The Last Man There

All people should have the blessing of knowing a secret place. A wild place known only to them. Go find the most distant, forlorn splendor you can. When you have thought you have reached the place, go further. Go to the furthest reaches, to the deep, high, and lonely corners of the earth. When you smell the ripe breath of the lion, however, turn back. You have gone too far. Some places are not meant for man.

In the secret places we can directly touch the heart of the great mystery. When you have found the place, sit in silence and breathe for a few hours or a few years. There you may hear an answer.

I will tell you now of what once was a secret place. I will tell you now because now it no longer exists.

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It seems the first people that came to the hidden place were clad in furs and feathers and came from the North. They must have managed to climb the perilous cliff face to the alcove before the moki steps were chipped into the sandstone. There, in the glowing grotto beside the clear spring, they painted an image of their philosophy onto the rock in rusty tones.

It appeared to be a tree of life showing thin, ethereal beings representing various races of men and animals emerging from a common root from within the earth. Snakes, bighorn sheep, deer, the bird people, and various men and women rose from wispy, red stalks towards the sky. 

They also left a small collection of clay figurines on a shelf under a deep overhang next to the tree of life image. There they sat apparently for thousands of years, untouched by man. The figures depicted men of a distinctly asiatic appearance, perhaps recent arrivals from the North. From their alcove the figures looked out towards the spiraling northern stars.

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The next that we know came to the place seems to have been a traveler or shell trader that came from the South. The great conch shell he carried must have originated at least as far from what we now call the Sea of Cortez, or perhaps from the jungle coasts of even further South. It may have been passed from person to person making its way North over many years, traded for parrot feathers or other great rarities as such things generally were. Such an item may also have been an object of great jealousy and cause of bloodshed. Whatever its story, it was a long journey over many hundreds of miles of broken desert for the conch to reach the secret place deep in the canyons.

For unknown reasons, whoever brought the great conch left it alone beside the hidden spring. Perhaps he was overcome by the beauty of the place, perhaps it was an offering, or maybe it was left for safe-keeping in the secret alcove. 

A carving on the wall near the spring shows a figure holding the shell emerging from the great spiral of the universe.

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The gardeners seem to have come next. It seems they lived in the place for many years. They tenderly transformed the basin of the hidden alcove into a magnificent garden filled with corn, squash, potatoes, and beans. Elaborate ribbons of water were guided from the spring to water the tender roots of the field. From images left by the gardeners, the conch shell was also used to carry water to nourish plants on the upper terraces. 

They also depicted themselves, a family or band holding hands in a circle.

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The next person that we know that came to the place was a Spanish priest. We know his name and where he came from because he carved it on the cliff face - Father Francisco de Grenada (Grenada in this instance abbreviated symbolically by a pomegranate, the symbol of the Spanish city).

We do not know how long he stayed. Like the shell bearer, he seems to have recognized the extent of the beauty of the place to leave a fine Spanish silver cross on the same shelf with the archaic figurines and carved an inscription in the wall - “El Reino Del Cielo Cubre La Tierra Pero La Gente No Lo Ve.”

A man with the same name was buried in a monastery courtyard in Grenada in año 1647, his grave gazing at a grove of fragrant orange trees. If it is the same man and he returned to Spain, this was more than 100 years before Father Escalante came through this wildest part of the West. I have often wondered if he would have shared the story of the place with his brothers before he died, and if the orchards of his home reminded him of the gardens of the alcove. He may have thought he had discovered Eden, and perhaps he did.

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It seems that the next that came to the place was a Frenchman named D. Julien. There are other inscriptions left by him elsewhere in the region. He was known to be a trader in the North, mostly of furs. In the alcove, like elsewhere, he carved his name and a depiction of a remarkable small boat with a sail, which he apparently used to explore up and down the Colorado and Green. How he came to the forlorn and remote corner of the world and how long he stayed will always be a mystery. He left nothing else.

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Others may have come to the place, but they left no evidence of their visit, nor did they disturb the gifts left by those before.

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I know with certainty the last two to come to the place, because I am the last and I met the other.

I grew up in the town of Escalante, where my father ran the post and the dry goods store. I became a cowhand when I was 12, and started riding down into the wild canyon country with a few outfits on occasion. The escarpments and broken slickrock of the country were respected as places of great mystery, the kinds of places where things disappeared.

Looking back now, I believe I may have actually met the old hermit when I was just a boy. Outsiders coming through our town were notable, and I remember the young man who said he was an artist stopping at the store with his two burros. I remember retrieving his mail and my father selling him tea, flour, sugar, and kerosene. He asked us to hold his mail for two months and said he may be back through town but then to forward it on to Kayenta, but we never saw him again. We had assumed he had crossed the river and headed South. Later we learned from the papers that he had disappeared, likely a victim of the countless hazards out in the lonely country. My father and I and many of the other men in town assisted in the search. If you know this country you have probably heard of him. 

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After my youthful years as a cowhand I went to school in Boston to study anthropology and returned home to work on various surveys across the Southwest. They were fond years full of sunsets.

In the 1960s the leaders of our great government to the East decided to dam and flood a swath of mostly unknown canyons in the West to create power for man’s machines and to irrigate the fields to feed their cities. I got a job working on the government survey to map and catalog the area before it was all gone.

I spent many weeks following the course of the Colorado downstream towards the dam site in Glen Canyon, working my way up every side canyon to look for likely indian sites up along high cliff bands. Most of these tucked away places had probably never been visited by a white man before, and never would be again. I found and cataloged many granaries and rock art sites, photographing everything and taking what artifacts I could back with me to go in a dusty government drawer.

As we headed downstream I was assigned to explore up the Escalante River drainage to the West of the Colorado. These were the wild canyons of my youth, though still relatively few had ventured this far down into the lower reaches that would soon be flooded.

In a side canyon that I will not name, I had the most remarkable experience of my life.

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The hermit said he hadn’t spoken to another man for more than 30 years, his estimation of the time that had passed since he found the garden. He had been an artist exploring the deep canyons, and said that he had found the hidden world in a moment of desperation, climbing up the moki steps to a crack to escape a flash flood in the floor of the wash. Once he had found the place, he had found no reason to leave. 

He told me the only other sign of man he ever saw over those years were fires on the distant mountain peak that he could see from the upper terraces. He said that he knew that I would be coming eventually, though.

He showed me around the hanging garden world, which had been his home and cathdral all this time. He showed me the shell and the shell man, the untouched figurines, the tree of life, the priest’s cross and inscription, and the Julien boat. He had added his own additions of art to the walls, including a panoramic landscape of the secret eden done in fine ochre tones under a large overhang.

I walked with him as he hunched through the sunny garden. The rivulets ran over his brown toes. As he shuffled along he muttered things to the ghosts of the gardeners as if he knew them personally, about this plant and that and how they were doing.

I didn’t tell him about the coming flood. I stayed the night in his wild hermitage, looking up at the bowl of shimmering stars and distant lighting grazing on the forage of the silent peaks. He served me raw potatoes and beans of wild and ancient varieties that must have been growing there for many hundreds of years.

The next day, I took my leave to return to my main camp where I had left my burros to consider what to do about the old man and the treasures of the secret place.

I returned a few days later resolved to tell the man about the coming flood and to offer to help him leave. I climbed the moki steps to alcove but found the old hermit dead. He was kneeling as if in a final quiet prayer. 

I laid him in the middle of the garden, his face bathed in the nourishing sun. It looked like he had a little grin under his long beard and he was happily asleep. I never learned his name, but I think I know it. I lingered for a few days in empty thought, and then took my leave. I was the last visitor to the place. 

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I took nothing from the alcove except photographs and memories and produced no record for the government of what I had found there. I have kept this secret alone to myself for these many years. But I am telling you now because soon I too will be gone, and man should know what has been lost.

As man's flood silently arrived a few months later, the red paint of the tree of life that had clung to cliffs for thousands of years gently washed away in a matter of hours. The arhaic clay figurines crumbled back to mud. The garden was submerged, and the plants quietly drowned. The carved images on the cliffs and the words of the priest probably lasted somewhat longer, but they too have probably slowly crumbled into the turbid waters by now.

The bones of the hermit look up through the shallow waters in the moonlight. The conch and the silver cross are at his side where I left them, quickly being buried beneath the accumulating sediment, and the place is no more. But man has his electric lights. 

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I had never much believed in holiness before. I had thought the world was basically dead stone and fleeting life. But in the place I saw that the words of the priest were true. The kingdom of heaven is real and is all around us, spread over the earth. There is a real spirit in the world and in life and that is a precious thing that we must treasure, but men do not often see it. Seeing this truth has affected the whole course of the rest of my life.

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