A Full-time Life

SKY CITY NEW MEXICO, October 2008

Sky City is the oldest continuously inhabited community in the country. Acoma people have lived in the Pueblo for almost 2,000 years.  It is the spiritual center for all of them and still the physical home for about 600, even though the village has no electricity or running water.  Other Acoma live in nearby villages, but return for special cultural occasions to celebrate their ancestral homes. 

Sky City is on the National Register of Historical Monuments, but it is owned and operated  by the Acoma People.  Like all of the Southwest Tribes, the Acoma trace their ancestry to nearby Chaco Canyon , a National Monument that we visited on an earlier trip.

Sky City has over 300 structures made of mud brick (adobe) and white sandstone.  The Acomas are a matriarchial society and mothers pass down the homes to their youngest daughter.  Here is a closer view of one of the homes.

 

 

  For defensive purposes, the Pueblo was built 370 feet above the desert floor, and untill 1959 was only accessed by hand cut trails. This picture was taken near the Museum and Visitor Center at its foot. It is an impressive sight looming above when you are standing on the desert below. 

We had a very good native Acoma tour guide, whose English name was Gary.  He gave us a good overview of the history of his people.  As always with Native American history, it was not something that is exactly easy to hear, but it is something that all of us should know about. 

  

The mesa in the distance is sacred to the Acoma people.  It was where they originally lived.  Their spoken history tells that once, when most of the people were on the valley floor, a terrible storm occured, washing out the only trail up the mesa.  There was no way to rebuild the trail.  A Grandmother and her grand-daughter were trapped on top, and rather than face a slow starvation, they jumped to their deaths. 

Prayer ladders are still used ceremonially, to access the Kivas (religious chambers).  The arrow near the top of this one serves to protect three Kivas that are located on this passage way through the village.

Because the Acoma still live in this village, it was a great opportunity to experience living history.  Acoma women are noted for their pottery and it was sold in the village and displayed in the museum.  Food was also for sale (homebaked bread and pies) and that is what we bought, because we don't know much about pottery, but we can always use a few good carbs.  

Here are a few more pictures from Sky City.  We really enjoyed our day; it was an enjoyable way to increase our knowledge and, hopefully, understanding of Southwest history.

To the right is a picture of one of the ovens the Acoma have used for centuries to bake bread.           The gentleman at left is pounding clay to prepare it for the women to use in making pottery.    

      
 

An Acoma family that has been living and working elsewhere and have now retired are building this new house on the edge of the pueblo, so that they can return to their ancestral home.  We were told that a lot of the residents go elsewere during the winter because of the zero to minus 20 degree weather. 

LANE COUNTY SUMMER

Lane County, Oregon -- it's a great place to spend a summer.  When we're here, it feels just like home, except in a smaller and more manageable house than the one we lived in for so many years.    That house, in Springfield, was a great place to raise a family but at this stage of life, our traveling home gives us more time and less work. 

The best thing was just hanging out with our family and having a chance to visit with friends. 

We had great times with our Northwest kids and their families -- including all six of our grandchildren.  What could be better?  Most of the time, there were no special occasions, just the gift of having time to spend together.  The picture is our grandson Ryan, with two catfish he caught from our little boat at Fern Ridge Shores. 

We did have one big family event, Andy and Denae's Labor Day wedding at Buford Park in Eugene. (He's our oldest grandson.)   It was a lovely day.  Click here to link to their blog where you can read about their fantastic adventures in India.  There's a wedding picture in there too.

Click here (and scroll down) to read previous posts about our Oregon summer.  Here are a few extra random bits.  

This picture is Spooky Island on the lower McKenzie River.  It's about three miles from the RV Park in Coburg where we stayed in July and just a few blocks from where we used to live in Springfield.  Our kids used to play here.  There is a huge new modern hospital now right across from here (where there used to be bean fields that provided summer jobs for all the neighborhood kids, including ours).This is it:

 

 

Some friends and I had fun on a 6K Volkswalk that took us through the Olympics Track Trials Fan Village at the University of Oregon's Hayward Field.  We got to see some of the meet on the big screen and enjoy the excitement -- no cost, and great fun and exercise.  Eugene did a very good job on the Trials. I thought it would make it more fun to watch the Bejing Olympics, but sadly nobody we saw did very well there.   

Oregon has a bunch of excellent wineries, several in Lane County.  The picture below right is at King Estates, probably the best-known one. 

The wine is good and the scenery is terrific.

One day we drove to McMinnville with friends to see the Spruce Goose Museum (below). It's an interesting museum and kind of amazing story the way this iconic plane ended up in this tiny town.  That is one big plane!  There are a bunch of other air-related exhibits, the miniatures of the plane's interior and exterior that were used in shooting the film "The Aviator" and an I-Max Theater. 

 

Our feet start to get itchy when Oregon's rainy season approaches.  But since we never have quite enough time to see all we want to of our family and friends, it is always hard to leave Oregon.  I guess we have split personalities.  When we're in Oregon, the part of us that enjoys routine and familiarity kicks in and it becomes difficult to leave.  We always seem to put off our departure day several times before we finally hit the road.  Thus, it was mid-October before our summer in Lane County ended. 

We enjoyed every minute of it.  Thank you everybody for the wonderful times.  We love y'all!

LIBRARIES

I’ve always loved using public libraries but thought we’d have to give them up when we sold our Springfield home to travel full time.   But we’ve been pleasantly surprised to get a visitors card in several of the places where we’ve stayed a few months.  You’d kind of think that people who could pull up their house and leave at any time would be poor risks for borrowing books, but instead we have found that Winter visitors are welcome to take out a card. There's a small fee ($8 to $10 so far) and all they ask is an RV Park address and our cell phone number.

It’s great to save money by not having to buy books for a few months.  But besides that, I like the ambience of a library.  I like to look at books and imagine having time to read them all.   

When we visited my sister and brother-in-law in Seattle recently, we toured  the amazing Seattle Central Library which opened in 2004.  The architect was Rem Koolhaas.  The print guide to the library is called "Cool House", so now we won't forget the name of that architect. 

I wondered if a building this massive and modern would even feel like a library.  It really does because there are lots of small and friendly spaces within the big one.    Although the map room alone (for example) is as big as some of the small libraries we’ve used, the whole building has been designed for readers.  There’s a café inside, a large but cozy reading area called the living room, and tables and chairs in every section. 

We learned that Koolhaus chose the art work and furniture as part of the design.  The different levels are built as ramps, similar to a parking garage, with the shelves arranged crosswise and leveled.  The Dewey Decimal System numbers are incorporated into large blocks on the floor, so it is easy to find the section you want.  My sister found a book of Kentucky history that mentioned one of our great-uncles.  (He fought a duel over politics – but apparently both parties were poor shots and nobody was hurt!)

The whole library is e-wired and there are tons of computers everywhere for public use. 

This is a view from a top floor window.  You can see the Amtrak Station Tower. 

The library was only a small part of our most excellent personally led tour of the wonders of downtown Seattle.  Our guides had to go back to work on Monday.  It was raining and we had some time before our train so we hung out there for a while reading magazines, drinking lattes and exploring the stacks.   If I lived in Seattle I’d be there a couple of times a week.  Maybe more often during the rainy season!

But while we’ve stayed on the lake this summer, Cyndi and Jeff have let us piggyback onto their family card at the Fern Ridge Library here in Veneta (pictured at left).    It’s considerably smaller, but there are, after all, considerably fewer people here than in Seattle.   We have borrowed great books and the staff is so friendly.  No lattes though!    This library also gets a lot of use – when I stopped by one afternoon the school bus let about ten high school kids out right in front of the building.  Before I left, they were on the computers doing their homework or quietly searching the stacks.  I love that libraries are a welcoming place for every age. 

No matter what size it is, a library is a great community resource and I am always happy when we get to use one again.

   

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