Sivan Va'aki: The Huhugam

The great-house builders were the second layer.

I say second layer as if there was a clean division between the sai jukam and the Huhugam - the ones who came before and the ones who built the structure above us. There was not. The dead do not sort themselves into historical periods the way the living sort their knowledge. What I was learning, across the years, was to distinguish layers by register, by the specific quality of how old a voice was and what world it was still thinking in. The sai jukam thought in a register I was still learning to parse after two decades of listening. The Huhugam were - not easier, but differently shaped. They were a people who had organized their knowledge into architecture, and architecture is a thing I understand.

They came up from the ceremonial compound.

If you stood in the compound in daylight you would see earth and ruin and the eroded shapes of walls. In the hours I worked in, you would see the bone-light of the dead, which is not luminous in the way the living think of light - it is not the light I could not approach in the canyon, not anything like that - but a quality of presence, a density of attention, that my extended senses had learned to read over five hundred years. The Huhugam were thick in the compound. Concentrated. The way they had concentrated in life, I understood later: a people who had organized their dead into specific places, who understood that the dead belonged somewhere, that the somewhere mattered.

They had left on their own terms.

This is the thing they taught me that I most needed to learn, and I did not know I needed it until they taught it to me. The Huhugam collapse is the archaeologists’ name for what happened around 1450 - the abandonment of the great houses, the dispersal of the population, the end of the canal systems that had made the desert bloom for a thousand years. From the outside it looks like failure. From inside the bones of it - from the voices of the people who had lived it - it was a decision. They had looked at what they had built and what that building had cost them and they had chosen to leave. Not in panic, not in defeat. In the recognition that the form had run its course and what came next needed a different shape.

I had not left on my own terms. I had fled. Tenochtitlan had burned and I had taken six skulls and run north because the alternative was ash, and for three hundred years I had believed that this made me fundamentally different from the Huhugam - different in kind, not degree. As if leaving-in-choice and leaving-in-fire were two species and I was the worse one.

The Huhugam dead did not tell me I was wrong about this. They told me, over the decades, something more complicated: that the terms you leave on are partly chosen and partly given, and the given part is not a verdict on your worth. The fire was given to me. The direction north was chosen. The six skulls were chosen. What I did with the road after was chosen. The Huhugam left when they were ready; I left when the world forced it; and the destination was not predetermined for either of us.

I sat with the compound’s dead for years before I understood this. Then decades. Then a century.

The centuries accumulate differently when you are listening to the dead: not as a weight but as a depth. The conversation I was having with the Huhugam was a conversation that took three hundred years because that is how long it took me to ask the right questions, and the right questions only became askable as the previous answers settled into something I could build on. You cannot rush the dead. They are not going anywhere. And if you are patient enough - if you are the kind of thing I am, which does not run out of time - you can have the conversation it actually takes.

The great horned owls made the open roof their territory in the third decade. I watched them from below while the Huhugam spoke. The owls stayed. They are still there. Powers recognize each other.