They drove on through the late November light with the road falling away toward the valley. In the west the sun hung low, a copper disk above the red land. The two men squinted through the windshield. Before them, Monument Valley unveiled itself in towering silhouettes and stone ramparts where the world opened to an ancient scene held in amber light. A long black ribbon of highway led onward, straight and true, toward those looming buttes etched against the sky. The older man eased the truck to the shoulder and killed the engine. In the newfound quiet, they sat as the wind ticked against the cooling hood. Ahead, the valley’s monuments stood waiting in the orange glow of sundown.
“Hell of a sight,” the driver said softly.
To the east, Sentinel Mesa rose broad and dark, its flat summit catching the last aureate light. The mesa loomed like a great natural battlement guarding the valley’s entrance. Aside, a solitary pinnacle known as the Big Indian stood in muted vermilion hues. In profile it did resemble a weathered face—a monumental visage gazing eternally south over the sacred lands. Farther south, Mitchell Butte jutted upward, its sheer walls burnished red-gold on one side where the sunlight still lingered. A mile or so southeast, the land climbed again to the massive bulk of Mitchell Mesa, now mostly in shadow. The sun was dropping behind it, outlining that mesa’s far rim in a halo of pale fire. Near to Mitchell Butte, a tall slender Gray Whiskers Butte rose like a lonely watchman. Its pinnacle was streaked with dusk, the stone fading from blood-red at its base to a somber gray at its crown. One of the men pointed toward it silently, and the other simply watched, understanding the unspoken thought: how small they were below these giants of rock.
High above Sentinel Mesa, the evening swan of this desert had already appeared — a waxing moon, nearly full and ghostly white. It floated just over the mesa’s dark crown as twilight gathered, like an omen or a blessing. The sky behind the landforms had begun to take on the deep indigo of coming night. In the east, opposite the dying sun, the heavens were lavender and faintly banded with pink. The moon climbed in silence, gaining strength as the sun bled out in a final flare of vermilion along the horizon. In that half-light the mesas and buttes became blackened shapes, cut from the twilight itself, their identities merging with the land’s dusk. November’s chill crept in with the dark. The younger man drew his jacket closed. Neither of them had thought to speak for minutes now. They simply wandered a few yards from the truck, eyes turned outward and upward, silhouettes of their own against the dimming day.
His companion nodded. He opened the door and stepped out. “Never seen anything like it,” the younger man said. His voice was reverent, almost a whisper. The driver climbed out too, boots crunching on red grit. They walked a few paces from the road, drawn forward as if on a tide. The evening air was cool and carried a dry, dusty scent tinged with sage. In the far distance, the monuments cast long blue shadows over the valley floor. The travelers stood for a long moment without speaking, each alone with the scale of it.
The land was vast and inscrutable. In the silence it felt holy. It was easy to believe no one else in the world existed at this hour — only these two and the ancient valley spread before them. The wind came from the west in a long sigh, carrying the dust of the desert. It whispered through dry bunches of brush at their feet and stirred a lonely tumbleweed across the cracked earth. The younger man removed his hat and ran a hand through his hair as if to assure himself this was real. The older man stood with thumbs hooked in his belt, head tilted back to drink in the view. His face was lined and still, the dying light painting one side in gentle umber. If either man harbored any burdens or regrets from the road behind, the land seemed to dwarf those worries into nothing. They felt themselves small as insects on an endless painted floor.
After a time, the driver cleared his throat. “We’ll lose the light soon,” he said. His voice was low. He seemed unwilling to break the spell with anything louder.
The younger man nodded again but did not take his eyes off the valley. “Just a few more minutes,” he replied.
“All right.” The driver smiled thinly and pulled out a cigarette. He struck a match and cupped it against the breeze, the brief flame reflecting in his narrowing eyes. In the glow of the match the canyons of his face showed for an instant, then vanished into shadow again. He drew in and exhaled a plume of smoke that the wind instantly seized and unraveled. Sentinel Mesa crouched out there like a great shadow, crowned now by a silver moon that grew brighter by the minute. The older man followed that mesa’s outline with his eyes, tracing the crenellated cliffs and the slope of rubble at its base. “They named that one right,” he said, mostly to himself.
“What’s that?” the other asked softly.
“Sentinel. Standing guard.” The driver gestured with the glowing tip of his cigarette. “Feels like it’s been watching this place forever.”
The young man considered the hulking form of the mesa. In the twilight it did have the aspect of a watchtower keeping vigil over the valley. “It probably has,” he said. “Long before we ever came.”
On the road behind them a faint glint of chrome from the hood caught a stray moonbeam.
The younger man broke the long quiet. “You ever been down here before?”
The older man nodded. “A time or two.”
“You see all this then?”
A chuckle from the older man, low in his throat. “Not quite like this. First time I come through here I didn’t see a damn thing.”
The younger man looked over, puzzled. “What do you mean?”
“Well,” the old man said, “I’d been driving since Durango, and I’d run out of good sense somewhere near Shiprock. Rolled in with the rain. Thought I’d catch a nap and wake up to a postcard.”
He paused, lighting another cigarette, letting the flame flicker in the cooling breeze.
“Only I parked across from a big ridge in the moonless dead wet dark, didn’t think much of it. Woke up next morning to what I thought was the edge of a landfill. Just a big wall of brown rock. Figured I took a wrong turn and ended up behind a gas station.”
The young man laughed. “You’re kidding.”
“Nope. Got out, stretched, cursed the road and the view and the whole damn state. Got out to take a leak, figured I’d head on. And just as I’m zippering up, I look to the right—and there it is.”
He waved his hand toward the black outline of Mitchell Mesa, vast and solemn in the moonlight.
“The whole valley,” he said. “Caught me sideways. I parked blind to all of it. Missed the whole show.”
He shook his head, the cigarette ember glowing orange.
“Spent the next half hour cussing myself out. Sat there red-faced with a thermos of cold coffee like a man at the symphony who showed up deaf and late.”
The younger man laughed, full-throated now. “You mean to tell me you slept in Monument Valley and thought you were behind a gas station?”
The old man shrugged. “In my defense, it was cloudy.”
They both laughed then, the sound rolling out over the scrub and rocks and into the vastness.
He walked a little farther from the road, and the older man paced beside him. Ground crunching underfoot, fine dust kicking up around their boots. They ascended a slight rise where the terrain leveled off in a broad expanse leading toward the valley proper. Beneath their feet the earth was soft and powdery—red earth, lit now by the dim purple of dusk and the growing lunar light. The younger man scuffed the toe of his boot in it, and a little crimson cloud rose and drifted away. By daylight this soil was a vivid rust-red, the color of dried blood. It was as if the ground itself had a memory of violence or sorrow, but the truth of that color was simpler and older: the iron in the earth, left behind by ancient oceans, oxidizing over eons in the sun and airen.wikipedia.org. The land bled red because the very minerals of its making had rusted in the long passage of time. In places the valley floor was cracked clay, in others loose sand, all part of the same great story of stone turned to dust.
The two men walked out a bit further into the open, where scattered plants clung to life in the hardpan. There were low shrubs of sagebrush exuding a faint herbal scent, and clumps of purple sage with gray-green leaves, their summer blooms long spent. Here and there jutted the spiky forms of yucca, bayonet-tipped leaves fanning out from the base of each plant. Most everything that grew here hugged the ground and wore the dusty colors of the soil. In the failing light, the sage and grass tuft looked almost colorless, pale as ash. Only when lightning storms rolled through would the desert briefly bloom green; in these dry weeks of autumn the vegetation lay dormant, patient. A scraggly juniper tree crouched in a shallow gully nearby, twisted by wind and drought, its bark bleached where it faced the sun. These were the survivors of an unforgiving climate – rabbitbrush, snakeweed, hardy shrubs that lived on almost nothing. The young man knelt and pinched a bit of sage between his fingers, releasing its sharp fragrance. This smell, to him, was the perfume of the desert itself.
In the sand at the base of the sagebrush, he noticed a faint track. He brushed aside some dust to reveal the imprint of tiny claws: the delicate spoor of a lizard that had passed earlier when the ground was warm. It wound off between the rocks and vanished. Other tracks crisscrossed subtly in the dirt – a jackrabbit’s long-toed prints, nearly indistinguishable amid scuffs, and the delicate imprints of some small bird that had hopped about pecking for seeds. Life was here, though it was seldom seen. A red-tailed hawk wheeled silently high above, cutting black circles into the dim sky. Perhaps it was hunting one last time before full dark. The younger man stood again and looked out over the valley with new wonder, realizing that countless creatures lived and moved in this terrain largely unseen. In the daytime heat they sheltered in burrows and shadow. At dusk they came forth. He imagined a coyote trotting through a distant wash on soft paws, nose to the ground; a mule deer picking its way among these rocks somewhere beyond sight; a mountain lion watching from high up on a ledge as it had watched all afternoon. This desert did not easily give up its secrets, but they were there.
The older man stepped out onto a broad flat of rock and ground his cigarette butt under his heel. In the silence his companion could hear the scrape of boot leather on stone. The rock was part of an exposed slab that had broken off from a greater outcrop. It sloped gently down into the valley and was strewn with fine gravel from its own slow decay. The driver pressed his bootsole into a brittle crust of the rock’s surface, and it crumbled with a dry sound. These monoliths around them were not as immutable as they looked. Wind and rain had been gnawing at them for ages uncounted. Every thunderstorm that swept these flats cut new gullies in the shale, undercutting the bases of the cliffs. Every hot summer day the rock expanded, and every cold night it contracted, fissures growing by imperceptible degrees. Water trickled into cracks and ice pried them wider in winter. In time, great slabs would calve off with a roar and a billow of red dust, adding another heap of boulders to the talus at a butte’s feet. The valley was strewn with such piles like fallen ramparts. Erosion was the master sculptor here, patient and inexorable, chewing away the softer rock beneath and leaving the harder stone standing in great towers and tablelands. Each butte, each spire, had endured unthinkable ages to remain in this moment as a seemingly permanent fixture—and yet they too were slowly disappearing grain by grain. In a thousand years the difference might be subtle; in a million, perhaps these forms would be gone entirely, ground down to the flatness of the surrounding plain. The land was alive in geological time, though to human eyes it appeared frozen in a grand and silent repose.
They wandered farther, and now the truck was a small shape behind them on the roadside pullout. Neither man minded. The road was empty; no other vehicle had come along for a while, and only a lone set of headlights glimmered many miles away, moving slowly, probably a rancher or a late tourist heading home. The two travelers were alone with the land and sky. Overhead, the first stars were coming out in earnest, timid specks appearing in the dome of night. The moon was higher now and bright enough to cast shadows. The tall profile of Big Indian was cut into the moonlit sky, unmistakable and solemn, and on the valley floor the leaning spire of Gray Whiskers stood lit on one side by the cold glow. Away to the east, the open desert beyond the valley was falling into darkness, a great stretch of unknown country into which the highway disappeared. And still the west flared with afterlight — a band of deep red on the horizon, fading to gold, then greenish and up into the endless blue-black. It was a sky that seemed too vast for the world.
The younger man found a boulder at the edge of the flat and sat down. He removed his hat and set it beside him. The stone felt cool now under his legs. The heat of the day had fled so quickly that the air itself seemed to crackle with cold. He drew a deep breath and let it out. The land gave back only silence. A great and ageless solitude reigned here, the kind that makes its home in deserts and high places where man has no authority. He could feel it pressing in, not unkindly. It was the solitude of a world largely unchanged long before humans and likely long after. Under that eternal sky and the gaze of those stony sentinels, their own lives felt momentarily trivial. Yet the feeling was not bitterness or despair. Rather, it was humbling and strangely reassuring, as if all the griefs and triumphs that had ever marked a human life were nothing next to the calm presence of these rocks. The earth endured. The earth would always endure. Time and wind would wear down even mountains, but until then these mesas would keep witness over the days and nights, the storms and still mornings, the generations of men who came wandering through seeking something larger than themselves.
The older man walked over and eased himself down on the same boulder. He groaned softly as he sat, rubbing one knee. They both looked out over the emerging night. For a long while, neither spoke. Far in the distance, a coyote yipped — a brief, high sound, then silence again. The younger man smiled in the dark.
“The cold is coming fast,” the older man said after a time.
“Yeah. It does that quick out here.” He picked up his hat and dusted it off, though no dust truly could be kept off in this country. Dust was the true sovereign of the valley — red dust that coated boots and clothes, that hung in the air at midday, that settled on skin like a fine powder. It would ride back with them in their vehicle no matter how well they shook their coats. It had a way of clinging on, a reminder of where one had been.
“You ready?” with a tilt of his head back toward the truck.
The younger man took one last sweeping look over Monument Valley. The forms of Sentinel Mesa and its neighbors were nearly indistinguishable from the dark of the sky now, save where the moonlight etched a line or two along a cliff. The valley floor was lost in shadow. In the east, a few scattered clouds caught a faint silver luminescence from the risen moon. The beauty of the scene was stark and almost aching — a kind of beautiful emptiness that a man carries away inside him, knowing he has witnessed something that can never properly be told. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but no words came. Instead, he simply nodded and got to his feet. They began walking back toward the truck, side by side.
Behind them, the desert night continued its slow unfurling. One by one, stars pierced the darkness. The moon climbed higher on its silent arc. The great stone silhouettes stood unchanged, as they had through countless nights. In a few hours the dawn would come and paint them in rose and gold once more. But for now the valley slumbered under the pale glow of the moon. As the two men reached their vehicle and the engine turned over, its headlights flaring to life, they took one last look across the plains of Monument Valley. Then the truck pulled back onto the highway and receded down the lonesome ribbon of asphalt, two red taillights diminishing and finally vanishing into the boundless Navajo night. The land remained as it was, vast and indifferent to their departure. Sentinel Mesa and Mitchell Mesa stood like opposing pillars at the great gateway of the valley, keeping their eternal watch. The wind sighed over the road and across the sleeping rocks. The footprints the men had left were already beginning to blur with settling dust. Above, the indifferent stars traveled their courses. And the red earth of the desert stretched away in all directions—ancient, patient, and still, beneath the enduring sky.
Michael Stephen Wills Photography 