As I paddled along, hugging the shoreline, I called out to every local I encountered to ask if they knew the whereabouts of the petroglyph. None of the locals had even heard of the petroglyph, despite living just hundreds of yards from it.

One of the locals, a kayaker, yelled at me to get away from a cluster of rocks I was investigating for signs of the petroglyph. He claimed the rocks were a “seal refuge” and that I was supposed to stay 100 feet away. He was wrong on all counts. The rocks off the northern tip of Lummi Island are not part of the San Juan Islands National Wildlife Refuge, which requests (but cannot actually require) boaters to stay offshore 200 yards—the likely source of the kayaker’s confusion. Rather, these rocks are part of the San Juan Islands National Monument, which does not request any approach limit for boaters, but which has closed certain rocks, including these, to landing. Contrary to the kayaker’s protestations, paddling near the rocks off the northern tip of Lummi Island is not a violation of any law or policy, so long as you do not land on the rocks.

The only source of authority more sure of itself than local knowledge is local ignorance, so I did not try to argue with the irate kayaker. These rocks weren’t the site of the petroglyph, anyway.

Even when I was directly atop the location I was ninety percent sure must be correct, there was no sign of a petroglyph boulder. Slowly, the truth sank in: the tide was too high. The petroglyph was underwater. I would have to return another day.

The failed search for the petroglyph did turn up any number of interesting birds and wildlife. The fall seabirds had begun to arrive. Surf scoters, harlequin ducks, and short-billed gulls were present in large numbers. Common loons and common mergansers were also abundant. Hermit and varied thrushes poked around in the underbrush ashore.

As is true of almost every petroglyph in the Pacific Northwest, the amount we know about the Lummi Island petroglyph is greatly outweighed by the amount we don’t know. We don’t even know how old it is. Petroglyphs in our climate, unlike those in the desert, cannot be forensically dated. A few of them can be dated anthropologically, but for the vast majority of petroglyphs, including the one on Lummi Island, there are no informants alive to ask. The members of the Lummi Nation, some of them the likely descendants of the petroglyph’s makers, have forgotten whatever their ancestors once knew about it. The petroglyph’s history, meaning, purpose, and even its name have all been lost amid the turmoil of cultural displacement.

In the absence of anyone to defend the petroglyph’s original story, new stories have sprouted from new sources. Local adherents of the goddess movement, along with artists, hippies, and other assorted gentle souls, have embraced the Lummi Island petroglyph as a message from a mythical “time that has passed into stone,” when women chieftains wisely governed and the people never went hungry or cold. The New Agers have identified the Lummi Island petroglyph as Tsagaglalal, She Who Watches, and have, by means known only to themselves, dated this shoreline petroglyph to a time of 14,000 years ago—a proposition as dubious from a geological standpoint as ethnological.

These latter-day goddess myths did not arise from a vacuum. There is, in fact, another petroglyph in Washington named Tsagaglalal, and its name does, indeed, mean She Who Watches, but this other petroglyph is not on Lummi Island. It is far to the south and inland, on the banks of the Columbia River. The Columbia River Tsagaglalal is one of the most famous petroglyphs in North America, having been photographed in 1910 by no less a luminary than Edward Curtis. In contrast to the Lummi Island petroglyph, the original meaning and name of the Columbia River Tsagaglalal petroglyph have not been lost. The Columbia River petroglyph’s story is still attested in the mythology of the local tribe, the Wishram Chinook. The Wishram, however, have no relationship to Lummi Island. There is, in fact, no connection of any kind between the famous Tsagaglalal on the river and the petroglyph on Lummi Island, except in the minds of the latter-day goddess devotees.

It might be tempting to sneer at the Lummi Island goddess-worshippers for a lack of authenticity. But what is “authenticity” when it comes to matters of spiritual beliefs? The fantastical stories the Lummi Island New Agers tell about their local petroglyph do not, on their face, seem less plausible to me than the fantastical stories the Wishram tell about their own Tsagaglalal. The New Agers have their benevolent stone watcher-goddess, while the Wishram have their loquacious, clairvoyant, transmogrifying coyote. We can’t call a spiritual practice inauthentic just because it involves outlandish beliefs about the universe. If that were the standard, then there would be no authentic spiritual practice anywhere.

The worst you can say about the New Agers is that their spiritual beliefs are syncretic and their factual beliefs are poorly supported by evidence. That is an accurate criticism but a weak one. It seems to me that every spiritual tradition, no matter how fundamentalist, must dabble in syncretism. It also seems to me that no spiritual tradition is overmuch concerned about evidentiary support for its factual claims. These New Age goddess-worshippers are not committing any epistemic error that any other spiritual tradition hasn’t committed a thousand times over. They may be wrong about the age of their petroglyph, for example, but just think how wrong the Abrahamic faiths are about the age of their patriarch, Methuselah. And this from a culture that prides itself on keeping accurate written records!

It might be galling, on anthropological or spiritual grounds, to imagine the New Age goddess-worshippers standing around the Lummi Island petroglyph and “making things up” or “getting things wrong” in the course of their worship. That would not only be an uncharitable criticism; it would also imply, falsely, that a true and correct spiritual practice exists. Not so. There is no such thing as a true and correct spiritual practice, because spirituality is all a matter of myth-making. From Methuselah to Tsagaglalal, it is made up by design. Therefore, there is no such thing as an incorrect spiritual practice, provided the practice meets the needs of its practitioners. No doubt the goddess-worshippers are doing something different with the petroglyph than whatever its makers did, but they aren’t doing anything wrong.

An even less charitable criticism might be that the goddess-worshippers are stealing something from the indigenous culture whose members carved the petroglyph, even if those members’ descendants have forgotten whatever that something was. The charge of theft is a stronger charge than the charge of inauthenticity, because it accuses the goddess-worshippers of being not just wrong but harmfully wrong. Fortunately, I think we can absolve the goddess-worshippers of such a serious offense. There are no property rights in spirituality, and therefore, there is nothing to steal. Spirituality is a commons. Schism, drift, and pollination are the norm. Every attempt to draw fixed and impermeable boundaries around a spiritual practice has failed, from the ancient pharaohs of Egypt right through to the modern-day salafists of, well, Egypt. Fundamentalists can neither fence their own adherents in nor fence adventurers out.

As I see it, the New Age goddess-worshippers owe indigenous cultures the respect of tolerance but not the respect of deference. Intolerance would include mocking, disparaging, or obstructing indigenous cultural practices, and any such behavior on the part of the New Agers would be inexcusable. So long as the New Agers refrain from intolerance, however, then I say they are not doing anything wrong in harvesting indigenous symbols and stories for their own spiritual purposes, even if they transmogrify the indigenous symbols and stories into something the ingenious practitioners would no longer recognize, and even if indigenous practitioners would rather they cease. If the Messianic “Jews for Jesus” can harvest cultural symbols and stories, then so can the goddess-worshippers.

The rest of us do not have to admire the goddess-worshippers’ innovations, but we do have to tolerate them. Cultural or religious fundamentalists, in their outrage, are free to denounce the goddess-worshippers, but they may not obstruct their practice. The goddess-worshippers are free to ignore the denunciations.

I am not spiritual, so I do not feel threatened by the goddess-worshippers, no matter how outlandish their claims. I am, however, fascinated by history—real human history, grounded in evidence. It is exceedingly rare, here in western Washington, to encounter a man-made object in situ that is more than 180 years old. If, indeed, the Lummi Island petroglyph is at least that old—and we don’t know whether it is—then I wanted to see it with my own eyes, even if doing so would leave me with more questions than answers.

At the next daytime low tide, I brought my kayak back to Lummi Island. This time, I found the petroglyph after only twenty minutes’ searching.

The eyes, to me, appeared somehow feminine, although I wouldn’t be able to explain why I thought so. The impression of femininity was only my own, subjective experience of the petroglyph, not any kind of evidence of its makers’ intent. I don’t want to say anything too specific or with too much confidence. Still, like the New Age goddess-worshippers, I suppose I am free to ascribe my own meaning to the petroglyph.

What I can say with confidence is that the petroglyph is gradually eroding. Comparing its appearance today with Leen’s photograph from 1979, the incised grooves have become much less distinct over the past forty-four years. Several features of the eyes that were visible then are no longer visible today. At some point in the decades to come, the petroglyph will be reduced to an indistinct smudge on the rock—the ultimate fate of all shoreline petroglyphs and perhaps all manmade objects wherever they may lie.

—Alex Sidles