[I can’t lie, I haven’t had time to read for pleasure during this academic year, so I don’t have a ton of new recs for this year’s Beach Reads series. So I wanted to revisit authors and books I’ve read on the beach over my life—and to ask for your own recommendations for a crowd-sourced weekend post we can all throw in the beach bag!]
On a great mystery series that captures the lure of the Southwest, then and
now.
There were a lot of reasons why Colorado’s Mesa Verde
National Park stood out to me among
the many amazing stops on my family’s 1990 trip to visit Southwestern National
Parks. Exploring thousand year old cliff dwellings, hiking out to the site of long-preserved petroglyphs, surprising a lone coyote at a sunset ruin—these are the kinds of
experiences that will hit a 13 year old AmericanStudier in a particular way.
But perhaps the most alluring aspect of Mesa Verde is its central mystery: the
question of why the Anasazi people abruptly abandoned their cliff dwellings less than a century into their time there, and what happened
to them after their departure. Archaeologists and historians have a variety of theories, but to some degree the Anasazi’s fate will always
remain a mystery—and will thus keep young AmericanStudiers (and all the rest of
us) coming back to Mesa Verde.
Even without an event as striking as the Anasazi’s departure, the dominant
features of the Southwest’s human landscape—villages atop isolated mesas, dwellings in
the sides of gaping canyons, petroglyphs carved in the rock and sand—lend
themselves nicely to the mysteriously inclined. No one capitalized on that
element more fully, nor more effectively, than Tony Hillerman, the University of New Mexico journalism professor who
wrote (among his more than 30 total books) a series of 18 phenomenal mysteries
focused on Navajo policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. I may be misremembering for dramatic effect, but I’m
pretty sure I was reading one of the best novels in the series, A Thief of Time (1988), during that family National Park vacation—and I know that I won’t
ever think of New Mexico’s canyons and ruins without thinking of how Hillerman
captures them in the hugely atmospheric, spooky, and pitch-perfect opening to
that novel.
Hillerman and his Navajo mysteries (as they’re usually collectively known)
also interestingly complement another Southwestern writer about whom I’ve
written in this space: Mary Hunter Austin. An Oklahoma native and decorated World War II veteran, Hillerman moved to
New Mexico for his UNM job and, like Austin, found himself more and more deeply
interested in and attached to the region and its histories, cultures, and
communities. (As he chronicles in his wonderful memoir.) While I can’t say for sure how the Navajo felt about
Hillerman’s books, from everything I have seen they recognized, as I believe would any reader, that Hillerman treated his
focal cultures and communities with the same abiding respect and admiration he
did his protagonist policemen and the landscapes they patrolled. Perhaps the
one thing that links the many different Southwestern authors and artists about whom I’ve blogged over the years is how much they found themselves drawn to the Southwest—to its places, to
its histories, and, certainly, to its very American stories.
Next Beach Read
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. You know
what to do—share Beach Read recs for the weekend post, please!
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