by Craig Childs
I tried to laugh aloud, but the cold water wrapped around my throat, and I could not let out anything but a gasp. I shot a broad, exhilarated smile—all teeth and muddy beard—back to him. It was a secret smile, one thief to another. We had stolen our way into a place where people should not go. We were now subordinate to the whims of the elements, and it felt beautifully insane, like riding a hurricane.
I swam hard to keep near the center of the stream, out of range of snagged cottonwood trees that grew along the banks. Adam had one arm draped over a floating tree trunk and clutched the floating ammo box with his other hand. Supported by the two, he made a raft of himself, a stable vessel that bucked through eddies and waves.
I needed something, too. Up ahead was a spinning backwater of debris, and I swam into it, splashing juniper berries out of my path. The water here was slow, and I could feel deep turnings below me, my feet touching drowned cottonwood branches. I found a half-sunken, rusty Coleman ice chest and grabbed its handle. Its lid was torn off, and bullet holes were punched through one side. I swam out of the eddy, using the chest as a buoyant shield, swinging it out into the current, where it picked up speed and dragged me along.
As long as we kept our wits about us, feet dancing off submerged debris, we would make it just fine. Nothing but heads and boot tips floating with the rest of the wreckage, we were small in the water’s hands. Pieces of trees heaved around us, broken branches and roots. We glided past them, following the laws of debris, spinning into knotted eddies and being spit back out. The ice chest helped keep me comfortably afloat.
When we caught glimpses of each other, we flashed signals with our faces, checking in.
We still good?
Still good.
I could feel minor shifts in the flood’s composition. Snakes of sediment were coiling around my body, tongues sharp and cold darting against my skin. It was too cold. Adam and I shouted across to each other. We needed to get out, just long enough to warm up. We swam to a shallow overflow, where we paddled over cacti and woody spikes of saltbush that bit at our chilled, pink skin. I dragged the ice chest behind me to a bank of dry sand.
We sat in the hot sand, scooping it up and pouring it over our scratched bodies, washing it down our chests, burying our thighs and the tops of our feet. It must have been 130 degrees, baked by the sun. When our bones no longer stung from the cold, we dove back in, slipping around trees like lustrous eels. We repeated this process every five or ten minutes, crawling out to bathe in the sand, then pushing back into the flood.
As we rounded a corner, an ample ruin appeared above us, its walls slowly eroding at the base of a hot cliff. The building maintained the best of its stature, three stories of cleanly cut stones, the fastidious trademark masonry of Chaco. Cacti grew up through rows of opened rooms. The ruin was almost blinding in the sun, like the whitewashed plaster of a Middle Eastern village.
During the past century, archaeologists excavated painted jars as big as watermelons from the site. I had seen them in storage at a federal artifact repository, the vessels set shoulder to shoulder on metal shelves, their glossy white exteriors painted with black geometric designs. In the repository I also saw drawers packed with cut turquoise and argillite, along with finely made trinkets of wood, stone, shell, and bone. As I passed beneath this ruin, I had only a few seconds to recall its many excavated objects, necklaces and small, carved bird effigies, a wealth of civilized artifacts once ushered into this canyon.
A gateway of high sandstone bluffs appeared ahead, and at the top of one was a crown of ruins. This was our destination. The place looked large even from a couple of miles away. It was one of the first great houses constructed at Chaco, placed high enough that it would have been visible from all around. Looking up from the flood, I thought that this may have been one reason so many travelers had come here. People approaching Chaco Canyon in the eleventh century would have spotted this great citadel from afar, a masonry behemoth unlike anything they had ever seen before.
My throat strangled by the cold water, I kept my eyes firmly on the ruins ahead. Eventually, we were close enough to them that we had to start looking for a way out. Paddling and kicking fiercely toward shore, I let go of the ice chest, giving it back to the flood. We clawed through blade-sharp willows that snapped at our cold skin until we reached exposed ground and sank our fingers into the slick clay. We crawled out of the flood on hands and knees, then stood. Mud draped off our shoulders and wormed down our legs. I turned and watched the ice chest vanish into dark waves.
Like creatures from a bog, we walked dripping and draining into the desert, moving up along tiers of sandstone, where the dead heat of summer radiated up from the ground and overtook us. The mud turned to dust as we climbed toward the top of the bluff, our boots sloshing. The sun began burning the scrapes in our skin. Adam stopped and opened the ammunition box. The sun was too strong; we needed clothes. As we slipped on shirts and pulled down sleeves to protect our forearms, we glanced at the flood behind us. It was nearly out of sight in the canyon below, a distant rumble like continuous thunder.
Not far ahead stood the ruins we sought, a tabernacle of fallen walls at the highest point of land, doors and hallways split wide open by erosion. The site is an oval with two hundred ground-floor rooms buried in the debris of the second, third, and fourth stories, which once surrounded a central mass of circular communal chambers known as kivas. No room stood wholly intact. The place looked as though it had been bombed. Tight whirlwinds scoured the ground, sweeping through gaping walls with quick, hot twists of dust.
Even though Chaco Canyon is one of the most heavily scrutinized archaeological centers in North America, many of its sites have never been excavated, their buried chambers still loaded with artifacts. This bluff-top great house had undergone only cursory explorations over the past century. I had heard that a tremendous amount of imported turquoise had been found just near the surface. But there had been no concerted excavation here. If archaeologists had the funding and political backing to break into this place, no doubt they would make discoveries that would revamp our thinking about Chaco, but up to now it has been left mostly alone.
Even with the astonishing amount of cultural material already excavated, Chaco remains one of the most enigmatic sites in American archaeology. There is so much data, so much evidence of religious and political complexity, so many far-flung associations and ethnicities, that just about any story makes sense in this desert canyon.
First is the argument over “foreign” influence versus spontaneous “local” development. Some say that Chaco was obviously an extension of empires existing at the time in Mesoamerica. Perhaps it was a miniature Tenochtitlán, with its own dusty temples lined up along the broad avenue of Chaco Wash. An expedition of Mesoamerican voyagers may have walked a thousand miles or more and planted themselves here, calling on awestruck natives to pay homage and build great houses. Others argue that Chaco was a purely indigenous creation, the quintessential work of people living in isolation on the Colorado Plateau. Those who rebuff any Mesoamerican influence insist that there were no Maya or Aztecs here and that Chaco was its own homegrown community.
Next comes the argument over function. The evidence gathered from a century of digging and mapping can support nearly any speculation thrown at Chaco Canyon: religious center, military center, government center, economic center, ceremonial center—the list is extensive. The place is thought by some to have been a colony of churches, its numerous great houses exhibiting certain recurring features thought to be religious. The repetition of specific architectural designs could also be interpreted as a form imposed by a ruling elite, the abundant goods as tithing. The outrageously copious artifacts found inside these great houses look like ritual paraphernalia: feathers and bones representing nearly every bird species found within a thousand-mile radius; a large number of wooden staffs like shepherds’ crooks, their handles inlaid with fine stones; and many rooms filled with precious, expertly crafted mementos, many of
which were found positioned as if on altars.
Other people take this abundance to mean that Chaco was a commercial center, a pre-Columbian shopping mall built to redistribute goods in the Southwest’s notoriously unstable environment. In that sense the buildings are seen as storehouses, with some rooms stacked nearly to the ceiling with intricately painted vessels that were hardly ever used. Alternatively, the way these stacked vessels are frequently gathered around burial rooms has led some people to believe that they were offerings to the dead and that great houses were monumental tombs.
Whether this was a place of economic tribute, religious oblations, or offerings to ancestors, Chaco reached its peak in the eleventh century A.D. as the hub of an immense, pan-Southwest pilgrimage. Episodic layers of trash were left by thousands of people who seem to have arrived in waves and stayed for only a short time. When archaeologists pick apart their garbage, they find the remains of feasts and construction events that would have filled the canyon with noise.
In this vein I have heard Chaco called an ancient Las Vegas, an isolated strip of grandiose architecture in an ill-watered desert where people came from all directions to participate in flashy ceremonies and where they left all their wealth before heading home.
Finally, there is the argument over culture, over who or what these people called Anasazi might have been. In one school of thought, they were dispersed bands of primitive farmers and hunters, cliff and rock dwellers living without benefit of the wheel or any appreciable amount of forged metal. The stones used for constructing great houses were cut by using other stones, harder rock against softer.
At the same time, many envision a much more complex culture on the prehistoric Colorado Plateau, one comparable to Neolithic peoples such as the builders of Stonehenge in England or those who erected pueblo-like townships in Turkey in the sixth century B.C. They see astronomers here, priests, master masons, and warriors dressed in finely woven textiles and brilliantly feathered robes. They imagine a powerful and rigidly structured civilization.
Despite all the theories to have passed through Chaco Canyon, one thing is certain: something colossal happened here, an astounding feat of organization for a seminomadic people who had never before built anything near this scale.
Before entering the ruined great house, Adam and I stopped to gather our thoughts. My mind was still occupied by the flood, my body poised for sudden movements, whether it be fending off tree trunks or swimming with a quick burst out of a whirlpool. Time took on a different quality atop this bluff, which had seen centuries of slow decay. I bent down and unlaced my boots, pulled them off, and slipped off my wet socks. I let my bare feet feel the ground, aware of every pebble and stick. It felt better to walk this way—more slowly, more attentively than boots allowed. I tied the laces together and slung the boots over my shoulder as I walked into the ruins.
Walls and parts of walls stood here and there. Thousands of sandstone tiles lay scattered across the ground. Ceiling timbers as big as ship masts stuck out of the ground where rooms had buckled and caved in. I traced the shapes of these rooms with my bare feet, stepping lightly around fallen walls still intact as they lay facedown where they had fallen over. Some of the rooms were big enough to have held twenty or thirty people; others were as small as closets.
No one is sure what these great houses were used for, but to say that they were only one thing or another is to misunderstand the Anasazi. This compound may have been a church in one generation and a gambling domain in another. Fine layers of archaeological research have revealed elusive cycles of rise and fall among these people and their architecture. Centuries and decades of expansions and contractions give an impression of great houses in a constant state of cultural movement, during which nearly all the kivas were torn down at one time or another and then rebuilt, an impressive feat considering that some were as big as ballrooms. It is as if the people who lived here mirrored the landscape and the environment surrounding them: swift to change, as suddenly grandiose as they were ordinary, gathering around great houses at one moment and nowhere to be seen at another.
Archaeologist David Wilcox once explained to me, “We see these places, and we think of them as static, as doorways and walls that are solid. But they weren’t. They were spaces meant to serve purposes, and those purposes were fluid, changing by generations, or yearly, or even daily.”
Adam and I each found our own pace, separating as we passed through the ruins. Near the peak of the ruins, I came to a single wall still standing. In it was an open doorway, a shimmering blue portal looking out at nothing but sky.
Flood silt, now dried, fell off me in a wind that came through the open door. My skin was scratched raw in places. In my flesh I felt the weight of water, the flood absorbed into calluses and fingertips. My beard still had some dampness, almost cool in the wind as I scanned the horizon. In one direction I could see blanched contours of other great houses down in the wide chute of Chaco Canyon. In the opposite direction apricot-colored washes coiled in and out of one another. To the north were a few flecks of clouds, puffs of moisture blooming where heat radiated off the ground and pierced cooler layers of atmosphere. I kept an eye on these clouds, thinking maybe one would take hold and swell into a thunderhead, give someone a bit of shade somewhere, maybe a taste of rain. Each one expelled its energy quickly, evaporating as fast as it had appeared.
I stood before the empty doorway thinking this site must have been a crucial location a thousand years ago, a great beacon standing over the desert. I turned away and walked down into a field of kivas one level below, their roofs caved in and covered with bedded dust. More kivas have been found in this great house than at any other Chaco site. Their numerous round mouths opened around me, gaping at the sky, their edges rimmed in dry, feathery ricegrass.
In the sixth century A.D., a single, ceremonial kiva was built on this bluff, the earliest construction of its order overlooking Chaco Canyon. In its day that kiva was one of the larger buildings in the Southwest, a monument standing high above early Anasazi villages that had already been erected along the wash below. Within a hundred years the climate shifted slightly, and these kiva builders easily moved on, appearing to have migrated mostly to what is now Colorado, where masonry architecture and floor plans of early great houses began to appear in the eighth century. In the meantime, the high kiva fell into disrepair. A century or so later, arriving with the rains, people built an even larger kiva. They, too, left. After them came others, and then others, until by the eleventh century this bluff was topped with a proud great house, its interior crowded with kivas.
I could detect a faint rhythm among these generations of ruined kivas. It had a gentle, carrying sound—populations washing in and out of Chaco Canyon like tides, like weather. Century by century, Chaco grew until it reached an exponential climax, the canyon crowded with great houses. In this dusty corner of North America, civilization had begun.
I crossed to the edge of the great house and from here I could see the flood far below. My toes dug into dust and broken rocks as I watched the flood rush across the desert. Adam came walking languidly through the ruins. He stopped beside me and looked out at the flood, bright mirrors of water disappearing into the distance.
“This is the place I would have been,” he said, appreciating the vista. “Right here.”
I silently agreed. This was why we had come. It had always been the place to be.
ALIGNMENT
FAJADA BUTTE AND CASA RINCONADA
Iwoke to sand in my sleeping bag, gritty as I turned over from my side to my back. Looking up at the last stars of morning, with a bare arm slung across my chest, I felt the faint coolness of open air. My sleeping bag was old, a summer bag thin as a ratty blanket. Anything heavier would have been too warm on a midsummer night in Chaco. I crawled out and dressed. A thin blue line of mesas shivered in the east. I pulled out a sooted pot and heated some tea over my small stove. The blue flame flickered, no louder than a whisper, as I crouched watching a dra
pe of ultramarine and pink rise from the eastern horizon. There were no clouds; the sky was crisp and arid.
A picnic table and a bathroom were nearby, all the conveniences of a National Park Service campground. A little more than fifty square miles of Chaco Canyon is overseen by the Park Service and listed by the United Nations as a World Heritage site, making it one of the world’s irreplaceable treasures, its archaeological sites to be preserved at all costs. During the day armed, uniformed rangers stroll pleasantly around the grounds, answering visitors’ questions with judicious courtesy. Some of them have spent their careers in the desert, and some are just passing through, on their way to Yellowstone or the redwoods. At night they lock the gates and return to their small settlement of white wood-frame houses, the only permanent dwellings allowed in the canyon.
Not far from rangers’ housing is the campground where Adam and I had spent the night. We were Chaco’s itinerants, staying for five nights before moving on. A numbered post stood in front of our square campsite, and on it was a metal clip holding a receipt saying that we had paid to be here. Adam was still asleep in his bag. I walked tea over to him: Earl Grey, double bergamot, the taste of turpentine. I nudged him, and he came to life with a sputter of words.
“Here’s your tea,” I said. “We need to get going.”
He sat up straight, and the rest of his bag fell into his lap. “All right,” he said, wiping strands of long dark hair out of his face as he glanced east at the horizon. “Yeah, all right.” He reached for the cup.
