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Seventh and final in a series of stories from my road trip last month to the Great Plains, Rocky Mountains, and Desert Southwest.

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Making Amends

Last year, I did a bad thing.

It didn’t register at first. Instead, I concluded slowly and painfully that the deed of which I speak was wrong.

It started in New Mexico in April 2011, when I visited Chaco Canyon, the ancestral home of most of today’s pueblo tribes.

The civilization in Chaco Canyon, known as Anasazi or Ancient Puebloan, rose around 800 AD and lasted for 300 years. The experts say Chaco was a place where native groups met to trade and compare notes about regional goings-on.

Chaco Canyon is seen by many of today’s Southwest tribes as a key stop along their migration path. They consider it important to their history, a spiritual place to be honored and respected.

Chaco is a remote and fascinating spot. I hadn’t been there in 30 years, so I spent a lot of time exploring the massive ruins and enjoying the solitude.

On the south side of the canyon is Casa Rinconada, a huge subterranean kiva surrounded by the ruins of smaller structures. The site is accessed by a half-mile trail that loops away from the road and into a box canyon.

The day I was there, I was alone. I took my time following the map and stopping at the numbered guideposts.

At some point, I left the trail and began wandering around, looking at the ruins, plants, rocks, bugs, and lizards.

Then, in the same way that your eye detects a four-leaf clover amid a sea of shamrocks, I spotted a sherd of pottery among the fragments of sandstone, siltstone, and mudstone.

The piece was white, irregular in shape, and an inch or so square. Across it were several perfect horizontal black lines.

I gasped and picked it up. It was beautiful.

Enthralled, I began to look around for more sherds.

Broken pottery was everywhere — hundreds of pieces, maybe thousands, in various shades of black and white and gray. Many had the incongruity of grooves, patterns, and painted designs angled across them.

Ten minutes later, I had selected five magnificent pottery sherds and dropped them in my shirt pocket.

Collecting artifacts is illegal. I knew that. But in that one small area of the canyon were so, so many pottery pieces. And they were exquisite. I couldn’t help it. I was simply atingle with satisfaction.

Back home, after the trip, I placed the sherds in a small velvet-lined wood box, which I kept on a bedroom shelf. I took the pieces out often to study and admire them. They were a prized possession.

For a while, one question mark remained: I was puzzled by the abundance of pottery sherds in the Casa Rinconada area. It seemed unnatural — far too many pieces were there to be random. Was the spot a trash heap?

So, I got to Googling, and I found a plausible answer.

The Chacoans, I learned, often broke pottery vessels ceremonially. Breaking the vessels made them useless to the living and in effect presented them to the dead.

No wonder the area around one of the major kivas in Chaco Canyon was littered with broken pottery. What better place to make an offering to your ancestors?

All of which made the sherds even more fascinating and desirable.

But only briefly. Slowly, like a fog, guilt was creeping in.

In most matters, I am a relatively honest guy. It isn’t the fear of getting caught; it’s because my conscience has a way of prodding and scolding me. It’s an unpleasant sensation I find I can avoid by behaving myself.

In the case of the purloined pottery sherds, my conscience began to inform me, quietly, but insistently, that the artifacts belonged not in a velvet-lined box in Georgia, but in Chaco Canyon, from whence they came.

Although I soon came around and owned up to my wrongful act, my options were limited. I could keep the sherds, conscience be damned; I could throw them out; I could mail them back to the Park Service in New Mexico; or I could personally return them.

I thought about it for months, still unsure.

Then, in early spring, when I hatched the idea of a road trip to the Black Hills and Glacier National Park, I realized I could stop at Chaco Canyon on my way home. Returning the sherds would not erase my transgression, but it was a positive step.

So, in August 2012, 16 months after I took the blasted things, I was back in New Mexico. I left civilization and drove south on County Road 7950, the road leading to Chaco Canyon, described in the literature as “13 miles of rough dirt road.”

CR 7950 seemed especially awful that day — in many spots, a brutal washboard. On arrival, I asked the ranger about it.

She said road conditions are unpredictable. It depends on the weather, the traffic, and when the surface was graded last.

“It’s extra rough right now,” she said. “Just your bad luck.”

I didn’t spend much time at Chaco that day. I drove to Casa Rinconada, parked, and walked down the loop trail toward the kiva.

Again, I was alone. I went straight to the place where I had collected the artifacts in 2011, selected an out-of-the-way spot far off-trail behind a shrub, and placed the five sherds on the ground.

I stood up and took a photo. Then, impulsively, I said, rather loudly, “I’m sorry!”

Who I was addressing, I don’t know.

To be clear, there was nothing spiritual about the incident. I never viewed it as “offending the spirits,” because that kind of thing isn’t in my belief system. It was simply that I did something wrong and regretted it.

No matter. The sherds were back where they belonged. I felt relieved. Case closed.

I walked back to my car and drove the 13 miles of washboard road back to civilization. After that, I settled in for an uneventful drive home. The vacation was over.

A few days after I got back to Jefferson, I left my car at the shop for an oil change and went home to wait.

Later that afternoon, the mechanic called. He had unwelcome news.

One of the boots enclosing the steering racks on my front wheels had been ripped open, probably by flying debris.

He knew it happened during my road trip, because he had done a pre-trip inspection just days before I departed.

Immediately, I had a flashback to the primitive road to Chaco Canyon, and the violent pounding my poor Subaru endured that day, and the dinging sounds as chunks of rock ricocheted off the underside.

“When the boot goes and dirt gets in, it’s fatal for the rack and pinion,” said the mechanic. “It’s chewed up pretty bad in there.”

The repairs were costly. Very costly.

If that was the revenge of the Ancients, I guess I deserved it.

The road to Chaco Canyon, photo by Q. T. Luong, 2009.