John squeezes sideways through a slim slot in the Utahn stone, his shirt rasping against the rough surface of the red rock canyon, its walls baking with the desert summer’s heat. On the other side of the slot waits a high-walled cul-de-sac of stone, a roofless chamber gaped toward the sun and the wind, its floor piled with hundreds of sun-bleached bones, startlingly white femurs and skinny ribs and cracked skulls. A bone might last forever in the desert, but it’s not the bones John has come to see. Painted across the chamber’s red rock walls are varnished figures, tall black smears of charcoal, once-colorful inks blanched gray by time. Nearly every figure is male, each is an exaggeration of a man: men running, men hunting, men worshipping, raising lanky arms to a distended sun, their torsos overly long, limbs stretched and unarticulated.Giants of a vanished earth, giving praise to a world now gone. John’s come to stand among them, to confront their remains. He traces the black lines of the petroglyphs, their meanings opaque, untranslatable. Whatever the original intent, eventually the mode of every sign becomes elegy, even ink scraped into timeless rock. John kneels, scattering bones and stones, then runs his hands through the dust. In the quiet, he stands, wiping his hands on his jeans, then turns in a circle to take in the paint and the bones, one more time. Maybe it’s too late for him to feel what he thinks the people who worshipped here… Click below to read the full story from Esquire
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