A Palpable Silence: Pecos

When you first come to Pecos you are struck by the beauty. Walking up the trail toward the old kiva and the remains of the mission, I always remember the words from the Navajo: I walk with beauty before me. I walk with beauty behind me. I walk with beauty below me. I walk with beauty above me. I walk with beauty around me.

But beyond the beauty and beneath the great palpable silence, you cannot help but be aware of the presence of those who have gone before; those who have lived here in peace, those who came to trade, those who came to enslave, those who sought to overthrow, and those who killed to empower themselves.

As you walk along the trail, a closer look at the trailside rocks and soil shows you a ground littered with pieces of ancient pots. History is overlaid with history here. You stand at the site of an ancient pueblo, two Spanish colonial missions, part of the Santa Fe trail, a Civil War battle, and a 20th century working ranch.

Go down the old ladder into the ancient underground kiva and spend some moments alone with your thoughts and all the swirling fragments of the past. Absorb some of that great silence into yourself and make it your own. Climb back up into the hot sunshine and walk with beauty all around you.

Pecos National Historical Park

Haunted, haunted Pecos

I don't think that you can go to Pecos National Historical Park without feeling a connection to the past. I've never been anywhere else where there is such a sense of disturbing history. The Indians there were forced to convert by the Franciscan fathers; their land was colonized, they were forbidden their kivas, and they were made to build an adobe church south of their pueblo. During the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, they rose up, killed the priest, and "built a forbidden kiva in the very convento of the mission."* When you visit today and look from that kiva to the ruined church, you can easily imagine the Pecos taking back the adobe bricks from the church they were forced to build and using them to reconstruct their sacred kiva.
Each time we have visited Pecos it has been hot and still, with only the sound of birds and the occasional quiet words of another visitor carrying down the trail on the wind. We step lightly, respecting the rattlesnakes' right to privacy. We look over our shoulders often, for there is always a strong feeling that the current peacefulness of the place is only lightly superimposed on the violence of the past.

I am reading The Night Journal by Elizabeth Crook, a novel set in Pecos. The narrative moves back and forth between the modern day and the late 1890s, and from Pecos to Las Vegas, New Mexico. Pecos is described as fantastic...unsettling...and eerily romantic. I think that you will agree, if you have the chance to go there.


Information source:

*Pecos; U.S. National Park Service brochure 404/952-40107, 1996.