Getting to Grey Owl

by Kurt Caswell

  One spring afternoon camped at Junction Ruin, some four miles from Kane Gulch station, I sat in my camp chair with a view of the stonework high in a crevice below the canyon rim. A moderate breeze carried off the stiff-sweet scent of juniper. A canyon wren called from somewhere out in front of me. The ladder high on the wall, broken by the years and precariously pinned to something I could not see, allowed me to imagine people dwelling here, milling about in the final moments of the day, the metronomic rhythms of the corn grinders, the laughing and crying of children, voices in reverberation in the rock shelters where the continual repair and expansion of the adobe dwellings cycled on. Village life.

  Nights in the canyon can be cold this time of year, even into the single digits, and as I sat there lost in this meditation, the temperature fell as the sun-line climbed up the canyon wall. The woman I was married to in those days once remarked that the sun sets backward in canyons, rising up from the bottom. I pulled on a fleece. The change I felt in that moment, the difference that urged me to pull on a warmer layer, awakened me to the passage of time in an otherwise timeless moment. I realized that in the moment previous to that awareness, nothing out there beyond the canyon walls concerned me, that I had been first cut off and then suspended as if by a great net that held me apart from the goings-on of the workaday world. The canyon was all I knew.

  This was not the first time I had had this experience, not an anomaly, that coming into this country you feel a soft blend of comfort and agitation, a strange awareness when you crawl from your tent and the sun is sparking an eager light high on the canyon rim, illuminating the soft sandstone stained by eons of rainfall and stormwater as you blink at the beauty and simplicity of the way the people must have lived here, how they must have hungered and fought and made love and sang and despaired and lived, and also died, in the shadow of the canyon and in the glow of a springtime moon. On any average night, or any average morning, in Grand Gulch you feel the presence of this presence, as if you have passed through a wormhole, a breach in space and time.

  In May 1996, I walked the canyon up to Kane Gulch station from Collins Springs, just fifteen miles up from the river. Those fifteen miles of canyon that I would not see, the boulders and the hot, dry emptiness of the canyon where even the Anasazi dared not go (there is little evidence of Anasazi occupation in the lower reaches), gleamed like a bright temptation in my mind. For one thing, Everett Ruess is said to have traveled in Grand Gulch, and at the river, he carved the word “Nemo” into the sandstone. This was his assumed identity, inspired by Captain Nemo from Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea. “Nemo” is Latin for “no one,” which was Ruess’s plan all along: to give up his ego, his identity, and become little more than another desert creature dwelling there, to be absorbed by the canyon so completely as to pass through unnoticed. The hitch in his plan is obvious: if he wished to leave no trace of himself, why did he leave a trace of himself? Well, the inscription has vanished too, or has at least been lost, as the few who claim to have seen it are either dead or believe that the river may have claimed it. Now all we have is the story. On that trip, I was leading a group of a dozen high school freshmen, part of the spring outdoor program at the private school where I was teaching, and it was not a time to be wandering about in search of Nemo.

  To say something more of his story, Everett Ruess traveled alone in the desert Southwest during the summers of 1930 to 1934. Sometimes he traveled with a donkey, sometimes a horse. And for a time, with a dog as his companion. He was a young man, only sixteen when he made his first journey. His mother had taught him to paint, and, afflicted by his art, he decided to make himself into a painter. To do so, he knew, he needed to fill the wellspring of his imagination with experience. He needed to make known in his body what was knocking about in his head. To be a painter, Ruess knew, he needed to make his life into his art. He needed to become a person. Curious that the more he traveled in the canyons, the more of his identity he gave up.

  Most of what we know about Ruess’s life comes from the many letters he sent home during his travels. In a letter to his father dated July 16, 1931, euphoria erupts from Ruess’s immersion in the wild deep of the Grand Canyon. “For a week I was in the depths of the canyon,” he writes.

  The heat was over 140 degrees at one time. I followed obscure trails and reveled in the rugged grandeur of the crags, and in the mad, plunging glory of the Colorado River. Then on sunset I threw the pack on the burro again and took the long, steep up trail. I traveled for several hours by starlight. A warm wind rushed down the side canyon, singing in the pinions. Above—the blue night sky, powdered with stars. Beside—the rocks, breathing back to the air their stored-up heat of the day. Below—the black void. . . . My life has continued as I have wished.

  His life didn’t continue much longer, however. Everett Ruess disappeared in 1934, last seen somewhere in Davis Gulch, in southeastern Utah. A search party found his burro but not his bones. The story of what happened to him is still a mystery. National Geographic broke a story in 2009 claiming that the remains of Everett Ruess had been found—but that claim has since been disputed. How did he die? Perhaps he starved to death: in 1933 he wrote, “I have been living on raw carrots and banana sandwiches.” Or maybe he offed himself as he faced the horror of returning to school: “How could a lofty, unconquerable soul like mine remain imprisoned in that academic backwater, wherein all but the most docile wallow in a hopeless slough?” But, more than likely, he fell to his death, as during his last two summers, he came to taking greater and greater risks: “Hundreds of times I have trusted my life to crumbling sandstone and nearly vertical angles in the search for water or cliff dwellings. Twice I was nearly gored to death by a wild bull,” he wrote; and then, “I have been flirting pretty heavily with Death, the old clown.” And finally: “He who has looked long on naked beauty may never return to the world. . . . Alone and lost, he must die on the altar of beauty.” The novelist John Nichols claims that Ruess did just that, “fashion[ing] a magnificent obsession that probably killed him. . . . It was his life,” Nichols writes, “that was his greatest work of art.”

  On a trip in the spring of 2001, one of my companions, a self-made man who, at that time, ran a backhoe business and portable lumber mill, operated and maintained a small hydroelectric dam, patrolled for a lumber company, and outfitted wilderness trips with llamas, found a human femur at Turkey Pen Ruin. We were neighbors in California’s southern Cascades, our wives were close friends, and this was his first trip in Anasazi country. As he is also a potter and maintains and operates a wood-fired kiln at his home, he was at first interested in the many pot sherds travelers had set up on slabs of sandstone, and those exposed in the sandy soil. He inspected the sherds, detailing the firing process and pigments. “Most of this stuff,” he said, “was fired at very low temperature. And notice how much care went into making these lines. That’s almost a right angle. You can see the brushstrokes here.” He then pointed out veins of color in the sedimentary layers of the canyon walls, a bright band of yellow-stained rock: possible pigment sources. “If I was looking for a yellow, for example, I’d look up there. Some kind of mineral seep or something.” Then, studying the long black streaks on the canyon walls known as desert varnish, the path water takes when it rains, he became convinced that the black, geometric patterning on Anasazi pottery was made with the canyon in mind. “They were re-creating their home landscape,” he said. You could see this easily, how the canyon, a negative space, took shape in the positive space of the pot, which itself contained another negative space inside.

  The femur lay exposed at the back of the rock shelter near the remains of a dwelling with two small doors. My companion came upon it easily, without much enthusiasm. It was one of many objects the people had left behind. Long, white, delicate, the bone was not cracked or broken. I have seen hundreds of bones in the desert. Cow, certainly, but also horse, sheep, deer, coyote, mouse, skunk, pronghorn, bobcat, even javelina. This was none of these. We kne
w right away what it was, and we did not doubt what he had found. My companion held the bone against his thigh, and you could see that it belonged there.

  The sun comes in early at Turkey Pen and warms the sands, so standing there that morning, the light was good. We could see everything. On the wall curving up over our heads, a collection of pictographs: handprints, a few sheep, and two ghostly figures in white, hovering over the site. Wetherill is said to have discovered and then removed human remains from Turkey Pen, and holding the femur with those figures dancing along the walls, I sensed that I was trespassing.

  Inspecting the bone, I noticed a series of striations near the greater trochanter, some horizontal, some vertical, like a game of tic-tac-toe. The markings looked old, but I didn’t know enough to know. I noticed how the shaft hides a web of fractures, most of which look to be superficial, a result of the stresses of time. Near the lateral epicondyle—something remarkable to both of us in that moment—a thick flake of tissue, translucent red, and stiff-sharp beneath my thumb. I came to think of the bone as that of a man, but there was no way for me to know. Against my own leg, it was several inches shorter. Perhaps this man stood five foot eight, or five nine; he would have been smaller than me, anyway. And perhaps he even stood where I stood, a long time ago, with the light coming in just like this.

  Turkey Pen was quiet that morning until we heard below us another party coming up the trail. Their presence jogged us from our reveries, and we had to acknowledge the miles we planned to walk that day. We needed to get moving. My companion then took up the femur, pulled back some of the cool dry sand that had fallen into the trough where he found it, laid it in, and buried it.

  I led my group of high school freshmen up-canyon from Collins Springs, leaving those bottom fifteen miles for another day. This was a hardy group of kids, and we moved at a steady pace, pushing along the trail through the stands of desert willow and across the sandy bottoms where our boots slipped back and turned the walk into a slog. We paused at Bannister Ruin, Deer Canyon, and Big Pour Off Spring. At Polly’s Island on our second day, the group followed a faint trail through the cacti and dense sage. I heard a scream up ahead, and the line stopped.

  “What is it?” I called out.

  “Nothing,” one of the boys said. “A snake.”

  “A rattlesnake?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he called back. “A snake. But it’s gone.”

  “I think the trail is gone too,” someone else said.

  And the trail was gone, vanishing into the thick brush and sage where we stood waist deep, bearing the weight of our packs, a pale midday sun hammering our heads. I heard the first boy say, “I think we’re lost.”

  “Are we lost?” someone called back to me.

  “Certainly not,” I said.

  “OK,” he said. “But do you know where we are?”

  I didn’t. I had not looked at the map all morning. The trail and the canyon led you easily in the direction you wanted to go, and when a ruin or panel of rock art or anything interesting came along, you always noticed. To me, in that moment, it really didn’t matter if we knew or didn’t know, and had I been looking at the map, I would have confirmed this to be true. Had we bushwhacked on up the west side of Polly’s Island, a massive butte that splits the canyon around it, the sage and dense brush might have been challenging, and might even have ruined our fine attitudes. Once around the point, the passage opens up, and a good trail leads back to the main canyon. At that point, we would have known precisely where we were, that understanding coming in after the fact, not before.

  “Good point,” I said. “I’m not sure where we are. So. Yeah. Where are we?”

  “Ohmygod,” another student said. “We’re totally lost.”

  “What are we going to do?” the first asked.

  These were the days before everyone had a cell phone, and before backcountry travelers routinely carried GPS locators or sat phones. We had no way of contacting the outside world. The world of the canyon was all we had. I carried my running shoes in my pack for this very reason. If we needed help, my plan was to find a place to climb up to the rim and run east through the desert until I hit the highway.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “We’re not in danger in any way.”

  “But we’re lost,” the first student said.

  “We’re not lost,” I said.

  “But you don’t know where we are,” the second said.

  “Right. I don’t know where we are, but we’re not lost.”

  “I’m out of water,” someone said.

  “Ohmygod,” someone else said.

  “Let’s go back,” the first student said.

  “Look. We’re all fine. Is there no trail ahead?” I asked.

  “Nope,” the first student said.

  “So, let’s go the easiest route. We can turn around, no problem.”

  And so, a little agitated, a little panicked, the group turned back, and we made our way to the main canyon and around Polly’s Island.

  “That wasn’t so bad,” the first student said. “Being lost, I mean.”

  “Nope,” I said.

  That morning in the spring of 2006, I was leading another group of students, college juniors and seniors, on a twenty-four-hour solo fast in Bullet Canyon near Jailhouse Ruin, just down from Perfect Kiva. Base-camped beneath a massive juniper, my coleader and I waited. The stoves kept breakfast warm and the coffee hot as the students walked in, one by one, from their private solo sites. We formed a welcome circle, but no one spoke just yet. To break the silence, we would give a rousing cheer, then open the pots to serve out the food.

  What happened to them out there during the long bright day and the long dark night? Fear. And personal struggles. And presences visiting in dreams. But then one of them asked if back here at base camp my coleader and I had heard a flute on the wind just as the light of the sun was going out. No, we told them. We heard nothing. They looked at each other. We did, they confirmed. A flute song. It went on for about ten minutes, maybe fifteen, they said, and hearing it helped them feel better, helped them not to be afraid.

  Up Shiek Canyon, a mile from the Bullet Canyon junction, a spring forms a pool near a few small cottonwoods. The shelf above and opposite is a fine camp, with views across the spring of a massive panel of pictographs. These shapes and figures and handprints, one of the major draws for most travelers, were likely made over many hundreds of years of occupation: A series of headless figures in red pigment, their wide, squared bodies stippled to reveal other shapes in the negative space. A row of bulbs on top of long lines, and, hovering over them, a circle with wavy lines radiating from each side that look like wings. Another figure with a death’s head, the shoulders and torso in yellow. A complete figure with a rectangular body, an impressive phallus dropping straight down, and two immense horns on its head, likely the ceremonial headdress of a shaman who walks between worlds. And not far off, another pictograph, the green mask, for which this place, Green Mask Spring, is named. The long hair along each side of the face is red and looks to be bound with white cord in the middle and at the ends. The face has no visible eyes; instead it consists of alternating bands of green and yellow, edged in white. It really is a tiny thing, about fifteen centimeters wide and twenty high, and is positioned high on the wall, so it is not easy to find with all the business and chaos of the panel. It may take some time before you see the green mask, but once you do, it glows like a beacon.

  At the mouth of Step Canyon, farther down, I find a terrifying face on the wall with gawking white eyes and lion-sharp teeth. The eyes are a little too close together, so that they penetrate in gazing back at you. It is a demon, or a man possessed. Handprints are everywhere, also human figures, some with pendulous phalluses; a few coyotes; a three-foot-tall quail with one red eye. All these eyes, watching. This place feels loaded, like something happened here, the memory of which could not get out. Great plates of sandstone peel from the wall, as if shaken loose, and have fallen and
settled upright on the ground.

  And farther down still at Big Man Panel, that day after not getting lost at Polly’s Island, concentric circles beneath the left hand of the “big man” on the right. These two huge figures—their high, squared shoulders, their hair like bulbs below the chin-line—look like shaman who may move between worlds. Three concentric circles, according to some sources, are the sun’s light on the outside, the sun itself, and then the portal, the umbilicus, the gateway through which flows a life energy between this world and the other. The shaman may use this gateway to get in and to get out.

  Concentric circles are not to be confused with the spiral, which some authorities say is the sipapu, the emergence place where the Anasazi were born into this world. This was a birth through water and through the womb of the earth. Do not forget the great flood of Genesis and Gilgamesh, and the flood that moves the people along on their migration route in the Navajo creation story. And do not forget that all human babies are born into this world through water from the mother’s womb.

  Think of the canyon from above: A wound in the skin of the earth where birds and lizards and coyotes live, and, long ago, people. Where cottonwood and willow and juniper hold the fragile soils, and the soil itself is alive with cryptobiota. Orange globe mallow, sage, Mormon tea. Like a cut in your arm, or like the opening of a woman, water made this gash in the earth, and life rushed in to fill it. One archaeologist has put it this way: “It seems everything goes into the canyon and nothing goes out.”

  On one walk in the canyon, a BLM ranger came upon me filtering water below a great sandstone knob that towers above a ledge where the water runs clean and pure. Lots of people stop here for water. I stopped here for water.