by Catherine Watson

The ancient pueblo of Acoma, New Mexico, is perfectly nicknamed: Called the Sky City, it commands the most exotic location of any inhabited place in the United States — the top of a 376-foot-high mesa, a natural citadel of golden rock, an island in the sky.

It’s also amazingly well-disguised.

I’d driven there from Albuquerque in late afternoon, turning south off Interstate 40 at the Acoma tribe’s booming casino complex and picking up a small, scenic road. At first, it ran past scattered homesteads — old stone houses, trailers, a few brand-new ranches — but for most of its nearly 20 miles, it took me through a gorgeously empty landscape of red and gold mesas, polka-dotted with plump, dark cedar shrubs.

Finally the road curved, and the vista I was waiting for opened out below — a wide valley, studded with mesas and giant rock towers, like sentinels along a sacred way. I pulled over where the road starts down, got out of the car and, as usual, stared in awe. The Sky City was right there in front of me, three-and-a-half miles away, but its camouflage is so perfect, I couldn’t see it, even though I knew where to look.

I drove a mile closer, down onto the valley floor, and still saw nothing but banded mesas and golden rock. I had to drive another full mile before I could finally distinguish the twin bell towers of San Esteban (SPELLING IS CORRECT ON ESTEBAN) del Rey, Acoma’s 1629 Spanish mission church, rising above the fringe of little flat-roofed houses along the mesa rim.

This place is North America’s Machu Picchu, and in some ways it’s more impressive: It’s older than the world-famous mountain-top ruin in Peru — and it’s still alive. Acoma people have lived up there for more than a thousand years.

The Sky City mesa is a tribal emblem now, and the Sky City nickname functions like a brand. But its real name — Haak’u — means something hauntingly different. It means “a place prepared” — a reference to a cosmic promise made to the tribe when it first emerged into this world.

“It was already foretold at the time of Emergence that there was ‘a place prepared’ — in all senses of the world — for our eternal occupancy,’’ Brian Vallo, director of Acoma’s brand-new cultural center, explained while the center was being finished. “It is the traditional homeland of the Acoma people,’’ he said. “A very sacred place.’’

Twenty pueblos — the Spanish word can mean village, tribe or individuals — still survive in the Southwest. One tribe, the Hopi, lives in north-eastern Arizona. The other 19 pueblos are in New Mexico, arrayed on the map like a backwards L, with Albuquerque at the hinge.

The pueblos are different nations, speaking different languages — Keresan at Acoma and Laguna, Zuni at Zuni, Hopi at Hopi, Tewa and its variants along the Rio Grande.

They look different too. Taos is famous for its ancient pair of multi-story apartment buildings. Tiny Picuris is set high in lush hills. . Jemez, beside a mountain river, has narrow, tight-knit lanes and the feel of a Greek village. Nambe’s homeland is a miniature Monument Valley bounded by modern suburban homes. And Acoma — well, Acoma is like nothing else in this country.

But those are superficial differences. All the pueblos share something more important — a powerful belief system so encompassing and so interwoven with every aspect of daily life that even to call it “tradition” or “religion” is to limit its scope. It is deeply rooted in the land, and the pueblos have managed to hang onto it for 400 years, ever since the Spanish conquest.

Whenever I visit, I try to imagine what it is like to inhabit the Pueblo world, a world where everything is sacred, where everything has meaning, where everything — and everyone — is connected to everything else. “The connections to place and people — that’s HOME,’’ said Brian Vallo. “And that’s a LOT.”

For me, imagining a world so complete is like trying to picture a color that isn’t in the spectrum, and it turns every trip to this part of the Southwest into a spiritual journey.

It was a long way, in more than miles, from the sacred Sky City back to Acoma’s Sky City Casino-Hotel and Travel Center on I-40 — so far a distance, in fact, that at first I had trouble picturing them in the same universe, let alone the same landscape.

But the casino complex and its huge, adjacent truck stop are the economic engine fueling Acoma’s future, and that future includes the preservation of its past. Gaming revenues, for example, paid for most of the tribe’s $17 million cultural center, which opened at the foot of Haak’u mesa in late May.

The handsome center is intended to be many things, Vallo said, but they all involve the precious concept of home — a home where visitors can feel welcome; a home for repatriated Acoma artifacts; a home where the Acoma themselves can study their language and heritage.

Even the architecture tells a story about home. It includes elements of every dwelling style in Acoma history — from ancient stonework like that found at Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon, right on up to HUD housing built by the U.S. government.

From my room in the casino hotel, I could look across the swimming pool and see the force that is driving Acoma‘s economy now: the raised roadbed of Interstate 40. It took the place of old Route 66, and it’s still the Mother Road across New Mexico.

Rivers of semi trucks glittered in both directions, and steady streams of them were pulling off at the Acoma exit to tank up and let their drivers fire down. More than 120 semis were parked at the tribe’s truck stop my first night there — I drove along the rows, counting — and more were arriving by the minute.

Inside the casino hotel, there were the familiar clangs, whoops and jingles from the gaming hall off the lobby. But the complex does not serve alcohol, and the hotel was surprisingly tasteful and quiet, even with the Fourth of July coming up. Families jammed the casino restaurant, and Sky City staff was setting up folding chairs out back for a casino-sponsored fireworks show. It felt more like a community social center than a subset of Las Vegas.

Haak’u, by contrast, draws a different crowd to the ancient mesa top, but it too draws large numbers: In summer, hundreds of tourists a day descend on a village of fewer than a dozen families.

To protect it, the tribe has been tracking tourism to the Sky City for more than a century. It began guided tours as early as the 1930s, and tours are now the only way you can visit the mesa. Small buses shuttle visitors up there from the new cultural center at its base, on a road built in 1950 for a John Wayne movie.

The rules are strict: No photography without a permit, no wandering off or hanging back, and you need to get the name right. “It’s pronounced AAAAH-coma,’’ my group’s tour guide said firmly, as we began our tour of the old city. “We aren’t in a COMA!’’

What looks enchanted from a distance is stark up close, and that always startles me. The houses of the Sky City are plain and box-like, one or two stories, made of stone or adobe plastered with mud.

Gusts of wind whip through the narrow streets, flinging sand against skin and into eyes. There is only one small tree — “the Acoma National Forest,” my tour guide joked — and the blistering New Mexico sun always feels as if it’s right overhead.

The mesa-top tours take about an hour under that sun. The guides move fast, and they cover a lot. Pause, and you’re guaranteed to miss something — an ancient window made of mica, for example, or the hole in the cemetery wall that allowed lost spirits to come home, or an explanation of the tribe‘s matrilineal system — how the youngest daughter inherits from the youngest daughter, down through time.

But visitors do pause — caught by stunning views at the end of every lane, by the tables of distinctive black-on-white pottery set out in front of artists’ homes, and by the food — apple turnovers, straight from the oven, and fry bread so fresh that the grease burns your tongue. A lot of these tourist pauses, I suspect, are really just ways of extending the experience, of getting to talk with people who actually live in this strange and sacred place. At least they are for me.

At the end of the tour, the guides always offer a choice of how to get back: Ride the bus back down the mesa or take the hidden foot trail that the Acoma people used for centuries before the road was cut.

I always choose the trail.

Almost vertical in places, it follows a steep, narrow slot in the cliff face. Getting down safely requires trusting the ancient builders, who knew what they were doing when they carved the footholds and handholds. It’s also a good idea to follow the guides’ advice and climb down backwards.

I turned around to face the yellow rock and then descended as if I were on a ladder, reaching my toes down step by step, sliding my fingers into ancient niches placed exactly where I needed to find them.

Of all the good experiences on this trip, that descent was the best. I liked feeling that I fitted into something that went so far back in time, with so many connections to other people — even if they could never be my own. The scale of the steps was human, and the warm, golden stone felt good and secure against my hands. It felt, in fact, like comfort.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 15th, 2007 at 2:49 pm and is filed under Destination, First Annual Solas Awards Winners, Great Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.