House of Rain

by Craig Childs

  Dick and I sat in the shade together, cradled by this huge mouth eroded from the cliff. From here we looked across the white heat of the land outside, and my eyes tracked over various stone shapes in the distance for any sign of greenery—a drip, a seep. There was no water anywhere. A teardrop of a butte stood maybe five hundred feet below us, half a mile away. After studying the butte for a minute, I pulled out my binoculars and handed them to Dick.

  “You see something circular down there, on top of that butte?” I asked.

  He adjusted the binoculars for a bit, asking me where, and finally said that yes, he saw something round in the center of the butte.

  “Does it look natural?” I asked, recognizing immediately the foolishness of the question. What out here is not natural?

  “Hard to tell,” my stepfather said. “But it doesn’t look quite right. Something’s out of place.”

  He handed the binoculars back to me and waited. He was willing to go about anywhere with me, walking for hours in the sun if necessary to escape another day of half-sleeping in hot shade. I steadied the binoculars, my forearms resting on my knees.

  “It’s something,” I said. “I’m going down there. You can stay up here if you want. I’ll come back for you.”

  I left him there and climbed down the carved toeholds, where I stepped into stinging sunlight. I side-hilled along balconies of sandstone, using my hands for balance on the hot, parched soil. Rocks clattered above me, dust kicking up. It was Dick coming down behind me.

  The butte stretched ahead of us, rising slightly where I would expect a rise if people had built here. I began to notice pottery, broken pieces growing in number, thickening the sandy orange soil the closer we got to the rise, which started to take on a circular form. Larger sherds appeared, half sections of bowls, red ware necks and bases. Gardens of red pottery spurred me on, as I quickly scanned the ground, seeing the remains of rooms, shapes in the earth. In the center was the dish of a kiva.

  I stepped to the kiva’s edge while Dick made his way over. It was not an ordinary kiva. It was at least fifty feet across, a great kiva, like the ones I had seen around Chaco and north of here near the head of Comb Ridge. I had not been expecting to find anything this large in the area. All of the great kivas in this part of the world had been mapped, I thought; not excavated or even measured, but at least recorded; spotted from airplanes, walked upon by ground crews, described through archaeological rumors. There was never any mention of a great kiva out here. This was right down the middle of Zedeño’s line.

  From just a cursory glance at the pottery, it was obvious that this had been a substantial regional center in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a place where many people had gathered in the dry hell of what was to become the Utah-Arizona border. I was impressed. That anybody had ever lived in this fractured topography was a monumental accomplishment, let alone a people who could afford shapely pottery and break what looked like hundreds if not thousands of vessels around the ring of this kiva.

  Dick walked up with a grinding stone in his hand, studying it through a hand lens as he approached.

  “Oh, yeah, that’s granite for sure,” he was saying. “Mica...quartz...feldspar...this had to have been brought from some distance. I don’t know any granite from around here. Probably it came up through one of the diatremes.”

  A geologist, he was thinking in longer time frames than I, his mind trained for a realm in which matter creeps indiscernibly, centimeters accumulating into mountain ranges. His scale was in billions and millions of years, mine in thousands and hundreds, yet the processes we studied were inseparable, the earthen crust and human civilization hardly different in their uplifting and falling but for the time involved. He handed the stone to me. It was as smooth as a rolling pin, a mano used to grind corn, amaranth, dried beans. I told him what it was, said that people in the area probably mined the diatremes for good, hard rocks that would make durable grinding stones. I slid my palm across the stone’s flattest, polished surface and then used it to point around us, explaining that the circular depression in front of us would have been an underground ballroom, maybe with quarter-ton timbers holding up an audacious wooden ceiling.

  “Can you imagine something like that here?” I said. “It must be sixty miles to the nearest good tree.”

  I told Dick that I knew of only four great kivas documented over the next fifty miles north of here and one at the Twin Towers in New Mexico to the east. Just about due south there was one at Antelope House in Canyon de Chelly sixty, seventy miles away, another south of there near Ganado. The closest one I could think of was at the point where Comb Ridge touches the San Juan River in Utah, an auspicious site marking a change in the landscape. On the map, the four nearest great kivas form a ring around a blank spot where no great kivas have been recorded. The center of that spot was where we were standing now, where this ceremonial chamber lay collapsed and mostly buried like a mouth forming an O fifty feet across.

  “Found yourself a missing link,” Dick said.

  I handed the mano back to him.

  Zedeño would want to hear about this, I thought, an undocumented great kiva out in the arid path she had traced on that table. This was a phenomenal find in an era when it was said that all the big sites had been documented, that there were no more startling architectural discoveries to be made in the Southwest.

  Surrounding this kiva, its interior as shallow and round as a dinner plate, I could see an attached cluster of rooms, their shapes pushing up through the soil. This is where they kept paraphernalia for the dancers, I thought. In the great kiva they must have begged the gods to open the underworld lake and let a little water back to the surface, the dancers’ feet shaking dust down from the rafters.

  Dick and I circled the kiva through the heat of the day like antelope grazing in tall, dry grass, our motions uncomplicated, difficult to detect. My hand drifted to the ground to lift the handle of a jug, then a red-slipped quarter of a jar, then a corrugated rind of red-painted pottery. We walked circles around the top of the butte. Every fifteen minutes or half hour our orbits would cross. Then Dick would lead me over to wildly colored pieces of carved chert (a type of rock), aqua and bloodred, and I would point out to him the base of a gray corrugated vessel, its coils winding inward in a graceful spiral. Then we would break away from each other again and drift back into our own universes beneath the sun.

  You could die here, I thought. You could rove the ground until thirst is forgotten. The skin on my hands was cracked and brown, my wrists blushing with sunburn from holding these sherds up to my eye and exposing the undersides of my forearms. The volume of ceramics was outlandish. Were the sherds candy wrappers and popcorn bags stampeded to the ground after a ball game, or were they coins serene in a shallow fountain, left as offerings? Whatever they were, they indicated the presence of a sizable, or at least a well--supplied, population, many pots and people moving through this desolate place.

  By the time I stopped, my movements were languid, inaccurate as I wasted in the heat. I had begun picking potsherds up and not returning them the way they were found, just lowering my hand, relaxing my grip, and letting them fall to the earth. Dick headed elsewhere, looking for shade. I drank from my bottle, a searing taste of iodine and death, and I let the bottle down, empty, hanging from my hand. I looked up toward the horizon, my eyes sweeping a country of stone spikes and ridges, Monument Valley in the distance, absolutely dry. Everything dry. I wished for summer to end, for this oppressive sun to fade. I wished for water, please.

  PART FIVE

  NORTHEAST ARIZONA

  RETREAT

  NEAR MONUMENT VALLEY

  For a short time Comb Ridge and Chinle Wash are on top of each other, riding along the same north-south trend, one a tightly meandering canyon and wash, the other a long and imperious crest of rock. Near the Arizona border they divide and follow two different geological destinies. Chinle Wash keeps its cardinal path straight south toward Ganado Mesa, while Comb Ridge str
ays westward, forming an elegant arc across the northern Arizona desert, a curving wall made of peach-colored sandstone. Crossing through the Navajo reservation, the ridge becomes a backdrop for the voluminous red buttes of Monument Valley. Hardly a living thing is to be seen but wind-raked snubs of blackbrush.

  Storms in the winter roam through Monument Valley like herd animals, low to the ground, enveloping one butte in clouds, revealing another. Cold wind scrapes and hisses across the bare red earth. On this day I was riding in the back of a pickup with a companion, a traveling man in his twenties named Colin. Dry bits of snow flurried across the highway as we watched Monument Valley recede over the tailgate, our gloved hands stuffed into our coats, our faces huddled down into our collars. Our two packs lay like carcasses in the bed with us. We had been carrying their winter weight through the Navajo wilderness when we reached this highway and hitched a ride. Colin looked weatherworn, his boots and pants wet from breaking through stream ice, his face unshaven, reddened and chafed.

  The pickup wobbled a little on its battered frame as we passed mudded domes of Navajo hogans. Fence gates were left open where abandoned tires were stacked on top of each other, used as signposts, their bald black rubber beginning to gray from too many seasons in the sun.

  This desert must have stretched into eerie isolation several hundred years ago, ghost towns of wasted jacal and stonework that had once been stopovers for extensive trade networks. People retreated across this land in the thirteenth century, pulling back their settlements for more than a hundred miles in all directions to hole up just down the highway from here. It was an impressive movement of far-flung populations, like the electric snap of a tendon yanking them back home, leaving kivas and villages empty in the hinterlands during a time of drought and conflict.

  The same thing was happening around Mesa Verde as was happening in northeast Arizona. People were scrambling for shelter, for highlands. Here they settled in valleys and high basins just above the desert, a territory known as Kayenta, analogous to the Northern San Juan Basin in Colorado, where farming was more tenable during the Great Drought. And if one needed an escape, a pair of precipitous, forested mesas stood nearby, Arizona’s own Mesa Verde. Kayenta was a haven.

  The towering buttes of Monument Valley shifted past each other as we traveled at a processional pace, forty miles per hour in a pickup. A raven perched on a fence post, wings pulled in like a coat against the beleaguering wind.

  The huge black bird startled when we drove by, its bolt of a beak coming up, wings trimming back to launch as it went up on its toes. Sitting cold in the pickup bed, I was glad to see that the raven didn’t fly, but instead settled its feathers. It was a cold enough day, no need to take off into the wind if it didn’t have to. I watched the raven recede, eventually becoming a comma in the distance, overtaken by banners of black trash-bag plastic flying from barbed wire fences.

  We were nearing the town of Kayenta, a mostly Navajo community with a high school, a post office, a Bashas’ grocery store. To this town and its vicinity, the Great Drought brought waves of thirteenth-century migrants looking for farming opportunities and for cultural alliance, neighbors to live by. Many clans of Anasazi converged here.

  Half Mesa Verde, half Kayenta cliffdwelling near Monument Valley. REGAN CHOI

  In that time a great cliff dwelling was built on the eastern margin of Kayenta, its windows looking out at Monument Valley in the distance. The floor plan of this site—one of the larger cliff dwellings in the Southwest—is partly based on Mesa Verde styles, while its rockwork is that of the more western Kayenta Anasazi. It is believed that this cliff dwelling represents the larger intermarriage between Anasazi from the Four Corners and those from Kayenta. Wives were producing pottery (traditionally a female task) in an eastern and northern Mesa Verde style. They lived with husbands who wove textiles and built structures (both believed to have been male roles) in a western Kayenta fashion.* Half of the pottery found at this site derives from Four Corners traditions, and the other half consists of red wares and intricately hatched black-on-whites from Kayenta. One team of archaeologists documenting this cliff dwelling referred to it as “a Mesa Verde pueblo with some Kayenta affiliations,” while another team called it “a Kayenta outpost with many Mesa Verde connections.” In a time of escalating migrations, at least some distinct groups of Anasazi seem to have found common ground.

  Prior to this the Kayenta Anasazi had been evenly scattered, some living in great-house communities around Comb Ridge, most occupying isolated farming households across northeast Arizona and southeast Utah. As drought came on, these people migrated to just south of Monument Valley looking for sanctuary, skyrocketing the local population. Around the modern town of Kayenta, smallthirteenth-century colonies quickly expanded into large, centralized pueblos with courtyards and plazas. At first these villages had no more than fifty rooms, but as people arrived from the surrounding country, they grew to more than three hundred rooms and were soon ringed by satellites of encampments and small communities.

  Bruce Anderson, a prominent elder field archaeologist of the Kayenta Anasazi, once told me about surveying this region. In his slow western drawl, Anderson explained how he had excavated along the path of a new railroad across the Kayenta heartland. There he unearthed the remains of pueblos packed tightly together, large residential sites no more than two to three miles apart.

  Along this planned railroad, Anderson clipped through a burial plot in front of a pueblo that had all but vanished under blowing dust and sand. There he dug up fifty skeletons within the thirty-foot-wide space of his survey corridor. Among the jewelry and many ceramic vessels he uncovered was a burial assembly of five wooden flutes, each a foot long and painted an alluring blue. Maybe it was the mark of a special society, he thought, a member of a Flute Clan, or a musician’s burial. He kept digging and finding more remains, proof of a high culture archaeologists had not expected in this region. Since Anderson’s work, evidence of vigorous trade in the area has been unearthed, trade that stretched into distant regions at a time when long-distance exchange all but ceased in the Four Corners.

  “If I could get a hold of a time machine,” Anderson said, “I would go back to Kayenta in the twelve hundreds. Out of any time or any place in the Southwest, that’s where I would want to see.”

  Many of the larger pueblos in the Kayenta region went up on the highest points around, establishing line-of-sight networks so that one settlement was usually in view of at least two others. In one case a notch was manually chopped into the terrain so that two key pueblos could see each other. In another case an unbroken corridor of visibility was established by way of relays between a site on a valley floor up to a nearby mesa and from there into a canyon on the other side. These people were making eye contact with each other across great distances.

  A compact social matrix is revealed by the settlements themselves. A litany of dedicated architectural forms came into vogue in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries around Kayenta. Large residential quarters were built, accessed through low-silled doorways with specialized vestibules. The walls were neatly plastered, the floors prepared with wet clay and sand. Small niches and shelves appeared in corners and on walls. Arrays of ceremonial and secular gathering places were constructed—kivas, plazas, and food-processing areas with batteries of stone bins for sorting cornmeal—were left unroofed and open to the public, implying that they were community property, places to kneel and grind corn together.

  Many different people were being thrust into these communities, and yet order was kept. Kayenta could easily have become an unruly shantytown, a refugee camp unable to survive even a decade without spiraling downward into conflict and famine. Instead the people were able to integrate to the point where one can seen hierarchical layers of households bound into federations of local pueblos. Isolated farmers had somehow consolidated into urban planners. Something in the Anasazi ideology, perhaps a rising and falling history of contraction and expansion, allowed them to shift
seamlessly into whatever pattern of organization was needed. This was a civilization of incredible potential.

  As we arrived in the town of Kayenta, the pickup listing badly on its unevenly worn brakes, we drove past the Burger King with its World War II Navajo Code Talkers display. When we pulled into a gas station, Colin and I jumped out and hoisted our packs behind us. We walked around to the cab, where a middle-aged Navajo man with a bit of plump Hopi in his face sat crammed with his two kids and his wife. I quickly smoothed a rumpled five-dollar bill between my palms and handed it to him.

  “Thanks for the ride,” Colin said.

  The round-faced man, small and beaming, told us to take care.

  Colin and I walked to the highway just as evening lights flickered on at the gas station. We stood quietly, enjoying the sense of rebirth that inevitably comes from getting out of the back of a pickup and having it pull away behind you. We could go anywhere from here, the book of our lives not yet written.

  For a minute we stood saying nothing to each other, assessing the world around us. Black Mesa rose roughly over the town, with an ivory band of cliff across its top. Beside it Skeleton Mesa bent up through arcs and precipices of red stone. The interiors of both of these mesas are gutted by high canyons we could not see from here, and inside of them are Anasazi cliff dwellings marking a turn for the worse late in the thirteenth century.

  THE LAST CLIFF DWELLINGS OF THE ANASAZI

  MESAS OF KAYENTA

  By midnight Colin and I were walking under the full moon, crossing miles of ivory light, the ground mostly barren, eaten back by cattle. Far from any road we stopped at the rasp of a solitary juniper tree, where we laid our bags and slept in the frozen dark.