by Craig Childs
Till had found a stable place and now rested against the bedrock.
“There’s another way,” he called down to me, his voice shaking, the route more difficult than he had recalled. “Don’t try the route straight down; it’s a dead end.”
Right.
I inched onto the detour, my cheek dragging down the grainy stone. It was by far easier to go first, not having to watch the others. The last climber to go is always shaken. Twenty feet from a solid ledge, the holds were faded, worn away by wind. I lowered myself as far as I could, then simply let go, my body sheeting down the rock face. I stamped to a halt on the ledge, planting my weight.
I forced a grin up at Ryan and told her it wasn’t bad.
Her face was like marble as she peered down at me.
“Send your pack down first,” I said. “I’ll catch it.”
Ryan climbed as far out as she could, letting her pack dangle by a strap until she let go. The pack skidded over the smooth rock and slammed into the ledge, where I slapped it still with my hands and prevented it from catapulting away. She came down exactly as I had, move for move, letting go at the same place and landing on the ledge beside me.
She forced a smile. “It’s really not that bad,” she called up to Till. “Once you’re down.”
Till sent his pack sliding down behind her, but it struck the ledge cockeyed and launched clear of my hands. It sailed into the air, hit the next level down, and then cartwheeled into a slew of boulders far below.
The blood drained out of Till’s face.
“Go now,” I called up to Till. “Just move on it, quick as you can.”
He did, right out onto the face, his breath huffing against the rock. He chewed on his lip as he peered down between his boots, repeatedly saying, “Shit, goddamn it. Shit, goddamn it.” His face lost all control, expressions rushing over it in panic. I gave him whatever encouragement I could, but after a while I sounded desperate. Silence was best. He clawed the last twenty feet down, half-falling, half-glued to the rock, landing hard. Balanced on the ledge, he crept back up to where he could stand.
Till swallowed quickly and apologized for his fear, for the sloppy climb. Ryan reached over and touched his shoulder.
“No apologies necessary,” she said.
Ryan and Till started moving down the slope of rubble where a stately ramp had once been built, its path lined with heaps of broken pottery and rock art carved into boulders, the route decorated. I waited for a few minutes before following them. I leaned against the cliff base and spread my arms across it, palms open, sensing the weight of Comb Ridge against my back.
This is one of the more prominent landmarks in the Southwest, a long cliff that seems to go on without end from north to south. Knowing how nimble the Anasazi must have been, this would not have been so much a physical barrier as a mental one, a great wall in the middle of the desert. I looked along it to the north, where the cliff vanished in the distance, and then to the south, where it vanished again. It occurred to me that Comb Ridge is a barrier only if you are traveling east to west. North to south, however, it is a compass line, a dramatic course set across the earth. As much as it is a great wall, Comb Ridge is also a great road. While Till and Ryan rambled through the boulders below, I peered south along this cardinal line, this bolt of red sandstone pointing the way.
WALKING THE LINE
CHINLE WASH
Comb Ridge bows politely where it meets the lower San Juan River. Then it rises again to the south, where it becomes entangled with the canyons of Chinle Wash. My stepfather and I walked these canyons in the relentless heat of July, Comb Ridge riding high next to us. All day we had been napping uncomfortably in what shade could be found, then rising and making time again. We walked among upwelling rock formations, the colored slabs of Comb Ridge painfully vivid in the sharp summer sunlight.
My stepfather, Dick, is a geologist, and when I asked him a question about strata and fault lines, he answered by dropping to one knee, sweat dripping from his face, and wiping clean a space in the sand. Using the point of his hand, he drew a map on the ground, making a cross section of the earth, with the mantle and then the core, where diamonds are born under heat and pressure and are thrown up along deep fractures, such as those along Comb Ridge, cracks down through the basement of the planet.
Dick’s vocabulary often ventured into an imagined underworld, the underpinnings of the earth where massive faults and continental fractures mingle. He named the odd species of minerals inhabiting such depths, the ones mysteriously forced up into daylight along parts of Comb Ridge: sodalite, alkali pyroxene, britholite, lujavrite, phlogopite.
When his cursory sand map was not enough, he emptied his pack and unfolded a map as large as a dining room table. All of southern Utah and northern Arizona spread before us, propped up by paper creases, and he tapped his finger on our position on the Navajo reservation near the Utah-Arizona border, the place where Comb Ridge bends away from the San Juan River, where Chinle Wash comes snaking north through a region of cliffs. His map showed jigsaw colors of geological formations, cryptic symbology of strikes and dips. I listened and watched, resting on my haunches beside him, heat radiating off the ground, through my boot soles, and up my leg bones.
In Dick’s eyes, everything on the surface of the earth has meaning, each hump and shove of the ground tied back to some process of uplift or erosion. I enjoy traveling with him. Every few years we found our way into the desert, where we could indulge in fantasies of geology, cracking open rocks to see what is inside, following fracture lines for miles out of nothing but pure curiosity. Now we were on the line of Comb Ridge heading south, trailing one of the most striking geological features on this part of the continent.
While my stepfather carried the geological maps—was there a need for any other kind—I carried our official papers, stamped and signed, acquired through a tribal agency in the town of Window Rock, giving us permission to walk the Navajo reservation. In these backlands, though, our documents were virtually meaningless. To the few Navajos who live around here, a tribal decree from Window Rock is a near-worthless piece of paper, if not an insult. It does not replace talking in person at the door of a hogan or sitting down to coffee with a local. But we saw no one to talk to here, only rocks.
Dick looked awful in the heat, hair smeared by sweat and now dry. I’m sure I didn’t look any better. We were traveling through temperatures unseasonably high even for summer—118 degrees in the air, 130 degrees on the ground. On our backs we carried several days’ worth of gear. Even without sleeping bags or much water, our packs felt heavy this afternoon, like sacks of lead. I had promised him water—springs leaking out of the Navajo sandstone alcoves, or at least a murky trickle along Chinle Wash—but I should have known better. I had hardly been touched by rain in months. Dick and I had not been able to find any of the customary water holes, pots and pans carved out of bedrock half-filled with old rainwater. Everything was dry. Late in the day we entered the wash, which had no water at all. We looked both ways. Salty tamarisk shoots crowded the wash’s outer banks. I had expected at least a warm, greenish trickle, a few pools rippled by dashing water striders. I knelt and pinched the ground between my fingers. It had not seen water for months.
We climbed to a high flood terrace, where we could look across the country. There I dropped my pack and told Dick to rest. I said I would have water for him by dark. I turned and walked toward a nearby canyon, which opened like a gateway.
Pieces of curled, dried mud popped beneath my feet like sticks of chalk. High red walls fell into shadow around me, relaxing finally, letting down their hot shoulders after a day in the sun. As I walked through the parting cliffs of this canyon, my own shoulders sloped toward the ground. In the shade the air was a few degrees below scorching. Just taking my pack off felt good. My body seemed to float along the canyon’s rubbled floor, where stones had once been driven by a flash flood.
How long ago was this flood?
I lifted one of
the rocks up with the toe of my boot.
Too long ago.
Every light step I took echoed among the walls. Panels of rock art came into view, unveiled as I passed around a bend. Petroglyphs were etched and pecked into red rock forty feet above the wash floor on my left. I walked with my head lifted, seeing fine geometric carvings go by—human figures with hands upraised, and spirals, and creatures with horns. I was too directed toward finding water to pause, so I just watched them pass, thinking simply, People were here—a long time ago.
Some of the zoomorphic drawings—a bighorn sheep with two other sheep set inside its body and some sort of canid below its front legs—came from a tradition of rock art known as the San Juan Style, a thousand years old, give or take a few centuries. In this style people are portrayed in events of the day—hunters and dancers dressed ceremonially, the pecked likeness of a man pulling back a bow before the arrow flies. This part of southern Utah is awash in rock art, a pre-Columbian archive with representations shelved by the thousands on cliff faces and boulder clefts. The day before, Dick and I had seen San Juan Style giants carved into another rock wall, manifold human figures taller than either of us, their bodies marked with clothing and jewelry, their hair composed in particular fashions beneath elaborate headdresses.
Some stories told by these panels are obvious: the dances, the hunts, people walking in lines with loads tied on their backs. But there are more specific tales, harder to read: insignias, ranks of geometric symbols, repetitive icons. Rock art in this area looks like a lettered narrative of some sort: clan symbols, society symbols, perhaps the names of places left in a forgotten script.
An eye-catching figure appeared above me. I stopped to look at it for a moment, my mouth tipped open in the warm canyon air. A spiral had been methodically pecked to reveal paler stone within the bedrock. It had been done with laborious attention to detail, its curves no more than half a finger width apart. Two bighorn sheep had been carefully installed at the start of the spiral, both sheep seeming to be in motion, positioned as if traveling toward the spiral’s center. One of the sheep was actually standing on its hind legs as if walking upright, part human. I took the figures as a story of a journey. Was I seeing a record of an event, a document of migration where a clan once set off in search of a promised land? Was it mere decoration, a tale told in code, a clever signature? I have asked these questions countless times in this decorated wilderness.
A man named Joe Pachak lives on the other side of the San Juan River in Utah, where he has been studying local rock art. Pachak once told me that he felt many rock art panels were places people migrated to, pilgrimage sites where they came to embellish very specific stories. A specialist devoted to cataloging ancient images around the Four Corners, Pachak has an old army barrack in the town of Bluff where every surface and shelf is overloaded with his drawings and photographs. Pachak has come to recognize the representation of Venus when he sees it in rock art, as well as the cipher of particular clans and the ubiquitous appearance of twin figures who must have played a role in Anasazi mythology. He is an antiquarian pacing through a library, thumbing through rows of canyons, finger lifted in the air as he silently reads captions and pictograms; images of carved faces, shields and weapons, animals, bird-headed people, star charts, insects, women giving birth, and men cutting off each other’s heads. If there is a question about rock art near the San Juan River, researchers turn to him.
Detail of two bighorn sheep walking a spiral on a rock art panel in Chinle Wash. CRAIG CHILDS
I once spent an evening in Pachak’s barrack, and there, for the first time, I grasped the scope and codified nature of Anasazi rock art. He unrolled wall-size sketches and showed me exact patterns reproduced in many places. Certain Anasazi petroglyphs and pictographs are consistently stylized regardless of where they are found, rhythmic like primitive ogham characters from Ireland, and representational like the earliest pictograms from the ancient Middle East. For the most part Southwest archaeologists have disregarded rock art’s usefulness.
“Archaeologists look at it as too difficult to handle,” Pachak once told me. “Too complex, too ambiguous.”
But for Pachak the purpose of rock art has become almost transparent. “It holds incredible information about prehistoric culture,” he said. “You can demonstrate theories with rock art the same as you can in an excavation. You can compile data that will say this rock art image is part of something bigger—it appears in four thousand rock art panels in this region, a reoccurring motif that tells a particular account. It’s demonstrable. No doubt in my mind.”
Pachak sees an Anasazi narrative recorded in this art, specific stories being told. He said, “I’m very interested in T-shaped doorways for that reason.” To show me why, he pulled out some rock art images and tapped his finger on representations of T shapes—not just physical portals, but artistic portrayals of Ts painted and pecked into cliffs and boulders. His voice accelerated as he explained that these Ts evolved from some of the earliest cultural icons on the Colorado Plateau. He excitedly said that he believes these symbols are associated with a very old legend, one that as far as he can tell involved twins and a passage between two worlds, a creation story.
“The T shapes are not doorways at all,” he explained. “They are windows, entries and exits. They’re holes of emergence. They are sipapus in the architecture. People would have been reminded of their story daily, going in and out of the house, emerging into the world, then going back inside. Rock art symbols were integrated into architecture to illustrate a creation mythology.”
Like any culture, the Anasazi appear to have been living within the emblematic framework of their own story. They wrote this story into their architecture, in the weave of their textiles, on their decorated vessels, and on rock faces.
Looking up from the canyon floor at a tightly bound spiral and the forms of two traveling bighorn sheep, I wondered, What tale is this? Pachak might know. And he might not. I thought of the way his voice had quickened when he told me of his findings, the same animation professional archaeologists have as they piece together codes hidden among artifacts and ruins. It is all storytelling, I thought. Flights of imagination and science. I was convinced that this scene overhead was a legend of migration, telling of a journey, but I was not an impartial judge. I had distances to cross myself.
I stopped looking for rock art and turned all my attention to water. My stepfather and I had barely enough to last until sunrise, even if we restricted our drinking. I sharpened my eyes, scanning any small, incoming drainage or shaded cleft. An ample depression appeared in the floor fifty feet ahead, its bedrock slopes stained with a white bathtub ring. I walked into it. Dry.
Damn you.
I stammered to a halt.
In the bottom of this hollow lay a dish of dark clay. I knelt and shoveled a hand down to reach a layer of slightly moist black matter that smelled like a rotting carcass. In the past I had coaxed water out of this sort of half-dry mud, but I was hardly in the mood to suck on a wretched ball of clay. I doubted that my stepfather had even imagined stooping to such an extreme. I walked on, wiping clods of clay on my pants. I abolished any wish for water. I just stared ahead.
A few minutes later I came to a pool of rot-green water. It was black down in its depths. Bubbles of methane troubled a gray film on the surface, where six fingerling fish floated, dead, an array of white bloated bellies. The fish had ridden the last flow of Chinle Wash and had taken whatever refuge they could find when it dried up, waiting for the next flood, which never came. I dabbed my fingers into the warm water and touched my lips. It tasted like a poorly kept aquarium. This was our ticket, I thought, our permission to keep going. I had promised Dick water, and here it was.
I slid my boots into silvery mud and reached out with a plastic bottle. I sank its wide mouth beneath the surface, hoping for better water two inches down. After gulping the bottle full, I brought it back and poured it into a canvas-lined bladder. I spent about half an hour ga
thering what I could carry, six gallons of bladders laid like dead seals at the edge of the water hole. As a final act I dumped a hatful of water over my head, stunning slices of coolness tracing all the way down my body, under my shirt. I walked back dragging a wet trail, as if I had just crawled out of the sea.
At a twilight camp I found my stepfather flicking red ants off his legs.
“Good news and bad news,” I said, dropping the weight of my pack onto the ground.
He could see from the way the pack landed that I had found water. I sat and pulled one of the bladders into my lap. I unscrewed its lid with one hand and with the other opened a small glass jar of iodine pills. I shuffled five tiny green pills into my palm, then dumped them into the bladder’s open mouth.
“I found plenty of water,” I said.
Dick nodded. In the past everywhere he and I had traveled together we had found ample water hidden in desert springs and holes, but now he was about to witness the other side of walking here: drinking foul, black water purely out of need. Part of the reason I had asked him along was because he is my stepfather, and I wanted him to see my life as I chased trails of ancient migrations into the wilderness. Most members of my family had no idea what I did for a living or how I filled my years. This was like having him over for dinner, showing him around the place.
I capped the first bladder and opened another.
“It’s pretty nasty-tasting stuff,” I said. “But it’s water. It’s not putrid, and the iodine should help the taste a little.”
He took this in, saying nothing.
“Just so you know,” I said, “there were dead fish floating in the hole.”
Dick repeated flatly, “Dead fish.”
“It’ll be hard water to drink,” I said. “But it’ll be good enough until we find something else. We’ve got a good three days’ worth here.”
