As I write this #stampoftheday, I’m sitting on a screened-in porch watching it rain on a lake in Maine and I’m remembering a long-ago trip that I believe was my family’s last vacation together.

The stamp spurring these memories is a 4-cent stamp issued in 1934 that portrays Mesa Verde National Park in southwest Colorado, which that was established on June 29, 1906. The largest archaeological preserve in the United States, the 52,485-acre park, which has more than 5,000 archeological sites, including 600 cliff dwellings and Cliff Palace, which is thought to be the largest cliff dwelling in North America.

The dwellings, which apparently were built about 1,000 years ago by Anasazi Indians as a defense against northern tribes., were made with hand-shaped limestone blocks, wooden beams, and mortar. Most are relatively small with only a few small rooms. However, there are some larger structures, such as the Cliff Palace, which was 288 feet long and contained 150 rooms and 23 kivas (ceremonial rooms). Mesa Verde also had an astronomical observatory and several structures to contain water both for farming and for ceremonial purposes.

The site was occupied until about 1300 when inhabitants left and left behind many articles, including pottery, weapons, tools, and other artifacts. Some believe that the people fled suddenly because of an attack by an enemy band, a natural disaster, or an extreme drought. Others believe the cliff dwellings were abandoned gradually over a period of more than 100 years, perhaps because of prolonged drought that made it impossible to grow crops.

Trappers and prospectors (re)discovered the cliffs in the 1800s and in the late 1880s and early 1890s a variety of people began exploring the site and removing many artifacts in ways that badly damaged the site. Efforts to preserve the site were led by two women—Virginia Donaghe McClurg, a writer who was one of the first white women to see Mesa Verde and Lucy Evelyn Peabody, an activist who had worked at the US Geological Survey’s Ethnology Bureau. Together, they founded the Colorado Cliff Dwelling Association, which adopted the motto he Dux Femina Facti or “feminine leadership has accomplished it” and launched an extensive campaign that resulted in getting the support of about 250,000 women via the Federation of Women’s Clubs.

In 1906, their efforts resulted in passage of a law making the site a National Park (actually two laws because the first, passed in early June, failed to include several notable sites). The law was especially notable because Mesa Verde was the first national park created to protect a culturally significant location.

Despite its focus on preserving a major site related to Native Americans, the park has had a troubled history of e relations with Native Americans, particularly in its early years. Notably, in 1911, the Ute Indians reluctantly agreed to a land swap that allowed the federal government to acquire land near the original park. And in the 1920s, the when the Park Service began offering “Indian ceremony” performances that gained popularity among visiting tourists; those ceremonies were performed by Navajo day laborers (not Utes), resulting, as one writer later noted, in “the wrong Indians doing the wrong dance on…the wrong land.” Moreover, few Native Americans were employed in other jobs in the park and few ancillary economic benefits flowed to the Ute Indians who lived near it.

Nevertheless, the park is magnificent. And unlike many of the places commemorated in the stamps I’ve been writing about for the last few months, I not only have been there, but I have strong memories of going there.

In the summer of 1968, when I was 11, my parents rented a retired U-Haul truck that had been converted into a camper van for a three-week tour through the southwest and southern California, including a slow drive across the Mojave Desert at 50 miles an hour, the fastest the governor on the engine would let us travel). The driving was done by my father and my late brother, who had turned 16 a few months earlier. And we soon learned that since my father liked to admire the views, it was best to let my brother handle the scenic portions of the drive, such as the long winding road up to Mesa Verde. (We also quickly found that if, as “sometimes” happened, my mother and father disagreed on something, it was best to have one of them in the cab and the other in the body (i.e. the camper), which was separate from the cab (connected by an intercom, I recall).

I have a vague memory of going swimming with my brother at Mesa Verde (which doesn’t seem possible). And while I sort of remember going to the cliff dwellings on a hot summer day, what I really remember is an incident involving my 14-year old sister, whose arm was in a sling from a bicycle accident. (I believe she had been trying out our brother’s ten-speed bicycle and apparently forgot that it didn’t have foot breaks so she crashed into a tree). Despite admonitions not to climb down the ladders into the kivas, pits for sacred rituals (perhaps only for men?), she went down into one. As the group started to leave, we heard a plaintive cry because she couldn’t navigate the ladder with her one good arm. My father went back to help her; I don’t know what he did but he did get her out; and I don’t recall any nasty recriminations.

I have many good memories of that trip, which produced many well-loved and often told family stories. I didn’t know it at the time, but I think it was one of the last – if not the last—extended trips the five us would take together. I was just at that special age—old enough to enjoy the trip but young enough that I didn’t know (or didn’t pay attention to), anything troubling that might have been going on. And I was too young (and too sheltered) to know much about what was going on the larger world (e.g. the Vietnam War or the riots in major American cities) and I was too young to know that such wonderful memories are fleeting and would, over the years, be tempered by life, particularly by the painful losses that would – as they must – come in years to come, starting, sadly, with the loss of my brother on July 1, 1987 (an anniversary we’ll mark while we’re here in Maine, a place that he greatly loved).

So I look at the stamp, and I look back at my memories, and I look out at the grey day and the choppy waters, and I am simultaneously feeling melancholy, fearful about the state of the world, and, strangely, quite blessed as well.

Be well, stay safe, fight for justice and work for peace.