To be honest, my world is rather small when it comes to things I’m not particularly interested in.

Or maybe I’d like to be interested in them, but time doesn’t allow me to be.

Last Friday, I stepped out of my car on a windy, cold, but fairly sunshiny morning.

I was there I was for a walk, mostly.

I saw there was a visitor center but thought maybe I’d visit it on my way out, if I still felt like it.

I saw the path in front of me was paved and it said it was a ¾ mile in a loop back to the visitor center.

Perfect, I thought. 

I’d whip it up to a fast walk and be back and warmed from my walk before I got too cold out there in the wind.

What I didn’t know, as I set out on my walk, was that I was only one in hundreds, or more likely, thousands, who had walked that area, and although at first I figured it was for an entirely different reason than I, yet in the end, I wasn’t so sure.

I stepped up my gait and soon came to the first point if interest. 

It seems the area I had chosen for my walk had significance to it, going back some 1,200 years, or approximately 700 years after Christ left this earth. 

Some Native American Indian had noticed something while passing through the area, and, like we humans are, others noticed what he had and wanted one for themselves. 

I was slow in catching on to what this thing of interest was, because I was so absorbed in the scenery. 

What had begun for me as a walk on a prairie plain, much like the pasture behind our place back in Kansas, suddenly divulged into something much more rugged. 

Grass gave way to huge stones, and the huge stones led me into a sanctuary of sorts where the wind was muted by the cliff like walls that surrounded me on three sides, and water cascaded down before me; its gentle music calmed me and made me stop my walk for some minutes as I stood and let it all soak in.

I crossed over to the other side of the stream and stood high on a lookout above it all. 

Here the wind hit me in full force, but being a Kansas guy, I felt its same soothing power that I have felt over and over at home.

Even now, as I write this, I pause to remember and feel it. 

The setting had changed drastically since I started my walk.  To my left was the cataract cutting through stone walls, bounded farther on by waving prairie grass.

To my right stretched an unbroken plain where my vision stopped on a solitary tree.  I could see streamers were attached to it and waving in the breeze.

I continued my walk and came to a site of excavation. 

Sheer granite walls led down about 15 feet to an area I figured must hold what all the plains Indians had traveled, some of them hundreds of miles for, but my eye failed to see what it was.

Rather, my gaze arrested on large piles of broken rock, each piece no larger than 6 to 8 inches square. 

All hewed from that chasm by hand. 

All piled in those piles for several hundreds of centuries.

All chipped out and passed over for that prized possession that lay wedged between its layers.

I came to a plaque that showed a picture of multiple teepee’s that were pitched on the open prairie to the south and east of where I now stood. 

The plaque told me that all these nomads had come here for a malleable red stone that could be fashioned into peace pipes that were used as a ceremony in their peace councils.

I read that most of the warring tribes that met at this place, and while within its sanctums, were at peace with one another. 

It seemed to all fall into place then.

Each of them had come with the intent to find a treasure of great price. 

That treasure, I was to learn in the visitor center was only a two-inch-thick vein of rock down at the bottom of that 15 foot trench.

Everything had to stop; every normal activity was put on hold, as the people took turns chiseling their way down there.

The space at the bottom was hardly wider than one person’s width.

I seemed to see squaws standing on the rim of it, watching the progress, joined by squaws from another tribe. 

I saw them all become one people there, as warriors worked side by side and hand in hand in that country of peace.

I saw the worst of enemies meet, and, after a bit of hesitation, exchange the precious rock that they had worked so hard to get to.

I saw them, in the shades of evening, with twinkling fires here and there, break out the meat that they had carried with them all this way.

I saw as they shared it with each other.

I saw them smile and laugh. 

I saw them broker for more peaceful associations and borders that weren’t as closely guarded as before.

And what I saw, out there on that common plain, made very uncommon by what happened there, seemed to remind me so very much of another place, and another time.

Only then they met outside of a roughhewn tomb, and there too, all strife came to a standstill, and every heart was filled with joy because of treasure they had found.

Written in Red Beard and Scooters