We drove north on Highway 163 toward the Arizona-Utah border on our way to Monument Valley and were finally caught by sunset. Dashed were our hopes to see the landscape in the late shades of day. We had driven into what seemed like a bottle of black ink and could not see beyond our headlights, but perhaps that's the best way to enter the valley because in the morning, when we lifted the shades of our RV, we felt like we had just walked into a surprise party filled with family, friends, balloons, confetti, and champagne. Suddenly, buttes and mesas, thin and broad, rose dramatically from the desert floor, striping the sky, a sky as turquoise as the stones encrusting the silver jewelry sold from the nearby stands. To think, we had ignorantly passed these very formations, hidden under cloak of darkness, and had no more knowledge of their existence than we had knowledge of the deepest Pacific. And the color. These monuments were a shade of rose so subtle that they have never been accurately captured on film.

Now we understood why Hollywood film director John Ford fell in love with this location and filmed some of his most important westerns here. One trip to this valley and you'll understand too.

Legends about Hollywood's discovery of the valley vary-indeed, John Ford, John Wayne, and Harry Carey all claim to have discovered it. However, the most probable legend suggests that Ford was first introduced to the location when Harry Goulding, a trader living in the valley, brought a portfolio of photographs to Hollywood. His trading post was struggling, and he knew he had to improve the local economy if he was going to pull his post through the Great Depression. As historian Samuel Moon tells us in his book Tall Sheep (the name the Navajo gave to the trader), Goulding stepped into the lobby of United Artists and was greeted by a receptionist. "Can I help you out any?" she asked. "Yes, ma'am, you really could," he told her. "I'm from Monument Valley, out in Arizona, and I hear that the studio here is looking for a location to make an Indian picture. So I brought some pictures in of this country, and I want to talk to somebody about it here at the studio." The receptionist explained to Goulding that he had to have an appointment or, at the very least, know somebody. "That don't worry me a bit," he replied. "I've got a rig right here across the street. I've got a bedroll, and I've got a little grub left in there yet. I've weathered a good part of the winter in an Indian hogan, and this is a much nicer place to stay than that. I'll just go out and get my bed, and I'll come on back and wait till they do have time."

Of course, that receptionist got the location manager into the lobby right away! Impressed by the photographs, he pulled the trader upstairs where the two men sat with director Ford examining the photographs until the early morning hours. The result of this meeting was not only a new location for Stagecoach but a new location for some of John Ford's most popular films.

At least seven times the legendary director filmed in this dynamic landscape, so many times, in fact, that his colleagues dubbed it "Ford Country." Stagecoach (1939), My Darling Clementine (1946), Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), The Searchers (1956), Sergeant Rutledge (1960), and Cheyenne Autumn (1964) provide us with the evidence that both Ford and his Western fans craved the scenic set. In fact, Ford was so fond of the area that he often mused, "I think you can say that the real star of my Westerns has always been the land." Of course, no land was as memorable as Monument Valley. But why? What was, what is, the magical allure of this location?

One critic has described Monument Valley as "mythic space," "a real place that has taken on, through its historical position, larger-than-life or mythic meanings." But what are those meanings? What is the metaphorical magic of Monument Valley? Last summer, I visited this area of the Navajo Nation in search of answers to those questions.

When I arrived in Monument Valley, I hired a Navajo guide, Jeremy, to take me through the majestic monuments. Our first stop was Ford Point, a promontory so named because the filmmaker often directed from this location. Standing here, the most obvious reason why we so value the valley struck me immediately: Monument Valley is truly beautiful. I had just come from the Grand Canyon and expected the valley to be somewhat anti-climactic, yet here I stood on Ford Point stunned once again, only now in person, by the unsurpassable beauty of this landscape. Part of the secret of this beauty lies in the country's unique dynamics. Smooth stretch of plain erupts into mounds, columns, pillars-angular, strong. These unusual formations, exclusive to this part of the world, are also very photogenic, stunning geometrics on the silver screen. The unique color-set off by the contrasting blue of the sky-and the unique shapes-like Stonehenge, resonant with balance and harmony-combine for a visual appeal only surpassed at sunset when shadows drape dramatically across the desert sand and the subtle rose sandstone glows red then gold.

In addition to the beauty of the Southwest in general and the valley in particular, I think filmmakers like Ford chose to shoot in this location due to the fact that it provides a pragmatic place to film epic movement and battle scenes. Further north, foliage, trees, and mountains obscure the audiences' view. Here in the valley the basin is open and flat; thus we can easily see the Indians gallop or the cavalry charge across the screen. In contrast to the empty desert, however, which provides no protective shields, no lookouts, and little room for military strategizing, the monuments provide eagle eye views, valley escapes, clever hideouts, rifle batteries, and ample ambush opportunities-in other words, room to ride and room to hide-but might I further suggest that the metaphoric possibilities resonating throughout this space heighten the area's allure.

The most obvious of these metaphoric possibilities concerns the myth of the frontier as defined by Richard Slotkin. For this historian, the frontier represents pioneering progress, Manifest Destiny, Darwinian survival of the fittest, and eternal strife with the forces of darkness and evil. If we consider the specific case of Monument Valley with his definition in mind, we can see that the undeveloped terrain represents new land, the land to which pioneers may go in search of a place to build a better life. As another historian described it, the frontier furnished "a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past." The arid climate, the antithesis of the lush north, devoid of food and water, symbolizes the incredible adversity and strife these pioneers will face while the staunch toughness of the boulders-with rigid sheer walls rising-symbolizes the defiant ones themselves with shoulders squared in stubborn determination against the so-dubbed "forces of darkness and evil."

In John Wayne's Ringo from Stagecoach, we can see the personification of that very struggle. Ringo, locked up for avenging his brother's murder, escapes from prison, but before he can enjoy a new life in a new country, he must face a journey across enemy territory, a sheriff who wants a bounty, a murderous gang, and societal prejudice against ex-cons. To succeed, Ringo must square his shoulders against adversity and the "bondage of the past"; only then will he find his "gate of escape."

But perhaps the power of Monument Valley's metaphoric possibilities lies in the ambiguity of such. Like Melville's white whale, sometimes a beast to be hunted in the Hemingway tradition, sometimes more amorphously that long sought for thing never attained as Tennessee Williams describes in the opening of The Glass Menagerie, sometimes Platonic Truth (with a capital T), or (even more concretely) God, the valley symbolizes more than the frontier myth alone. We can, for example, see the Freudian phallus in these towering formations which are, indeed, the perfect manifestations of what feminist critic Annette Kolodny has termed the "psychosexual dramas of men intent on possessing a virgin continent." The phallic imagery, bold and masculine, marks Monument Valley as male space, space to be conquered and maintained by men like Henry Fonda's Colonel Thursday. In Fort Apache, Thursday, intent on becoming a military legend, foolishly leads his men into a battle with the neighboring Indians, only to be killed himself. For the Colonel, this is the land of adventure where a man carves his name in immortal stone.

Perhaps another metaphoric possibility involves the American ideals of individualism and independence. One critic argues that the "image of the knight and the concept of the quest are reflected in the American Western." Central to the ethos of the Arthurian romantic tradition is a tension between individual desires and the edicts of civilized society. Can we see within these single sandstone formations a symbol of the Thoreauvian individual standing alone in civil disobedience or perhaps even capitalist determination? Is the visual binary of the flat plain and the monument that very tension between an individual and society?

Historians have spoken to us of the great magnitude of the American frontier, and Ford's establishing long shots certainly confirm the vastness of this territory. In this framing, we can see the individual standing apart from others in wide open spaces, the quintessential image of freedom, an essential component to the American dream. We need look no further than Woody Strode's Sergeant Rutledge to see an individual struggle. Rutledge, a black man in a white man's army, is falsely accused of rape and murder and must endure an unjust court martial. If he wants his freedom, his independence, he must take a stand against an oppressive and threatening world.

Yet another metaphorical possibility may exist in the regenerative power that Ford and many others have credited to the wilderness. Perhaps part of the secret to this power lies in the spirits, the gods, many Navajo believe live in the monuments. Indeed, some of the formations have eroded bridges or arches that seem to be windows to the very heavens themselves. The quiet stillness of the valley coupled with the warm, caressing breezes further enhances the spiritual aspect of this location. Is it possible, even through the conduit of a silver screen to feel the spiritual magic of this place? "If the West in its natural state was healing and pure," Ford biographer Ronald L. Davis tells us, "urbanity brought corruption; cleansing came through the healing effects of nature. And like Ralph Waldo Emerson [and I would add Mark Twain], Ford worried that the human race might die from too much civilization." Setting his films in Monument Valley, Ford allowed the possibility of spiritual cleansing. Davis states, "The image of cavalry officers fighting and dying amid Monument Valley's formations, with billowing clouds dwarfing the human drama, had an almost mystical appeal for him, suggesting a higher reality."

Visit Monument Valley and see if you agree that, in addition to the beauty and pragmatism of choosing Monument Valley as a location for the Fordian Western, the valley was a popular choice for Ford and his fans alike because of the metaphorical magic echoing throughout this space. The undeveloped terrain, the arid climate, the square toughness of the boulders, the sheer faces, the magnitude, and the phallic nature of the formations all suggest spiritualism, the myth of the frontier, and the myth of the American dream. Not all would see these connections as positive; certainly the feminist Kolodny, for one, would be "frightened and dismayed by the implications of the male images." I must say, however, as Jeremy and I wind through this lovely land in our sturdy jeep, I find it difficult to see anything negative in the splendor of the valley, one of the most beautiful places on earth.