SPECIAL FEATURE

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While on a 1920s visit to the Grand Canyon to select the site for the world’s greatest observatory, astronomer Edwin Hubble encounters the Navajo creation myth. In this extended essay, Don Lago weaves Hubble’s exploration for the best vantage point from which to view the universe with the emblematic story revealed in the Navajo Storm Pattern rug design.

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STORM PATTERN by Don Lago

The sky was going to explode. The night sky was going to burst out in light, in streamers of light. There was going to be a loud noise, a big bang.

The bilagaana, the white man, was going to set off his cannon and light up the sky. They watched him aiming and fiddling with the cannon. Yazzie had seen fireworks in July, when his parents took him to Gallup. Yazzie told the other kids that fireworks were how the white men celebrated the beginning of their tribe. Yazzie was always trying to show off how much he knew about the white man’s ways. He had even seen a railroad train. In Gallup Yazzie hadn’t seen the cannons that shot off the fireworks, but he supposed that this was how it was done. But now the white man only continued staring at one end of the cannon. Was something wrong with it? Perhaps Father Sky was annoyed with the white man. Perhaps an explosion among the stars would be harmful to Father Sky and the harmony of the cosmos. White men didn’t know about the harmony of the cosmos.

They watched the white man’s pipe glowing in the dark. Then after a long time of nothing happening, the white man spoke to them in the white man’s words. Yazzie translated: He says we can look through his telegraph. They stood there, perplexed. They had seen the white man arrive by daylight, and he had appeared to be a stern man, and now he was speaking nonsense. He spoke again, and Yazzie translated: He says his telephone lets you see the stars. They had heard of telephone and voices in metal wires. “No,” said the man, “telly-scope.” You could hear the stars telling stories through his metal tube. Even in the dark they could see the man pointing to the end of the telly-story. And of course, it was Yazzie who had to prove how smart and brave he was by being the first to step up to the tube. He leaned down at the end of the tube the way the white man had, and continued moving his head about. Then he gasped. He saw lights, crowds of little lights. Were these the stars? Were there really so many stars?

Each kid took his or her turn looking through the telescope, puzzling over it, exclaiming over it. Then they looked up at the sky as if they had never seen it before. They had never imagined it held so many stars. They looked up at the white man and wondered about him. It was October, the time of year to begin telling stories of the night sky. Had the white man come with his telly-scope to help tell stories of the night sky?

When the kids were done looking through the telescope, the man took it apart and placed it into a long suitcase and put it back into the trunk of his car. Then he walked to his cabin next to the trading post, struck a match and lit the lamp and closed the door. As the kids headed up the hill to home, they gazed at the sky again.

The white man noticed the rug on the wooden floor mostly for how it saved his now-bare feet from the splinters and dust and chill. But the pattern on the rug looked slightly familiar. It was full of geometric patterns. In each of the four corners there were boxes with geometric patterns, and from each box a zigzag line reached toward the center. Zigzags like lightning bolts. The lightning bolts hit another pattern in the center.

The rug felt warm but his feet were cold; the room was cold. This might be the Arizona desert, but it was high desert, and it was October. He glanced at the wood stove, but he didn’t want to bother with it. He picked the rug off the floor and tossed it over his bed. The lightning bolts would keep him warm all night.

As he blew out the lantern and lay there in the dark, he mused on his circumstances. Here he was in a bare, crude, wooden cabin, next to a stone trading post in the middle of nowhere, far down a terrible dirt road, a cabin without electricity or running water, the only bathroom an outhouse perched above the Little Colorado River. He was surrounded by horses and beat‑up wagons, by people who couldn’t speak English, people who lived in ancient ways. And yet, he had just conducted tests for locating the world’s most sophisticated astronomical observatory. Right now he wasn’t sure why his boss, George Hale, who had already built the three greatest telescopes in the world, had included Cameron as a potential observatory site. The rim of the Grand Canyon, where he had just conducted tests, seemed more plausible.

       When he had signed his name to the trading post guest register, perhaps the trader asked him if he was related to the famous Hubbells, the family that ran the Hubbell Trading Post and a constellation of other trading posts on the Navajo reservation. The Navajos trusted the Hubbell name more than that of any other trader. Edwin would have said yes; he didn’t know those Hubbells personally, but he was related to them way back in the Hubbell family tree, back in New England. Edwin’s branch of the tree had changed their spelling to “Hubble,” for reasons no longer clear. But Edwin was accustomed to seeing his name spelled in the old way. When George Hale hired him, Hale spelled his name “Hubbell,” and when The New York Times announced that Edwin had proven the existence of other galaxies, his name was “Hubbell.” Even living in Los Angeles, Edwin couldn’t help knowing about the trading-post Hubbells, for two years ago the Hubbells had opened an Indian arts store on Hollywood Boulevard, in Hollywood’s hottest block, right across the street from Grauman’s Egyptian Theater, and across from the Pig ’N Whistle restaurant where the movie stars hung out.

How curious that a Hubble had come to the land of the Hubbells to locate the world’s greatest observatory.

Edwin Hubble had also crossed over into a parallel universe, into the Navajo universe. The rug under which he slept portrayed the Navajo creation story, the beginning of the world. The design at the center of the rug was the Navajo’s place of emergence. The designs in the four corners were the four sacred mountains that bordered the Navajo world. The lightning bolts between the mountains and the place of emergence conveyed blessings. This rug design is called the Storm Pattern.

At least, since the details of Edwin Hubble’s two nights at the Cameron Trading Post in 1928 are vague, we are indulging in a bit of imagination to flesh out the beginning of this story. The most common rug design in the Cameron area was the Storm Pattern, so chances are that the rugs in his room included a Storm Pattern.

As Edwin Hubble drifted off to sleep, chances are he thought about the discovery he was making, research he had interrupted to come to the Grand Canyon and Cameron. He was right in the middle of discovering that the universe was expanding. He couldn’t stop thinking about it, even in his sleep. Even in his dreams, reality wasn’t as strange as this expanding universe. The Magritte cloud-galaxies that raced through his head at night were not as surrealistic as the racing galaxies he awoke to and saw through his telescope.

As Edwin Hubble lay sleeping, as galaxies raced through his dreams, the Navajo creation story pulsed all around him, dreaming of emergence, sending out its lightning energies of affirmation.

If Edwin Hubble had slept within a Navajo hogan, he would have opened a door that faced the rising sun, the giver of life. The design of the hogan is full of symbolism that aligns humans with the life-giving patterns of the universe. Every hogan is a re-creation of the first hogan, built by First Man when humans first emerged into this world. The first hogan, and every hogan since, was carefully aligned with the four cardinal directions. The building of the first hogan plays a large role in the Blessingway ceremony, the most important Navajo ceremony for maintaining harmony between humans and the universe. Of course, a doorway facing the sunrise also has a practical advantage, for in a high-desert climate, where nights can be chilly even in summer, a hogan receives the first morning warmth and minimizes the afternoon heat. The sacred often begins with what nourishes life. The design in the center of the Storm Pattern rug is – by some accounts – the first hogan.

On the day between the two nights Edwin Hubble spent at the Cameron Trading Post, it’s likely that he observed the daily life of a remote, 1920s trading post, the Navajos coming and going by horse and wagon. Though Cameron was thirty miles from the Grand Canyon, the dirt road between Cameron and the canyon was steep, narrow, twisting, and dangerous, and most Grand Canyon tourists avoided that route. Most of the visitors at Cameron were Navajos bringing things to trade for food or utensils or supplies – few Navajos had cash for buying anything. Edwin would have seen Navajo women in velvet blouses unloading from their wagons bundles of wool or newly finished rugs. He would have seen a weaver unroll her rug on the countertop and discuss it with the trader. Since most Navajos lived widely scattered on a lonely landscape, coming to a trading post was an important social event, and many Navajos remained all day and visited with friends. Like many trading posts, Cameron included guest hogans where customers could stay overnight. Edwin would have heard the Navajo language, full of words for the beauty and emptiness of sandstone space, coloring his nighttime view of astronomical space.

       The wool being carried into the trading post was the sandstone landscape translated into the language of life, whirls of sand translated through sheep stomachs and sheep genes into whirls of wool.

The sandstone on which the Navajos live is the geo-fossil of Jurassic sand dunes about 190 million years old. Those dunes were part of the largest aeolian sand deposits on Earth, stretching from present-day southern Arizona into Wyoming and Idaho, leaving 2,500‑foot-deep sandstone dunes visible in today’s Zion Canyon. The dunes were formed in a time of severe drought, which dried up the rivers that had been flowing in from the east and burned the green land into brown. Relentless winds piled up sand into long, tall, gracefully curving and arching dunes. Occasionally old rivers flooded back through, followed by old forests, followed by dinosaurs that left in the mud the footprints that would one day provide a sip of water to Navajos herding their sheep. The sand dunes turned into rock, and after other periods of rivers and forests, the land reverted to desert and eroded into orange-red cliffs, releasing its ancient sand to wander in the wind again. Then arrived a people whose faces matched the color and deep lines of the sandstone cliffs; then arrived animals whose wanderings matched the wanderings of sand.

Like surveyors, like geologists, the Navajo’s sheep map out the ghost landscapes of the Jurassic. They follow canyons that follow old weaknesses in the rock. They find the best grasses where old rivers left the richest soils. They know the location of every spring and seep, the pores of hidden sandstone waves, of ancient wind energies. They are summoning the minerals of dinosaurs into a renewed frustration over the scarcity of food in a desert.

The sheep scramble up the sandstone slopes and ledges, stopping at each patch of grass, obeying where the stone traffic light has turned from red to green, turned from geology into biology, turned from a long stasis into the quick, intricate sedimentation inside cells. The sheep eat the revived sandstone and feel it reinforcing their own energies. The sandstone becomes red blood flowing through their bodies, becomes a red heart beating, becomes red flesh full of curves and cliffs. The sandstone swirls itself into DNA, into cells, into O’Keeffe bones, into a face, into eyes in which sandstone sunsets glow with a living twilight zone. The sandstone swirls itself into a cross-bedded brain that pulses with images of sandstone cliffs. The sandstone swirls itself into horns that deceive sheep into imagining they are strong and dominant, when the sandstone knows otherwise. The sandstone swirls itself into a thick, swirling wool coat, perfect for guarding life’s warmth against the cold of winter, the cold of night. The sheep huddle together in the winter and in the night. The wool understands that the starry night is not an easy place for life. In Navajo cosmology the gods were trying to place the stars carefully in the sky, place them in patterns that would sustain and guide human life, when Coyote the trickster grabbed their fawn-skin pouch full of stars and tossed it into the sky, spraying the stars chaotically. But Coyote placed one star deliberately and named it for himself, Ma’ii Bizq’, Coyote Star, and under Coyote Star the sheep huddle, wide awake, eyes full of fear, as coyotes howl and circle not far away in the night.

The weaver unrolled her rug on the counter. It was a Storm Pattern design. It was a map of the life of sheep. It contained years of wandering through sandstone mazes. It contained thunderstorms that set arroyos flooding and set plants growing; it contained lightning that couldn’t find a tree to strike and so left a boulder scarred by the sky, and left brains with long memories of lightning. It contained blizzards and scorching summer days, wind and deep silence. It contained the pleasures of sheep companionship and the miserable bleating of lost lambs. It contained endless puzzlement at the doings of humans. It contained the dismay of realizing that their proud horns made perfect handles for humans to drag them off to be sheared.

As the weaver unrolled the Storm Pattern rug on the counter, Edwin Hubble looked on. At least, it’s plausible that Edwin Hubble, knowing the fame of the name Hubbell in Navajo country and now seeing a Navajo trading post for the first time, took an interest in what went on there. Hubble saw the Navajo creation story on the countertop. He saw its order, and its intense energy.

The Storm Pattern rug was sandstone that had now swirled itself into patterns far beyond cells and wool, patterns by which life sought to recognize itself and its origins. It was a map of the universe. It was sand that after eons of falling into canyon-deep hourglasses had finally begun to hear the echoes of mysterious time. It was Jurassic lightning trying to shed some light on the pathways of energy. It was an ancient wind that had focused itself into a search for meaning. It was a universe of stone that had been transformed into a story of creation.

Ten days ago, Edwin Hubble had no idea he would be staying at a Navajo trading post in the Arizona desert. He had been in the middle of the most important work of his life, the most important work in the history of astronomy, when his boss at Mt. Wilson Observatory, George Hale, directed him to drop everything and head for Arizona.

Four years before, Edwin Hubble had expanded the universe in another way, by proving that our Milky Way galaxy was not the entire universe. Our galaxy was part of a very large universe full of galaxies, millions of galaxies, maybe billions of galaxies. Astronomers had long supposed that nebulae – little fuzzy patches of light, often spiral shaped – were just clouds of gas within our own galaxy. A few astronomers wondered if spiral nebulae might be other galaxies, other vast systems of stars, but this seemed an outrageous idea, requiring the universe to be unbelievably large. There was no way to settle this question, for astronomers had never had any reliable way to gauge cosmic distances. Edwin Hubble found a way. He used the world’s most powerful telescope, at Mt. Wilson, to identify one particular type of star, a Cepheid variable, in the Andromeda nebula, and then he used a new method for determining the distances of Cepheid variables. It turned out that the Andromeda nebula lay far outside our own galaxy. Hubble determined the distances to more nebulae, and they too turned out to be other galaxies.

About three months ago Hubble had begun intense research into the motions of galaxies. By now he had accumulated many measurements of the distances to galaxies, and he began comparing these with spectrographic studies of nebulae done by Vesto Slipher at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. Slipher’s spectrograph revealed the motions of objects by showing their light Doppler-shifted toward the red end or blue end of the spectrum. A redshift meant that objects were moving away from us. Stars moved with a great variety of speeds and directions. Yet when Slipher began studying the spiral nebulae, he was startled to find that most of them were moving away from us, and moving at fantastic speeds. If nebulae were merely local gas clouds, this didn’t make any sense, so some astronomers doubted Slipher’s findings.

When Edwin Hubble began comparing Slipher’s redshifts with his own measurements of galactic distances, he soon found a pattern. The farther away a galaxy was, the faster it was moving, and moving outward. The galaxies were spreading outward from a common origin. The universe appeared to have had some sort of beginning.

In another three months Hubble would submit his findings to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Yet Hubble must have already known, when he set out for Arizona, that his findings were going to transform the universe. The universe was much vaster than humans had ever imagined, full of gigantic swarms of matter, full of raging energies, full of motion, full of change, full of chaos – yet also full of order. All this energy and motion showed incredible patterns. As Edwin Hubble wandered around the Cameron trading post, his mind must have been charged with images of galaxies flying through space, charged with the outrageous mystery of it, charged with massive energies and massive patterns.

Edwin watched the weaver showing her Storm Pattern rug to the trader, pointing out its good workmanship.

The pattern in the center of the rug represented the place of emergence into this world. Sometimes this central pattern is described as the first hogan, sometimes as a lake. In Navajo cosmology our world is the fourth – often the fifth – world humans have inhabited. Humans have emerged from a series of underworlds.

The first world was dark and small and plagued with evil insects. Two clouds came together, a white cloud and a black cloud, a male cloud and a female cloud, and produced First Man, a supernatural man. Further holy people appeared, though they were Mist People, with no definite form. When the first world became too crowded and the insects too troublesome, the people – including Coyote – climbed into the second world. The second world was already inhabited by blue birds, who didn’t appreciate the new arrivals. The people saw an opening in the sky and climbed through it. The third world held two great rivers and six mountains, but no sun. Things started off well, but then the people quarreled and got into troubles. Coyote the trickster went and stole the two children of the Water Buffalo. By some accounts, First Woman sent Coyote as an act of mischief. Water Buffalo was enraged and sent a great flood to drown the world. The people fled, climbing a mountain to stay above the rising floodwaters. At the top of the mountain, First Man planted a reed and used his medicine to make it grow. The people climbed the reed into the sky and emerged into the fourth world. Water Buffalo started to emerge too, bringing his flood, so Coyote finally returned one of his stolen children, keeping the other to bring rain.

On the Storm Pattern rug, the flood is represented by logs whirling and by water beetles.

In the fourth world First Man built the first hogan, and here the holy people met and planned an orderly cosmos. They created the sun and the moon and the seasons. They summoned Black God, the god of fire, and he began placing the stars in the sky, giving them patterns full of meaning, patterns to support and guide human life. In the north, Black God created náhookqs bikq’, or Central Fire, the fire at the center of a hogan, around which all the other stars would rotate. Black God created two constellations, one male and one female, to revolve around Central Fire and remind humans of the importance of family, of protection and nurturing. Black God created constellations that signaled when it was time to start planting or hunting or to hold ceremonies; constellations with stories that told humans what to honor and how to behave; and constellations that reminded humans to remain in harmony with the universe. Black God wasn’t finished when Coyote stole his pouch and tossed the rest of the stars into the sky, ruining Black God’s patterns.

The Storm Pattern rug acknowledged the chaos of creation with its image of the flood, yet ultimately it portrayed the creation as a blessing. The lightning bolts were not the lightning of the storm that brought the flood, nor were they the evil omens that lightning often is for Navajos. The lightning conveyed blessings. For a billion years the cells of Earth had defined the universe, its good and evil, as mere patches of light and dark, but now life was weaving creation stories with light as symbols, stories full of images and ideas and judgments. Edwin Hubble was carrying on life’s primordial quest for order in a still more elaborate form.

The Navajo creation story is unusual in its combination of motifs. Emergence stories, in which humans emerge from a series of underworlds, are almost always associated with agricultural peoples. For farmers, life is something that emerges out of the ground, emerges from seeds that are rich and reliable in potential. Humans emerged from the nurturing womb of Mother Earth, just as crops do every spring. Father Sky too is full of order that nurtures life, reliable cycles of seasons and rain and sunlight. Plants too offer reliable cycles of planting and sprouting and growth and harvest, harvests of seeds that carry through the winter the reliable secret of a renewed cycle of life. For agricultural peoples the universe is full of predictable order. This order can be disrupted too easily, but these disruptions are an unnatural invasion of cosmic order. The goal of religious ceremonies is to honor and encourage cosmic order, to make sure that humans are in harmony with it.

Yet the Navajos are not an agricultural people. For most of their history they were nomadic hunters and gatherers, and then they became pastoralists. Their encounter with agriculture was fairly brief and limited.

For hunters and gatherers the universe is usually far more unstable and dangerous than it is for agriculturalists. Wild animals don’t behave as predictably as corn; corn doesn’t appear randomly, run away, get angry, or turn and attack and kill people. A hoe is much easier to aim than an arrow. Corn lasts all winter, while meat spoils in days. Most wild plants are less nutritious than corn, and take a lot of effort to find and carry for miles. Hunters and gatherers have to keep moving, instead of returning every night to the same stone house where your family has lived for 500 years. For hunters and gatherers the universe is full of uncertainty, full of tricks being played on you – the universe is a coyote. For hunters and gatherers the creator god is often a trickster, a coyote or raven, and the cosmos was full of chaos from the beginning. Nature is full of evil spirits that constantly have to be warded off with magic.

The Navajo creation story combines emergence and coyote, order and chaos, pattern and storm. These elements do not fit together easily. The Navajo creation story is full of tension and uncertainty. The reliability of order and the sources and powers of evil are unclear. In some versions it is Coyote who ruins an orderly world by triggering the flood; in other versions it is First Woman, who is supposed to be benevolent, but who secretly sends Coyote on his disastrous mission. To the Navajo’s Puebloan, agriculturalist neighbors, the mere presence of coyote in the creation story is bizarre; for them coyote is merely a clown whose bumbling ways make good jokes. Scholars believe that the Navajo creation story emerged from the Navajo’s encounter with Puebloan culture, which greatly impressed them. The Navajos adopted the Puebloan emergence story, but it could not supplant their own deep experience as hunter-gatherers, so elements of both got mixed together. This mixture seems to include the symbolism of lightning. For Puebloans there is no greater blessing than rain, and Puebloan culture is full of symbols of clouds, rain, and lightning. For Navajos lightning is often evil; a hogan struck by lightning must be abandoned permanently. Yet the lightning in the Storm Pattern design is a blessing.

Whatever the historical and cultural influences on the Navajo creation story, it expresses the universal human longing to find meaning in creation. Every creation story mixes order and chaos, good and evil, if in varying proportions. This mixing reflects a mixed‑up universe, a universe that gives us life but does not make it easy and then takes life away. No culture has been able to resolve this mystery, to write out an outright equation that proves the exact value of human life.

The weaver pointed out the strengths of her rug. Normally she, like many Navajos, was a very quiet and modest woman, but now she was playing a game with the trader, a game whose rules they both understood. The trader recognized the rug’s quality but he pointed to a line that was a bit crooked, a weave that was too rough. The creation of the universe was flawed, he was saying. The creation of the universe was almost perfect, she replied. They were negotiating the value of creation. Edwin Hubble looked on.

At some point Hubble would have taken a look at the canyon of the Little Colorado River, atop which the Cameron Trading Post was perched. Here the canyon was still modest, about 200 feet deep, and the walls were tiered and broken, allowing a person to scramble down to the riverbed. The riverbed was usually dry, except in the spring when snow was melting in the White Mountains a hundred miles away, or in the summer thunderstorm season; then the river was dark brown with desert sand. Edwin may have walked across the steel bridge, the reason the trading post was located here.

As Edwin looked downstream he saw the canyon walls rising, and the river dropping. Over the next forty miles the Little Colorado River dropped more than a thousand feet, running through a deep, narrow gorge, emptying into the Colorado River deep inside the Grand Canyon. A few miles before it reached the Colorado River, the Little Colorado River flowed past an odd mineral dome, hollow, with a spring within. This was the Sipapu, the place of emergence in the creation story of the Hopis. A thousand years ago the ancestors of the Hopis lived and farmed within the Grand Canyon, and the Hopis still made a sacred pilgrimage into the canyon to make offerings at the Sipapu. The Zunis too believe that their place of emergence was at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, though a different place than the Sipapu.

As Edwin looked west he saw the land rising, rising over 3,000 feet to form the Kaibab Plateau and the rim of the Grand Canyon. It was this canyon rim that Edwin was testing for the site of the world’s greatest observatory.

The observatory was the dream of George Hale, who twice now had built the world’s greatest observatory, first Yerkes Observatory, then Mt. Wilson Observatory. At Mt. Wilson, Hale had built the world’s two most powerful telescopes, first a 60‑inch-mirror telescope, then a 100‑inch mirror. Now Hale was planning a telescope with a 200‑inch mirror. But he needed a new location, for viewing conditions at Mt. Wilson were being steadily degraded by light pollution from Los Angeles. Hale was strongly inclined toward Mt. Palomar, which was a safe distance from city lights yet still reasonably close to the labs, workshops, and offices Hale had built in Pasadena at the base of Mt. Wilson. Hale was all ready to announce his plans to build the telescope, though without a designated site, when he was shocked to hear that another astronomer was planning to build an even greater observatory, build it on the rim of the Grand Canyon.

The other astronomer was George Ritchey, an old friend, then a bitter rival, of George Hale. Hale and Ritchey had met in their twenties and collaborated for nearly thirty years. Ritchey was a master telescope designer, who had designed and built the Mt. Wilson telescopes. But Ritchey’s ideas for future telescopes were too outlandish for Hale, and their big egos had clashed for years, so Hale fired Ritchey. Now Ritchey was working for the Paris Observatory. In June of 1928 Ritchey announced his plans for a telescope far more ambitious than Hale’s. Ritchey would locate it on the rim of the Grand Canyon, which he declared to be the best possible site for a great observatory. Ritchey released a canyon photograph he had taken from Desert View, onto which was imposed a drawing of his 25‑story-tall observatory. Below the observatory was the Colorado River curving near Tanner Rapid, and vague in the distance was the gorge of the Little Colorado River. The New York Times covered Ritchey’s plan three times in the next few weeks, culminating in a September 30th, nearly full-page, well-illustrated article lauding Ritchey’s genius. This must have been too much for George Hale to bear. A few days later Hale ordered Edwin Hubble to drop everything and rush to the Grand Canyon.

Hale had organized a process for selecting a site for his observatory, and even designed a special telescope for making tests, but his site list hadn’t included the Grand Canyon. How bitter if Palomar was inferior and George Ritchey was right. Hale could have sent someone other than Edwin Hubble to the Grand Canyon. The fact that Hale sent the world’s most famous astronomer is a measure of how seriously he took Ritchey.

Hubble already knew that he was reaching the limits of Mt. Wilson’s 100‑inch telescope, and that further progress in astronomy required Hale’s new telescope. Now Hubble probably realized that astronomy’s most important future question was how the galaxies could be streaming outward from some time and place of emergence. Perhaps the riddle of this emergence would be answered from the rim of the Grand Canyon.

Edwin Hubble placed the test telescope into the trunk of his car and headed east on the new Route 66, some of it still unpaved, and into the Mohave Desert.

       As I turned into the narrow driveway of the Hubbell Trading Post, I glanced over at the Pueblo Colorado Wash to see if it had water in it. The Pueblo Colorado Wash ran for – I guessed – a hundred miles across eastern Arizona. Summer thunderstorms turned the wash into a rampaging brown flood, only a hundred feet from the old Hubbell house. The Pueblo Colorado flowed past many Puebloan ruins, including the “red house” ruin for which the wash was named. It flowed past abandoned kivas that symbolized the underworld and the place of emergence. It flowed into the Little Colorado River, past Cameron, into the gorge, past the Hopi’s Sipapu, and into the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River. The water flowed in jagged, curving patterns that resembled the lightning bolts that had generated it, lightning bolts now engraved deeply into the earth.

I had arrived early in a flood of hundreds of vehicles. Navajo youths directed us to park in what was usually a green pasture, which over the centuries had been digested into hundreds of Navajo rugs. The big tent next to the trading post gave the day a carnival air. Navajo kids were running about. From food booths came the scents of fry bread, Navajo tacos, and mutton stew. Inside the tent nearly 500 Navajo rugs waited to be auctioned. Serious collectors came from all over the country just for the Hubbell rug auction. Auctions eliminated the middle man, the Santa Fe galleries that pocketed half the price of a rug. The Hubbell auction gave 90% of the price to the weavers. Today’s auction would give more than $120,000 to weavers. Dozens of weavers were present today, so you could meet them and talk with them about their work.

The Hubbell Trading Post had been here since 1876. It was started by John Lorenzo Hubbell, whose father had migrated west from Connecticut, where the Hubbell family had arrived from England in the 1640s. John Lorenzo Hubbell started his trading post a decade after the U.S. Army had tried to destroy Navajo society, if not the Navajo people themselves, by herding them off on the Long Walk to a long imprisonment at Basque Redondo. When the Navajos went home they had lost their houses, horses, sheep, and tools, and they were heavily dependent on the new trading post system.

Navajo society strongly emphasizes reciprocity, people helping one another, and it’s wrong for anyone to consistently extract an advantage over others. Yet this was exactly what the Navajos encountered at trading posts. Trading posts were disturbingly un-Navajo. Some traders saw their trading posts as just another shovel for exploiting the West, just another gun for conquering the Indians. Navajos did their best to avoid predatory traders, and occasionally they put traders out of business, but in a world where the nearest trading post was twenty miles away and the nearest honest trader might be many more miles away, Navajos were often at the mercy of traders. Fortunately there were traders who had plenty of mercy, who genuinely admired Navajos and Navajo culture and who would make considerable efforts to help Navajos, such as by representing them in the baffling world of the white man’s law and bureaucracy. The Navajos soon decided that J. L. Hubbell, while a shrewd businessman, was also a reliable friend. This trust helped Hubbell build the largest trading business on the Navajo reservation. While many traders lived in the back rooms of a crudely-built store, the Hubbell Trading Post became a large complex of buildings, including a warehouse for shipping rugs and other goods to distant places, such as Hollywood. At one time or another the Hubbell empire included over thirty trading posts. J. L. Hubbell built a plain-outside, elegant-inside house where he hosted many Southwestern artists, writers, and scientists. The artists left their now-famous names, such as Maynard Dixon, on Hubbell’s walls. In 1913 ex‑president Teddy Roosevelt visited, and Hubbell took him to the Hopi villages to watch the snake dance, through which the Hopis honor and encourage the rain.

It was the size, historical importance, and relative benevolence of the Hubbell Trading Post that prompted the National Park Service to acquire it as a national historic site in 1967. While dozens of historic Southwestern trading posts have been abandoned and fallen into ruin, the Hubbell Trading Post is still functioning, buying rugs from Navajo weavers and selling them weaving supplies or canned fruit.

The Hubbell rug auction was a good place for me to pursue a mystery I had been pursuing for two years now. This mystery had led me into run-down, century-old trading posts in remote parts of the Navajo reservation, and into the fanciest galleries in Santa Fe. It had led me to talk with 90‑year-old Navajo grandmothers who barely spoke English, with professors of art history, with the fourth generation of famous trading post families, and with Navajo teenagers in rock-and-roll t‑shirts. It had led me to search through a century’s worth of books. It was still a mystery. There were people who thought they knew the answer, who didn’t even realize there was a mystery, but the more I inquired, the more puzzling it became. This mystery was the origin of the Storm Pattern design. Other rug designs had a well-documented origin, a place and time and person and idea behind them. But the origins of the Storm Pattern design seemed lost in confusion, in wildly contradictory accounts. For some reason, this bothered me. I had never taken much interest in Navajo rugs, but the Storm Pattern wasn’t just another rug design: it was the creation of the universe. Surely the origins of such an important design couldn’t have been forgotten. The creation of the universe couldn’t be left a mystery. I set out to find the source of the creation of the universe.

       Edwin Hubble drove across the Mohave Desert basin and range, where Earth’s crust had expanded, and climbed onto the Colorado Plateau, where Earth’s crust had risen, and into the ponderosa forest, where Earth’s crust had risen into green telescopes for tracking the sun. Hubble drove into Flagstaff. He drove up Mars Hill to Lowell Observatory.

A week before, Hubble had written to Vesto Slipher, the director of Lowell Observatory, whose spectrographic redshift studies Hubble was now using to discover an expanding universe. Yet Hubble’s letter made no mention at all that he was right in the middle of using Slipher’s data to transform the universe. Nor did Hubble mention it when he saw Slipher in person, judging from letters in which Slipher mentioned Hubble’s visit. Hubble’s secretiveness represented a personality whose outer brashness masked deep insecurities; as an astronomer Hubble was very cautious, downright frightened of attaching his name to a mistake. The idea of an expanding universe was so outlandish that Hubble must have feared it was all a mistake.

Hubble wrote to Slipher to plan his visit to Arizona. On October 5, 1928, only days after The New York Times article lauding Ritchey, Hubble wrote: “Mr. Hale is rather anxious for me to start as soon as possible – I am writing within a few hours of his communication – so I shall take the liberty of asking you to wire me as to whether the visit will be convenient and agreeable to you.” Hubble was also secretive about the purpose of his visit, except to say that Hale was interested in building “another observing station in the Southwest.” Hubble wanted to meet with Slipher to discuss viewing conditions in Arizona, and to arrange for tests: “I would like to go to El Tovar and interest one of the Park Service men in watching the seeing with their exhibition telescope while I go back 1, 3 and 10 miles or 1, 5 and 20, for comparison.” Hubble was “planning to stop a couple of days before going to the Canyon.”1

It’s likely that Slipher showed Hubble around Lowell Observatory, and took special pride in showing Hubble his spectrograph. Hubble must have looked at it with wonder. It was not terribly impressive to look at, just a metal tripod less than three feet long, not very complicated. And yet this little gadget had transformed the universe. Perhaps Slipher noticed Hubble looking at him with an odd smile. If only Slipher knew . . .

       I became curious about the origins of the Storm Pattern design only because of curiosity about Edwin Hubble’s 1928 scouting trip to Arizona. When I realized that Hubble had spent two nights at the Cameron Trading Post, I wondered what it had been like in 1928. I had stopped at the trading post hundreds of times, eaten there dozens of times, hiked far down the riverbed, and stayed overnight. Over twenty years I had watched the trading post adding new wings to its store, dining room, and lodges, in a big contrast with all the other old-time trading posts that were closing. The Cameron Trading Post owed its prosperity to being the eastern gateway to the Grand Canyon. Increasingly it was run for tourists, not Navajos; the grocery store where locals shopped was moved from the front of the store to a back corner. After eight decades of changes, what was left of the trading post Edwin Hubble had seen? The next time I stopped at Cameron, I tried to find out.

It turned out that the trading post of 1928 was now the art gallery, a 2‑story sandstone building in front of today’s trading post. Or at least, part of this building had been here. A Navajo man who worked in the gallery pointed out the original section and the sandstoned‑up original doorway. He showed me old photographs. The cabins of 1928 looked primitive indeed, their logs very uneven and full of gaps patched with mud. At least there were glass windows.

I asked what a 1928 visitor would have found inside the trading post. I knew that many trading posts were famous for their own design of rug, designs often named for a trading post. Perhaps the most famous of all Navajo rug designs is the Ganado Red, named for the town of Ganado, the location of the Hubbell Trading Post. Was there a Cameron Trading Post rug design? No, he said, Cameron never had its own rug design. The Cameron Trading Post wasn’t founded until 1916, a bit late in trading-post history, and a stagnant time for Navajo weaving. The closest thing Cameron had to its own design was the Storm Pattern design. He took me over to a display of rugs and pointed out a Storm Pattern. I asked him where it originated, and he said that the answer depended on who you asked. The books on Navajo weaving gave a specific place of origin for most rugs, but for the Storm Pattern the books said only “the western reservation.” This was a huge area. Some writers narrowed it down a bit to “the Tuba City-Kayenta area,” still an 80‑mile spread. I asked him what he thought, and he said he wasn’t sure, but he thought the Storm Pattern design came from Coal Mine Mesa, about thirty miles east of here.

Then I asked him the meaning of the Storm Pattern design. This too, I was to discover over the next two years, depended on who you asked.

       Edwin Hubble walked up to the rim of the Grand Canyon. He stood there looking down, looking back and forth, looking across. Everywhere, he saw redshifts. The canyon cliffs were redshifted. The spires and mesas and boulders and talus slopes were redshifted. The sandstone was redshifted; the Hermit shale was redshifted; and the Redwall Limestone was so boldly redshifted that it was named for its redshift. The canyon walls were receding, moving ever farther apart. The canyon redshifts revealed depths of time, layer upon layer of time. The canyon redshifts revealed that the rocks were not nearly as stable as they might seem: they were actually the face of endless motion, of dynamic forces, of an evolving universe.

For weeks Edwin Hubble had been prompting himself to start seeing an expanding universe. He looked at galaxies he had seen for years and tried to see them racing through space, racing through time. He tried to imagine Earth flying amid millions of flying galaxies. So perhaps when Edwin Hubble looked into the Grand Canyon, he saw astronomical depths there. Here was the one landscape on Earth that best personified the same immensities as the sky. The Grand Canyon was already a famous map of deep time, dynamic forces, and great masses moving and evolving. The canyon was its own expanding universe, starting from some primordial crack and growing steadily larger, adding more and more complexity of shapes. The rock strata were the earthly materialization of the same-era light strata in the sky.

As Edwin Hubble walked on the canyon’s limestone rim, he was walking over spiral-shaped fossils, spirals that once had flowed densely through an ancient sea, flowed as a continuation of the flowing of spiral galaxies through space. The canyon rocks recorded the growing complexity of life through the eons, an evolution that – it would soon be clear – was a continuation of the evolution of the universe itself. The spiral fossils contained a universe of time and power and creativity and changes. The spiral galaxies had become the spiral fingerprints with which Edwin Hubble steered a telescope.

The day lengthened; the shadows in the canyon lengthened; the colors of the rocks lengthened into deeper reds. Hubble was seeing October light, often the most vivid canyon light of the year. At sunset the rocks glowed intensely red. Then the stars came out, then the galaxies. A sky full of galaxies swarmed over the darkness of the canyon. A few years ago the nebulae had seemed to be randomly placed, but now Hubble was seeing a deep pattern, a haunting, October-light red glow. He saw all the galaxies, including the galaxy on which he was riding, emerging from some cosmic Sipapu and journeying to become canyons of fossil spirals and of Sipapu creation stories.

       Depending on who you ask, the Storm Pattern design is so sacred that most Navajos are forbidden from weaving it, or it’s just a gimmick to sell rugs. It’s a picture of creation, a picture of Navajo lands, or simply a pretty picture.

Most of the people I asked, and most of the books, say that the Storm Pattern design portrays the Navajo creation story, with its flood and the emergence of humans into this world. This makes the Storm Pattern one of the few designs that portray Navajo religious ideas. Most Navajo rugs offer simply geometric patterns, although in a Southwestern landscape where the mesas and canyons are strongly geometric, the rug motifs can easily invoke images of landscapes. There are two other rug designs with religious images. One is of yeis, or spirits. The other is of Mother Earth and Father Sky, an image taken from sandpaintings used in healing ceremonies. Navajo weavers seldom weave this or other images from sandpaintings, for sandpaintings contain powerful magic.

Most sources agreed that the squares in the four corners of the Storm Pattern are the four sacred mountains that border Dinetah, the Navajo world. Most people agreed that the lightning bolts are indeed lightning bolts, although a few said they are sacred arrows. Most said that the lightning bolts are conveying blessings, although some said that they are simply the lightning bolts of the storm that caused the flood. The whirling logs are sometimes just logs, sometimes a raft used to escape the flood. The central square is usually the place of emergence, which could be a hole in the sky, a lake, an island, or the first hogan. But a few Navajo weavers told me that the central square is simply the weaver’s own hogan, or a symbolic hogan for the whole Navajo people. They refrained from saying that the Storm Pattern represents the Navajo creation story. When I inquired further about this, trying to be subtle by saying, “Some people say that the Storm Pattern is the Navajo creation story,” the weavers would be subtle in reply: “Yes, some people say that.”

It’s a problematic thing for a white person to ask Native Americans about their spiritual life. A century ago such inquiries were usually hostile interrogations by Christian missionaries trying to cure Natives of their pagan errors. Navajos learned to be evasive about their spirituality. Yet even among themselves, there are secrets Navajos don’t talk about. Navajos also have an opposite problem: spiritually hungry whites who are over-eager to find meanings in Native ways, or impose meanings borrowed from Rousseau or Tibet or theosophy. This syndrome was well-known to some of the white scholars, museum officials, and old-time traders I asked, and it made them hesitant to ascribe spiritual origins to the Storm Pattern design. They’d heard all sorts of nonsense ascribed to Navajo rugs, such as old horse blankets being advertised on eBay as sacred prayer rugs. They said that while today the Storm Pattern might represent the creation story, perhaps this meaning was encouraged by traders who knew that whites wanted religious symbolism. Perhaps the Storm Pattern started out as a simple geometric design, which just happened to be a good fit for the creation story.

Other experts told me that the Storm Pattern had deep spiritual roots and meanings, perhaps evolving from an old sandpainting pattern. On my previous year’s visit to the Hubbell Trading Post I spoke with a Navajo woman who was now a National Park Service ranger there. She told me that Storm Pattern rugs could be woven only by people who had participated in a Lightning Way ceremony, a long, intricate healing ceremony for people who had been struck by lightning or been close to a lightning strike. Lightning was dangerous magic, and Navajos weren’t supposed to even touch a tree that had been struck by lightning. The ranger said that weavers of the Storm Pattern didn’t need to have had a personal encounter with lightning, but at least they needed to have participated in a Lightning Way ceremony for someone else; otherwise it was strictly forbidden to weave a Storm Pattern rug. The next time I visited the Cameron Trading Post I asked the Navajo man in the art gallery about this, and he shook his head and said he’d never heard this claim before. His mother had woven Storm Patterns for decades, nothing but Storm Patterns, and she had never been through a Lightning Way ceremony. Later I went to Garlands, one of the most prestigious dealers in Navajo rugs, and I asked Sandy, a white woman who’d worked there for twenty years, and she said yes indeed, some Navajos will refuse to weave a Storm Pattern unless they’ve been through the right ceremony. But few other sources made this claim.

       Edwin Hubble set up his telescope on the rim of the canyon and aimed it at Polaris, the star that Hale’s tests were using to compare different sites. Polaris was a Cepheid variable, the type of star Hubble had used to prove that Andromeda was another galaxy. Polaris was the Navajo’s Central Fire, symbolizing the hearth in the center of the hogan.

It seems that Hubble got cooperation for his tests from the superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park. But we receive only a glimpse of Hubble’s activities at the canyon, through a letter Hubble wrote to Slipher after getting home.

If Hubble stayed at El Tovar Hotel, it’s likely he explored the nearby buildings on the rim. In the Lookout Studio, an ingenious stone building that seemed to grow naturally out of the canyon rim, Hubble would have found a long, shiny telescope for gazing into the canyon. Hubble couldn’t have resisted. The eye that had recognized Andromeda to be a galaxy now puzzled over the scale and shapes of things inside the canyon. Hubble probably also went into Hopi House, an imitation 3‑story pueblo that served as a quality Indian arts gallery, designed by the same architect who designed Lookout Studio, Mary Colter. The main supplier of Navajo rugs for Hopi House, and for other shops connected with the Santa Fe Railway, was J. L. Hubbell. Hubbell also supplied Hopi House with real Indians to demonstrate weaving or silversmithing, and to perform dances outside.

As Edwin Hubble walked through Hopi House he was seeing stacks and walls of Hubbell rugs. He was also probably thinking about the galaxies flying apart. How could he ever stop thinking about it? Flying apart from what? A universe of millions of galaxies was mind-boggling enough. A universe of galaxies flying apart was even more unbelievable. Now he had to face the possibility that an incredible amount of matter had emerged from one place, one moment, one event. Did the laws of physics even allow for such extreme compression? How could the universe have a beginning? How could humans ever understand it? Perhaps the origin of the universe would remain a mystery.

On the wall Hubble noticed a Navajo rug with a center from which energy was flying in all directions.

       Just as there were many opinions about the symbolism and sacredness of the Storm Pattern design, I found that there were many opinions as to where the Storm Pattern originated. Most people I asked agreed that it came from the western reservation, but the exact spot was all over the map, most often Tuba City, but also Kayenta, Red Lake, Black Mesa, Pinion, Coal Mine Mesa, or just “somewhere between Tuba City and Kayenta.”

My most authoritative source was Jim Babbitt, whose grandfather had owned some twenty trading posts in the western reservation. Jim himself had managed the Tuba City Trading Post in the 1980s, and he had restored its stone building to its original eight-sided, giant-hogan elegance. Jim said that the Storm Pattern design had always been his personal favorite, partly because the Babbitt trading posts had used the Storm Pattern as a logo on their stationery and other items. Jim had inquired into the origin of the Storm Pattern. He told me that it came from the Red Lake Trading Post at Tonalea, sometime around 1900. The trader there wanted to have a rug design that was unique to his trading post, like other trading posts did. But whether this trader designed the pattern himself, or only adopted it from Navajo sources, wasn’t clear. Jim thought that a likely source was a sandpainting design that looked a lot like the Storm Pattern. Jim had talked with Navajo elders who said that the Storm Pattern was definitely the Navajo creation story. In one detailed account, the whirling logs were cottonwood trees that the people strapped together as a raft, on which they floated down the Little Colorado River, and when they reached the Colorado River at the bottom of the Grand Canyon the raft hit a whirlpool, which is what made the logs whirl, but the people survived.

In her book Navajo Trading Days, Elizabeth Compton Hegemann, who in the 1930s ran the Shonto Trading Post near Red Lake, said that the Storm Pattern was originally “called the ‘Red Lake pattern’ because a trader at that post had originated the design sometime after 1900.”2 The next time I passed the Red Lake Trading Post, I had to stop and ask. The 1891 stone building is still there, though in poor shape. The trading post had been famous for its “tuna” sandwiches, actually made from the plentiful local rattlesnakes. But today it was just another convenience store, contagious with junk food. The owner was away, so I asked the teenaged Navajo clerk, but she had no idea what I was talking about.

A few people told me that the Storm Pattern came from New Mexico, but I noticed that this opinion was coming from whites, often transplants to the Southwest. Navajos who were born on the western reservation and who learned their weaving there always said that the Storm Pattern came from the western reservation.

I was startled, then, when I walked into one of the most prominent Native art galleries on the square in Santa Fe and asked about the Storm Pattern, and they said confidently that it was created by J. B. Moore at his Crystal Trading Post in New Mexico. I asked in other Santa Fe galleries and museums, and this was all I heard: J. B. Moore invented the Storm Pattern in Crystal in 1911, invented it as a sales gimmick for white customers who wanted religious symbolism. As I inquired in other New Mexico galleries, in Albuquerque and Gallup and elsewhere, I ran into J. B. Moore everywhere. Some said that J. B. Moore had copied the Storm Pattern from some oriental rug. I realized that there were two basic versions of Storm Pattern origins, an Arizona version and a New Mexico version, with many variations on each version.

As I looked into the literature on Navajo rugs, I found that the J. B. Moore story tended to dominate. Since Santa Fe is the capital city of Southwestern culture, it wasn’t surprising that a Santa Fe version of events got emphasized in the books. Arizonans who relied on books for their Navajo rug knowledge tended to pick up the New Mexico version.

J. B. Moore certainly was an important figure in the history of Navajo weaving. Along with J. L. Hubbell and a few others, Moore helped revitalize Navajo weaving from its Bosque-Redondo-inflicted decline; he encouraged quality materials and workmanship, and developed large new markets, especially through his mail-order catalog. Moore’s 1911 catalog, the first to use color plates to display Navajo rugs, is now legendary, an extremely rare collector’s item that brings many thousands of dollars. Plate #28 is a rug that Moore called simply a “special design,” with all the elements of today’s Storm Pattern. Certainly, it was this catalog that made the Storm Pattern famous across the reservation and far beyond. But some historians go farther and say that this catalog was the origin of the Storm Pattern, and that J. B. Moore invented it, or ripped it off from an oriental rug, as a cynical marketing ploy to sell rugs to mythology-hungry white customers.

The problem with this theory is that Moore’s own catalog contradicts it. If Navajo mythology was such a hot marketing trick and Moore was such a hustler, he could have claimed that other rug designs had mythological themes. But of all the rugs in the catalog, the Storm Pattern was the only one to which he ascribed mythological meaning. He also said that it had old, sacred roots: “This pattern is one of the really legendary designs embodying a portion of the Navajo mythology. Not many weavers will do it for superstitious reasons and on that account its production is practically confined to one family or clan . . . The trouble has been to get enough of them made, and to overcome this is the main purpose of this engraving. With the pattern for a working model, we hope to get other weavers to making it.”3

It’s not clear how this statement got turned into the now-widespread theory that Moore invented the Storm Pattern just to make a buck. There’s definitely some cynicism going on here, but it may be cynicism on the part of historians. J. B. Moore never wrote another word about the Storm Pattern, for soon after his catalog appeared, Moore left the trading post business, left Crystal, and pretty much disappeared.

       My search for the origin of the Storm Pattern led me to Albuquerque’s Old Town, the original Spanish plaza that is now a zone of galleries, gift shops, and restaurants. At the Margaret Moses Native American Gallery my arrival was expected, and Tom Moses, Margaret’s father, took me to a café for a better conversation. But we weren’t talking about Navajo rugs. We were talking about Albert Einstein, specifically about Einstein’s 1931 journey home after Einstein met Edwin Hubble at Mt. Wilson Observatory and was converted to the idea of an expanding universe. From Los Angeles Einstein took the train across America, and he made two stops in the Southwest: the Grand Canyon and the Petrified Forest. Tom Moses’s step-mother, Margaret Wennips Moses, had served as Einstein’s translator and tour guide for those stops.

As evidence for an expanding universe accumulated through the 1910s and 1920s, Albert Einstein watched with dismay, for the idea of an expanding universe, which implied that the universe had a beginning, seemed absurd to him. It seemed more logical that the universe had been here forever, stable forever. Poets and scientists alike had long regarded the night sky as the definition of eternity and stability. Even when Einstein was in college there was no obvious evidence for a dynamic universe. Yet Einstein was very aware of a problem with the idea of a stable universe. If the universe had been around forever, gravity would have had time to gather matter together, until it ended up in one huge clump. The alternative was that the universe was expanding – absurd! When Einstein was spelling out the cosmological implications of his general theory of relativity, he adopted a new tactic to avoid both cosmic collapse and expansion. He invented a “cosmological constant,” a mysterious expansive force, an anti-gravity that perfectly matched gravity’s tendency to contract the universe. Einstein wasn’t happy with his cosmological constant, for it was completely arbitrary, unexplained by anything in nature, but at least it preserved a stable universe. The Einstein who had become great by following his equations wherever they led, even into the most outlandish concepts, had now lost his nerve, reigning back equations that yearned to fly through space.

When in 1929 Edwin Hubble published his findings showing a correlation between galactic distances and redshifts, consolidating years of accumulating evidence for a dynamic, expanding universe, Einstein knew he had to come to terms with it. At the end of 1930 Einstein made his second trip to America to visit Mt. Wilson Observatory and Caltech. Einstein stayed several weeks, and was given an office across the hall from Edwin Hubble’s office at the observatory headquarters at the base of Mt. Wilson. Hubble’s wife Grace helped chauffeur Einstein around Los Angeles. The observatory bought a new car just for Einstein’s visit, since the old truck that usually hauled astronomers up the rough Mt. Wilson road was deemed too undignified to be seen by the flock of national media that was following Einstein around. When the day came for Einstein to make his drive – his pilgrimage – up the mountain, he was accompanied by young filmmaker Frank Capra, a Caltech engineering graduate who had aspired to be an astronomer and who would always regret he hadn’t become one. Capra captured the historic moment for a newsreel. Einstein dutifully posed for Capra, pretending to be gazing into the telescope, though it was daylight and there was nothing to be seen, as Edwin Hubble stood puffing on his pipe beside Einstein. But Einstein was genuinely delighted by the telescope and examined all its workings. Einstein’s wife Elsa was not so impressed: when told that this was the telescope that had discovered the universe’s shape, Elsa famously replied, “Well, my husband does that on the back of an old envelope.” That night Einstein looked through the telescope for real.

A few days later Einstein gave a lecture to Mt. Wilson and Caltech scientists in the Mt. Wilson headquarters library. He announced that he had now accepted Hubble’s findings, accepted that his own cosmological constant was unnecessary, accepted that the universe was expanding. “A gasp of astonishment swept through the library,” wrote an Associated Press reporter in an article that was published all over the country.4 The New York Times ran the front-page headline: “Einstein Drops Idea of ‘Closed’ Universe.”5 For many readers this was the first time they’d heard the idea of an expanding universe; they read that the great Einstein had bowed to someone named Hubble.

When the Einsteins left Los Angeles at the end of February a thousand people gathered at the train station to get a glimpse of them. “Their arms were filled with roses,” said the newspapers, “and boxes of California fruit were stacked at their feet.”6 The president of the Santa Fe Railway loaned his private railroad car to the Einsteins. The railway also loaned them Margaret Wennips.

Margaret Wennips had worked for several years as a guide for the Indian Detours, tours run by the Santa Fe Railway’s tourist services subsidiary, the Fred Harvey Company. The Indian Detours offered car and bus tours of regions around the Santa Fe Railway route, especially of Indian villages like Taos Pueblo and Acoma, and ruins like Bandelier and Mesa Verde. The guides were all college-educated women, uniformed in Navajo velveteen blouses and Navajo jewelry. The Fred Harvey Company hired experts like author Charles Lummis and anthropologist A. V. Kidder to train the guides in geology, history, and Native American culture. For Margaret Wennips this was the start of a lifelong immersion in Native American culture; her future husband, Horace Moses, was one of the founders of the Gallup Intertribal Ceremonial, still one of the leading pow-wows. Many of Wennips tourists were seriously interested in Native cultures, but there were also spoiled rich folks merely looking for diversions, such as the lady who complained to Margaret about the Indians building their ruins too far away from the railroad. Guides had to be prepared for everything, such as the time a lady passenger started picking flowers, not noticing that they were full of bees, bees that began swarming her brightly-colored clothes and stinging her, sending her fleeing and tossing off her clothes, sending Margaret in pursuit to wrap her coat around the now nearly-naked woman.

Guides received an extra $10 if they used their language skills. Margaret was the only guide who spoke German, which is why she was assigned to Albert Einstein.

If another Indian Detours guide, Margaret Hubbell, had spoken German, she might have been Albert Einstein’s guide at the Grand Canyon. Margaret Hubbell was the niece of J. L. Hubbell. Only a month after Edwin Hubble had stood beside Albert Einstein and pointed into deep space and deep time, Margaret Hubbell would have stood beside Albert Einstein on the rim of the Grand Canyon and pointed into its deep space and time, its expanding and evolving shapes. Indeed, Margaret Hubbell would have been pointing out a serious problem with Edwin’s research. Edwin’s estimate of the rate of cosmic expansion predicted that the universe was about two billion years old. But some twenty years before, physicists had used new discoveries in radioactivity to date the planet Earth as two billion years old, and recently they had announced that it might be as old as three billion years. How could it be, Margaret Hubbell would have declared to Einstein, that Earth is older than the universe? Clearly, cousin Edwin didn’t know what he was doing; silly Edwin didn’t even know how to spell the Hubbell name correctly. Einstein would have looked at Margaret Hubbell, nodded sagely, and started thinking . . . more time.

As it turned out, it was Margaret Wennips who stood beside Albert Einstein on the rim of the Grand Canyon and pointed into a rock manifestation of the same depths of time Einstein had seen through the Mt. Wilson telescope. Perhaps Einstein even gazed at the canyon through the Lookout Studio telescope.

We don’t know what Einstein thought of the Grand Canyon, but it’s likely that, as unique as Einstein was, he shared the nearly universal experience of people first seeing the Grand Canyon, the experience of immensity. First-time visitors have seen pictures of the canyon and suppose they know what to expect, but they are usually amazed to see the true scale of the canyon, to feel its immensity, to measure it with their suddenly puny human bodies.

Yet we can guess that Albert Einstein also saw the canyon in unique, Einstein ways. Human brains are busy bio-looms for finding patterns in the world, and Einstein’s brain was especially hungry and sensitive for patterns. He would have looked at the canyon’s strange shapes and colors, its layers and cliffs and slopes and mesas and bends, and tried to glimpse patterns in it and behind it: hidden forces or laws that made sense of its complexity. Einstein stared into the canyon just as humans have always sought out the larger powers that created them.

Having just come from looking through the Mt. Wilson telescope, having prompted himself to start seeing an expanding universe, perhaps Einstein glimpsed astronomical time in the Grand Canyon. Here was the one landscape on Earth that best personified the same immensities as the sky.

Most of the details of Einstein’s day at the Grand Canyon have been forgotten, but it seems that Margaret Wennips liked Einstein, who wasn’t at all stuffy or pompous like many of the other famous people she had guided. She shared the opinion of Frank Capra, who right after filming Einstein at Mt. Wilson began filming Jean Harlow in Platinum Blond, in which a reporter comments: “Say, I interviewed a swell guy the other day – Einstein. Swell guy, a little eccentric, but a swell – doesn’t wear any garters. Neither do I as a matter of fact; what good are garters?” And Einstein liked Margaret Wennips, and enjoyed his Grand Canyon vacation. When the Einsteins got back to Germany Mrs. Einstein wrote Margaret a thank-you letter, in German of course. Margaret also kept a photo of Einstein on a porch, probably the porch of El Tovar Hotel, with the canyon beyond.

One event in Einstein’s Grand Canyon day has become famous, and made headlines in The New York Times on March 2, 1931:

Einstein is ‘Great Relative’. Hopis Decide on his Theory

       Yesterday at the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River in Arizona the Hopi Indians made Professor Einstein a chief of the tribe. But the Indian council, which has honored presidents and other notables, was puzzled to assign a name to the scientist.

       “What’s his business?” the redskins asked.

       “He invented the theory of relativity,” they were told.

       “All right,” was the reply, “we’ll call him The Great Relative.”

This event was loaded with cultural confusion on all sides. It took place at Hopi House, and the Hopis in the article were the Hopis who lived upstairs and demonstrated crafts and performed dances for tourists. Whatever the commercial motives of Hopi House, it was built with respect for Hopi culture. Its architect, Mary Colter, was a deep admirer of Native American culture; her Desert View Watchtower, farther east on the canyon rim, may be the most inspired tribute to Native American culture and spirituality ever built by white Americans. The fact that the Santa Fe Railway and the Fred Harvey Company would hire Colter – at a time when women weren’t allowed to be architects – and turn her loose to build a very expensive shrine to Native American life is a measure of their own respect for Native culture. The Hopis who lived in Hopi House were certainly serious about their own traditions: Hopi House contained a consecrated kiva that allowed its residents to maintain their spiritual life, a kiva still there today, though carefully hidden from tourists.

Yet most of the tourists who visited Hopi House held cartoonish images of Indians, images reinforced by Hollywood, images taken from plains tribes like the Lakota. Indians were supposed to live in teepees, wear feathered headdresses, hunt buffalo, and smoke peace pipes, none of which was true for Southwestern tribes like the Hopi and Navajo. The Fred Harvey Company was quite ready to pander to tourist stereotypes, and expected its Indian employees to pander too. The publicity photos for the Indian Detours included Pueblo Indians posing in plains Indian clothes and headdresses.

The ceremony that made Einstein a Hopi chief – the Hopis don’t actually have chiefs – included placing a feathered headdress on Einstein, and handing him a peace pipe. A now-famous photograph shows a feathered Einstein surrounded by the family of Porter Timeche, the Hopis who lived in Hopi House. Einstein is holding the hand of Porter’s little girl, Laverne. Today this photograph is usually misidentified as taking place in a Hopi village. The “Indian council” mentioned in The New York Times was merely a few Hopis trying to earn a living by entertaining silly white people. Yet Albert Einstein, smiling happily, appears to be having a great time. Einstein’s favorite childhood author was Karl May, a German who wrote a wildly popular series of adventure novels about American Indians. Karl May had never set foot in America, and his ethnology was wildly scrambled. Yet Einstein seemed delighted to be meeting real Indians and becoming an honorary Indian.

A couple of Santa Fe Railway big shots couldn’t resist barging in for another photo with Einstein, including Herman Schweitzer, the buyer for the Fred Harvey shops. Schweitzer’s largest supplier, J. L. Hubbell, sold Schweitzer $25,000 worth of Navajo rugs every year.

Another photo, taken with the canyon in the background, shows the Einsteins standing with Margaret Wennips.

It’s a safe guess that Margaret Wennips took the Einsteins inside Hopi House. Einstein would have seen lots of Hubbell rugs, and it’s quite likely that his attention quickly zeroed in on a Storm Pattern rug, but not for the best reason. At that time, Storm Pattern rugs included swastikas. In 1931, the year before Adolph Hitler came to power, swastikas were parading threateningly through German streets, and through the nightmares of German Jews like Albert Einstein.

Margaret Wennips was astute enough about world events to recognize why Einstein was suddenly distracted. Perhaps she took him over to the Storm Pattern rug to explain it to him.

The swastikas, she would explain, are really whirling logs, logs spinning on the flood waters of the Navajo creation story. The swastika is also an ancient Navajo symbol, a Hopi symbol too, that conveys a blessing; perhaps she translated the Navajo concept as “a good luck symbol.” The whole creation was a blessing; the lightning bolts carried blessings; even the whirling logs symbolized a blessing. The square in the center of the rug symbolized the place where the world first emerged.

First emerged – thought Einstein. So the Navajos too lived in an emerging, changing universe. He looked at the Hubbell rug more carefully, just as he had stared at the Hubble galactic velocity-distance graph. The first thing Einstein appreciated about the Storm Pattern rug was its perfect symmetry, how each of four quadrants was exactly the same: a lightning bolt heading from the center to a sacred mountain. Symmetry was very important in Einstein’s mathematical equations. When equations stuck out ungracefully it was usually a warning sign. Stuck out like the cosmological constant. Einstein admired the lightning bolts, the sheer energy of the Navajo creation. And yet – what a snug universe that is bordered by visible and immovable mountains.

Swastikas represented cataclysmic flood, Coyote’s ruining the creation, the power of chaos set loose. Primordial chaos itself was marching down the streets of Berlin. With World War Two, the swastikas disappeared from Storm Pattern rugs, or were transformed into water bugs with four bent legs.

That night the Einsteins stayed at the Mary Colter-designed La Posada Hotel in Winslow. At 5,000 feet above sea level, La Posada was nearly as high as Mt. Wilson, and its dry desert skies were even clearer. Arching across the sky was the Milky Way, more vivid than Einstein had ever seen it. To the Navajos the Milky Way is Yikáísdáhá, or “that which awaits the dawn” for the way it rises just before dawn in January. The Milky Way was the last pattern that Black God placed in the sky before Coyote stole his crystal pouch and scattered its remaining stars into the sky chaotically.

The next day the Einsteins toured Petrified Forest National Park, where Einstein saw crystals that became not stars but the patterns of trees. Today a photo of Einstein, perhaps taken by Margaret Wennips, remains in the park’s Painted Desert Inn, the former Fred Harvey café. Centered in the inn’s main room, hanging on the wall facing the Painted Desert, is a Storm Pattern rug.

       I arrived at the Hubbell Trading Post early to have a chance to look over the rugs before the auction began. The rugs were laid out on tables, where serious collectors were examining them carefully, discussing every nuance. Of nearly 500 rugs on the sales list, 33 were Storm Patterns. Nearly half of these were woven around Pinion, a remote town halfway between here and Red Lake, but no one I asked could tell me why Pinion had become today’s center of Storm Pattern weaving. In color and design, the Storm Pattern rugs ranged from traditional to jazzy. In age the weavers ranged from their teens to their eighties. Most rugs were new, but auctions often dredged up one or two Storm Patterns that had been locked up in a trunk in 1939 or on December 7, 1941, and never seen again, which meant they were in excellent condition, but they were still hard to sell. The target prices ranged from $40 to $4,000.

Before he got busy I talked with one of the auctioneers, Hank Blair. Hank’s parents had run the Kayenta Trading Post, and today Hank ran the Lukachukai Trading Post. Hank said that no one was really sure where the Storm Pattern originated. It was first published in J. B. Moore’s 1911 catalog, but it could have been a Navajo design of some sort before that. Was it a sacred design? Hank was wary of this claim, for both traders and collectors had imposed so many false meanings onto Native art that the truth could be hard to sort out. But Hank seemed pretty sure how the Storm Pattern had come to be identified with the western reservation. From J. B. Moore’s catalog, the Storm Pattern design was adopted by the Hayden flour mill in Tempe, Arizona, as the logo on their flour sacks. The Babbitt trading posts got their flour from the Hayden mill. The Babbitts were distributing many tens of thousands of pictures of the Storm Pattern all over the western reservation. Every Navajo who traded at a Babbitt post was looking at the Storm Pattern as they cooked fry bread. Thus the Storm Pattern became a yummy design to weave. Now those flour sacks had cooked up the myth that the Storm Pattern actually originated in the western reservation.

I also ran into a professional rug appraiser from Tempe. She wasn’t convinced that J. B. Moore had invented the Storm Pattern. The whole subject of trader influences on Navajo designs was highly controversial. For various reasons, whites often give too little credit to the Navajos, who had plenty of creativity of their own. She suspected that the Storm Pattern evolved through a process of give-and-take between Moore and local weavers. She also doubted that the Storm Pattern had any religious origins; this was merely a later interpretation. She also agreed that the Storm Pattern had gone from the J. B. Moore catalog to the Hayden mill flour sacks to the Babbitt trading posts to the kitchens of the western reservation, and thus it became a popular design there.

A few days after the auction I went back to Jim Babbitt and asked him about the Hayden mill flour sack theory. He shook his head with pity. He’d been hearing this story for years. There wasn’t any evidence for it. He’d never seen one of those Hayden mill Storm Pattern flour sacks, and he didn’t know of anyone who had ever actually seen one, including the people repeating the flour sack theory. The Babbitt family had a museum’s worth of artifacts from their trading post history. In fact, I was visiting Jim in his office above the 1888 Babbitts store in Flagstaff, his walls full of Babbitt history, his desk loaded with old photos he was turning into a book. You would think, said Jim, that if the Babbitts had been distributing tens of thousands of Storm Pattern flour sacks, someone in the Babbitt family might know about it, and one of those sacks might have survived. There were still plenty of 1890s Arbuckle’s coffee crates nailed to reservation walls, including the walls of the Red Lake Trading Post.

Jim thought that the flour sack theory might be a garbled version of Babbitt trading post history. In fact, the Babbitts had done a lot to popularize the Storm Pattern design by putting it on company supplies such as stationery, jewelry boxes, and shopping sacks – not flour sacks: paper shopping sacks. Perhaps some elderly Navajo weaver told someone that she had learned her Storm Pattern from a Babbitt sack, and this mutated into the flour sack theory.

The Babbitts adopted the Storm Pattern for their logo because it was already representative of the western reservation areas they served. Jim suggested I look into the book Navajo Trader by Galdwell Richardson. The Richardsons were another of the great trading post families, who still ran the largest Native gallery in Gallup. When I had stopped in the Richardson’s store they had told me that the Storm Pattern originated in the western reservation. In the other Gallup galleries, they told me J. B. Moore. Gladwell Richardson had run various posts in the western reservation, including Cameron around 1930, and later Sunrise. In his book, Richardson discussed the origin of the Storm Pattern design, and said that it was already being woven around Sunrise in 1890, two decades before J. B. Moore’s catalog. He also said that the Storm Pattern symbols derived from sacred sand paintings. Jim Babbitt’s own research led to the Red Lake Trading Post, and beyond that, it got mysterious.

Perhaps J. B. Moore had merely taken an obscure western reservation design and made it famous in his catalog. Because Moore’s catalog was so historically significant, it has cast its aura onto the Storm Pattern design, getting credit for its origin, even when Moore himself said otherwise in the catalog.

As I walked down the stairs of the old Babbitt store I was puzzled indeed. As I turned the sidewalk corner I saw in the distance the white dome of Lowell Observatory, the dome where Vesto Slipher had measured the redshifts of the galaxies. It was puzzling indeed that humans could calculate the exact time and intensity of the creation of the universe, but we were at a loss to figure out the origins of a rug design, barely a century old, that depicted – some people claimed – the creation of the universe.

       Edwin Hubble walked up to the canyon rim at Desert View. He looked down at the best view of the Colorado River he had seen, the river curving through a more open section of the canyon. It looked right: it looked like the view in George Ritchey’s photo-drawing. But it didn’t take any scientific instruments to notice something wrong. On the canyon rim the air was often turbulent. Desert heat in the canyon depths sent heat waves boiling out of the canyon and mixing energetically with the much cooler rim air. Turbulence was bad for astronomy; it blurred the images of stars.

Hubble looked up and imagined the world’s greatest observatory right here. He imagined a giant telescope tracking the stars all night, measuring the redshifts of galaxies farther and farther out, finding the largest patterns of the cosmos.

In the distance Hubble saw the gorge of the Little Colorado River, which hid the Sipapu, the Hopi’s place of emergence.

       The Navajos say they were taught to weave by Spider Woman. Spider Man gave them the loom and Spider Woman gave them the secrets of weaving. The people carried the loom with them when they escaped the flood. The loom was made of earth and sky. The warp sticks were sun rays; the batten was a sun halo; the spindles and tension cords were made of lightning bolts. There are prayers for building a loom, prayers and songs for weaving. Weavers talk to their rug as if it is a child. When weavers come upon a spiderweb in their hogan, they gently remove it and rub it on their hands to acquire the skills of the spider. The steady thumping of the weaver’s comb, used to pat the weave tight, is like a ceremonial drumbeat, like a heartbeat. Navajo babies are soothed by the rhythms of weaving.

I was sitting in the rug room of the Cameron Trading Post, watching an older weaver weaving a Storm Pattern rug. Public demonstrators like her were a century-old Southwestern tradition, if a problematic tradition, since some white tourists took it as merely exotic entertainment. Yet for Navajos there was honor in representing your people to the world; demonstrators were often the only chance whites had to talk with Navajos about their culture. Most of the questions asked of weavers were technical: “How long does it take you to weave a rug like that?” But some tourists asked about the meaning of a rug design. I had noticed that public demonstrators seemed less likely than other weavers to volunteer information about the sacred. For this weaver, the symbol in the center of the Storm Pattern was simply the weaver’s own hogan.

I watched the rhythms of the weaving, her hands going back and forth, in and out, up and down. Back and forth, in and out, up and down. She worked from no pattern, only from her own mind, her sense of what was right. Her heartbeat became the thumping of the weaver’s comb and a cardiogram of wool. Dangling threads of many colors slowly coalesced into patterns. The ancient sandstone was sedimented into strata of deliberate beauty. The floodwaters of last year’s thunderstorms welled up into the lightning bolts of sanctification.

I was watching an emergence of order, a creation of patterns, that was far more ancient than Navajos or humans or life or sandstone; it had begun with the universe itself. In its first moment the universe exploded into order. The raw energy of the Big Bang flashed into patterns, into particles and forces that quickly built more elaborate particles and forces and gradually built stars and galaxies. The tsunami of gas racing away from the Big Bang shaped itself into billions of spiral galaxies spinning and spinning, spinning themselves into webs of greater order. The galaxies spun themselves into stars and pulsars and black holes, into planets and comets and moons. Planets spun and spun and spun themselves into oceans and atmospheres, volcanoes and mountains, rivers and canyons, sandstone and thunderstorms and lightning. Some planets spun themselves into highly patterned carbon molecules, and then into cells, which turned out to be master weavers. Cells wove whole oceans of molecules into cells, then into multicelled creatures. Cells wove billions of patterns of life. Cells wove the land into green forests. Cells wove fish and birds and dinosaurs and mammals. The universe’s genius at weaving patterns became a spider weaving a spiderweb. The universe’s long quest for patterns became brains searching for patterns in events, patterns on the earth, patterns in the sky. The master weaving that began with the creation of the universe became the weaving of a rug symbolizing the creation of the universe. The flash of the Big Bang became the lightning bolts of sanctification.

       As Edwin Hubble lay sleeping beneath his Storm Pattern rug, a spider was spinning a web in the ceiling corner.

Around 1640, astronomer William Gascoigne was looking through his telescope when a spider dropped across his field of view, leaving a spider thread across the stars. Gascoigne was impressed by what a thin line it made. He arranged two spider threads into a cross-hair, creating a telescopic sight that greatly enhanced the aiming of his telescope and the mapping of the sky. Three centuries later astronomers were still using spider threads for telescope cross-hairs. At Royal Greenwich Observatory astronomers plucked their spiderwebs from hedgerows. At Mt. Lick Observatory in California, director Robert Aitken fed bugs to a nest of black widows, whose webs, he insisted, were superior. George Hale used spiderwebs at Yerkes Observatory, but astronomers and historians at Mt. Wilson aren’t sure whether Hale used them there. It’s possible, at least, that Edwin Hubble was gazing through a spider’s web to discover the source of all weaving.

       Waiting for the auction, I wandered through J. L. Hubbell’s house, full of rugs and art and books. I noticed two astronomy books from the 1890s. Then there was The Light of Western Stars, Zane Grey’s bio-filter of astronomy: “She had shunned the light of the stars as she had violently dismissed every hinting suggestive memory of Stewart’s kisses. But one night she went deliberately to her window. There they shone. Her stars! . . . Those shining stars made her yield. She whispered to them that they had claimed her – the West claimed her – Stewart claimed her forever.”7

In the trading post rug room I asked Steve, the Hubbell buyer, about the origin of the Storm Pattern, and he said there was a mystery about it. Most books said J. B. Moore. I told Steve what Jim Babbitt had said, and Steve said that the Babbitts knew the history of the western reservation better than anyone, so Steve was inclined to accept Jim’s account. But then a Navajo woman who worked with Steve said she’d always heard it was J. B. Moore.

During the auction Hank Blair pointed out the weaver of one of the Storm Pattern rugs, a woman who looked old enough to have been the daughter of the original weaver of Storm Patterns, and I edged my way through the aisle to speak with her, convinced that at last I would learn the secret from the source, but it turned out that she spoke only Navajo. If she knew the secret, it was going to remain a secret.

Along with Hank Blair, the other auctioneer was Bruce Burnham, a fourth-generation trader. Hank and Bruce, both married to Navajos, were two of the last old-time traders, still doing some business in barter. Like traders from the Hubbell era, Burnham had given direction to a new rug design, the Burntwater, though this design started with a creative mutation, with one weaver combining elements from two other designs. Hank and Bruce knew their rugs well, and in the auction they were careful not to hype a rug, but they were also quick to scold the audience for not recognizing the quality or value of a rug. Unfortunately, when the rug I had decided to buy came up for bid, Bruce announced that it was a great deal, a very nice rug for too low a price.

The previous year I’d been here only as an observer, free to enjoy everything, but now I had a biologized role, competing for resources against unpredictable others, and needing to decide a rug’s value for me. During the preview I’d made a list of seven possibilities, but since I preferred #345, I had to let most of the others get away. I liked #345 because it had Ganado colors – red, white, black, and grey, the colors of J. L. Hubbell’s Ganado Red rugs – and because it was the traditional design, the design the Hubbell or Cameron trading posts might have been selling in 1928. The lightning had to be white, not red as weavers often made it – real lightning was white.

Encouraged by Bruce Burnham, the bidding on #345 took off. Most rugs got only one bid, but for #345 the price quickly jumped by 60%. What was the value of a creation-story rug that Edwin Hubble might have seen when he was in the middle of becoming the first human to see the creation of the universe? SOLD!

The rug identification tag gave the weaver’s name and hometown, but as I asked around, no one knew her. She too would remain a mystery.

For twenty years I’d kept a Ganado Red rug on the foot of my bed to keep my feet warm, to guard them against the unbiological night. Now the Storm Pattern rug would take its place.

A few weeks later I ran into Bruce Burnham at another Navajo rug auction and asked him about the origin of the design he’d sold me. Bruce adhered to the J. B. Moore theory, though he thought that Moore “worked out the details” of the design with local weavers, maybe just the one weaver he’d mentioned in his 1911 catalog. Bruce said that the design then got picked up by the Hayden mill for their flour sacks, which the Babbitts distributed all over the western reservation, which is the only reason the Storm Pattern became so identified with the western reservation. Bruce admitted that he had never actually seen one of those Storm Pattern flour sacks, but he suggested that I go talk with Jim Babbitt, who had a museum’s worth of trading post artifacts; Bruce was sure that Jim Babbitt would have some of those flour sacks. I did contact the historical museum in Tempe, where the Hayden mill is a famous landmark. The museum had a collection of Hayden mill flour sacks. They told me that no one there had ever seen or heard of a Storm Pattern flour sack. But they told me to go talk with Jim Babbitt, who had a museum’s worth of trading post artifacts, and who might have a Storm Pattern flour sack.

The next time I went to Sedona I stopped at Garlands again and asked them, again, about the origin of the Storm Pattern. They said that no one knew: it was a big mystery. I replied that it was refreshing to hear someone admitting that no one knew.

When I looked at my Storm Pattern rug I saw the creation of the universe, densely woven with mystery.

       As Spider Woman spun her white galaxy in the ceiling corner, Edwin Hubble lay protected from the cold, immense, mysterious night, protected by a thin layer of human stories.

Yet Hubble was restless; Hubble was dreaming energetically; Hubble couldn’t stop imagining the galaxies flying apart. Hubble woke up in the middle of the night. Starlight glowed imperceptibly from the spiderweb. Hubble woke up in a shock of wonder. Was it a dream that the universe was expanding? Could it really be himself who was transforming the universe? He had always been so cautious, so shy of exotic ideas – like Einstein’s theories. He avoided using the word “galaxy” even after the galaxies had made him famous. In his public writings he stuck to the facts, avoiding any sense of wonder.

Yet people seldom become astronomers without a sense of wonder. There must have been at least one night when Edwin Hubble woke up in a shock of wonder at the mystery of creation, a mystery that no thin layer of human stories or theories or numbers could prevent from sinking deeply into human bodies.

       The weather forecast was perfect. A 100% chance of thunderstorms. Some possibly severe. Strong winds. Dangerous lightning. A chance of hail. Flash flood warnings for large areas. Perfect.

I drove up to the Grand Canyon, and along the rim. Already the clouds were building up above the canyon, a line of clouds that curved this way and that, imitating the canyon’s curves. The July heat welling out of the canyon energized condensation above the canyon before there was much condensation around it. The clouds spread out and linked up and rose taller. The canyon built a mountain range of clouds above it, the ghost of the mountain ranges from which the canyon rocks had come. The clouds started out bright white and then grew grey and blue and black. Far away, the rumbling began.

I arrived at the great astronomical observatory at Desert View.

George Ritchey never built his Grand Canyon observatory. His plans were too technically ambitious, and he couldn’t find financial backing. The National Park Service, after years of fighting the owners of private lands inside Grand Canyon National Park, was not inclined to give Park Service land to anyone. Ritchey’s dream was also strangely oblivious of astronomical realities. One of the most important requirements for an observatory is the “seeing,” the calmness or turbulence of the air. Calm air is essential for clear star images. But the heat waves roiling out of the Grand Canyon make the air along the canyon rim very turbulent, good for keeping ravens and condors soaring for hours, and good for triggering thunderstorms, but very bad for astronomy. Ritchey did have valid reasons for selecting the Grand Canyon: its high elevation, dry air, usual lack of clouds, and remoteness from city lights were all good for astronomy. Yet Ritchey knew the Grand Canyon well enough that he should have recognized a big problem with turbulence. Ritchey first vacationed at the canyon in 1907, and the next year he may have become the first person ever to take color photographs of the canyon. Ritchey’s ignoring of the turbulence problem suggests that he had become obsessed with the idea of an observatory on the rim of the canyon, on the rim of deep time and deep beauty. Ritchey’s vision seems to have captured the imagination of the New York Times, which in one of its articles about the Grand Canyon observatory dubbed it “the desert watch tower.”

George Hale too may have become obsessed by the Grand Canyon observatory, if in a negative way. Two years after Hale sent Edwin Hubble to the canyon, he sent Hubble’s assistant, Milton Humason, to make further tests, to make sure Ritchey was wrong. It was even odder that Hale sent Edwin Hubble to Cameron, over 3,000 feet lower than Desert View, and much hotter and dustier. Hale built his observatory on Mt. Palomar after all.

Yet someone did build an observatory at Desert View. At least, Mary Colter thought of her Desert View Watchtower as a Native American astronomical observatory.

We know quite a bit about Mary Colter’s thinking about the Watchtower, for she wrote a 100‑page book about its inspirations and motifs. Colter modeled her watchtower on the Puebloan tower ruins in the Four Corners region, especially at Hovenweep. Colter spent six months studying tower ruins, even hiring a plane to search for them in remote areas. Colter studied them more extensively than had any archaeologist. In her book Colter discussed theories of the purpose of the towers. She dismissed theories that they were granaries or habitations. She admitted that they were often defensive, but she pointed out that many towers were connected by underground passageways to kivas, which didn’t make any sense for defensive purposes. But it did make sense for ceremonial purposes. The Puebloans were farmers whose survival and ceremonial cycles depended on the seasons, and they watched the sky closely. Colter endorsed the theory of anthropologist Jesse Walter Fewkes that the towers were used by priests to track the sun and moon and stars and seasons. A watchtower connected Puebloans with the sky, and allowed a priest or kachina to arrive from the sky into a kiva ceremony. Colter built her watchtower with a connected kiva.

I walked through the kiva room and up the narrow stairs into the 70‑foot-tall stone Watchtower. The tower’s first floor held murals by Hopi artist Fred Kabotie, depicting the Hopi universe, especially their connection with the Grand Canyon. The ceiling was full of astronomical motifs, whose Hopi meanings Colter explained in her book. I climbed through two more art-rich floors, then reached the top floor, with its eleven large windows, about three feet high. Mary Colter had planned to install telescopes here or on the roof, just like in her Lookout Studio. Colter finished her architectural plans for the Watchtower less than three years after Edwin Hubble had stood on the canyon rim here. Given all the publicity about the Grand Canyon observatory, Colter must have known about it, and it’s the kind of idea that would have inspired her.

I gazed into the canyon, now densely patterned with cloud shadows and sunbeams, constantly changing. I gazed north at the gorge of the Little Colorado River, the Hopi’s place of emergence, an idea given historical flesh when the Hopis really did emerge from the Grand Canyon and migrate to the mesas where they live today. Far to the west several cloud banks were already raining, dropping blue warp threads that curved in the wind and sometimes evaporated before they reached the ground. Some rain streaks fell into the canyon and darkened the cliffs. A lightning bolt hit somewhere behind the rim, and after awhile its washed-out thunder arrived. Then a lightning bolt hit one of the buttes inside the canyon.

I watched the clouds building up a few miles away, rising, spreading, darkening, rumbling, and then they released their rain, first a few strands, then a curtain dropping into the canyon, obscuring the shapes behind it. As the clouds moved, the rain streaks hiked through the canyon, and then a sunburst followed them, and the canyon buttes gleamed. Far to the west a rainbow was growing.

The sky above me darkened. The wind whooshed around the tower, gaining stranger tones from the roughness of the stones and the cracks between them. Raindrops spotted the windows, streaked the windows. The blue curtain wrapped itself around the tower, eliminating my view of the canyon. Then the rain drifted off, and I got a cloud’s-eye view of rain falling into the canyon.

Along dozens of miles of the canyon, half a dozen clouds were raining into it, and raining much larger shadows, and through them the sun rained jigsaw patterns of light. Thunder continued rumbling from far and near. A lightning bolt struck a cliff, which flared with an odd glow.

On a normal summer afternoon the thunderstorms dissipate after an hour or two, but today they continued building up, the clouds growing blacker, the rain and lightning more intense. I watched a huge storm cell building up just west of me, very dark, loud with thunder, moving my way. An eerie twilight. Then the storm exploded. The windows became waterfalls; the wind roared; the tower vibrated; thunder boomed very loud, very near. I stepped well back from the windows, not trusting the tower’s lightning rods. The storm raged for fifteen or twenty minutes, and when it drifted off I could see waterfalls erupting from cliffs, flash floods frothing down drainages, creeks combining into larger flows. I watched the floods working their way layer by layer, turn by turn, down to the river.

I was seeing a power that had been at work on Earth for eons. The power of thunderstorms had melted mountain ranges down rivers to the sea and built the strata of Grand Canyon rocks. Thunderstorms had nurtured eons of life, supporting its evolution, welding its limbs, building it into the mile of fossils in Grand Canyon strata. Then thunderstorms had carved that strata away and created the canyon. The lightning had signed its jagged name deep into the ground. And yet, thunderstorms were a small part of much vaster energies and eons. A lightning bolt was but a planetary mirror’s glimmer of the power of the sun. A thunderstorm was but a micro-eddy of a galactic hurricane. A lightning bolt was but the memory flash of the Big Bang.

I was seeing the power of order and the power of chaos, the power of Emergence and the power of Coyote. I was seeing the power that curled the sandstone desert into green grass and white wool, and yet also flash-flooded away soil and sheep. I was seeing the power that grew forests, and yet also set them afire. I was seeing the power that built a mile of stone, and yet also eroded stone into canyons. I was seeing the power that had welcomed Hopi ancestors to grow corn in the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and yet then withheld the rain and forced the Hopis to abandon their homes. I was seeing the power that provided Navajo ancestors with lots of rabbits to hunt, and yet also provided lots of coyotes to snatch rabbits away. I was seeing the power that gave life, and yet also gave disease. I was seeing the mysterious power that filled the world with both blessings and evil omens and that challenged humans to tell them apart and to encourage the omens to become blessings. I was seeing the power of pattern and the power of storm.

Occasionally I went to the window facing away from the canyon. I was looking for a mountain fifty miles away, but clouds blocked my view. Finally one of the gaps in the storm aligned with me and I saw Dook’o’ooLííd, one of the Navajo’s four sacred mountains, this one better known as the San Francisco Peaks. Above the mountain was a huge dark mountain of clouds. I waited. I watched the streaks of rain curling down. Then it flashed: a lightning bolt. A lightning bolt connected the mountain and the cloud. This mountain was one of the four sacred mountains in the Storm Pattern design. I waited. I watched. Then it flashed: a lightning bolt arced from the mountain, just like in my Storm Pattern rug.

Then nearby clouds drifted across my view.

I stayed in the tower for as long as the storms continued coming, for maybe five hours. The storms came in waves that advanced through the canyon for a dozen miles or more. The clouds turned on and off, built up and melted away. The tower was engulfed in rain, then in sun. Mist rose out of the canyon, white snakes of mist curling up the drainages and over the edges of cliffs, ballooning into strange shapes, into ghosts, rising to meet the much darker rain clouds. Rainbows sprouted and changed shape and intensity and melted away. Dozens of lightning bolts proclaimed that powerful and invisible forces connected the sky and the earth.

When the storms were over I headed down to the Cameron Trading Post for dinner. I went into the original trading post building and peeked behind the on-the-wall rug that hid the original doorway, the doorway through which Edwin Hubble had walked billions of years ago, when the universe was much younger, the doorway now sedimented shut by ancient sand dunes. On the dining room walls there were a dozen rugs, five of which were Storm Patterns, including the largest. Another rug blended the Storm Pattern design with the Tree of Life design, filling the lightning bolts with colorful songbirds. The lightning bolts offered a Navajo blessing onto my food.

At sunset I headed for the San Francisco Peaks, still wrapped in clouds. I lived at the base on the mountain, in the forest, with no other human structures between me and the mountain. Occasionally Navajo medicine men came up my driveway and harvested some of its bordering wild roses for ceremonial uses, but they would never tell me exactly what uses.

I looked anew at my Storm Pattern rug. I looked at the symbol in one corner, the San Francisco Peaks. I looked just beyond it, and I picked out one little crest of red wool. This is where I live: this is me. This is the purpose of creation stories. They are maps that locate humans amid the forces of creation. They are clouds that make visible the secretly flowing energies that generate life. They are lightning rods that turn dangerous energies into blessings. I looked anew at the Storm Pattern, and I saw the flash of the Big Bang turning into outrushing galaxies and weaving a further pattern that praised the journey and the patterns and even the storms of the universe.

And yet, in the middle of the night, when humans are even more oblivious than usual, when dreams only hint at the strangeness of reality, the black boundaries of my rug merged with the blackness of the night; the thin layer of human stories was engulfed by space; the compass of the map of creation was overwhelmed by electricity from the stars; and the origins of creation remained a mystery.

NOTES

1. Vesto M. Slipher papers, Lowell Observatory, Flagstaff, Arizona.

2. Elizabeth Compton Hegemann, Navajo Trading Days (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1963) p 302.

3. Facsimile page of Moore catalogue in H. L. James, Rugs and Posts: The Story of Navajo Weaving and Indian Trading (Altgen, Pa.: 2005, 3rd edition) p 86.

4. Quoted in Gale E. Christianson, Edwin Hubble: Mariner of the Nebulae (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1995) p 210.

5. The New York Times, February 5, 1931.

6. The Arizona Republic, February 28, 1931.

7. Zane Grey, The Light of Western Stars (New York: Easton Press, 1914) p 345.

Don Lago is the author of Starchild: The Human Meanings of the Big Bang Cosmos (Plain View Press, 2009) and On the Viking Trail: Travels in Scandinavian America (Iowa Press, 2004). His essays have appeared in Orion, Astronomy, Sky & Telescope, and Isotope: A Journal of Literary Nature and Science Writing.