by Craig Childs
The next day I suggested entering this canyon of handprints, even though we had planned to only walk across, using this canyon as a bridge to another. Just to explore, I said. I pulled my wet suit out, so that I could last for more than five minutes in this cold spring water. Keith was in a different mood. The trek had worn on us both, but had taken particular vengeance on him. His right Achilles tendon had swollen as if filled with hot sand. The back of his left knee was red, something torn beneath his skin. He decided to stay high, to take the time to dry his gear and study these handprints. He rigged a hand line at one of the interior rims for me, anchoring it to a metal chock he inserted into a crack. “Okay, this is just a guide line,” he told me. “Don't put all your weight on it. I'll be up here for an hour, then I'm coming looking for you.”
“An hour,” I confirmed, feeling taken care of, tugging at the line to test it. I looked up a last time to a constellation of white handprints over our heads, then climbed down on his line. The line ran out before reaching water, so I inched across a ledge and jumped in. The wet suit, a Farmer John variety, came over my shoulders to leave a circle where my chest and throat met. The water was cold, in the low fifties, so I tried not to go in over the circle, not to let the water touch my bare throat. I dog-paddled to a shallower reach, then waded into the canyon with water running nearly to my waist, pushing me along. The canyon bunched tight. I followed archways and dark, narrow tubes of rock, feeling exact hydrological values around my thighs as the water raced past.
The canyon turned into stone carvings, shapes swelling, masking the sky, marking water's passage with involute profiles. The entire canyon floor was an adaptive geometry to the motion of water; each of the shapes, the shallow cups and yawning bends, documented the curve of water's energy. Canyons this intricate are not grotesque like most active geology—the scrambled heaps of mountains, tossed boulders, and rock slides. This is the finest of geomorphology, like wing prints against snow. The stray, momentary strands of moving water leave no impression in the rock. They are too transient. But the fundamental and insistent currents leave signs, so that the bare feathers of moving water are recorded here.
I thought briefly back to Cabeza Prieta, and the recollection startled me. Water had been written all over that landscape, but very roughly, shown in shapes visible from above, in an airplane, where washes and canyons would appear orderly among the fallen blocks of mountains. To have imagined this kind of water and this kind of delicate canyon from Cabeza Prieta would have been almost a sin. It was difficult enough to imagine water there at all. The austere point that water had brought itself to in those water holes was now being traced in cursive, spelling out novels on down the canyon. But still, handprints had been painted here, just like the single handprint painted near the monumental tinaja of Cabeza Prieta. The different brands of water undoubtedly produced different cultures, but the recognition was the same.
At a waterfall dropping maybe twenty feet, I removed a coiled length of webbing I had carried around my left shoulder. The falls formed where boulders clogged the floor, forcing water to run across their roofs. I stood on a boulder's point looking down, unraveling the webbing.
The webbing reached to the frothing pool below. I anchored it to a stack of boulders and tied into it seven loops as handholds, measuring them out with my eyes, carefully tugging each one tight. As a backup, I secured an extra anchor using a small wire stopper with a metal block on the end that fit down a crack in the rock. I climbed into the waterfall, putting my full weight on the loops. The waterfall pounded at my head like fists. I sputtered, looking for air, blinking water out of my eyes. Cold water filled my wet suit, drenching the exposed flesh of my throat, causing a strong breath to leap like a ghost from my mouth. My hand groped down for the next loop. My feet searched the slick rock for something, a crack or nub or any slight imperfection. Then down to the next loop, my legs entering the concussing pool at the bottom. My feet traced the fine lips of holes and tureens in the rock, seeking different currents, finding a place to stand. Once I let go, the webbing snapped out of my hands and bucked as if being tugged by an animal. I continued from there, ducking into lower causeways.
Eventually there came a pool too long and deep to swim. I would lose my body heat. I moved to the tip of the last boulder, looking down the corridor. When I glanced upstream, I saw handprints just beside me, fingers spread just like those painted up high. For a second I was confused by these. No one would have painted anything down here, not this low in the canyon. All the other handprints were high, out of view from here. Paint could never hold against floods. The rock cannot even hold.
Then the paint faded, soaking into sandstone. It was water. The handprints were mine. I had been moving with my wet right hand along the concave wall, using it not as a support but as a reference point.
My handprint was larger than those of the Anasazi, but it had the same configuration, spread as if meaning something: studying the shape of the rock, telling a story about a passage, announcing that the forms are all the same—water, stories, the body. The prints faded into the coffee-colored sandstone. I turned back. My hour was up.
On the sixth day we took a route across a high saddle over numerous feeder canyons. The top was a region of boulders, great red sandstone balls and disks worn from sitting out, hot in the sun. When we came to the cliff edge over one of the canyons, we heard the roar. It was the waterfall I had seen a year ago. Walking off the edge, down through crumbled boulders, we reached a point where we could see it emerging in a clean free fall, then bursting against ledges, sending a rampage of water out of sight into the descending canyon. The full length of the falls was about four hundred feet, with numerous shelves, breaking it into white explosions aside long, diaphanous skirts of water. It emerged from the cave, appearing out of a strikingly green beard of moss and other plants, an absolute anomaly up on the cliff.
We disposed of all gear except what was now needed and climbed toward the waterfall from the southwest, taking a ledge that clung to the wall. The ledge petered out, leaving a small clip of rock at eye level that could be pinched with both hands to support our bodies. We used this pinch to swing over an eighty-foot drop, blindly planting our feet across where the ledge restarted. Gear was shuttled ahead, passed from shelf to shelf while our faces and fingertips hugged the wall. It would have been safer to bring equipment—carabiners, anchors, harnesses, rope—but the weight would have been too much. It would have stalled us long ago, so we brought what we could. After suiting up with headlamps, webbing, and wet suits on one of the larger shelves, about a foot and a half wide, we climbed to the final spine of rock, where last year I had huddled, fearful, reaching my arm into the water.
It was quiet work here. We had fear, of course. My breathing was quick. My chest ached from nervousness in the sticky wrap of the wet suit. At the entrance, from the spine, we rigged a piece of webbing that could be grabbed in an emergency, if we lost footing and got sucked into the waterfall. Keith called it the “Oh, shit” line.
It was important to move straight into this, not to hesitate because of fear or too much caution. We would never make it in if we delayed here. For days now we had recited our mantra of We don't have to enter the cave. We could just get there and look through the entrance, deciding that we had seen plenty, that it was too dangerous, and walk back with clean consciences. We knew that these words were lies, becoming more and more lies as our days wore on our bodies. We came to enter the cave, to walk inside of a spring.
I took the line in my left hand and reached with my right foot into the brink of the waterfall, facing into the cave. Water separated around my calf, sending sprays into the air. I watched over my shoulder to see down about forty feet where the spray twisted and rejoined the falls. Once I had my next foot in, I was able to brace my hands into the entrance of the cave, swift water rising to the tops of my thighs, then bulging to my hips as I pushed forward. The water could not have been much warmer than a glass of ice water.
Keith was just getting his hands around the corner, looking toward the dark. Half in and half out, I turned to look at the daylight, to make sure we knew what we were doing, that we were making the right decision, and our eyes met once. “Pierce the veil,” Keith commanded. I nodded and turned inside.
It was firehose water, charging from a crack. Nothing was soft in here. The rock, a hard limestone, was sharpened into small thorns and razors. If I were to lose my grip, I would be hamburgered before getting another hold, before getting washed out of the waterfall. Immediately my wet suit ripped where I brushed against one of the thorns. My fingers hunted out smooth places, cautiously fitting into niches, then taking some weight.
This was nothing like yesterday's sensuous, refined canyon, hugging me down through its narrows. This was absolutely raw. The water had not yet learned about daylight, about carving a path with all of its slender grace. Its knowledge was primal here. I searched ahead with my headlamp. Within a minute I left the last remnants of sunlight and turned off my light for a few seconds. Complete darkness. I waved my free hand, saw no motion at all. The boom of water stole my remaining senses.
My headlamp on, I glanced back once to see if Keith had entered. He was gripped to a wall, pulling himself ahead, making the same moves I had made. I recognized his reach, and his recoil when he tore his wet suit on a thorn.
The water did not slow as I moved farther inside. Deafening and inarticulate, the sound was terrifying. A hundred opposing currents twined up my body, to my crotch, my navel, my chest. They fumbled like mad hands demanding, racing around my legs, yanking at me, vanishing behind me toward the exit. My body hardly dented the water's boiling surface. Rivers burst from multiple corridors, pouring from crescent hallways as if bulkheads had blown in a sinking ship.
“Choice!” I shouted.
Keith, an arm's length behind me, yelled, “Which is bigger?”
I threw my arm out to a passage on the right.
“Take it!”
We followed these rifts for at least a hundred yards, turning back at dead ends, the cones of our headlamps shifting from water to ceiling to water. I could smell our bodies, the saporous, fertile stink of life floating aside our breath. Nothing else alive or dead in here. We came to a low archway, our lights piercing the turquoise interior. There was only enough headroom in front of us for breathing, no way to tell how far the passage led around the next bend. I looked toward Keith, shining the light at his chest so it would not strike his eyes.
The sound ahead was like wind pushed down a glass tube. “Should we keep going?” I asked.
We were spidered between knobs and walls, holding ourselves in place despite the current so that our limbs made strange angles against the rock. Keith crouched until his shoulders met the river's surface. He studied the passageway.
I did not want to drown in a cave. It was one of the more horrible ends I could imagine, pressed to the ceiling as my headlamp shorts out. So we stared at this low passage that would seal off if the water came up six inches. Keith squinted as we both trained our lights on the same spot, as far in as we could see. Mist rolled from his mouth into the beam of his light. “Looks like the way,” he said.
He took a handhold on the ceiling and pulled himself in. The choice was made. I followed, studying every turn ahead with my light, taking holds in the limestone over my head, hauling myself along. My head slid underneath as I gripped my way through, my feet touching rock now and then. The passage did not widen, but after fifteen feet of travel became much taller, maybe forty feet. It was in this last passage that I passed ahead and wedged into a tight hole, with Keith shouting behind me that the cave ended here.
I kept trying ahead, but found the water only coming from the ceiling, from holes too tight to even take my hand. I turned back and looked at Keith. This was already more than I had anticipated. I had thought we would maybe venture a hundred feet into the spring, but it seemed as if we had now worked a quarter-mile back.
I pushed out my right hand like a stop sign. “This is it. No more.”
Keith pointed toward dry boulders and mantles above us. “What about up?”
Our headlamps brushed the ceiling, showing a few passages. We went up. Each of us tried a different dry route, climbing through dust and pieces of rubble. I ascended a chimney, emerging into a room the size of an aircraft hangar. Perhaps seventy feet tall and over a hundred feet long, its ceiling was a lifted dome, its floor a garden of waterfalls and pools. Darkness ate my beam of light toward the back. A quarter-mile into a desert cliff, beneath two thousand feet of solid rock, inside the belly of the mother, was this: a buried grotto with the broken plumbing of a spring sending water everywhere. As I walked, my light took on altering values, passing through swift water, still water, deep water, sheeting water, plumes of mist, and shiny, wet stones. The river ran the width of a street.
When Keith arrived, we stood together, our headlamps casting about the space. Nothing was said. The water was still loud, but had more definition in here. We could hear individual waterfalls instead of the galling roar of the corridors below.
At the far end sat a broad, deep well, its surface motionless beneath a tapering ten-foot ceiling. Our lights drifted into the lagoon-blue water and to the cerulean boulders sunken beneath. Green ribs of reflected light traced the ceiling into farther chambers.
“You want to go on?” I asked.
“I'm getting really cold.”
“Yeah, I'm feeling that too. You want to go on?”
He waited, studying the length of the swim, the shape of the ceiling. “Yes,” he said.
We slipped into the well and swam across. In the center of my stomach I felt the drawing weight of the space below. I looked down to see if my feet might brush anything. There was no bottom within reach of my light. I did not look down again.
Now, when it touched the flesh of my throat, the water cut my blood. Sharp on the jugular, the cold moved directly into my body, pumped without reservation into my heart. Our gasping, percussive breaths came in rhythm with our strokes, as if we were trying to throw the cold from our mouths. We rounded one bend, swimming side by side as the ceiling came down to a smooth cupola five feet over our heads. We swam into one of the inside hallways.
“I can't,” Keith blurted between breaths. “Too cold. I've got to go back.”
We treaded for a moment, facing each other. The cold was now all the way in. “I'm keeping on,” I said. “Just around this next corner.”
“All right, but I'm going back.”
“I'll be right behind you, in a few minutes.”
“Go,” he said, as he turned to swim out the way we had entered.
Cold followed the path of veins beneath my skin, into my organs. I swam ahead another several strokes before drifting into a back room, a slight wake pushing ahead of me. By now the sounds of rushing water had faded. I climbed to a shelf and stood knee-deep, flexing the muscles in my arms and legs for warmth. My mind was already faltering toward hypothermia, my thoughts becoming rudimentary, drifting away as if I were falling asleep. My face felt weak. I could not hold an expression. I would have to speak out loud to remember any of the details.
This room, I whispered. Remember this room.
It seemed to be the end of the cave. Water welled slowly from below. The surface quieted from my swimming until my light sank straight down, no ripples in the way. About every forty seconds a bead of water fell from the ceiling, dotting a circle into the pool. Each drip was so widely spaced that the silence between had weight. Then the weight broke with the next startling drip.
The drip seemed to be something to remember too, something that would fall every day, every year in consummate, unstirred darkness. The ripples would spread unnoticed like those of a star pulsing at the far edge of a galaxy. I whispered so that I would remember it.
I watched radiating circles disappear before the next drip fell. Then I heard my breath. I held it for a second. This was not silence like a windless field at n
ight. It was silence like a space buried deep within the earth.
The silence, I whispered. Remember this silence.
I thought of the Hopi emergence story, and that before everyone was able to climb out of the sipapu, the ceremonial song ended. It could be sung only four times. The hole closed on those who had not yet reached the surface.
Those people, I thought. I looked into the pool, as far down as I could see. Were they in here? But there was nothing in here. The impossible pain of the world above, the mystery and beauty and fear, there was none of this in the far back of the cave. None of the sky and purple asters and hot winds. No emotion or desire. I reached to my headlamp and turned it off. Total darkness moved in. It was true, there was nothing. This was the beginning, so utterly still that I could not breathe. Then I heard the drop of water. It plucked the surface of the pool with a low, ripe tone. The first act of creation. I inhaled.
I swam and climbed back along our only route, aiming for the exit with fumbling, hypothermic moves. At the first sign of bluish light near the cave's mouth, I felt the soapy slickness of algae on the rock. Then moss as I waded farther with the current. Then tufts of maidenhair fern and monkeyflower with crimson blooms above the water, and a spider's web catching mist. The mouth of the cave became a green tunnel of life. I grabbed the emergency line and pulled myself from the water, out to the brightly lit spine of rock. Mayflies mobbed the air.
Keith stood on the ledge just beside me. Sunlight needled into my skin, rapidly drawing blood toward the surface. I did not know how long we had been in there. Twenty minutes at least. Half an hour maybe. Keith checked his watch. Nearly an hour and a half. The interior of the cave began washing from me like a dream. I looked down fifty feet to the ledge where we had left our gear.
“I need to get to my notebook,” I said. But then I had to breathe. Each time I took a breath I forgot. By the time I climbed to my notes, the air and sunlight had turned my memory into incorporeal sensations, rendering it in an older, more arcane language. It was the same as it is with dreams. Reason was lost as I clutched at my memory. I opened the notebook and wrote what I could. Remember this silence.
