TriumphAnt

Monument Valley

“Around her neck
She wore a yellow ribbon,
She wore it in the springtime
And in the month of May.
And if you asked her
Why the heck she wore it,
She said 'It's for my lover
In the U-S Cavalry'.”

Refrain:
“Ca-val-ry!
Ca-val-ry!
She wore it for her lover
In the U-S Cavalry.”

For full effect, picture that John Ford adaptation of the old folkie staple being sung by a near Mormon Tabernacle Choir-quality baritone chorus as, onscreen, a long line of dusty, mounted cavalry troopers plods along. In the background, gray towers of rock (it’s a black-and-white movie; in colour, the towers are rust red) rise hundreds of feet from the floor of the sun-blasted desert, its surface mottled with clumps of sagebrush and scrubby little bushes that seem to need only the faintest of gusts to be converted to the rolling tumbleweeds that have themselves become the subject of many a fireside camp song.

Welcome to Monument Valley.

“She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” (1949) is the second of three John Ford movies that have come to be known collectively as his “Cavalry Trilogy”. The other two are “Fort Apache” (1948), and “Rio Grande” (1950).

This is one brief part of what one reviewer had to say about “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon”:
“[It] is one of those glorious westerns, luminously photographed by director John Ford. It stars John Wayne as a widower living at a military outpost with the cavalry and features some of the most gorgeously photographed exteriors ever captured on film. Monument Valley becomes a place of quiet, stoic beauty and The Duke never gave a more impressive performance than he does here.”

“Quiet, stoic beauty”… Well yeah, I suppose. But when you’re traveling with two 14-year olds who scuttle under the edge of a boulder the size of a four-storey building and pretend to be twin “Charlotte” Atlases, “quiet” and “stoic” are not in evidence (said, incidentally, without a shred of regret. What minds but those of 14-year olds could look at The Mittens – more below – then quickly set up a shot for you in which each has a hand pulled into her sleeve so that both are now immortalized in our home photo album as they stand with silly smiles while each appears to be “wearing” one Mitten?). So you don’t miss “quiet” or “stoic” one little bit, because you are left with beauty and, in the early evening’s setting sun, Monument Valley provides more than enough of that.

If you scroll down a bit here: http://www.tcf.ua.edu/Classes/Jbutler/T440/FordIllustrations.htm
you’ll see the master actually directing scenes in the Valley. The image with the little railroad trolley car features a formation in the background called The Three Sisters, a trio of stark and wonderful fingers of rock. Immediately below it on the left [right under the words “Stagecoach (1939; left)”] is a beautiful black-and-white shot, taken at sunrise, that captures two similar formations in the left and centre background that together are called The Mittens (because that’s what they look like).

And here is a stunning colour sunrise photo of one Mitten casting its shadow on the other. http://www.monumentvalley.com/Pages/english_homepage.html

Given the distance between the two and their near match in height in this photo, this camera’s shutter had to have been tripped at almost the precise moment the morning sun first rose above the horizon. A minute and a half later would have been too late. While you’re “there” (virtually, I mean), click on the Photo Gallery to see a few other equally gorgeous shots. This is obviously a photographer with a deep reverence for this place.

I doubt there are many people with a lifetime spent among American movies who haven’t seen some part of Monument Valley onscreen at least once. I found one website that lists some 33 major film titles whose screen images have included parts of this magnificent setting. And not just westerns. “Forrest Gump”, “Easy Rider”, “2001: A Space Odyssey”, “National Lampoon’s Vacation”, “Back to the Future Part III”… all included Monument Valley scenes. The Valley’s “Totem Pole” formation even doubled for part of the Swiss Alps in the Clint Eastwood movie, “The Eiger Sanction”. To that list can be added a bunch of television shows – ranging from old classics like “The Lone Ranger” to the modern ultra-high-tech helicopter adventure, “Airwolf” – and countless TV commercials. No wonder I felt a sort of kinship the moment we crested the first hill on the dirt road that winds through the Valley after you leave the Visitors’ Centre. It seems I grew up here!

Ever since Mr Ford first scouted locations for his early signature film, “Stagecoach”, and decided that Monument Valley would fill the bill, the setting hasn’t been just merely associated with the mythological “American west”, it _is_ the mythological “American west”. Ford himself said, "I think you can say that the real star of my Westerns has always been the land." The gift shops and souvenir shelves in this area are liberally stocked with books about the films of Johns Wayne and Ford, and the impact of Hollywood on shaping the modern perception of the American west.

Look closely at that photo of Ford directing from the railroad trolley. The lead horseman in the cluster on which he is focused – the man carrying a rifle, buckskin-wrapped to shield it from the dust – is John Wayne. Heck, even the Navajo-themed souvenir store in the Best Western Kayenta was selling books about the Indians’ perpetual silver-screen nemesis, cowboy John Wayne.

(This story might be apocryphal, but there is allegedly a scene in one of the many Hollywood westerns where a line of Indians sits poised on a ridge, waiting for the order to attack a hapless wagon train passing by far below. As the camera pans the war-painted “savages”, suddenly one of them, obviously the chief, turns to his warriors, raises his rifle high in the air, and shouts fiercely, “Ya’a t’eeh!” (pronounced “YAH-te-hay”) which triggers a howling charge.

Thing is, “ya’a t’eeh” is Navajo for “Good morning”. One can almost see the weary scriptwriter, hunched over his morning coffee at Kayenta’s Amigo Café after having been up all night, tasked with producing a final re-write before shooting was to begin a little later in the morning. He inserts the one word of Navajo he’s heard – probably every morning at the Amigo Café, in fact – then bundles his much-overwritten script pages together and rushes out to the Monument Valley location to tell the director, “OK, I’ve got it!”

But this following delightful note isn’t apocryphal. It appears in an article documenting how Navajos have been portrayed in movies:

“One evening at the Elderhostel I was attending in Phoenix, a young Navajo man who makes traditional flutes played for us and told us religious stories of his people. He also enlightened us about John Wayne and director John Ford, who are appreciated by the Navajo because they made movies with the Navajos playing the Indians.

These movies introduced the public to Monument Valley and brought tourists to their reservation, where they proceeded to buy souvenirs, thus helping the Navajos build an industry on their rugs and silver items.

Only after 1980 did movies come onto the reservation, allowing many Navajos to see these old westerns for the first time. Because locals had been extras, the audience became very emotional when they saw themselves or their parents as young people. On first viewing these movies, people often cried.

Several of our presenters emphasized that the Navajos have a strong sense of humor. During the making of the westerns, Ford would tell the Indian actors to talk to each other in Navajo. This they did, and what they talked about was how silly white men’s ways were and what a strange person this John Ford was. Watching the movies and understanding the language the Navajos would break out in raucous laughter, to the bewilderment of the whites in the audience.” (from The Columbia Daily Tribune travel section, March 6, 2005)

The first thing that struck me about Monument Valley is that it is a surprisingly compact space within which to drive a loop sufficient to take it all in. Onscreen, it always seemed to me to go on forever, with dozens of miles between buttes and hundreds of miles across its vast floor. But in reality, it’s fractions of a mile between buttes and a couple dozen miles across. Maybe surprisingly, that actually helps make it that much easier to appreciate that you are in a very special place as every turn of the wheel brings you face to face with yet another breathtaking tower of wind- and sand-blasted sheer rock faces.

At one point, my daughter, surely risking arrest, snaffled a small bag of the rust-red soil that makes up the floor of the Valley. I had some trepidations as I thought ahead to the inevitable encounter with Customs officials, but fortunately I recalled that most of the contraband responsible for raising their ire and suspicion usually assumes the form of a white powder, not ochre-coloured dust. Our bag of dirt proved to be no problem whatsoever.

The “monuments” in Monument Valley are all apparently possessed of deeply meaningful names rooted in Navajo spiritualism, but good luck trying to find them. I did discover that Monument Valley itself is known as “changing of the rock” – “Tse' Bii'ndzisgaii” in Navajo, a stream of letters that to me suggests that when spoken should immediately be followed up with “Gesundheit!”

But ever since the first white traders arrived and realized this was a place worth a diversion, they labelled the structures with much more mundane titles, but each strangely applicable to the object suggested by the stone’s shape. “The Mittens” are perfect examples.

Others include The Three Sisters, Owl Rock, Elephant Butte, Camel Butte, Totem Pole Rock,
Rabbit Rock, Castle Rock and King-on-his-Throne, to name just a few.

(And oh yes, don’t think for a minute the 14-year old minds in our company didn’t trigger combined fits of giggles the first time a small sign appeared pointing to “[Anything] Butte”. Camel Butte and Elephant Butte just about did them in.)

I forget who asked and answered the question, but never let it be said that we pass up an opportunity to add an educational component to our travels. Our journey into the Valley, as noted, saw us occasionally confronted with the name of yet another “butte” or “mesa” and, somewhere during our trip, we found out that what makes a plateau, mesa and butte respectively is simply a matter of size and age.

Start with the point at which flat land falls away at a cliff edge, and the land approaching that cliff is a plateau. As erosion and weathering work their way through a different part of the plateau, isolating a large, flat-topped stand-alone feature, like an enormous inverted soup bowl, that’s a mesa. Add a few more millennia, mix with countless days of stoutly blowing winds and rainstorms; combine with perhaps the work of a river inexorably grinding away at its base, causing sheets of stone around the edge of the mesa to fall away, landing as rubble, eventually to be carried away or further eroded to smaller rocks and dust, and the smaller, usually more dramatic formation is a butte.

So when you finally do appear on Jeopardy, and get the chance to say, “I’ll take plateaux, mesas and buttes for $1,000, Alex”, send me a thank you card.

Oh, and 5% of whatever you win.

Up next: Off to Springdale, our longest stay anywhere this trip, Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon, bumbleberry pie, Polygamy Porter and back into Sin City.