2024-03-20 02:07:07
Traveling along the very long straights of “Scenic Highway 163” which descend from the anonymous town of Kayenta towards Monument Valley, it seems as if they take you to a huge film studio where, suddenly, you are the protagonist of a film. The most iconic images of the most famous Stars and Stripes films flow around you, almost as if it were a full immersion all “special effects”. It’s all a succession of very famous frames that have contributed to making the States known and admired throughout the world. As one gets closer to those spectacular mesas that rise from the desert and those dizzying pinnacles of red sandstone that dot and characterize the landscape of that arid plain on the border between Utah and Arizona, the mind of every visitor becomes increasingly lighter. She is captivated by the beauty of a natural setting that has no equal.
On that stretch of road the fantastic landscape becomes, as you enter, more and more unreal. And this is how, progressively, we detach ourselves from reality. The mind flies away, free. Magically you can feel yourself traveling alongside Peter Fonda in “Easy Rider” or together with Susan Sarandon in “Thelma and Luise”. Or being with Tom Hanks in “Forrest Gump” or with Tom Cruise in “Mission Impossible”. Or, again, on the set of one of the more than one hundred western films that have made Hollywood rich from “Fort Apache” to “Mackenna’s Gold” to Hohnny Depp’s “The Lone Ranger”, without forgetting the scenarios presented in ” A Space Odyssey” and “Back to the Future 3”.
Once you reach the esplanade of the Visitor center of what is now the “Navajo Nation Park”, you cannot help but feel that you have become an integral part of those spectacular and unforgettable cinematic sequences shot by John Ford in his famous stagecoach assault told with extraordinary and dramatic filmic power in the incomparable “Red Shadows” (filmed in 1939). Those iconic images that have made the history of cinema are masterfully narrated and exalted through the deeds of the intrepid hero-justifier Ringo Kidd (alias John Wayne) and the reassuring arrival of the Seventh Cavalrymen who bring peace back to where the “savage” Indians they felt like masters in their own home, the everlasting Yankee spirit: the yearning of a people committed to the perennial realization of the American dream. And it is precisely while we observe full of amazement and wonder that extraordinary “special effect” created by nature over millions of years and which reveals itself as a superb witness before our eyes, an appropriate historical reminder is in order. Monument Valley, as well as being a wonder of nature, is the monument that will always bear witness to the true story of the race to the West: the one which in the nineteenth century cost not only the extermination of Buffalo Bill’s bison, but also the elimination of 10 millions of Native Americans, the erasure of over 500 indigenous tribes, guardians of centuries-old cultures sacrificed in the name of conquest and progress. And admiring that world of wild beauty, all the names that characterized that epic flow through your mind, just like in a film: from Geronimo to Jassie James, from Sitting Bull to Billy the Kid, from Sand Creek to Wounded Knee.
In the fiction of “Red Shadows” the attack on the stagecoach was led by the Apaches. In reality those lands have always been inhabited by Navajo Indians. This is why Monument Valley has now been compensatoryly renamed “Navajo Nation Park”. The last Navajos, heirs of the “lords” of those desert lands populated by pumas and coyotes, and who for decades have been relegated to living in reserve parks (authentic ghettos for “different” minorities) are still there. They earn a few dollars by selling souvenirs, caps and beer.
2024-03-20 02:07:07