land, where they still are today.

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One way or another, here we are in Skelling. The dusty sagebrush desert, swirling with wind and magpies. Jackrabbits and tarantulas skittering across the scorched earth, rattlesnakes hiding in the shade of sage scrub. 
	Autumns cruel with brown leaves and haunting rainbows, winters wide with snows and bright skies, springs flush green and windy, summers of sunflowers and lightning. How we love our awful little town.
	There’s a sense of insider’s pride among us, those who allowed this land to render us human extensions of her seasons, to rise and fall under no delusion of separation or superiority over her whims and boons. When the time comes you just crawl under the porch and die. The world no wiser, no better, no different, nothing changed. But against all odds you understood the mainline truth of the universe: that it wasn’t about you. 

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(from Cricket’s Almanac, which chronicles Skelling, NM through its geological inception, the Spanish settlement of the southwest, mobsters and bootleggers and hippie communes and motorcycle gangs, railroads and coal mining and fracking, up to the present day.)

There is some dispute about the accuracy of this Apache creation story and whether it was distorted via the anthropologist who recorded it; valid — I recount it as something told to a child in the Southwest, and all respect to their unwritten and original origin story.

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Image: Ellen Harding Baker (1876) ‘Solar System Quilt’