2004 | Wukoki Ruin, Arizona
When my son was about eight years old, we began our annual summer ramblings. From our base in San Diego, any direction on a U.S. land route would take us into the Southwest. A theme would develop as we got out on the road, out of the chatter and gravitation of the city – one year it was dinosaur quarries, another year, caves, then peaks, and this year the abandoned buildings of the Ancient Ones.
In the widely dispersed ruins in Wupatki National Monument, as we walked up to each site, many of them discreetly away from the modern paved road, I asked Alex if he could visualize how each place might have been inhabited.
He suggested that Wupatki, the big one with imposing structures and a game court, would of course be the capital, and then Citadel Ruin, high on an outcrop, he named the university, and later, the intimate and lovely Lomaki, built for just three or four families on a rock shelf directly above a seasonal streambed, would be a farming community, and this place, Wukoki, where walls rise impeccably and imperceptibly separate from the desert strata, he called the library.
Fiat Lux.
▷ Years later, Alex would matriculate at Berkeley under this motto.