A Touch of Imagination
The traveler scrambled down the banks of Siphon Canyon. It wasn’t much of a canyon, really, more like a gully. It was the end of the dry season, but the creek still meandered between its banks. The traveler headed into that gully for a reason: it was far cooler in the shade of the ash, willow & mesquite trees fed by the perpetual, life-giving waters of the spring at the head of the creek.
It was that famed spring the traveler sought. Once he reached that spot, he would head east towards his destination. But a shadow in the trees moved in the wrong direction. There was something up ahead, blocking the path. Small eyes stared past a broad snout, straight at the traveler. The two, the wild boar who belonged, and the unarmed man who did not, locked gazes. One would react with instinct, the other needed to react with thought or risk being gored. This far from civilization, that would not be a good outcome.
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It was dry up on the knoll, far to the east of the creek and spring. That’s where they built these forts back in the day: the inevitable filth from dusty soldiers couldn’t pollute the only reliable water supply. Despite the dry, hot air, there seemed to be a mist, a spectral haze, hovering over the ruins. The entire place was eerie. The air was still, not a leaf was blowing. There was no sound beyond the traveler’s own breathing. No squirrels were shuffling leaves in the woods, no birds were twittering in the trees. Even the ground was heavy, the traveler barely kicked up any dust as he wandered through the ruins.
The ruins themselves were downright ghostly. The remnants of adobe walls, white and rounded from decades of wind and monsoons, dotted the area like mournful apparitions. Nothing of substance grew on the pathways. Life, it seemed, wanted nothing to do with this place. This was a place of evil, a staging area for mayhem, conflict, abuse, and genocide. This was a place used by one people for the subjugation of another, used by the powerful to forcibly take the land and lifestyle from another. Now, the very place murmurs out a mournful “why?”, but of course, there’s no one to listen. No one but a lone traveler who briefly bows his head and continues on to his next destination.
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I’m a firm believer in imagination, and in my view, there’s no better place to exercise one’s imagination than in the varied sites of the National Park System. Let’s face it, some of the sites are pretty lame: a four-room loft in a Philadelphia townhouse, an old steel foundry in a sleepy Massachusetts suburb, a forgotten fort in an unspectacular chunk of Arizona. A little imagination goes a long way in such places.
One can imagine the past and try to reconstruct how people lived and thought in days gone by. One can imagine the future by applying old lessons to today’s situations. Fort Bowie’s remoteness and appearance encourages imagination, perhaps the plot for some third-rate fantasy novel or Peter Jackson film project. Because of this, Fort Bowie is one of my favorite National Historic Sites.
Imagination is good. Exercise it from time to time. And take a trip out to remote Fort Bowie.
[Sadly, I didn’t own a digital camera when I visited Fort Bowie. Pics are public domain from the University of Arizona and a neat site I stumbled upon: Fort Wiki.]
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Links:
America In Context 
“Imagination is good. Exercise it from time to time.”
Well said…. and a good time of year to further remember that. -Pk
Finally made it to Fort Bowie earlier today on the tail-end of a national park roadtrip. I can’t believe it’s taken me, an Arizona native, so long to make it to the site. We’ve planned several trips there, but circumstances have always forced us to forgo the stop.
Not today.
Good! Glad you’ve made it!
I’ve been following your trip on your own blog, makes me want to begin planning my own. I’m thinking another southeast U.S. tour in the spring, and Alaska in the fall. 🙂
Thanks for reading. We had a good time, even though the historical sites are less exciting to us than some of the big Western parks. Nonetheless, it’s hard not to have fun in a any national park unit, and we always learn more than we anticipate. I can’t wait to make it to Alaska, but it’s much harder to set aside the time and money to make the trip we’d like to do.
I swap off: parks one day, historic sites the next. Keeps me from overdoing it. Example: I did Chiricahua one day, and ran into serious heat exhaustion problems (read my Chiricahua post if you haven’t already). The day after that, I did the stroll to Bowie at a nice, relaxed pace :-).