The Way Out

by Craig Childs

  I had heard coyotes so many times, howling in the faraway. I had seen their tracks and caught them spying on me from a half mile away. But never this.

  Never even slowing its sprint, it made contact with us. I saw its recognition, a suspicion answered. In that instant it swerved and ran the other way, an amazing turn, never losing speed. The coyote was gone as fast as it had arrived. We had played some strange creature out of the ocean depths, and the line snapped just as it reached the surface. The coyote darted back into the darkness, and my father shut off the spotlight.

  I had never been coyote hunting with him. I expected next the terrible blast of a handgun, the flash of white shooting into the dark. Instead, the desert became a deep and fathomless sea, a universe I could not touch, but one that I was carried into. I forgot about the gun. Paws struck silently across rocks and arroyo, fur brushing quickly through creosote branches. The coyote ducked invisibly onto an old path, recognizing scents along the ground, checking over its shoulder.

  My father and I had summoned an animal who could run into the unreachable desert with us clinging to its back. I fled with it into the dark.

  As long as I could hold my breath, the coyote carried me. But I needed to breathe. I resisted. When I gave in and inhaled, I let go of the animal and found myself standing exactly where I had started. Only then, when the mind glitter wore off, did I look at my father. I realized that he was unarmed. He had no intention of killing a coyote. This is what coyote hunting meant, a glimpse of a wild animal drawing us out of our skins.

  He had not yet taken his breath. The light was off, and he was standing still, a dark form against the stars. His profile faced the coyote, motionless. The spotlight hung in his hand. His body seemed limp, shoulders dropped. He was being carried. I saw the thing that cannot be seen, the line that passes through: the union of father, coyote, and desert. In that moment he was far away from me, the fastest man alive.

  DAY SIX

  We pitch across a rock face under the weight of our packs. The earth is a sugar cube to my fingers, granules springing free, lifting into the wind. The angle is barely enough to hold us; we are ten grains of sand away from boot-skidding down. But we do not fall. We move deferentially, fingers on the rock ahead, body weight brought nearer to the core of the earth, thigh muscles hot as coals. Only the crescent edges of our boot soles do any good.

  My world is the oilskin circle of my hat brim, the grade just ahead, and my tumbling heartbeat. I lift my head against my pack. Here: the cliff depressed barely enough. To my left: treacherously steep. Straight above: perhaps possible, but unlikely. The danger is not a deterrent. It governs our movement, buffeting our shoulders and hands. It leads us in the right direction. It leads us to safety.

  Climbing straight up would require ropes and anchors, multipitched ascents with racks of metal-alloy gear jangling like cowbells. But there is a way to go with bare hands. There is a course within the cliff. We follow the slope of the braid, crossing left to right to left only along its accessible exposures.

  I glance at Dirk, fifty feet down from me. His hands are in front of him. He sweeps the face of the rock as he moves, lightly balancing himself, touching the surface as if clearing spiderwebs from his path. I see in the cleanness of his movements that he belongs here. He creates a path as he goes, closing it as he passes, a ribbon of awareness traced up this ascent.

  We rise into spindles of rock left by the wind and climb through them, brushing their plump bases with the receptively soft undersides of our hands. With every step I touch something: the visage of a boulder soon to fall, a small crack, a saltshaker knob of rock. This is a way of reading this landscape. I memorize the details because each will prove useful. I snap a loose pebble into my hand and roll it the way a starfish seeks weakness from a clamshell, discerning its shape, its friability. I hold it for two steps, three steps, then, once I’ve made its acquaintance, I drop it and it ticks hundreds of feet down the face, popping high over Dirk’s head.

  My sense of touch is volatile. The synapses between fingers and brain fire until they shiver. They tell of each meager change to grain or temperature or friction. In the past, weeks into treks, I have looked at my fingertips and found them bare. The prints had been sanded into inconspicuous pads by all the touching. But always, the prints regrow. I don’t know where they come from, how such delicate and subtle circuitry is re-formed. I have watched the prints fan into place over the weeks until I am exactly who I was to begin with. I am inescapable.

  In a saddle between rock formations I slide from my pack, letting it fall to the ground, banging it with my hand to make sure it is well planted. From there I climb free toward the top, the lack of weight sending me up, nearly flying. A minute ahead of Dirk, I come over the crest of an open, desolate park. My hands slide like whiskers around me.

  Now I can see where I am. This is the top of the land, only the sky from here. I move immediately into the open space, crossing it to the other side, where it drops off.

  Dirk arrives, no pack either, his arms outspread above this field of eroded, stellate boulders, over the whole of the earth.

  I turn back to see him for just a moment, to make sure we are together, then keep moving. I walk straight across the basin and climb the low abutment of eroded rock on the other side, which leads me to the edge.

  There, the world falls beneath me.

  I find the place jutting farthest out and lower to a waiting and urgent crouch. One palm is flat on the rock, one knee on the ground, head pushed over the edge. Cloisters of canyons and haphazard stone fins gather in the depths below. This is the mad country I had seen from the airplane window on the way to my father’s funeral. It is the place we will have to cross.

  My hands are suddenly inessential, nothing but springboards.

  Now my eyes serve me. Color, distance, depth, scheme. Everything is out of reach. As if searching for a thread’s beginning in a terrible knot, I start my eyes in one place, then another, then another, unable to find a beginning or an end to this landscape. Schismatic shadows corkscrew into nowhere, vanishing into optical illusions of far and near. The place is a geographic rummage sale, pieces of canyons, buttes, spines, and ravines all over one another, no visible bottom. It does not even have an other side that I can see.

  I recall a story that the Diné tell about coming through here. When they first arrived, unsure of the terrain around them, they sent a small dog ahead as a scout. The dog returned every day telling of routes and places to sleep. One day, as they neared this difficult heart of canyons, the dog vanished. They could hear it, but they never found it. As the story goes, the dog’s voice is still calling out, forever lost in these cell walls of stone.

  I am filled with a mix of anxious craving and atavistic fear. It is an alarming sensation. I want to be in this stronghold this instant, wrapped in shadows, stone forms launching around me. I also want to crouch at this vista and never move except to inch my way out, no sudden motions to draw attention.

  Looking for a route just to get into this place, I cannot see any clear passage. Massive bulwarks of stone stand in the way. There is no repetition among landforms that I can see. Every item is fashioned by its own urges; an assault on civil, human principles; the result is the kind of reckless imbroglio that only the deranged might enjoy. Seductive, though.

  Dirk walks to the edge beside me. He presses his hands against the heat of his thighs, still breathing hard. I remain in a feral crouch, waist high to him, my weight leaning forward, barely balanced, the dog on point, the gargoyle high in the gables of a cathedral.

  “Bad rock wilderness,” he says. “That is absolutely bitch country down there.”

  I say nothing. This must have been how Galileo saw the bespangled night sky, looking for consequence among the sweeping, self-propelled pinpoints of light, finding neither the sterility of divine order nor Satan’s sex-craved bedlam. He saw meteorites fleeing the stars, planets minding mathematic rhythms, and the whirligig earth turning beneath so t
hat nightly our universe changes, and changes back.

  Dirk and I look from here into the garish mouths of canyons furrowing into unsolvable precipices, beams of stone as long as rivers. We have the jump on Galileo, I think. We can physically walk into it. There is no need for telescoping lenses of glass; we can travel through stars with our hands and feet.

  Dirk’s voice is soft at first, trancelike. “Look at these shapes,” he says, his left hand tracing over the skyline. “Like clay all wormed out.”

  His voice becomes prophetically measured, a rising oration. I know by the tone that I do not have to respond or even look at him. His audience is the air, the land below.

  “There are two landscapes,” he announces from this pulpit of rock. “Two at once. The first one is this hard, tangible country, the one where you make decisions—do this and you live, do that and you die. The second one is what etches onto the silicon disks of our minds.”

  I think back to the trap I tried to catch him in at the single clip of a rabbit track in dark soil, how I had wanted to hear him say this.

  He continues, “You can hear the needle scratching into us right now. Every little detail down there, shapes and colors we’ve never seen before. They all leave this mark, this second landscape inside of us. You can hear it. Like a pencil scribbling something on paper.”

  Both of his hands start moving, defining something in the air.

  “A place like that land down there means countless numbers of contact points driven into the hard drives of our minds. This is where people won’t go. They get their little bundle of recordings and that’s it for their lives. They turn off their eyes. The needle scratches too deeply out here, too much information, No, thank you, I’ll pass; just let me decline into my own intangible world, drooling into my bowl of corn pone.”

  His voice lifts across the rims of canyons, growing louder. He is no longer speaking to the land. Now he’s after someone else, someone far away. He is speaking, I think, to himself.

  “The thunderstorm is just over the horizon,” he warns. “The thunderstorm is just over the horizon every day, every place you go. Always right there, about to bear down on you. Get it?”

  Then his hands cast out and he is shouting, every word barked to attention.

  “Go back to your daytime TV and fucking sale prices at Wal-Mart and stay the fuck out of here!”

  His shoulders drop, hands to his sides. He comes easily onto his rear beside me, knees up like gun sights, arms laid across them. He is done.

  I sit quietly beside him.

  Is he a madman? No. I’ve known him long enough. I listen to his outbursts as if they were poetry, strange mirrors of his mind. He is haunted. He has spent too much time in the secret hell of human civilization, which has twisted his language. I have seen people shrug unimpressed when they hear he worked not the streets of New York or Chicago, but lowly Denver. What they do not understand is that no one city is more tragic or violent than any other. Wherever people gather there are guns and lies and voracious predators. Beneath parking tickets and patrolling the schoolyards is always a cancerous layer of duplicity and habitual violence. It is not even an urban phenomenon. Park rangers are shot by drug traffickers. Rapists leave their victims dead in the desert. A rancid odor follows this species wherever it goes. Dirk carries very clear memories of this smell.

  On the other hand, what judge am I over who is a madman and who is not?

  Red Tricycle

  Memories from childhood come mostly in bursts of color. This particular memory is the color red.

  I was standing at the living-room window in a Phoenix duplex when a woman came screaming and beating against the glass. Her wrists were sliced open. Ferns of blood uncurled across the window. I stood in utter bewilderment.

  The slashes across her wrists looked like two dark mouths, tight-lipped and violently sputtering. She howled for help, her hair wild with blood, the window in front of her slapped in fist prints. My red metal tricycle was the only object on the porch, and it was being lavished.

  I thought that nightmares had been allowed into daytime. I did not scream or cry. Probably, no expression at all came across my face. I was helplessly thrown into another world. The home I knew was uprooted without warning, replaced with this bloody screaming and chaos. I could do nothing to bring it back into line. My life was now the panic of this woman spilling herself all over my tricycle. Where had she come from? Was this my new world? How long would it last? If my old world left me, would it come back again?

  I turned only for an instant to look at my mother, who was standing at the far end of our duplex, on the other side of the couch. She was wearing only a bra, caught changing perhaps, and she was frozen with fear. I do not remember her ever moving from that position. She is still standing there, immobile in my mind.

  Shouldn’t something be done? Am I in danger? My mother’s eyes said nothing to me. She was too young, too unfamiliar with the world. Perhaps, like me, she knew nothing of suicides. She would later explain this thing I saw as a fable; the moral: Never leave sharp objects lying about.

  She told me that the woman had tripped and fallen on discarded razor blades.

  I turned from my mother and looked through the window in time to see the woman streak into the street. She was a dancer followed by sheets of blood that my memory has turned into beautiful curves of red fabric tracking her every movement, filling the street, the sky.

  At this theater of glass I watched people run into the street and grab her. A man with white hair, who had once been gentle and played with me, tied the woman to a dining-room chair, and suddenly she was a pageant queen. He wrapped towels around her arms, and when he could do nothing else, he stroked her face.

  Then there were sirens and people in uniform all around. A white fire engine. The situation was cleaned up in a matter of minutes, leaving only the decorated window and my spattered tricycle as proof.

  The memory diverges from there. It leads to a bathroom.

  I picked up a razor blade off the sink and studied it. My mother’s boyfriend had left it there. The fable my mother had given me to explain what I saw seemed so bizarrely out of place that it broke the trust I had with myself. I could not imagine how a woman might fall and slice both of her wrists on such a slender piece of metal as this, such a small thing, harmless. My eyes had expressed to me the truth of the matter, the violent emotions of suicide, but my mother’s explanation pointed in a different direction entirely, to an accident, to formless happenstance. Razor blades had become dubious and powerful.

  Here was a live one on the sink.

  I needed to know for sure. There was only one way. With a resolute slash, I split my palm open. For the first instant there was no blood at all, and I stared in astonishment. Skin pouted outward from a long white line. I knew immediately that the woman’s dilemma had not been a fumbling accident. She had done this herself.

  Then came the blood. With a burst of screaming I began to flail, spackling the bathroom mirror with rubies.

  It was in this way that I learned to ask questions, branding quandaries into my skin in order to discern their reality. This was my first time traversing the wilderness alone.

  DAY SEVEN

  There is a design to this landscape that is as refined and sufficient as the cables and spans of a suspension bridge. I see it as I move, cataloging in my journal and in my mind the subtle variations in fracture patterns within the sandstone, how the weight of arches is supported by struts and cross beds in the rock, the way canyons are connected by stairwells of ledges. I feel beneath my steps great tidal surges of erosion and tectonics. The most primary elements are recorded here. Water, earth, and wind are only containers of still-older elements—motion, weakness, intention, resistance, desire. This desert speaks in ancient tongues.

  I have heard that the beginning of the universe is often witnessed in places other than here. Echoes slap back and forth between the mysterious walls of nothing beyond the quasars. We have ears listening
for them, radio telescopes dished toward the hinterlands of space. Our sky is streaked with aluminum-foil satellites tracking the tail of the big bang as it floats off to nowhere . . . as if we had not walked this viscera of earthly geology and found ourselves surrounded by the original pops and hisses of the embryonic universe. I hear old-universe echoes booming among blowholes in the rock where wind pours through. I see in the ellipses of floods left in dry tarns of sand the primeval patterns that we still live by. I find all of this here in a water hole drilled like an Einstein scribble into the rock, twisting downward, its ceramic walls shrewdly incised.

  The water hole is seated in a canyon floor, something we have come upon during a day’s exploration. We have been walking without our heavy packs, moving freely, recording what we find, moving on. A map is being made, one that defines this land for us before we dive in with our packs and start moving camp into the abyss of chasms.

  As part of this map, we chart the water holes by taste. Yesterday we took water from a shallow saucer of a hole flavored as strongly as an Earl Grey tea bag squeezed into the mouth. The morning before, we relied on two owl-eye holes, huge circles of water, one mealy with dead insects and a faint slime of winter algae, the other clean and snowmelt sweet.

  Today’s water hole is deeply inset. Dirk waits above as I climb down toward its storage. My boots and back brace into the turn of its wall. At the bottom is a smooth, indigo mirror that shivers as grains of sand fall in one at a time.

  Below the water is a gathering of smallish rocks, edges rounded smooth. When a flood comes, these rocks will leap into action, spinning, wearing the hole deeper. When the flood stops, they will fall silent to the bottom. They have no hope of escape. The way they rest, the shapes they gouge from the walls, these things tell me of history, the kinds of floods that are generated, the grain size of local geological currency.

  As I inch down, feeling the cool of the wall behind and ahead with both hands, I imagine floods pounding over this hole, boulders obliterated with dark-sounding smacks. The rocks down here become like worry stones played in the water’s hand. In the floods, these rocks are as powerless as I am, thrown and ridden by the currents, hopelessly driven by incomprehensible forces.