< PREVIOUS ] [ 2001 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
How long does it take for an act of vandalism to become an important part of our heritage, worthy of preservation?
That question occurred to me after reading a report last week about a graffito in the Indian Peaks Wilderness Area along the Continental Divide between Granby and Boulder.
It seems that one hiker happened upon two other
wilderness visitors -- a young man and woman. One of them
was applying spray paint to a rock: Roman + Ni
until
they were observed and told to stop. The tagger apparently
wiped the paint container free of fingerprints before
handing it to the first hiker, and the couple took off.
The Boulder County Sheriff's Department has been trying to find them ever since. They could be charged with defacing property, and if convicted, be sentenced to up to a year in jail and a fine of $1,000.
Their aborted message was soon removed by sheriff's deputies, although there were some concerns that the cleaning chemicals might damage the moss and fungi on or near the afflicted rock. That raises the question of whether the environmental damage from cleaning the rock outweighed whatever environment damage was caused by the painting of the rock.
But this is a wilderness area, after all, and people don't venture into wilderness to see graffiti.
Technically, this spray-paint message wasn't graffiti.
For one thing, graffiti
is plural, and we're talking
about only one message, so we should use the singular,
graffito.
For another, the word comes from the Italian
graffio,
which means scratching,
not
painting.
And when it comes to scratching messages, Americans have been inscribing stones for a long time.
In the pleasant country around Fort Laramie, Wyo.,
there's Register Cliff State Park.
Wagon-train
pioneers on the Oregon Trail were fond of scratching their
names and other information on the relatively soft rock,
and now it's part of our heritage, protected by law.
I've seen Register Cliff, and I enjoyed trying to read the 150-year-old graffiti, which was a lot more interesting than a natural sedimentary cliff. I've never seen Independence Rock along the Oregon Trail near Casper, which got its name because westbound settlers figured that if they reached it by July 4, they had a fair chance of getting across the far western mountains before the winter snows fell and trapped them like the Donner-Reed party.
Independence Rock was where one James Nesmith recorded
in his 19th-century diary that I had the pleasure of
putting the names of Miss Mary Zachary and Miss Jane Mills
on the southeast point of the rocks,
and he was far
from the only one. Farther along the trail, there's also
pioneer graffiti on Register Rock in a state park near
American Falls, Idaho.
The lithic literacy movement wasn't confined to the Oregon Trail. One branch of the Santa Fe Trail passed through Cimarron County, Okla. (at the end of the panhandle, and famous among trivia buffs as the only county in America that borders four states -- Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico and Texas). The chamber of commerce there promotes Signature Rock and Autograph Rock as tourist attractions, even though they're just some old graffiti, and the sheriff would be looking for people who did the same thing now.
Those graffiti aren't nearly as old as the material
promoted and protected throughout the Southwest: the
Anasazi petroglyphs. No one seems to be able to decipher
them. For all I know, they really say things like Maria
the enchanted flute player loves John the killer of big
elk,
and it could be that any youngsters caught
defacing the rocks 800 years ago were severely punished by
the elders.
The impulse to mark our presence at some spot is an old
one, and it continues. When I'm walking in the mountains
and see a scarred aspen with an inscription like JT+AC
79,
I smile and wonder if they're still together.
There are people who do not find that charming, just as
there was a group called The Fourteener Cleaners
which went around removing summit registers from our
highest peaks -- in their view, a small piece of pipe stuck
under some rocks was an artificial intrusion into what
should be a natural environment. However, I never heard
that the Cleaners wanted to obliterate the hiking trails up
those peaks, and those trails are also unnatural.
For that matter, the whole concept of a 14er is artificial,
since the determination is made by surveyors with
hypsometric technology.
At any rate, if the spray-paint message in the Indian Peaks had survived, then at some point it would have ceased to be vandalism, and would have become worthy of protection as part of our cultural heritage, just like Register Cliff.
But when does that happen? Does it take a century, or just a decade? Somebody must have figured this out.
< PREVIOUS ] [ 2001 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >