Places and Names: Inscription Rock

Do your strongest memories take place far from home? Why do we marvel at etchings on a distant rock, but never think to write our name on our kitchen walls? The farther you've gone, it seems, the richer your life, the longer and truer your legend.

Near Ramah, New Mexico, just east of the Zuni Indian reservation, is a lonely National Monument called El Morro. My visit was one of 66,686, according to the National Park Service, in 2001. By comparison, over a million people went to Death Valley last year, and nearly ten million to the Great Smoky Mountains.

Morro means "snout" in Spanish. The monument is, not surprisingly, one of the innumerable rock formations of the Southwest, which at some angle may have resembled a snout to the Spaniard who named it. At its top lies A'tsi'na, yet another of the innumerable Anasazi ruins of the Southwest. El Morro is not breathtakingly large or beautiful, nor does A'tsi'na rival the majesty of places like Chaco Canyon or Mesa Verde; but neither the Snout nor the ancient pueblo fully account for El Morro's landmark designation. El Morro bears another attraction that makes it "touristic" -- an awkward word, I've always thought, that Lijsa, my Dutch travelmate in Cambodia, often used pejoratively.

The trail up to A'tsi'na ascends past a face of El Morro called Inscription Rock. A few twelfth-century Anasazi petroglyphs are etched into it, along with dozens of signatures of anglo travelers. Most of the signatures are over 150 years old and the first is dated 1605. The earliest names are Spanish, most are American, and a few explain the signatory's presence at El Morro. ("They passed on March 23, 1632, to the avenging of the death of Father Letrado.") But the majority are nothing more than autographs: P. Gilmer Breckenridge. Andres Romero. These carvings have been added to the stick-figure petroglyphs made by the A'tsi'na Puebloans back in the twelfth century. Some of the signatures are intricately filigreed, and remarkably calligraphic; even the simplest ones must have taken longer to engrave with the point of a sword than it takes me to write and edit each of these travel letters. Perhaps the degree of difficulty helps explain their terseness -- just a name and a date, most of them, no time to chisel details. Probably the enigmatic brevity of the Indian petroglyphs set an example, too.

But I think there's more to it than that. In La Recherche du Temps Perdu, these massive volumes whose first third I've lugged around Southeast Asia and now into the American desert, Proust gives titles to his sections like "Place-Names: The Name," "Place-Names: The Place," and "Names of People." I'm no apologist for Proust's autobiographical minutiae; I loved Swann's Way but the longueurs of its sequel, Within a Budding Grove, bored me crazy. But Proust's impulse -- to make a legend out of even a madeleine or a little violin phrase, to sing the litany of names and places -- is so pure. In order to do this travel writing I frequently consult my journal, but all I ever want to verify are the names of people and places, and the sequences of events. The rest is foolish emotion, fleeting opinion, and unreliable analysis. Or, as Hemingway puts it in A Farewell to Arms, "finally only the names of places had dignity."

A name carved on a remote rock carries that same dignity, that enduring confidence: I made it here, I am, I was. This place and I, we came together. I have traveled.

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