It's up there so high you can see it only with binocs or 300mm lens, but it's there. It's in a gallery of etchings and signatures all around. I'm not sure how many years will have to pass before it will be thought of as "historical," but right now, just about a century later it's only sort of what?--well, rare. He's the only "Rev" up there.
So sometime in 1919, this Rev. Ypma, in all likelihood Rev. Lambert Ypma, passed through this cavern while visiting a new Navajo mission just east of Gallup, NM; and when he did he took the time to write his name on the wall of the canyon, First Canyon, as it's still called today.
Now sandstone is more like a blackboard than it is cement. Lots of other etchings have disappeared, as you can see. Some manage to stay, however, on account of the elbow grease that put them there. A person could walk First Canyon for a week and not record all the multitudes who left what, when, where; but up and down the stretch of the canyon, this is the only "Rev." I could find--"Rev. Ypma." (Look at that--he even put in the period.)
In his circles, in his denomination, the Christian Reformed Church, Ypma was not anonymous. He started a Christian school in Minnesota, and ended his distinguished preaching career just down the road in Sioux Center. He died in Grand Rapids, Michigan, like a host of CRC pastors. Today, you don't have to surf all that long to see that some glorious things of him are spoken.
But I have no clue what he was doing in First Canyon in 1919, just off a dusty rutted road that ran east of Gallup to Rehoboth Mission. He may have been simply visiting, although that's unlikely, given the list of out-of-the-way pastorates he had, places where there wasn't a budget for New Mexico vacations. Rehoboth history doesn't record his being a missionary.
He might have been a board member of "The Heathen Mission Board," out there visiting the place, making sure it was running with efficiency and preaching the unadorned gospel truth to the Indians. But it's hard to imagine this Rev. Ypma as being hard-core. Any preacher who'd take the time to carve his initials into the mountain couldn't be too self-righteous.
I took this picture with my big lens. Don't think you can get up close because successive gully-washers have done what they always do in First Canyon--and always will: they lower the floor, scrape up detritus and push it down as far as it'll go, so far, like I said, that you need a lens to see what the man left in the rock a century ago. Where he stood to write his name is now halfway up the side of the canyon.
But it's there, I'm telling you, even the period.
It's not graffiti. If you wanted to get up tight about it, yes, he deliberately defaced the side of the mountain; but the scratching all around his name makes it difficult to consider what he did somehow akin to the unforgivable sin.
Besides, you got to think he was smiling when he did it, don't you? You got to think he sat there with a jackknife or whatever, chuckling to himself, adding his name to the gallery.
It had to be fun. He didn't slap a Bible verse up there, no line from Jeremiah. Just his name--and the Rev part. Maybe he looked around at the baby blue sky above that promenade of glorious sandstone all around and just loved it. Maybe all he wanted to say is that he'd been there and found all that New Mexico beauty perfectly breathtaking.
What kind of preacher was he anyway, this Rev. Ypma? I think he may have been something out of the ordinary, not just your run-of-the-mill, early 20th century Dutch Calvinist. I think he may have been a smiler.
Hike First Canyon yourself sometime, read the walls. But if you want to see the etching of a bit of goofy Calvinist pastor, bring a lens.
It's there. Trust me.
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