[Grigg is an American educator. In the following essay, he discusses the symbolism of mountains and valleys in Waters's writings.]

When both time and space take on a strangeness, we know that we have been taken to the "once upon a time and place" of dream, fairy tale, myth—and the world of Frank Waters. His work is modeled not upon our rational, separate perception of time and space, but upon those denizens of the unconcious who point both backward and forward in time, and who float like mountain peaks above the dimension of space.

Because Waters' work from the beginning has had an Einsteinian quality in treatment of the dimensions of space and time, we can look in works widely separated in time for mutual illumination; Waters' work does look both forward and backward, as well as up and down. In his most recent book Mexico Mystique (1975) Waters states explicitly an idea fundamental to his work but, in earlier works, developed primarily in images and symbols. For Indians of the New World, he writes, time has no beginning nor end, is motionless and boundless, and it has two aspects: "It may be statically condensed into a point (now) which is the pivotal center of every event. And it may expand dynamically into a boundless continuum (always) which is Duration, involving past, present, and future." Indian "space" likewise has two aspects: "shrinking to a center (here), and swelling to a boundless continuum (everywhere)." In short, both dimensions are one, condensing into a point (now, here) but expanding into a boundless continuum (always, everywhere). Like [Henry David] Thoreau, Frank Waters travels not through space but through "the whole world heaped up in layers" in one spot.

When Waters condenses time into a point (now) and space to a center (here), and both into one "now-here," the expression of the idea is often in the image of the mountain. Throughout his work mountains hover enshrouded in mists, the peaks "condensing" from them, yet suggesting as well the twin idea of time expanding dynamically into a boundless continuum (always) and space swelling in a boundless continuum (everywhere). The mountain-like Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan, now in ruins, still exists "in a space-time continuum beyond our worldly comprehension," Waters writes in Mexico Mystique. During his youth in Colorado Springs, Pike's Peak became a central feature of Waters' inner landscape, joined now by Taos Mountain which looms over his New Mexico home as well as over his work. These magic and sacred peaks have exercised their power over him as he has "revisioned" his inner life in novels, biographies, and other books. The image of the mountain has truly possessed Frank Waters; and he, it.

Nowhere does he explore the mountain theme more fully than in Pike's Peak (1971), a revision and abridgment of the even more massive work in 1,500 pages published as a trilogy (1935–40). The very weight of both versions (Pike's Peak is 743 pages) suggests the mass and multilayered upthrust of the Rocky Mountains themselves. It is a novel of earth statically condensed into a "now-here": the mountain itself, which is the center of the novel. Rogier, on his way west, is drawn as if by magnets to Pike's Peak. The remainder of his life is spent battering the mountain in a compulsive search for its hidden gold.

Pike's Peak in this novel, like dozens of mountains in legend and fairy tale, is magic because of its buried treasure: gold. Stories like this of treasure mountains are perhaps rooted in the custom of burial gifts. Robbing the mountain of its gold carries a taboo similar to the robbing of graves, and Rogier's search for gold is as certain to fail as it is to be pursued. Waters makes the same point concerning the looting of the Mexican pyramids by the Spanish explorers: even in triumph white man has somehow lost his soul too through looting of the continent. In stories the mountain's hidden treasure is often within the earth itself, where the grass grows most luxuriantly, or where the rainbow ends, for instance. Even without such explicit signs, Rogier is drawn to the mountain from his first glimpse of it across the plains, called by the voices from the mountain which awaken the irresistible voices within himself. As with the dimensions of space and time, the conjunction of the two is more powerful than their sum. And when he arrives at the mountain, the gold, like hidden treasure in many old stories, is hard to find, seeming to have the power to change location until the right person comes to seek it.

In the last third of Pike's Peak Rogier's grandson March is able, in part because of a strain of Indian blood in him, to participate in the sacred peak's peace and power. Although the cast of characters changes from grandfather to grandson, the mountain remains the static, condensed image of legendary sacred mountains. The psychological meaning is the world's center, the place where the powers of Creation, flowing together from the four corners, stand still—and the image of this power standing still is the peak itself. There opposites are united, the hidden treasure lies buried, salvation emanates. Rogier failed because he became enamored of the gold for itself. The grandson was able to perceive that the gold was merely the symbol or manifestation of the magic mountain's power, and as a result the grandson drew peace and energy from it because he recognized the true hidden treasure, the energy that was merely manifest in the gold, a treasure not to be unearthed by picks. The old gods are still strong in magic mountains precisely to guard the buried treasure and to give it to that hero alone who comes to it pure and radiating the same mystical energy that radiates from the magic mountain itself. Such treasures are usually only to be found by one "right" person. Those who want only to exploit its treasure will receive from the mountain in kind: Rogier's energies are dissipated as he races about the face of Pike's Peak with his picks. The elect will know, Waters believes, that they must give to the mountain, as well as receive from it. As Waters puts it in Mexico Mystique, "the realm of objective events stretches away to the realm of mythical events which can only be known subjectively"—a fact he symbolizes in the mountain condensing both time and space into a point. Decades earlier Rogier's story had begun with the same idea keynoting the opening sentence: Rogier's glimpses of the mountain, "like something risen from the depths of dreamless sleep to the horizon of wakeful consciousness."

Waters went on to sketch in other areas of the Rocky Mountain complex (in biographies such as Midas of the Rockies, 1937, for instance), but it was natural and inevitable for him to shift from the Rockies to the valleys and canyons. People of the Valley (1941) focuses on Mora valley in New Mexico, a valley that is for Waters an inverted mountain that complements the sacred pyramid mountain altar thrown skyward by explosive forces within the earth. Valleys, in contrast, take the breath away with their plunge into the body of the Great Mother of earth, deep to sacred spots where this life began. Violation of this sacred spot is the threat by the government to build a dam to control and change nature's patterns in this valley long inhabited by Spanish-Americans deeply imbued with the Penitentes, a blood cult.

In The Colorado (Rivers of America series; 1946) Waters has definitively celebrated both parts of his vision's vertical world: the river god's origin high in the Rocky Mountain altar (Indian drawings of both mountains and altars in Waters' region are stepped-pyramids) and its plunge into the womb of earth itself in the Grand Canyon. Waters shares with the Hopi the feeling that the Grand Canyon, "the Rocky Mountains upside down," is the sacred place of emergence of life itself in this world, the world's womb. The landscape of the Grand Canyon, a diagram of time's erosion and bared layers of space, turns in on itself and is known subjectively. Immense space conquered outside has crawled inside, Waters writes in The Colorado.

Taos Mountain rises on the other side of those valleys and canyons as the mountain rises over Taos pueblo. Seen from the plain, the pair of multi-storied, stepped buildings imitate and comment on the stepped sacred mountain immediately behind, the pueblo buildings nestled at its foot. In In Man Who Killed the Deer (1942), which centers around the sacred Taos mountain, Waters' range of talent is made clear. Although here again time and space condense into a static center point, the mountain has nothing of the mass and weight of Pike's Peak, but is weightless. It is as weightless as any psychic entity, or any Japanese painting of Fuji. The novel is about Martiniano, an Indian who has cut himself off from his culture by rejecting it. From the rejection only unhappiness has come, crystallized into his killing of a deer out of legal season and without the required sacred Indian forms. The deer in this novel are as weightless, as spaceless and timeless, as the mountain above the pueblo Martiniano has moved out of. The novel is about Martiniano's realization that his need is not to stifle his instinctive animal life, the Indian life he has cut himself off from in the white man's boarding school, but to make come alive the deer within himself. He does find his way back to the life of the pueblo; the way is on the mountain and the guide can only be the deer. His near-white mind rediscovers his instinctive "deer" self, which he needs as mountains need valleys.

Martiniano, who has seemed to bring only bad luck to the pueblo through his alienation from the powerful forces, is led by his wife to resume his role in the pueblo ceremonies and to become a transcendent figure, knowing something of both the white and Indian ways. When he runs in the pueblo spring races, radiating his bodily energies toward the sun so that it will have the energy to continue its course and radiate energy back to the pueblo people, he finds that he has tapped the deep and life-giving energies of the sacred mountain itself, and that it is as much within as without.