A Sense of Place

What if your home town were a canyon? This past spring a Navajo guide led my family on a hike through the Canyon de Chelly in Arizona. (The New York Times today has an article and nice slide show featuring it.) Our guide had grown up in the canyon and he still has family down there. He said his family has lived in the canyon for 500 years.

It made me wonder what it must be like to call a place like that canyon your ancestral home. Those of us who know something of our ancestry might be able to trace our family back to “the old country,” perhaps some village in Europe or maybe Asia.

My own family has ro0ts in Poland, Russia and Romania. My maternal grandfather came from Czernowitz in Romania (now part of Ukraine). I’ve never been back, but I suspect if I had, with the passage of time, the changing of borders and the destruction and construction of buildings and roads, what I would find would not be recognizable to my grandfather who was born there.

Part of my wife’s family comes from Castinatelli, Italy, which lies about 100 kilometers south of Salerno in the hills. We had the opportunity to visit Castinatelli some years ago. We met my wife’s 97-year-old great aunt who still lived there, walked the cobblestone streets and saw the ancestral family home, made of stone blocks and situated at the edge of a small piazza with well. The house is empty now; the current generation has moved up the hill to more modern digs.

It was a special privilege to walk amid the old country. Even if it wasn’t my own, I felt a connection to it.

My visit to Canyon de Chelly, where Navajo families have lived for 500 years, put the idea of the old country in different perspective for me. There is not much in the way of ancestral buildings down in the canyon. I think the Navajo’s primary tie has been to the land itself, to the 600-foot canyon walls, the river running along canyon floor, the pattern of sunlight and darkness that pass through the canyon as the sun crosses the sky. And apart from an invasion of non-native plants that has occurred over the last 50 years or so, the canyon looks just the way it did 500 years ago.

How powerful, looking upon the same home your ancestors did some 500 years ago, built not by human hands but the forces of nature, in geologic time. How powerful, that sense of place.