One day, we will have created the petroglyphs
How a stupid Star Trek joke changed my perspective on history.
I spent this past week in southeastern Utah. It’s not a place I expected to spend a whole week, but my mother-in-law is from there and wanted to show the family around her hometown. I loved it there and cannot wait to return.
A lot of the land we traveled across belonged to Native tribes1 and there was something about the landscape that never really let you forget that. Obviously there were road signs informing you that you were always entering or leaving tribal land, but even when you were in official American “Utah”, I was never really able to shake the feeling that I was a guest in someone else’s home.
Every hike we did gave us sightings of a long-abandoned cliff dwellings and carefully-scratched petroglyphs. And you didn’t even have to work hard to see them if you didn’t want to.
A couple of days into the trip, we drove to Sand Island. We wanted to see the San Juan River up close, and this was the quickest way to do that. When we got there, we saw signs indicating that there were petroglyphs in the park. It was so thoughtful of those people to put their art basically right next to the parking lot!
When we got up to the glyphs, we all tried to identify what was going on in them and what it was all supposed to represent. Then someone noticed some words in English. We started looking around and realized how much had been added to those petroglyphs by modern “artists”. It turns out that the US government didn’t actually protect these kinds of pictures from the past until 1979. Because they were unprotected, many people had taken the opportunity to add their own marks to the rocks.
Naturally, everyone’s first instinct was to be upset about this. I think disgust probably wouldn’t have been too strong a word to describe our feelings either. That’s a good instinct that we’ve been socialized to have. History destroyed is unrecoverable, and prioritizing the preservation of the past shows a real maturity of our society. When you’re fighting for survival, you don’t have the luxury of thinking about preserving history; you do whatever needs to be done to preserve the present.
I had made a joke as we were walking up to the glyphs earlier. I said that it felt like we were in a Star Trek episode where the away team gets trapped or kidnapped or stranded. It seems like it always happens on a desert planet, and there are always bluffs and mountains where the baddies can hide. The whole area looked like it could have been the setting of any number of Trek episodes. I had meant the remark as a throwaway line to make my husband chuckle, but I think it stuck with me more than I expected.
After my initial anger at the modern graffiti, I started thinking about why someone might have done it. Didn’t they know what they were destroying? Why didn’t they care? I wondered for a split second what someone thousands of years in the future might think about a society that produced people who would do something like that, and then I realized it. They probably wouldn’t see any difference between the people who made the marks to begin with and the people who added to them in the twentieth century.
I thought back to the trip we’d made to the Blue Mountains the day before. We were searching for a specific grove of aspen trees that my MIL remembered from her youth. We stopped at one, and nearly every trunk had been tagged by someone wanting to leave their mark. We saw inscriptions from the 1950s and ones from last year. Members of our party added their own.
Realizing how human this desire to be remembered or to leave an indelible stamp on something is helped bring me closer to the past. Instead of seeing the people who drew the petroglyphs in the first place as simply bits of history, I was able to see them as people who wanted the same things that humans still innately want today. They wanted to tell stories and leave their marks on something. We could all only hope to make a mark so valuable that future generations view it with awe and wonder.
We spent a lot of time in currently-recognized Navajo and Ute tribal lands in addition to land that’s now considered just Utah that was also once theirs.
That’s a really interesting take on the act of leaving your mark. Reminds me of a small sentence I saw scratched in Chinese into a remote part of the Great Wall of China. “We’re back”
You see people leaving their mark in all sorts of places. What an interesting point of view you have written about.