by Craig Childs
The roads crossing this reservation are dotted with death-memorial shrines, one every couple of miles, and countless others are scattered through the country, marking drownings, horse accidents, murders, heart attacks, or suicides, showing not the burial places but the actual places of sudden death. In a region of clustered votive candles, crucifixes, Virgin Mary statues, and small plaster grottos or nichos filled with flowers, this desert shrine of ocotillo stood out like a piece of gallery art, its sculptor working only with natural elements. I wondered if the makers had intended it to be so visually alluring, ascending orderly from the ground, becoming playful, then delirious as the ocotillo limbs flared back toward the ground or formed corkscrews to the sky. Then the feathers dangling to the four directions. Not being in a gallery, but out among villages, roads, and open desert, it seemed even more enigmatic.
I walked toward the east entrance. Ocotillo limbs curved at their ends. To enter, I had to duck, as one should when entering a place that belongs to children, like being invited into a living-room fort made of cardboard boxes and blankets. I crouched at the rock pile and studied its offerings.
Quarters, pennies, dollar bills; numerous toy guns; hand-drilled shell beads; two fine, handwoven baskets of Tohono O'odham style; a slingshot; a plastic bag of cedar leaves brought from a faraway place; matchbox cars; paper Teddy bears made by children; a cassette tape of rap music, its title being Life After Death; pens and pencils; a fuzzy, stop-sign-red elephant with a pink tongue; clutches of creosote branches; a complete miniature tea set, including four saucers, four cups, a cream pitcher, a sugar bowl, and a teapot; a Virgin Mary pendant; many shells, including a conch and an abalone; colorful barrettes; play binoculars; dolls; and pieces of coral collected from a beach.
The sense of care and order was overwhelming. These gifts were for children only, mindfully chosen. There must have been profound fear of this water, I thought. So much fear that they killed their own offspring, having to spend the remaining centuries nursing them with precious, honest gifts.
A story arose in Arizona from European influence in the 1940s, naming this not as a shrine of a flood but as one of drought. The selection of four children, a number common in Native American rites, was replaced with three, indicative of European stories. In this version, the final shaman ordered, “Take three of your youngest children, and when you have put them into a hole in the ground, the water will come again.”
It was the perceived fear of drought that reflected European ignorance about people of the desert. There are, of course, Tohono O'odham ceremonies to call the rain, repeated annually with fermented juice from saguaro cactus fruit, heavy vomiting, and an invitation to the clouds, but none near as drastic as the story of sacrificed children. Drought is ordinary here, dealt with adeptly, no need to make great sacrifices. During a 1923 drought, cattle bones protruded from the sand like bedsprings. The Tohono O'odham ranchers turned around and sold the bones as fertilizer in Tucson for seven dollars a ton.
What is terrifying here is too much water. I remembered the Hopi, how water from below brought their ancestors to the surface of this world, bringing birth. But that does not matter here at the shrine of drowned children. This is a different side of water.
As I crouched inside, I felt the ground with my hand, picturing the water beneath that had once burst through. I imagined the darkness of the space below, as if this desert were perched on a thin crust of land, floating tenuously upon the water of the underworld. One indiscretion might open a hole, allowing the water to spew up. It was not evilness that I felt from this water. It was a ravenous organism.
Purposely, I did not mull over records of local geohydrology to isolate this story of water bursting out of the ground. Even as more than 95 percent of rain and snowfall in Arizona is lost to plant leaves and evaporation, I know that water is stored beneath the desert. From the dry country of Nevada down to Mexico, in these alluvial basins pitched between barren mountains, there waits over 4.3 trillion cubic feet of water. I once spoke with a petroleum geologist who headed oil and gas exploration in the Nevada desert. One of his drill bits struck water instead of oil. He described what he thought to be a near endless fountain of water, over a thousand gallons an hour rushing from a pipe three inches wide. But the crew members were looking for oil and not water, so they capped the water by sinking concrete down the well, like heaping rocks over an unsolicited hole.
In 1912, when the first water well was drilled on the Tohono O'odham reservation by the U.S. government, some people must have watched in horror, standing far back as a drill broke through to the underworld. Children had been sacrificed to close such a hole. Did these well drillers not know this? And what did the native people surmise in the coming decades as they dug hundreds of wells for themselves and the water table dropped? First by inches, then by tens of feet, now by hundreds. The planet's mysterious interior was being sucked dry, perhaps leaving the desert to soon collapse into the gaping pit left behind.
It is true that when the earth is drained of blood, of its hidden waters, the surface will die. Crops wither. Livestock collapse on weak legs. Villages become stark. Mesquite trees, even with roots sixty feet deep, stand vacant, like concertina wire discarded among rocks.
Our offerings to water, our requests of it in the desert, must be balanced carefully. Not too much and not too little. The Tohono O'odham are famously cautious with water, their lullaby words to their children being “Don't drink too much water.”
I walked out of the shrine and wandered among the stacks of old ocotillo. There were signs of recent ceremony: deliberate piles of grass bundles or sticks or small rocks. To the east sat eight stones, each larger than any of those in the shrine, each caged by two upright ocotillo limbs decorated with feathers. These, I figured, were the seats the eight shamans took, where they made the decision to sacrifice, probably singing as the children were led in. Offerings here were of a completely different nature than those at the main shrine: shells, feathers, cigarettes, a lighter. Each rock had at least one cigarette, if not an entire package, already opened but with none of the cigarettes missing. This was the adult place, where difficult judgments were made. Tobacco was to be smoked late into the night. Dark feathers tended to the breeze, tied with twine or leather to their ocotillo moorings.
Who knows water better, the children who were most recently swimming in the womb, safely inhaling liquid, or adults who have learned about terror? It would have been too easy to sacrifice adults. Adults would have died noble, civilized deaths full of symbolism and martyrdom. Children have no such impurities. Thrusting children into a womb that takes their lives was such a painful act of betrayal that there will never be enough cigarettes to ease such a decision. This is why offerings are not restricted to the children, but are also left for the adults who suffered their own responsibility. The water had no choice but to recede in the face of such a gesture.
Turning to look at the shrine, I was struck again by its image, as if I had not yet seen it. This was perhaps the most unassuming, elegant shrine I had ever seen, with its curved architecture of ocotillo arms, some of them bowing inward, their tips nearly touching the rock pile in the center. Its simple gifts, so appropriate and thoughtfully chosen, implied a disciplined understanding of the story. Cigarettes for the shamans, Teddy bears for the children. I walked back and ducked inside once more.
My emotions became raw, rising unexpectedly to the surface. It was the care taken with these offerings. It was the image I could not shake of people crying as their children bravely entered the hole, their faces soft and confused with naivete. Heat grew inside of my heart. I felt flames in my chest, pushing aside my organs. No metaphors. It was just that way.
I also came to this shrine for a young man who had been taken by the water. He drowned in a river at the age of sixteen, the youngest of a family to which I was very close. I do not know if he was sacrificed so that the world could be saved, or if he was simply stolen by water. He drowned while tubing with friends, wh
en his tube flipped in a turbulent stretch below a boulder. A friend who made it out safely ran after him, chasing him down the river, shouting his name until he could run no farther. The body was not found for six days.
I reached into my pocket for an offering, a fossilized clamshell I had brought from Utah, 300 million years old. I fished it out and held it forward in one hand.
“It's a fossil seashell,” I said. “Very old.”
Would the children play with it? Would they laugh and toss it between one another and study it, curious about its origin?
I dipped my index finger into the hollow of the shell, testing its shape. “I don't know if it's okay to say this,” I whispered. “But this is for my friend too. He went into the water, just like you.” I reached forward and placed it between the rocks, letting it rattle down, out of sight.
7. CARRYING AWAY THE LAND
Royal Arch Canyon, Grand Canyon
December
DARK.
Not the simple dark! that cradles you to sleep, but dark hard as stone.
I worked a knot by hand as rainwater shoved into my coat around my neck. I had to close my eyes with the rain poking up in the wind. I couldn't see anyhow. I wore a coat, boxer shorts, and boots without socks, trying to limit what would get wet. The wind came from seven directions at once, then joined and chimed up the cliff face, making a sound that screeched out of range. I finished the knot, checked the line. It was tight. Spare climbing gear had been used to get this tarp up, and the wind strained the moorings until they buzzed. I slipped underneath into shelter, and my partner Mike Morely's headlamp came on. The light was not for finding anything, or for seeing what gear might be left out, but just a reminder that we had light, that we were still in control. Our knees pressed together. Wind came under, sprayed our faces, then went elsewhere.
We were sitting on a ledge inside the Grand Canyon, where half an hour ago the air had been still and the sky, powdered with stars, said nothing of clouds. The ledge traced one of these monolithic cliffs of Redwall limestone, its edge rounded slightly, like a bowl lip, dropping into smooth walls below. We backed against a fifteen-foot boulder, crouching as far in as we could. If the storm had come during the day it might have been different. Our options would have been clear as we scurried around, battening gear down, looking up to see which way the storm moved, where the thickest parts lay. Instead we were blind and terrified for reasons neither of us could understand. It was no longer obvious how far our ledge extended. The storm had its thumb on us, grinding us into the rock. The tarp snapped up, then bunched down on our heads. Whip cracks came from each corner.
When the tarp kept snapping furiously, I shouted, “Jesus Christ!”
“I know,” Mike said.
“I mean Jesus Christ!”
He turned off his headlamp. We pushed closer together to keep as far from the edges of the tarp as possible. The first rock-fall came. It sounded from the north, a series of cracks and rumbles. The rain quickly washed out its echoes. Then something to the south. This one made the sound of a train derailing into the canyon, boulders uncoupling. We could hear each part, each shatter. A section of wall had come down. It bolted down the cliff, and again the rain took away any more details.
The desert is a book of change. Right now, pages fluttered too fast to read. Rocks are always falling in the Grand Canyon. I had become used to the sound, to turning suddenly during the day to see boulders chasing each other off the edge of an outcrop, to hearing the light clatter of small stones or pebbles falling from somewhere. A few Grand Canyon geologists have kept note of rockfalls, one writing that “the weakening process is a long one, and perhaps only a little extra heating on a hot day, or a light shower or a touch of frost may be the critical factor.” Tonight, everything was the critical factor. On a calm day, one of these geologists recorded thirty tons of Redwall limestone that he saw caving into the Colorado River west of here.
Boulders crumble to sand at the bottom of canyons. Intense rains wash the debris into even lower canyons. Everything is in motion. Sediment coming down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon was once, before Glen Canyon Dam, estimated to be 27 million tons passing a single point in one day.
All of this movement began here, on this night. Hard rain wedged itself into the cracks, pouring through holes and fissures, sending mud sailing over ledges. Events known as debris flows occur here, events now heavy on my mind. Of any place on this continent, the Grand Canyon has the greatest focus of debris flows, of monumental, sudden floods that dramatically alter the landscape. I did not mention to Mike how much I was thinking of them. Weak slopes in the canyon will fail, collapsing into floods below, which turn into a boiling mess of boulders and crushed shale. Rarely do large, stable cliffs like those of the Redwall fail. Debris flows generally come from the weaker formations, but the Redwall has certainly been known to collapse. We were hearing it clearly from beneath our whipping tarp. Canyons governed by debris flows are open toward the dominant paths of weather systems, which describes our canyon. They act as precipitation traps, gathering the confined, more intense storms.
Not only is the direction of the canyons conducive to debris flows, but the actual constituents within the rock are primed to run. The sequence of formations in the Grand Canyon tends to be hard, sheer cliffs on top of weak shales on top of cliffs on top of shales. It is the shale of ancient oceans, as opposed to shale of prehistoric streams or estuaries, that best mobilizes debris flows. The shale crumbles, weakening the foundations beneath overlying walls, pulling down entire sections of cliff. The marine shales are heavy in the minerals illite and koalinite, which are basically lubricants, turning the contents of a debris flow into an oiled slurry, at the same time electrochemically bonding to increase the density of the mixture, allowing larger pieces of debris to remain afloat. Boulders become buoyant in this soup, traveling farther, quicker. Wherever these shales are exposed, debris flows are compounded. The Redwall limestone and its tiers of cliffs sit atop the Bright Angel shale, one of the heaviest in illite and koalinite. Directly overhead, barely breaching the rim of the Redwall, is the Supai Formation, a major source of boulders and weak ledges that supply the bulk in debris flows. Above that is the Hermit shale, the primary producer of lubricant minerals for these semi-liquid floods. Above that, Coconino sandstone cliffs lean over the weak Hermit shale, ready to fall. In between, we crouched on a ledge, listening to the collapse.
I have spent much time in places where if I wished to find water, I had to restrict myself to nothing but thoughts of water—not planning my life, not thinking of a job, a relationship, or a destination. I have walked between water holes not letting my mind slip once, remaining vigilant to any clue that might lead to water. And now, here, all I could think about again was water, but in a different way. I could not escape it. No other thought could possibly enter my mind. I backed to the boulder in fear of water bringing down the entire cliff, turning our bodies into debris.
Water-piled stones
Most historic debris flows in the Grand Canyon are associated with the hard precipitation of convective summer thunderstorms, which tend to be isolated and influence only one or two drainages at a time. In July 1984 a debris flow descended Monument Creek, west of here. The entire side of a canyon crashed down at about 160 feet per second. When it hit the floor, debris exploded 300 feet up the opposite wall. Boulders nine feet in diameter were washed to the river, several miles away.
Mike and I were now in a December storm, not the key time for debris flows, yet in December 1966 a forty-four-foot-tall wave of boulders and slurry descended Crystal Creek, on its way into the Colorado River. Cliffs had failed in numerous places, slumping into the flood. Fifty-ton boulders bounded for miles, finally wedging into the very bottom of the Grand Canyon. On that December day in 1966 they formed one of the largest rapids along the entire length of the Colorado River. It is now called Crystal Rapids, a Class X rapids, the most difficult rating that can be given in the Grand Canyon. Before
this December flood, there was hardly a riffle in the same location.
I once talked with a geologist named Bob Webb, one of the principal researchers of desert debris flows. He had encountered one in the middle of the night where Prospect Canyon opens to the Colorado River. I asked what it sounded like. “Freight train,” he said. In a closet at his home he found a chart from that night's storm. He shuffled it out of its folder and pointed to a peak in a graph of rainfall. “You see that burst at the end? That's what you need to create a debris flow. And we felt that burst at camp because right around midnight our camp got blown to pieces by a high wind. Before I could get to sleep again I heard this big roaring sound.” The debris flow missed the camp and the twelve members of his research team by a couple hundred feet, rumbling down the floor of the canyon into the river. In the morning he walked to the river and stared aghast at the remains of the debris flow that created a massive new waterfall in Prospect Canyon and buried in boulders the left side of a rapids called Lava Falls.
I asked him if there had been any smell to it and he tapped the side of his head with his finger, his eyes sharpening as he remembered something in vivid detail. “It was kind of a salty, musky smell that comes from those kinds of flash floods…. I used to go out and measure flash floods on the Santa Cruz River [in southern Arizona] and it was the same kind of decaying vegetation, muddy water smell that you get.”
Mike and I were now at the source of such an event, should it come. We would be delivered to the river along with our camp and every surrounding stone. From beneath the tarp I listened to bursts of wind. They peaked and fell and peaked higher. The storm only grew. Mike told a story about an ocean voyage, then stopped talking. I prompted him to go on. He said that was all. So I asked him about climbing and about Yosemite, where he liked to travel. He started another story. This one elicited a monotone, each word given proper weight. Two summers ago he had finished a technical ascent of one of the big walls in Yosemite. Walking back with his climbing partner along a popular trail, he heard a crack and then a sound like a jet buzzing the valley. He looked up to see 170,000 tons of granite separating and falling from a cliff. I asked about the size of these pieces of cliff. He described them as a fleet of semitrailer trucks falling through the air, gently rotating as they descended.
