Here is one of my favorite places—I was there yesterday, following a three-day hiking trip in Escalante National Monument in southern Utah. Everyone knows intellectuals are suckers for a good café, but how about this one?
It’s set at perhaps the key intersection in the Monument’s territory, where highway 12, —among the most scenic drives in the Southwest—crosses the Escalante River. A semi-circular structure, it sits atop and somewhat embedded into, a short hill, so that its main view looks down the Escalante River Canyon. Here’s what it looks like from the immediate outside, but when you’re hiking down in the canyon, it blends in almost too well to be noticed:
A family owned private property in this key spot, in the heart of the area President Clinton declared the Grand Staircase/Escalante National Monument in 1996. Lucky for us, this was not any family, but one with a true visionary, Bradshaw Bowman. The Kiva Koffeehouse website (don’t miss its much-better photos!) informs us that he wanted to “create a beautiful building that blended harmoniously into the landscape of Southern Utah using natural building materials.”
He succeeded.
We learn further from Utah Stories that “Bowman started sketching his ideas in the late eighties. By 1996, Grand Staircase Escalante became a national monument. Fortunately he had already been grandfathered in with his permits… The buildings took five years of actual construction and were completed in 1998. Living to see his dream completed, Brad died in 2000. His dying wish was that his family continue to operate Kiva Koffeehouse and Kiva Kottage as a bed and breakfast and coffee shop.”
Well, they still do!
The Monument is loaded with spectacular scenery, and works great for a driving trip, but the best of it is accessible only by means of long hikes or expert canyoneering, such as the Golden Cathedral in Neon Canyon:
About 3.5 hours down from the plateau trailhead to reach this, and 5 hours up and back, the latter likely in serious heat. So experiencing that beauty comes at a price! And unless you’re backpacking it, the prospect of having to complete your return prior to nightfall will force you not to linger long amid the Cathedral’s unique forms and colors.
A sweaty hike like that is a price worth paying, and a very good thing in itself, but I do like exchanging such an activity one day for setting down in the Koffeehouse on another. First, it isn’t exactly healthy to do day after day of sun-flooded desert hiking, and second, I also love the civilized ritual of setting down amid a similar scene of natural beauty, but with modest comforts at hand, reading and writing to my heart’s content, and without the grime and timetable that come with day-hiking.
Much is ugly or falling apart in our modern world, so let’s review of few of the benefits that the simple grandeur of Kiva Koffeehouse illustrates:
1.) The good of private, family-owned business. No chain or corporation would have used that property as well.
2.) The good of private property simply, even (and especially!) when patched-in amid public national parks.1 No government park service could have done as good a job as Bowman and his family did, and still do.
3.) The importance of an artist’s vision, guided by a sense of the Beautiful, and of the Natural.
4.) The good of gathering places. Good for the locals, but also as a way to interrupt the at times too-individualist feel of the Road Trip.
5.) The good of cultural appropriation when done well. Yes, it is not a real Kiva. Yes, it is a family of blue-eyed blonds who built and run the place, and with no Navajos or Puebloans involved, as far as I know (FWIW, the Escalante area borders, but is not really in, the areas of present-day Navajo and Puebloan habitation). But even more than the better Southwestern architecture that apes and learns lessons from the Ancestral Pueblo (aka the Anasazi), Bowman’s Kiva Koffehouse honors their legacy, and in no way cheapens it. This after all isn’t a real kiva, nor a “repurposing” of an abandoned one.
(Point 5 should be obvious, but for those for whom it is not, having been made uneasy by present-day Woke railing, I recommend pages 28-30 of Ralph Ellison’s landmark essay (1986) on American identity, “The Little Man at Chehaw Station.” I’ve written previously about its take on democratic art and its take on the good-enough idea of the melting pot, and in a footnote here,2 I’ll give you a key passage that applies to the appropriation “issue.”)
Titus does some deep riffing on the regenerative importance of the Beautiful in the podcast he links to in one of the posts below on the Italian film Hand of God, and if you want to experience a bit of what he’s getting at, I’d highly recommend that trip to southern Utah, and a morning spent at the Kiva Koffeehouse.
One fantasy-idea of mine is that a citizen awarded one of the top U.S. military decorations, such as the Medal of Honor or Silver Star, would additionally be awarded a small plot of land for residential or small-business use within a National Park, Monument, or Forest of his choice, to be developed and enjoyed as he pleases within certain parameters, and perhaps with limitations on who he could sell it to, or on how long he could own it. In general, I think our national parks are too monolithically excluding of more standard human habitation and organic business enterprise. There’s a certain squelching of creative possibilities in our Parks.
“Everyone played the appropriation game… …So perhaps the complex actuality of our cultural pluralism is perplexing because the diverse interacting elements that surround us, traditional and venacular, not only elude accepted formulations, but take on a character that is something other than their various parts. Our old familiar pasts become, in juxtaposition with elements appropriated from other backgrounds, incongruously transformed, exerting an energy or (synergy) of a different order than that generated by their separate parts. …Still such mixtures of cultural elements are capable of igniting exciting transformations of culture.” Ellison has Afro-American music in mind here especially, and perhaps all that is a little grand for thinking about a mere coffee-house built with Ancestral Puebloan architectural principles in mind, but also with new ideas and techniques (Bowman apparently pioneered a novel method of concrete use), but it shows us why Ellison’s works should still be studied, as they provide a way back to a more Americanist, humble, and far less grievance-studded conception of multiculturalism.