The Low Wall

Polly crossed the high desert of northeastern Arizona in the early morning and came down at the mouth of a canyon she had been promised was one of the great ones. She was, at first, unimpressed. The walls at the entrance were red and handsome, but they were barely thirty feet high, hardly taller than the old cottonwood trees growing along the sandy floor beside them.

A raven was working through the cottonwoods, turning over loose bark with a heavy black beak. This canyon does not begin big, he said, without looking up. It grows. Walk into it. The Navajo people, the Diné, call this place Tséyiʼ, which means inside the rock. Spanish visitors heard that word, spelled it their own way, and the spelling stuck.

So the map says Canyon de Chelly, and everyone here says it aloud as though it were the word shay. Whatever it is called, the floor of it belongs to the Navajo Nation, and it is not an empty place. About forty Diné families still live inside the canyon and farm its floor. People have followed this wash for more than four thousand years, which makes it one of the longest inhabited places in all of North America.

Polly looked down the wash, where the sand curved away between the walls and the walls leaned a little higher with every bend. She had planned to stay one afternoon. She took the raven's advice instead, chose a branch, tucked one foot up, and decided to follow the sand inward for a week and see how tall rock can get.