Sacred Children of the Canyons

Three children lay nestled under an old juniper tree. Giggling and swaying, they crouched together as tightly as possible to remain hidden from parents as one by one they came walking through the canyon.

To enter Happy Canyon, you have to step off the trail. But first there has to be a trail, and today there is one only because the children have walked it so many times. It is a nowhere place, a cleft in the side of a small hill, a hideout for bobcats and owls and the bones of their dinners. A wilderness for the imagination.

Within its narrow walls we had been working on a play for two months, and the day of our performance had finally come. The children crouched under the tree were dressed as Bobcat, Cougar, and Narrator in pink sweater. Others stood sentinel on the opposite side of the stage.

I’ve had the privilege of watching these kids grow from silent, toddling creatures to long, lean beanpoles, all within the walls of this little drainage. There are other canyons, other trails and places that fill our days with mystery, boredom, and adventure. But Happy Canyon, so narrow, so brief, remains unique. This would not be the first visit from parents.

I walked through center stage in three pairs of pants, two jackets, hat and gloves. It snowed four inches that morning, and our first order of business had been to sweep and shovel the set. Kids dusted snow from the trees and cleared the stage, which sloped from north to south, west to east. Some of the snow still clung to branches, and when the breeze came through wisps of glittering snow filled the scene. “It’s beautiful,” I said. Michael, eyes wide like the cat he was, replied, “It’s real.”

Two months prior, as I sat idling over winter break, it had dawned on me that it was time to do a play. A real play. The kids are 7-10, purposefully mixed age, and while Silke and I had done a few performances with them, they were mostly kindergarten stuff. Five minutes, a cardboard dragon, few words and a song. This would be different. “We’re starting a play in January,” I texted parents. “I’m writing it now. Kids get to choose their spirit animal. Anything they want.”

“What’s your spirit animal, Joe?” asked Jacques upon his return.

“I’m an ant,” I answered, a response that never fails to fall flat. By now we had cougars, bobcats, owls, buffalo and deer. “You could be anything,” Jacques pleaded, “Why an ant?”

“I’m not particularly important,” I said with a smile. “I live in the background. There are millions of us. I move things around.”

“Shh!” whispered Deer. My remaining students, on the far side of the canyon, were also squeezing themselves against a tree, trying to remain hidden as parents entered and took their wobbly seats. I walked through the crowd. “Here,” said one mother, “the antlers.” They had been forgotten at home that morning.

I walked to Deer at stage left, a splendid juniper with multiple trunks growing like fingers from hand to sky. “Are you guys ready?” I asked, looking each child in the eye. Heads nodded. Fists tightened. We had rehearsed that morning, and again that afternoon. Both had gone well, though there were always a few hiccups. “I’ll be at the side of the audience. Look to me if your forget…”

“We know. We know…”

“Okay,” I smiled. “You know.”

I walked back through center stage, the zip-zip-zip of my snow pants conspicuous in the silence. I looked at no one. Silke had walked over with the parents, asking them to enter quietly. We had a plan.

Zip-zip-zip, I walked to Cougar, Bobcat, and Narrator, huddled under the tree on stage right. “We’re close,” I said, “Are you ready?” Their heads bobbed eagerly.

“Wait, who’s Jawkwess?” asked Jacques when we first read act three six weeks ago.

“That’s you!” said Risa.

“Oh,” said Jacques, a little dumbfounded.

“It’s French,” I offered, “the spelling is strange.”

Years ago, like Happy Canyon, I was a nowhere writer in a nowhere place. I often used the children’s real names without giving it much thought. It hardly mattered. But as our trail to Happy Canyon slowly took shape, other walkers in our neighborhood began to follow. Just so, my writing became more visible and I began to realize that it wasn’t right of me to lead a trail right to their doorstep. I gave them back their names.

Our play was written in four drafts, acts one and two coming first, with modest changes based on the kids’ feedback. “I want this to be your play,” I told them, pen in hand. But I wasn’t always prepared for what that meant. After some name changes and revised staging, act 3 came pretty easily. But it was act 4, with its central fight scene, that drew the biggest conflict. In me.

“Look guys,” I said after our first read through. “I’m not going to have someone say, ‘stabby stabby,’ and have a bunch of people and animals bleeding all over the place. This is… Do you even know what it’s like to cut someone like that? To see someone bleeding? It’s not funny. It’s not… I’m…” I was angry. Resistant. Disappointed. This was no ant.

There’s a conversation hidden in children’s games. In the play. The canyon. Our footsteps. It’s so subtle it’s often overlooked, even by those doing the conversing. Most of the time I miss it too. But I knew from the beginning of our play that the performance wasn’t really the crux. It was the chance to let the story live through us, be written upon us, by us, with us. What I wanted, what I deeply wanted, was to engage with it. I wanted the story to be pressed into the trees, like the bodies of my students, handholds of memory, stage right and stage left. The language. The resistance. The confidence and disturbances. I wanted to feel all of it.

Years from now, when these children are adults, I will walk this little drainage in the hillside, transformed by its name into the immensity of a canyon. Now privately owned, a small house will sit nearby, a curl of smoke drifting from its stove pipe. Stacks of wood will be neatly arranged between two trees, familiar trees, and the stones will be less crooked. I will have to sneak in under cover of darkness, a perfect job for an ant. Three of the trees will have died or been cut down, others will have grown. Little will remain of the messy hodgepodge of Happy Canyon.

Small flower beds will be neatly terraced into the hillsides, bulbs of tulips and narcissus having replaced the crocuses we planted one fall. The old plastic tarp, rotting in the sun, long gone. But as I walk past the familiar jog in the trail, some twenty years from now, the dominant cedars will all still take their place on stage, marking our entrance and exit. The old stone upon which I sat, mouthing forgotten lines. The wind picks up, sending a spray of snow over the scene.

“Who? Who is it you’re talking about Cougar?” The call of a Great Horned Owl, hidden by darkness among the trees. “The humans. They’re fighting again,” Cougar growled in response.

I talk to myself by planting stories in time. I plant them in trees and children, in stones and canyons. It’s selfish. But I don’t care. The very fabric of my fingerprints reveals the arc and twist of plotlines. As I took center stage before the parents, smiling at that future man, I looked out upon the parents teetering on crooked ground. “This time it’s for real,” the kids had said as they took their places for the final time. I pretended to speak to them. I pretended to speak to the children. But I spoke these words to one man only, and that is myself.

“Thank you for coming. I know the weather has been difficult, the ups and downs of our schedules and changes. It’s not easy to put on a play in the wilderness of March. It’s good that you’re here.” A jay flew over our heads, then veered toward the sun, calling to her friends. A wisp of snow tickled my neck.

“The kids have put a lot of time and energy into this, and I’m proud of them, proud of us. Thanks for everything you did to make it happen, the costumes, practicing lines at home. The performance is just a small part, but it’s an important part. When you sit with a story like this for so long, when you write and fashion it - it works its way into your body. Your heart.”

I smiled, then took a breath of cool air, holding it briefly against my lungs, and released, “I present to you Sacred Children of the Canyons.”

A day after arguing with the kids, I sat outside our classroom with a purple pen and our third draft. “Okay,” I said. “I heard you yesterday. I got frustrated. I’m sorry. I recognize there’s something important here, and I want you to be part of it. I understand you want a better fight scene, a bigger conflict.”

The kids cheered. This was the real play; the performance was only its shadow. My heart eased. “I’m willing to listen to what you want. But I’m not just going to write a bunch of needless violence into it.”

“No, no. See… I want to hurt somebody, but I also want to get hurt,” said Bobcat.

“Yeah, that’s what I was trying to say. I want to hurt somebody. But like, I also want to be hurt,” said the Hunter.

“I want to almost die, but not die,” said Lioness.

“I want to hurt somebody, but I don’t want to get hurt,” said another.

“Alright,” I said, listening to the story coming alive in the kids, “let’s find a good way to do this. We’ll go one by one…” We staged the final scene in less than half an hour. I rewrote it that night. The kids didn’t want a bloodbath. They wanted a conflict. They wanted to resolve it too. “It has to be real,” said Maria.

It’s hard to engage with the stories inside, to make them real. It’s a subject I study with books and theories, but more importantly in myself. I observe it in children. It’s a gift they give to me. I hope I offer them a small seed of it in return.

“We enter in different forms in different ages,” says Buffalo near the end of the play. “What appears hidden or lost is often buried right beneath our hoofs.”

I wrote these words because I wanted to hear them. I want to hear them in the mouths of kids, and I want to question the man who put them there.

“But why bury it? Why forget?” asks Mountain Lion.

That’s a good question, Mountain Lion. I’m not sure I have the answer. I have suspicions, but it’s a question that’s very much alive in me. Why do we forget our kindness? Our love? Even our grief and pain? “Why do the gifts of the grandmothers and grandfathers become like illnesses in the hands of their children?”

Owl replies, “The ways of the earth are mysterious. What is born as magic often dies as corruption.”

I sat to the side of the audience during the play. Here and there I mouthed a line to the kids, but their memories were lovely. Words came alive in the right place, the right moment. The movement, rhythm, and cadence. We’re speaking to the earth. The earth speaks to us. With our own voices the earth speaks to us.

Why do we forget?

Near our classroom is another canyon, much larger than Happy Canyon. The Rio Grande Gorge is 100 miles long, anywhere from 600-800 feet deep. These little side canyons, the result of water flowing from mountains in the east, are often the only way down to the river bottom, which is otherwise protected by steep cliffs.

To gaze into this gorge is to look over broad spectrums of time. “There are many gems hidden in the walls of a single canyon,” spoke the Narrator, “Many generations yet to come.” Our small band roams these canyons most days. It is not uncommon to find petroglyphs and old tin cans, other signs, bones protruding from the earth. Hawks, doves, lizards and bighorn sheep. There are millions of stories written between its walls. We are but one.

“But why bury it? Why forget?”

Lioness, having survived a deep wounding by the Hunter, lifted her head softly in reply. Deer, her old companion, tended her injured shoulder. I shed a tear of gratitude in that moment, a sweetness reserved for that old man who walks alone in darkness.

Throughout most of our rehearsals, the children’s lines were delivered in the matter of fact tone required of rote memorization. But words are only symbols of a larger meaning often expressed behind the scenes. This time, in the performance, the words came soft like a dream, as if Lioness had just realized something. The words wore away like layers of wrapping, drifting like snow into the wind. The story has been told thousands of times, but each performance gives them new depth. I held my breath.

“So that children may remember.”