The Way Out

by Craig Childs

  He went home at the end of his workday and sat on his couch. He turned up the stereo until the walls vibrated. His living room became a sheltering cave of music. He stared at nothing.

  DAY FIVE

  Dirk says, “No ravens. No sign anywhere.”

  He is dismayed. How can there be a land without ravens? There are no animal prints either. No bones. No knuckled fox vertebrae half buried in sand, no bighorn sheep ribs sprung over the rocks. No evening birdsong, not even the far-off, gravel-throated scratch of a wren. No sudden owls in back-alley canyons with wings that sound like breath. Neither of us has ever encountered such absence.

  I would call it a dead land, but that would be an error. The place shifts in and out of itself. It is more organic than geologic, luscious foliage of sandstone grown beyond all reason, fed and sculpted by erosion, cliffs rising and collapsing. We move through this place in the morning with only enough gear for the day, our packs left behind so that we can walk freely, scouting routes. The morning is cold. Wind pushes small pebbles. The air smells of snow, a crystalline-wet scent. Stone-gray clouds buckle and turn over one another, ripping across the higher and farther rock formations. I scan the ground for a sign, for sun-bleached nut piles of bighorn sheep droppings, for a bone left in a dry basin where a water hole once sat. These are things we would usually see, the leavings of the desert. But the only organic life I notice here is the movement of our two shadows. They stretch with winter light, rippling, extending, and falling back in the changing terrain.

  Dirk’s shadow is crisp on the rock, kept tight, his day gear well packaged around his waist, climbing rope bound over his left shoulder with only the knuckles of the bight standing out. Beside him, my shadow is a billowing apparition. I wear a serape bartered from a Guatemalan textile merchant, its wool flanks turning in the wind, hood pulled to a monk’s peak. My day gear is an assemblage of parts salvaged off my main pack, strapped together with extra webbing, water bottles hung like ballast.

  Dirk moves to the edge of my vision. The drab color of his clothing barely shows. Still, I recognize his body, the cock of his arms, the spread of his hands. He moves toward the east, looking for easiness in the terrain. I know his shape, the loping pad of his boots on stone, his glance turning one way and the next in constant scrutiny. I am pulled in his direction by an invisible tether between us. This is the way we usually move together, aware of the other at each moment. In more familiar country, the line connecting us is allowed to go long, and we often separate for miles, ranging into entirely different canyons. Even then, I walk alongside Dirk’s invisible pace and his unseen pauses across obstacles, trailing him with the crystal ball of my imagination. Always we are able to reel back in and find each other by nightfall.

  Not here. This place is filled with uncertainty. We might not find each other again for days if we wander apart. We rarely even drop from sight, toting each other around like two young boys holding hands in a crowd. There are too many possibilities to vanish from each other. These dendrites and bifurcations, choices leading to choices, tumble-slope boulders and brief shimmies down to ledges, each promises to separate us. We stay close. I feel him lure me around the rim of a vacant water hole. A paint-peel layer of dry mud lies in the basin below me. I drop to the west of it, my motion lightly catching Dirk’s attention, towing him back toward me.

  Dirk follows the strands of lesser canyons while I loop in and out of higher domes. My mind is busy memorizing uplifts and crevices that might show themselves when we need them miles or days ahead. There is a constant internal chatter of navigation, like working a small, fragile boat across the sea.

  Our paths meet again where a canyon cuts through the face of another dome. I am ahead, the slope steepening around me. I hear the hushing of my footsteps and the labor of my breath. They sound as if they belong to someone else. Most of my attention lies in the slope and in the presence of Dirk not far behind. I let my vision spread outward, getting some idea of where we are going. Mushroom country ahead. It looks like the earth is overgrown, a field of enormous organic shapes making up for the complete lack of plant life on the ground. We could go in any direction, following a cascade to the west into what is likely a bed of canyons just out of view, or toward the southeast, where shoulders of rock rise to a towering, spindled crown, or into these sandstone chanterelles and amanitas just ahead.

  My attention is drawn back to the steepness of the immediate terrain. Boot soles swear they will come out from under me. My heart gulps on a skid of sand, sending up a blood command. My hands flash out for balance. I pause, holding back my weight, judging the increasing angle, how close I might come to falling if I keep on going. A slip would roll me eighty feet down the slope, dropping me into a wind-rounded bowl at the bottom. I would lose much skin, break a few bones, but be alive.

  Dirk comes. The ink of his shadow washes the face below me. Instead of pondering the next move, I watch his shadow. In it is skepticism, a scant lingering. In the presence of even his shadow I feel solid ground, a firmness in the bluster of my own life. I have questions. He has answers. The answer is clear in his shadow: This is too steep. I turn back. Find another way.

  Lone waves of rock curl up from the earth’s surface, lifting beside us, leftovers of long-evaporated groundwater, some aberration exposed from its domain once deep inside the planet. Caves scoop from the faces above us, where weaknesses are exploited by the wind. Bowsprit formations stand into the weather, and we walk by them, taking a moment to circle, then move on. We are heading toward a concentration of geological eccentricities, stretches of ground covered with hundreds of chocolate-brown marbles, hard as iron and up against each other in perfect symmetry. An octopus emerges from the rock, a vestige of some living thing that died in the dunes of a Jurassic desert.

  If the sandstone here were much harder, it would stubbornly resist the elements, remaining stern as a granite face, its hunchbacks and disproportions unseen. If it were softer, it would be flung into dunes of blowing sand. As it is, strengths seem to be equal between ground and sky. It is an open conversation, erosion and resistance. Whales of sandstone begin surfacing around us, their backs curved, sleek as they slide through the wind. They dive by the hundreds, drawing the surface down with them into foaming boulders and beds of sand. We keep to their backs, following one to the next, rising hundreds of feet. In one of the spaces between whale bodies we come to an enclosure of plants, signs of life.

  It is an interior garden where soil has been gathered from out of the wind. We circle it.

  Dirk says, “Zen garden.”

  “Mmm.” I nod my head.

  This site is an assemblage of plants and small stones that is neither disorderly nor grossly formal. All of the plants are miniatures—weather-punished bonsai. There is a stub of a cactus, defensive as a scorpion fish; three turpentine bushes with winter-small leaves; sporadic bunches of snakeweed and ricegrass; and a centerpiece yucca, its flagpole still bearing a few emptied seedpods. Their potting soil is a black material, a single, slowly living organism, hundreds of years old.

  Flakes of glassy rock gather like bits of beach shell across this dark surface. Each is a different color. These are what lure us down to a crouch at the edge of the soil, not stepping in where our footprints might remain for months or years. We have no wish to leave bold statements of our crossing.

  Dirk and I lift these curious stones as if plucking spilled rubies off the ground, thumbing them between fingers, letting them go. Each translucent piece of rock is finely shaved. We know exactly what they are: human artifacts broken on the ground. Nine hundred years old, maybe older—five thousand, eight thousand?—hard to tell from this collection. There are no whole pieces, no notching styles that tell one cultural group from another, no finished spear tips or arrowheads that might argue a five-thousand-year difference in their design.

  My weight rests on one heel at a time, shifting and reaching. My recollection of this posture is old. It is a cellular memory, habit, weight to the heel
s, drawing a finger over a sharp edge, turning an item to feel for its dimensions—the geography of body posture formed in order to read the geography of Earth. It feels good to stretch my muscles, to feel the ground with my fingers for a few minutes. This is what humans were left with when we began walking upright, our fingers no longer skimming the ground, our eyes suddenly and hungrily searching the sky. An entire horizon of questions and answers fell away from us when we turned vertical, so we had to learn this way of coming down on our haunches, hands turned into tools. Memories of planting; memories of hunting.

  I lift a knife-curve of gray stone, something that had snapped off while a tool was being made. This kind of scatter is all over the canyon desert, bangles left across the land by hunters on the move. Another piece that I find is the remnant shard left from a hard blow. A third is flaked off thin as paper, peeled away by the palm-pressed tip of an antler, a square of leather across the thigh to soften the work against the maker’s skin.

  My fingers read these details, accumulating knowledge of whoever hunted here. I feel for the expression of a person cutting a tool, eyes turning up to the horizon in routine watchfulness, back down to the task at hand. I have done the same before, sharpening a knife or taking notes in my journal, my stare moving up now and then to keep track of the wind and the motionless boulders.

  Dirk runs his berry-picking fingers across the ground, searching for the whole, ripe arrowhead. He does not do this to slip it into his pack, but only to lift the piece and feel its accuracy. There are no complete pieces, though. I pick up another sliver, a clear slice of red stone. I hold it to the light of the sky so that I can see the blood clots captured within.

  “Check out this one.” I lean my crouch toward Dirk, arm out, and pass it to him.

  He tilts to me, takes it, and does the same, studying the universes suspended inside the rock. He looks up then, attentively rubbing it between his fingers, examining the terrain.

  “You can scout game through this gap down here clear across this lower region,” he says, using the piece to point in that direction. “Maybe for other unwanted hunters coming in from below or any sign of movement. And the wind is blocked from the south.” He aims the piece south.

  He is right. This is the place. It does not break the skyline, so a person can see without being seen. This is a hunting shelter, a place to sit and scratch out your tools. I think of hunters along my family line. They obeyed the same ritual that Dirk and I have fallen into, ducking into terrain that both protects and reveals.

  From my father I inherited a box, a container of arrowheads that I now keep beneath my desk at home. The box is a 1940s Christmas greeting-card container originally secured by cotton string. Inside are items that my great-grandfather had gleaned from the land near his home in southern New Mexico: the elbow of a fired clay pipe; a piece of corrugated pottery around seven hundred years old; two carved stone pendants likely of Paleo-Indian origin; eight hand-chipped atlatl points, big-game variety, ten thousand years old, give or take; and thirty tiny arrowheads—pink, cream, banded black, and sugar-grained brown—as finely crafted as ivory figurines, some notched on their sides by desert nomads as far back as six thousand years ago.

  When my great-grandfather died, my grandfather inherited this box of artifacts. When my grandfather died, the box passed to my father. When my father died two years ago, it moved to me.

  Every now and then, I take out the box and examine a few of its pieces. I feel for subtle messages, codes inscribed across thousands of years. I slip my finger across the edges, thinking, You could not have known who would next interpret your communiqué. The pieces say hunt and kill and watch. Some say rabbit, others deer, bighorn, even bison. I know there is more written on them—age of the maker, male or female, hunter-made or done by a craftsperson who has never killed. But I have not become proficient enough to read the code that closely.

  I sometimes imagine what would be read if someone studied my own knife blade or touched the edges of my journal. Would they know of my history, my entire family line, those who were eaters of rabbit, squirrel, quail, and white-tailed deer from the gale-beaten scrub of the Chihuahuan Desert? Most men in my family were hunters or fly fishermen patrolling the tiny boulder- and vegetation-infested creeks scattered across the highlands of New Mexico and Arizona. A great-great-uncle worked as a game warden in the West Texas desert, and my great-grandfather was a rancher who regularly shot and trapped predators. My father hunted coyotes. His methods were the most persuasive and evocative of anyone I have known, bloodless and far-reaching.

  Dirk continues ferreting out the most colorful pieces and the ones with the finest edges. Suddenly, his hand snaps back with a bee-sting yowl. I am quick on him, looking for the culprit.

  “What?”

  He holds one hand in the other, thumb stuck up like a sprout. On it is a welling bead of blood. The bead blossoms, and a bright thread winds toward his palm.

  “Damn,” he says, truly surprised. “That one was really sharp.”

  A grin sweeps my face.

  “I’m serious. Look at this. It’s a deep cut.” He sucks it clean, and before the blood returns, I see that the inside flesh is white beneath a superficial layer of pink. A deep cut indeed.

  “Jesus, Dirk,” I say, moving a hand across my face so I do not laugh. “Be careful with that stuff.”

  He considers the wound, pulling it apart to peer inside, just to see how well these tools actually work. He turns his hand to let the blood curve one way, then the next.

  I draw the hood over my head to keep the wind out and continue scanning the surrounding land.

  It is so rare to find soft ground out here. On the sheltered bays of a mesa top we come to more of these Zen gardens, fields of coral-reef soil: black, pointy, and layered by centuries of growth. We arrive at a large field, and immediately Dirk sweeps down to one knee, poking a finger into the ground.

  “This stuff is in good shape.”

  I join him, hand grazing these tiny, friable soil heads as if passing over rime crystals.

  “Nothing’s been walking on this,” he continues, glancing up, obviously searching for a way around so he won’t have to crush it with his steps. “Old-growth crypto.”

  The soil is infinitely delicate. We walk, but there is suddenly very little bare stone to carry us, so we skirt every edge of soil we can, as if wandering the ins and outs of very small coastlines. This way of moving reminds me of childhood games—don’t step off the rocks / the log / the sidewalk lest you plunge into boiling lava. It takes time, changing the pace of the day so that we do not leave footprints.

  Anywhere that an animal touched this black molten earth, we can see a disturbance. We pause where a skullcap of soil has been kicked off, landing upside down a few inches away. The event happened months in the past. Rabbit, we conclude. Without the evidence of any other tracks, we account for the trajectory of the animal, the size (small enough to slip under a blackbrush broom just ahead), and the speed. Had to be a rabbit. Startled, perhaps. Moving fast, taking swift cover around these nearby dry bushes.

  “Hawk,” Dirk suggests.

  “Yes,” I agree. Hawk. Something that would not leave tracks but would send a rabbit quickly across the soil.

  The concealment of this landscape makes subtleties such as this stand out far more than they would anywhere else. In sand or mud, a fresh track is bold, revealing species, genus, direction—the more available facets of an animal. Here, the animal shows up only in a stray step, a quick crossing, a suggestion of personality in the light paw scratch, the telling of age in this story trap of black soil.

  I don’t mean to say anything out loud, but a question slips past my lips. “Why are we so interested in tracking?”

  Dirk’s answer is quick, like a reflex. “Information,” he says. “We want to know what’s going on.”

  “Why?” I look at him. “Why do we want to know?”

  He shrugs it off. “Curiosity.”

  I don’t like
his answer. I know it is more than curiosity. We track animals and hunt our way through the wilderness as if we would die if we didn’t. That’s not just trivial inquisitiveness.

  I say, “But it’s like we’re trying to look through something. Like the world is camouflaged and we’re trying to see through it. We spend all of our time at this. It’s more of an obsession than it is curiosity.”

  “Whatever you want to call it.”

  I’m not done, though. Dirk is my sounding board. I feel as if I am a puppy springing at a wolf, and I trust that he won’t suddenly tear my head off. I go ahead. “No. It’s not whatever I want to call it. There’s something about tracking, something about the way we move out here that is more than just nosiness.”

  Dirk responds by sitting on the naked sandstone. Now he’s giving it some thought. I am suddenly not just a puppy. I have lured him in.

  He looks at the print, the single tick of soil out of place, something that most people would never notice.

  “There’s an otherworld,” he says.

  He tells me that in order to amuse himself when he was a cop he used to ask someone for his name, then, within less than a minute, determine that the person was lying and extract the real name. It was an exercise in vision, as routine as morning sit-ups, training to see through obfuscation.

  He acts it out for me. “‘Let’s see your driver’s license. How old are you? Where do you live? Hmm, that’s a different address than what you just said. What’s the address on your driver’s license? Open your wallet. What’s that? Yeah, that one with the picture. Yeah, that’s you, but there’s someone else’s name on this. That’s funny. What else do you have in there? Where did you say you live?’ Pow. I got him. Then we start getting down to the real dirt, busting open the underworld, having a look inside. That’s when you start seeing things.”