Smith Rockand the Oregon High Desert

It was an honor, I suppose, to be drinking Johnnie Walker with the Army’s top technology officer on Alaska Airlines’ red-eye to Portland. “Fourteen flights in ten days,” he said by way of introduction, “and you’d think I’d get upgraded to first class.” I told him I’d take crying babies in coach over internet executives in first class any day.

He twitched his moustache. “Where are you going?” he asked.

“To Monkey Face, I think. Wherever my brother takes me.”

“Where is Monkey Face?”

“In the desert. Did you know most of Oregon is desert?”

“But why is it called Monkey Face?”

“I don’t really know. It’s a giant rock that looks like a monkey god.”

The officer wasn’t interested. He wanted to talk about war. “I can’t really tell you this,” he said, and then went on about war technology anyway.

“Did you know there are only two places in the world with a monkey god?” I said.

“Two more Johnnie Walkers,” he told the stewardess.

The Lost City of the Monkey God

“In India, the Hindus call their monkey god Hanuman. But on the other side of the world, in the jungles of Honduras, there is supposed to be an entire lost city with a monkey god of its own. They call it the White City, Ciudad Blanca, but some people call it the Lost City of the Monkey God.”

“Why lost?” he asked.

“Because nobody can find it.”

“So it doesn’t exist.”

“Oh, it exists,” I said. An American adventurer named Theodore Morde came out of the jungle in 1940 claiming he had found it, and promised to go back. He never did, and he never told anybody where it was. The Mosquitia rainforest is too dense to walk through.

“Technology can take care of that. Fly a plane over it,” he said.

“People have tried. The Discovery Channel is looking for it as we speak.”

“So it doesn’t exist,” he said again.

“The people of the Mosquitia have been telling stories about it for centuries. Everybody’s just looking in the wrong place.”

“She’s a cutie, isn’t she?” the officer said, ordering two more Johnnie Walkers from the stewardess.

“She’s too young for you,” I whispered.

“How old are you?” he asked her.

“Twenty-one,” she said.

“See?” he said. Then, turning back to me: “So how do you find it?”

“Well, it’s the White City. White stone. Where do you find white stone?”

“How would I know?”

“Neither do I. But I’d look for a river with calcium deposits.”

“If it existed, the Army would have found it.”

“There are supposed to be hundreds of undiscovered ruins in the Mosquitia,” I said. “Somebody just has to look in the right place.”

The officer turned to the stewardess. “Honey, you haven’t been doing this very long, have you?”

I felt sorry for her, so I steered him back to his favorite subject. “Why haven’t you guys been able to take out Saddam?”

“I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.” It was the fourth time he had said it to me. “We can’t even talk about assassination in the Army.”

When the plane landed, he said, “Have fun looking for your monkey god,” and turned back to the stewardess.

Ten years later, the officer turned out to be right. In 2012, a small plane flew back and forth over the Mosquitia with a lidar scanner, a laser that sees through the forest canopy, and found the outlines of plazas, earthworks and pyramids in a valley nobody had mapped. When a team finally cut its way in, in 2015, they found a cache of stone sculptures at the base of a pyramid, among them the head of a were-jaguar, half man and half cat. Not a monkey god, but close enough. Technology had taken care of it.

Eastern Oregon’s Blank Slate

My brother Hans was waiting at the airport, and he talked the whole way about Monkey Face, trees and religion. We headed east, over Mount Hood, to Bend, a rare town with a vibe and a style of its own.

In the morning we drove north with coffee, through the snow. I stared out the window, thinking, watching lines of fog funnel through the gulches.

Eastern Oregon is a blank slate. In the physical sense that’s obvious: this high desert, which runs east and south into the Great Basin of Nevada, is thinly populated and thinly vegetated, with few famous landmarks, natural or man-made.

But it is blank in another way too. It has almost no place in the American imagination. Outside of hunting, ranching and fishing circles, few people understand eastern Oregon for what it is: not an extension of the Northwest’s foggy drizzle, but a vast and distinct piece of North America.

We crossed out of Cascadia into broad, high flats of sagebrush and juniper, double-wides and ranchland. The snow-spotted plains are broken only by the occasional deep ravine, or by a river: the north-flowing Deschutes, or the aptly named Crooked, which bends around an outcrop of rock in a 180-degree arc.

That outcrop is Smith Rock. A mound of lopsided spires and sheer faces rising out of the flats of central Oregon, it looks almost religious. Eastern Oregon is not exotic. It is simple beauty, nothing more.

The rock is welded tuff, the ash of an eruption some thirty million years ago, part of an ancient caldera so big that geologists have only recently traced its outline. Climbers started bolting routes up its faces in the 1980s, and Smith Rock has been called the birthplace of American sport climbing ever since.

Monkey Face

Hans pulled out of his truck all the things we Angelenos find foreign: gloves, Scandinavian sweaters, hats, ropes, pulleys, scarves, wool socks. We walked for a long time without talking, up Smith Rock in the fog, past the junipers and the ground cover, up into the lichen and the snow. Hans threw a rope over a cliff, buckled me into a harness and told me to jump. He followed, and we kept going up a narrow path through the snow. This, I thought, is life. Walking is underrated.

I thought about Hanuman, who is worshipped in temples all over India. Abraham, Mohammed, Buddha, they’re all great guys, but watching Hans with his rope slung over his back, I wondered whether the modern American male could learn something from Hanuman. He is the god of agility and dexterity, the great bachelor of the Hindu gods. And here we are, growing fat and pasty, obsessed with television and watching other men sweat and throw balls around. Hanuman wouldn’t have had much use for that. He spent his life in service, to Rama and to Sita, whom he leapt across the sea to find. Strength, for Hanuman, was something you used for somebody else.

Sometimes at work, women come to me for advice about their men. They tell a complicated tale, a dense tapestry of regret, sorrow and confusion. My advice is always the same. Think of your man as a monkey. We are no more complicated than that. We are simple; we don’t think as much as you do. Once you see your man as a monkey, you will understand him. I think Hanuman would agree.

We reached the top at nightfall, and there it was: a column of stone some 350 feet tall, thrusting up from the mountain. Monkey Face. The monkey god, a stern gorilla with a heavy brow and a deep gaze. It’s only a natural formation, but it looked heroic, as if someone had carved it.

I was out of breath. Hans didn’t seem to have lifted a finger.

We stood there while the last light went off the rock. Somewhere over the Midwest, I imagined, the officer was on his fifteenth flight in eleven days, still waiting for his upgrade, still sure that anything you can’t find from an airplane doesn’t exist.

He was right about the lost city, in the end. It took an airplane and a laser to find it. But nobody needs technology to find Monkey Face. It has been standing over the bend of the Crooked River for longer than there have been people to name it, waiting for anyone willing to walk up through the snow and look.

Hans coiled the rope, and we started down in the dark.