It isn’t often that you can visit a place like Spruce Tree house at Mesa Verde National Park and have a large portion of it to yourself. You must go on a tour and they can be quite large and of course everyone is very excited and full of questions. The rangers guiding the tour do a good job of keeping the kids from climbing the walls or falling into the kivas. People are yelling to the others in their party to come look at this while they are looking at that. The experts within each group tell each other incorrect facts in a very authorative way. And of course because the structure is built inside an acoustically perfect cavern the noise is incredible. The slightest sound is amplified back to you as if your iPod was set on 10.

But every once in a while the gods take pity on you and you are accorded special privileges, like being in a tour with only three other people, and those other people were either very soft-spoken or mute. Consequentially it was quiet, so quiet that even footsteps made with rubber soled tennis could be heard. If you moved past the partial walls looking into the open rooms and floors that are no longer there, and thought about how it must have been to live here, you can imagine their movements and if you listen hard enough it’s almost as if you can hear those sounds, so faint it’s like you’re hearing the shadows of those echoes. The soft sounds of sandals against the rock floors and the rasping sound of a woven basket rubbing against the ladder as it is carried up to be stored away. They’re very faint sounds. In fact you may not be hearing them at all, but then again if your imagination is strong enough, you may.

There are legends and memories, and strange and wonderful sounds locked away in these stones and sometimes they come out. And if you get lucky and have your imagination set at full strength you can hear them. It doesn’t take much, just stand still and listen. You’ll hear them. Maybe.