The Pot Thief Who Studied Pythagoras Read online

  I turned off the wheel and watched it slowly stop spinning. I liked the form I’d created and wondered briefly if I should try to make pots of my own design. I’d tried it in the past and never liked the result, so I let the thought slip and stared at the pot.

  How would I place a series of designs around it? I picked up a clay knife with a thin rectangular blade and laid it gently across the top of my glistening new pot. The knife made indentions on opposite sides of the rim. I rotated the wheel ninety degrees and repeated the process so that I now had four evenly spaced indentions.

  Big deal. It’s easy to get even spacing if the number of designs is a power of two. But Martin’s uncle’s pot had seventeen clouds around its perimeter. How do you get equal spacing in that case?

  Of course, you could measure the circumference and divide by seventeen. You could do that. Martin’s uncle could do that. I could do that. But a Mogollon potter could not have done that. They had no measuring tapes. They had no system of exact measurement. Their counting system very likely had no numbers higher than ten. Yet they managed to get perfect spacing on their pots.

  I decided to see if I could work out some way of achieving that spacing using only things the Mogollon could have had at their disposal. They didn’t have measuring tapes, but they could have had a straightedge and a compass, and Pythagoras showed that you can do a lot of geometry with just those two implements. I already had a straightedge in the form of my clay knife, so I rifled around my toolbox until I found a compass. No, not the thing that points north, the hinged thing with a point on one leg and a pencil on the other. It’s the thing people forget about after their geometry class right after the forget about hypotenuses. Or are they hypoteni?

  The Mogollon could have had both. Their compass wouldn’t have looked like ours, of course. It might have been a forked stick with one end dipped in the ashes of last night’s fire so it could make a mark on the clay.

  You can create a right angle using only a straightedge and a compass. If you can create a right angle, you can create a right triangle, and you can use Pythagoras’ theorem to find the lengths of the sides. Of course Mogollon teenagers were spared learning the famous formula, so they wouldn’t have done it that way.

  However, they did know about triangles; they decorated their pots with them, and they might have used another Pythagorean method involving isomorphic triangles. The idea is to lay out the number of … well, I’m probably telling you more than you want to know, and it doesn’t matter because at this point I looked across the street and saw Susannah coming out of Columbia Coffee Company with a paper cup in each hand. I was surprised because I usually don’t see her during the day. She walked up to my shop and kicked the door. I opened it.

  “This is an intervention,” she said. She placed the coffees on a shelf full of clay and then walked back and locked the door. When she came back to the workshop, she frowned at my new pot with slits in the rim and the straightedge and compass.

  I explained what I was trying to do.

  “Suppose you figure out how they did it,” she asked. “What good will it do?”

  “It will satisfy my curiosity.”

  “No offense, Hubie, but does it ever occur to you that you might spend the same amount of energy or even less and solve a practical problem?”

  “I don’t think you can always distinguish between practical and impractical. Some of the world’s most important practical problems were solved using discoveries made by people who were just following their curiosity with no particular application in mind.”

  “Yeah? Like what?”

  “Well, about fifty years ago, a scientist was tinkering with high frequency radar waves just out of curiosity and he noticed a candy bar in his pocket had softened. And that’s how he discovered the microwave oven.”

  She shrugged. “Have you gotten anywhere?”

  “I don’t know. I was hoping I could use isomorphic triangles to divide the circumference of a pot into equal segments.”

  “I don’t know what isomorphic means in triangles, but in drawing it’s a way of representing three-dimensional objects without using normal perspective,” she said.

  I began, “Isomorphic triangles are …”

  “Hubie! I came here to intervene. I’m not interested in geometry right now.”

  “Oh.”

  “Is that true about the microwave?”

  I told her it was and she handed me my coffee. “Look at the logo on that cup,” she said after I took a sip.

  I looked. Then she handed me a card from her employer, La Placita. “Look at that logo.” I looked again.

  “What you need,” she said, “is a logo.”

  “I don’t know, Suze. I’ve operated all these years without…”

  “A name,” she interjected. She shook her head in exasperation. “You’ve operated all these years without even a name. So before we get you a logo, you have to choose a name.”

  “I can’t choose; that’s why I don’t have one. I went through a long list for about a month when I first opened. I spent hours on it, but nothing I could think of was ever quite right. Then at the end of the first month, I was doing my bookkeeping, and I realized I had done surprisingly well. The problem was my shrinking inventory, so if I was going to stay in business, I had to start replacing the pots I was selling. I spent some time digging, some time scouting the pueblos, and some time placing and answering ads offering to buy old Indian pots. Between inventory building and shop tending, I didn’t have time to work on a name, so I just let it slide. My business grew steadily, and after a few months I realized that not having an official name wasn’t keeping me from making money, so I just stopped thinking about it.”

  “But how do you advertise?”

  “I’m in the yellow pages under so many categories I can’t remember them all. Pottery, Native American Merchandise, Curios, Antiques, Specialty Shops, and maybe a few others.”

  “But what do the ads say, Hubie?”

  “They all say the same thing: ‘Classic Native American pottery bought, sold, and traded. Then they give my phone number and address.”

  “An ad without a business name?”

  I shrugged.

  “How do they know where to put you in the list of stores in each category?”

  “The list me alphabetically under ‘C’.”

  “‘C’?”

  “Right. ‘C’ for ‘Classic Native…”

  “Geez, this is hopeless. Look, Hubie, I have some fellow students in one of my art history courses. They’re studio students, but they take art history as a related minor. In one of their studio courses, a design seminar, they have to do a group project, and they want to design a logo.”

  “They don’t need my help to do that.”

  “They do. They could make one up for an imaginary business, but if the project is real life, if a business actually uses their logo, they’ll almost certainly get a better grade. And it will look great on their resumes that they had a real live client and produced satisfactory work.”

  “What if the work isn’t satisfactory?”

  “Then you won’t have to use it, but at least keep an open mind.”

  “Hmm.”

  “You’ll do it, won’t you, Hubie?”

  “I guess so,” I mumbled.

  “This is so great. They’re very talented; you won’t be disappointed. Now we need the name you want to use.”

  “Susannah,” I begged, “I’ve already told you I couldn’t pick a name. Let’s just leave it at the logo.”

  “How can you design a logo without knowing the name of the business?”

  “O.K.,” I said, “How about ‘Pot Thieves Я Us’?”

  “Very funny.”

  “Pilfered Pottery?”

  She just shook her head.

  “O.K., I’ll make you a deal,” I offered. “You have them design a logo. They know what I do. Well, some of what I do. You can even bring them by to see the shop and the pots. When I see th
eir design, I’ll try to pick a name that fits the design.”

  “Hubert! That’s a great idea. I can see it on their resumes: ‘Designed a logo for a client who was so pleased that he named his business based on it’. It’s almost like what we were talking about earlier, isomorphic drawing.”

  I felt my brow furrow. “How is it like isomorphic drawing, Suze?”

  “Because you’re moving from the logo to the name instead of the other way around.”

  Now I was even more confused. “You mean isomorphic drawings are backwards?”

  “Not backwards, exactly. They go from something with perspective to the same thing without perspective, so it’s sort of the reverse of the normal 3-D drawing.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “This is strange, Hubie; me explaining an art term to you, an artist.”

  “I’m not an artist, Suze, I’m an…”

  “Artisan. Yeah, I know. Look, suppose you draw a cube. If you look straight at it and draw what you see, the drawing will be a square, right?”

  “Right, because you see only one side,” I added.

  “But if you want to show it’s a cube instead of just a square, you could draw it from an angle, say above and to the left. Then you could see three sides, or maybe I should say two sides and the top.”

  I nodded in understanding.

  “But when you look at a cube from that angle, you have to add perspective. The three surfaces you draw will not be squares like the side you drew when you were looking straight at the cube. The front will still be a square, but the side and the top will be parallelograms.”

  She made a sketch to illustrate.

  “If you want to show a 3-D image without the distortion of normal perspective, that is, without using a vanishing point, then you can make an isometric drawing.” She drew a big rectangle on one side of the paper. “Say this is your frame. You draw the perspective cube outside the frame. Then you connect the corner points back inside like this.” And she drew some lines. And I sat there staring at a design outside of the frame connected to a similar but still different one inside. And I stared at it some more.

  “Susannah, you’re a genius!”

  “Just because I can explain isomorphic drawing?”

  “That, too. But mainly because you just gave me the perfect example of how idle curiosity can lead to the solution of a very practical problem.”

  Although I didn’t tell Susannah at that point, the practical problem solved in this case was how to get the pot out of the Valle del Rio Museum, and just as I had expected, it came about while I was thinking about math and trying to see things from a fresh perspective. O.K., the solution didn’t really arise directly from trying to solve the spacing problem geometrically. It actually came about because of Susannah’s drawing, but that drawing was a new perspective, and that’s what’s needed to solve problems that look like they have no solution.

  27

  Saturday had broken clear and crisp, and the plan I had discovered for getting the pot from the Museum made the day seem even brighter.

  I drove south towards the Isleta Pueblo until I reached the unnamed dirt road that leads to the residence of Emilio and Consuela Sanchez.

  “Bienvenido, Señor Uberto.”

  “Buenas dias, Señor Sanchez.”

  “Consuela, she is in the kitchen.”

  “That is good news for both of us, amigo.”

  I put a hand on his shoulder and stopped him before we went in. “How is she doing?”

  “She looks to me the same as always, but perhaps that is because we grow old together.”

  She was peeling freshly roasted chiles on a counter laden with enough vessels of food to supply a wagon train.

  “You’ve been roasting poblanos, Señora Sanchez.”

  “What do I say, Emilio? Uberto has the nose for every chile. But, Uberto, you must call me Consuela.”

  We chatted for an hour about what she was planning to grow in the garden that spring, and she asked if she could plant something for me. I told her chiles, preferably poblanos or anaheims.

  “You always ask for chiles. What else would you like?”

  “Fresh oregano.”

  “Is always the same, chiles and oregano.”

  “The recipes are the same, so the ingredients must be the same.”

  “Those recipes I brought with me from Chihuahua as a girl. Now they are old and tired like me.”

  “They are not old; they are classic. And judging from this kitchen, you are not tired.”

  “It is messy, no?”

  “It is a place where a cook is working.” I had a brainstorm. “You should publish a cookbook with your recipes and traditional techniques of the Northern Mexican kitchen.”

  She laughed out loud.

  “Consuela, Uberto gives us a good idea. You are the best cook of traditional Mexican food. Such a book would be a good thing.”

  She picked up a large knife and playfully waved it at both of us. “You two are like small boys. Now sit down for the food and say no more about cookbooks.”

  She made a soup that she doesn’t have a name for. It’s a sort of corn chowder, but I don’t suppose that’s a proper word for a Mexican dish. In one pan, she sautés chopped onions, poblano peppers, garlic, and cumin. In a separate pan she uses a big knife to slice kernels off ears of fresh corn into hot lard and then stirs like crazy until the corn softens. Then she combines the contents of the two pans in a large stockpot, adds chicken broth and limejuice, and lets it simmer. When all the flavors have combined, she takes the pot off the heat, throws in fresh oregano and crema Mexicana, and lets it sit for two or three minutes before ladling it into bowls. She serves it with warm corn tortillas and cool cucumbers sliced and sprinkled with chile powder and pilon sugar.

  Emilio and I both had four bowls of it and Consuela beamed with each refill.

  28

  “Get out of town.”

  That was me talking to myself. And I meant it; I had to get out of town. I wanted to escape prowlers, thugs, cops, and zealots. Those would be, in order, the mystery intruder who crossed my threshold at 6:57, the two heavies from firstNAtions, Whit Fletcher, and Sven Nordquist.

  But mainly what I had to do was dig. The plan I had hit upon to get the pot from the Museum required that I have a special pottery shard, and you can’t pick those up at your local Ace Hardware. So I had to get out of town. Back to Gran Quivera. Back to the scene of the crime, so to speak.

  So after a relaxing Sunday in my workshop with my hands in clay, I had a delicious dinner of pollo en mole and went to bed at the crack of dark. I set the alarm for midnight.

  I hate alarm clocks; I believe we would all be healthier if we slept until nature woke us in a manner that is, well… natural. Schuze’s Anthropology Premise number eight is that schedules are incompatible with the evolutionary history of humans. Americans and northern Europeans love schedules, and we’re dismayed by cultures that don’t follow them. We joke about Mexicans saying mañana and Jamaicans talking about ‘island time’, but we are the ones who’ve got it wrong. We spent most of our million-anda-half year history living like lions, sleeping when we were tired, hunting when we were hungry, and running when we were threatened. These things don’t happen on a nine to five schedule. Pots weren’t made on an assembly line. We made one when we needed one.

  But duty and digging sometimes call, so, although it is rarely set, I do own an alarm clock. It’s a special one. When the wake-up time arrives, a chime sounds ever so softly. Moments later, it chimes again with only a slight increase in decibels, and this pattern increases until you awake and press the quiet button. When all goes well, you become gradually aware of the chimes and wake up slowly as opposed to the rude awakening of a normal alarm. However, when the wake up time is midnight, even the gentle chime does “become as sounding brass.”

  It was bitter cold, so I dressed in a navy blue watch cap and black fleece workout suit over insulated long johns. I put a long p
iece of rebar that I use for probing and four shovels in the 1985 Bronco I refer to fondly as my rust bucket and set off with a thermos of coffee.

  If you want to visit Gran Quivera, and not many people do, you would normally take State Highway 55 south from the picturesque town of Mountainair, or you could take Highway 55 north from the town of Claunch, which is about as picturesque as its name suggests. That’s what you would do because you wouldn’t mind driving in right through the main entrance and past the ranger quarters.

  I, on the other hand, desired to enter and leave undetected, so I took Interstate 40 east from Albuquerque to Moriarity where I turned south. This took me east of Mountainair. I stopped in the middle of the road a few miles south of Willard, no problem at that time of the night, or at most times during the day for that matter.

  There is something decadent about parking in the middle of a highway, something almost regal about owning the road. Of course it wasn’t the Via Romana or even Interstate 40. It was a small state road in the middle of nowhere.

  Actually, it was on the edge of nowhere. The middle would have been more crowded.

  I stood in the middle of the road and observed the moonbeams bouncing off the reflective white strip between the two narrow lanes. Lean old ranchers in beat up old trucks drive this stretch of road, signaling the occasional colleague going the opposite direction with a nod or a lifting of two fingers off the steering wheel.

  I breathed in the clear desert air, checking for scents. There were none.

  I laid a strip of canvas in front of each wheel then drove the Bronco forward slightly and got out and lifted the canvas strips around the tires, securing them by lacing a cord through the grommets installed for that purpose.

  With the tires covered, I turned off the pavement and the headlights and sat silently for a while until my eyes adjusted to the dark. Then I followed a rancher’s sandy road as it skirted the north end of a little portion of the Cibola National Forest which is cut off from the larger Forest of the same name across the Rio Grande, and I headed south into the fringes of Gran Quivera.

  It was a beautiful still night, the cold dry air so clear the sky looked like a sequined shawl and the moon like a polished ball of ice hovering just above the dunes. A coyote peered at me from behind a mesquite bush. Fifty yards ahead a jackrabbit stood alert, ready to bolt if the coyote came his direction. The land rose slightly to the north and the distant ridge was crenellated by black triangular pines.