Trevor Huxham

What remains of a multi-room complex “Is this it?” I thought while walking back to my car. Compared to the Ancestral Puebloan dwellings I had visited the day before at nearby Wupatki National Monument , the low stone walls at Homolovi State Park didn’t do much to convince me that a complex of more than a thousand rooms once stood on this patch of northern Arizona. High Desert Housing But unlike Wupatki, it was clear that this lonely grassland once teemed with the residents of those thousand-plus rooms. Potsherds were everywhere!

If the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that the things we thought only used to happen years or centuries ago can definitely happen again. I grew up in a world where polio could no longer stop you from going to school and where the worst that could get you sent home sick was mainly colds, flus, and chicken pox, not the deadly measles now covered by routine shots. And plague? Like polio, it was just a history class lesson.  But here we are at the end of a year that has seen one of the worst pandemics since the 1918 flu, reminded that outbreaks of infectious diseases can still occur—and will continue to occur—even in our advanced scientific age. View from the rim It’s this kind of reminder from Mother Nature about the reality of the world we live in that makes me think of Meteor Crater, out in the lonely expanses of northern Arizona.