Leaving a Mark

When the ancient inhabitants of Horseshoe Canyon first began to decorate the redrock walls with images millennia ago, I wonder if anyone told them that they were wasting their time.

The time and energy needed to grind pigments, or to carve outlines into the desert varnish with a stone must have been a serious commitment considering that there would have been animals to hunt and crops that demanded cultivation. Whatever lives that the early people were able to build for themselves in that canyon could have been uncertain, under threat from a surprise drought or an act of aggression from neighbors. Nonetheless, the ancient artists continued to chip and paint the rock, leaving images of people, animals and spirits.

When I looked at those images on a hike through that canyon in the Utah desert thousands of years later, the stone left me with more questions about the people who marked it than they answered.

Clearly, animals were important to those people. Representation of game animals may have been a way that they tried to ensure a successful hunt in the future, or a way to document past triumphs.

Without a written language, the people within the canyon were limited in the level of detail that they could convey. They would have to make the pigments and brushes. They would have to re-imagine what the animals looked like and be responsible for creating their own arrangements that worked with the space that they had. 

Contrast that to our current, connected world where anything can be typed out, digitized, uploaded and made accessible to everyone. The only barrier between the thought and the creation is the time it takes to tap the touch screen a few times — trap the image with the camera and then post it.

Making paint or carving out an idea in the desert rock was much slower work that would require commitment. No doubt, those early artists would choose their panels carefully and think hard about what they wanted to depict.

Even with those efforts to express themselves, we are far removed from any complete understanding of those panels now. We can only take guesses about what the artists had intended. Should it be any different after we have spent our time on earth? What will all our Facebook posts, internet memes, videos and blogs tell future generations? No doubt, they will fade into obscurity as well, though I doubt I am making headlines for saying it.

I can only imagine that in their time, those ancient wall posts must have sparked pride in a people, perhaps a sense of identity. If even a small portion of the artists’ intentions had come across to me as the visitor in the canyon, then that artwork had preserved more of who the people were than any well-

cultivated field or successful hunt. What marks do we leave of ourselves today that people will best remember us by?

The fact that so much of the images’ meaning will likely be lost forever, tells me that we should try to make ourselves understood in the moment — future generations will look to others to speak for them, not us. If we are lucky, a few of them may look back at us and wonder. If people in the present hear our voices, they will have a better idea of what we mean.