Jose de la Cruz Jacquez and Maria Magdalena de Atocha (Aranda) Jacquez, also known as Joe and Nellie, raised seven children. In order, they were Joe Jr., Barbara, Patsy, Annalee, twins Rita and Ronnie, and Johnny. Annalee and Johnny would die in their mid-40s, and with each death Nellie appeared to become physically smaller so that her cheekbones emerged and the skin on the back of her hands grew thin and taut, and when I hugged her, I could feel each vertebra. This recollection of sudden diminishment may be false. It is likely that time gradually whittled down my once-plump grandmother who lived long enough to settle upon the couch and brace herself for the embrace of her chunky great- great-grandchildren.
The descendants of the union of Jacquez and Aranda became Castillo, Robinson, Griego, Garcia and in the next generation grew to include the Dugans, Johnsons, Fletchers, Coles. Jacquez married Sutherland. Castillo married Weir. Griego married Smith.
A family changes shape over time. It becomes broader, its roots not necessarily more shallow but less concrete, flesh and blood passing into memory. In 2009, three of our members died, all of them too young. The family attempts to reassemble itself around its loss. Its members seek to renew the bonds to one another, and so, the call is issued. It comes from my auntie Rita and uncle Tom, who live in the tiny town of Hinckley, Utah.
We’re getting the house ready, they say. Come and visit. It’s time for a family reunion.
I had not driven along Interstate 70 into Utah for more than 10 years, and I tell my brother-in-law as we prepare to leave Grand Junction that we are in for a boring stretch of road. Gray. Desolate. Nothing to see.
I do not know how I forgot its magnificence, the way in which the earth jutted and heaved, was lifted high and carved through, rounded, jagged, a landscape that somehow manages to be both muted and ostentatious. I see myself at the bottom of an ocean. I imagine that I have been flung backward millions of years.
I know I am looking at a story I cannot read. I do not possess the vocabulary to decipher the layer-cake geology, to interpret, amid the hints of lilac, rust and green the color of oxidized copper, how liquid and iron met and parted. A geologist named Marjorie Chan at the University of Utah will explain this to me later. She will do so in the pleased voice of a person delighted to introduce one to a longtime friend. I long, for a moment, to possess Chan’s eyes, her knowledge. When she is out in that beautiful, stark terrain, she tells me, she sometimes feels as an accomplished musician might when confronted by a sheet of music. She sees notes and hears a symphony.
You were in the Colorado Plateau, Chan tells me. It is unique in that the layers of sediment were spared intense twisting and turning and folding through time. They survived relatively intact, preserved, in horizontal layers raised and laid bare by erosion. “It is an open book of the geologic record,” she says. She speaks of an ancient ocean, inland seas and desert sand dunes. Much later, the Colorado River cut the land risen from earth like a knife slicing cake, and the desert climate now offers the gift of keeping the land unveiled. She says of the earth forms that it is as though Mother Nature had sculpted the land in such a way to enhance the properties of each rock.
Chan says I likely passed rocks 70 million to 200 million years old. How long has the plateau existed as we see it today, I ask her. About 9 million years, she says.
Not all the family makes it to the reunion. But many do, and we, too, are like notes come together in a symphony, discordant only in that not a single one of us is capable of offering a decent karaoke performance. We eat and drink and visit while the kids chase one another through the yard until they are red-faced. A cousin and his wife and child show up exhausted after a long haul all the way from Wisconsin, and they are swallowed in embraces.
I think of the land through which we passed, of how it is capable of anchoring a person. I think of the scale of time and the many forms of permanence and impermanence and of that which once existed and no longer does.
That which surrounds us, that which we are a part of, the landscapes public and private, fold and turn and change and, in that way, are transitory. Yet within their changed forms, some elements remain constant. They endure.
One of my cousins brings a DVD of some old family films. And suddenly, there they are. Joe and Nellie. Joe dancing. Nellie, laughing and plump again. There is Joe Jr. and Barbara and Patsy and Rita and Ronnie. There is Johnny and my mom, Annalee, and they are all so young. We rewind and play again. Rewind and play again. They are here. They are gone. They are here.
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
