Journal of the Dead

by Jason Kersten

  To the Mescalero, the sudden presence of thousands of cattle and hundreds of “white eyes” on the Pecos was an outright invasion. Led by the brilliant war-chief Victorio, the Mescalero entered into a ferocious resistance that tied up settlement in southern New Mexico and west Texas for almost fifteen years. Only after the U.S. Army hired Apache guides and posted detachments at every water hole along his raiding routes were they finally able to defeat Victorio. The last battle he fought before retreating to Mexico took place in 1880, when his band rode into a trap just across the Texas border at Rattlesnake Springs. Heavily outnumbered, Victorio is said to have fought the soldiers only in the hope that he could push them back long enough to draw water from the spring.

  The drive from Austin, Texas, to Carlsbad, New Mexico, was 550 miles—an endlessly repeating conveyor of baked Texas flatlands and lonely, windblown ranches. By late afternoon, Raffi and David had crossed the Pecos, and found themselves speeding through Eddy County, New Mexico, which was founded by a man who had come from as far as they, Charles B. Eddy. An adventurous, stone-eyed New Yorker, Eddy came to New Mexico in 1880 and began ranching right where the city of Carlsbad now sits. He, too, fought for water, and in his case it was the Pecos River itself that he was after. Four years after he arrived, a devastating drought killed a third of his stock, and Eddy decided that the only way to survive was to use the river to irrigate the surrounding desert so it could be farmed. In 1888, he teamed up with some locals to form the Pecos Valley Land and Ditch Company, and embarked on a massive construction project that eventually brought water to twenty-five thousand acres. At the time, the area was part of the infamous Lincoln County, and if Eddy had any doubts that he was in the Wild West, he needed to look no further than his principal partner: Pat Garrett, the same man who, as sheriff seven years earlier, had put a bullet from his Colt .44 through the heart of Billy the Kid.

  The pair made a good team. The combination of Garrett’s western know-how and Eddy’s New Yorker’s flair for selling saw the creation of a town out of more or less nothing. Eddy printed up brochures he ran in East Coast newspapers, advertising of a “land of milk and honey” along the Pecos, and a trickle of settlers soon followed. Ironically, the very water they were harnessing wiped out much of their efforts in 1893, after the Pecos flooded. The irrigation system would be rebuilt and expanded in later years, but after that the residents of what was now called Eddy County decided that they could no longer base their livelihood on the rise and fall of the Pecos. Looking for a more permanent draw, they turned to the river once again, this time hawking its curative powers. A local wag had noticed, or claimed, that the Pecos near Eddy had nearly the exact same mineral content as the famous spa in Karlsbad, Czechoslovakia, and the town seized on the opportunity and quickly renamed itself after it. Soon the ads were once again flowing in the East Coast papers, but unfortunately the spa idea never quite caught on. Carlsbad found itself limping toward the next century.

  In 1898, a local cowboy named Jim White noticed an unusual smoke column percolating into the desert sky, and he hiked over to investigate. Drawing near, he realized to his awe that the dark cloud was really a stream of bats—over a million of them—emerging from what appeared to be a bottomless hole in the ground. Intrigued, he returned a few days later, roped down into the hole, and discovered what he immediately recognized as one of world’s great geological treasures.

  “I came to more and more stalagmites—each seemingly larger and more beautifully formed than the ones I’d passed,” he later told a biographer. He continued:

  I entered rooms filled with colossal wonders in gleaming onyx. Suspended from the ceilings were mammoth chandeliers—clusters of stalactites in every size and color. Walls that were frozen cascades of glittering flowstone, jutting rocks that held suspended long, slender formations that rang when I touched them—like a key on the xylophone. Floors were lost under formations of every variety and shape. Through the gloom I could see ghost-like totem poles, tall, graceful, reaching upward into the darkness. I encountered hundreds of pools filled with pure water as clear as glass, their sides lined with crystalline onyx marble. The beauty, the weirdness, the grandeur and the omniscience absolved my mind of all thoughts of a world above—I forgot time, place and distance.

  Once again, water had played a central role—in this case an epochal one—in the creation of the caverns: twelve million years of rainfall seeping through the limestone remains of a prehistoric coral reef that once stood on the edge of the biggest water of all—the Permian Sea. The water and limestone combined to form sulfuric acid, which gnawed away at the reef drop by drop, countless billions of teeth of time that left behind magnificent underground chambers as megatherial and as stupefying as time itself.

  Nobody believed the cowboy’s tall tale about stumbling through the belly of God, of course. The only man who listened was Abijah Long, a guano miner who cared little for the caves themselves. Hiring Jim White as his foreman, Long leased the land, and the two set about turning twenty thousand years of bat guano into fertilizer for Californian farms. White never lost sight of what he considered the real resource—the caves themselves. Whenever he had a free moment, he continued exploring them and gave tours to whoever asked. For twenty years, he wrote letters trying to get scientists, newspapermen, and the government interested.

  When the Department of the Interior finally got around to sending a dubious inspector to New Mexico to check out White’s claims, he returned to Washington a humbled man: “I am wholly conscious of the feebleness of my efforts to convey in the deep conflicting emotions, the feeling of fear and awe, and the desire for an inspired understanding of the Devine [sic] Creator’s work which presents to the human eye such a complex aggregate of natural wonders…” he wrote in his official report.

  Calvin Coolidge finally declared Carlsbad Caverns a national park in 1930. It had taken Jim White nearly thirty years of letter writing, but at long last, thanks to the most dogged booster of them all, Carlsbad was fixed on the map. Salvation had come from beneath the very desert they had fought to tame. A dying town built on flimflam, false promises, and failed ventures had finally found a great emptiness that it could sell forever.

  It was close to five P.M. when Raffi and David finally pulled up to White’s City, a cluster of tourist shops and motels that clings to the park entrance. They were road weary, nursing the dregs of a hangover from their night out in Austin, eager to find a place to camp and rest. At the Texaco station just off Highway 62/180, they asked Brian Laxson, an attendant, if he knew of any nearby campgrounds.

  “There’s an R.V. park, and you can also camp up at the caverns,” Laxson told them. They decided that the second option, camping in the park itself, was the best choice. They’d be closer to the caves, and it would be cheaper. They hopped back into the Mazda and wound their way up the seven-mile road to the visitor center.

  Carlsbad Caverns’ visitor center sits atop a broad plateau—a remnant of the ancient Permian reef that overlooks the surrounding desert for miles. Getting out of the car and stretching, they saw a flat and limitless peel of rusty land, an immense griddle with a horizon that stretched all the way back into Texas. The air conditioner in the Protegé had been set on high; now they abruptly felt the Chihuahuan heat, mixed with the tarred air of the hot summer parking lot.

  It was a cool seventy inside the visitor center. The day’s last tourists were exiting the cave elevators, a pair of ingeniously convenient lifts that descend 754 feet straight into the Big Room, a cavern so colossal that it takes an hour to walk its perimeter. The walls of the visitor center were covered with geological exhibits and photographs of the wonders below: towering stalagmite columns, gypsum crystals suspended by threadlike stalks, flowing draperies of sandstone so intricately textured that they resembled forests, broccoli, ice-cream cones. It would have to wait for the morning.

  At the information desk, a young ranger with a dark, seaman’s beard was fielding questions from a line of tourists, most of
them interested in that evening’s bat flight—an event that Raffi and David would have wanted to see. In just about an hour, over a million Mexican free-tailed bats would begin their nightly exodus from the caverns’ natural entrance—the same wondrous spectacle that had lured Jim White to the caves a hundred years earlier. Long since then, the park had constructed an amphitheater around the caves’ mouth, allowing visitors to sit comfortably and watch the show unfold. At first, what seems like a few dozen bats whirl around the hole; then, as darkness thickens in the New Mexico sky, so does the bat cloud. They come out in waves of tens of thousands, the buzzing of their wings incessant as the streams grow denser and denser. Finally, they become so concentrated that individual bats lose all identity within the whole, fading into what seems to be a long, giant serpent, winding its way to the southeast, where the bats disperse to spend the night feasting on the insect blooms of the Pecos and Black Rivers.

  Unfortunately, hanging around for the bat flight didn’t mesh with David and Raffi’s plan. Sometimes the exodus could last over two hours, and by the time it was over, it would be too dark to make camp. When their turn in line finally came, they asked the bearded ranger, a twenty-three-year-old student from Purdue University named Kenton Eash, what they needed to do in order to camp.

  “The nearest place is Rattlesnake Canyon,” Eash explained, pulling out a map of the park’s main roads and trails. To get there, they’d have to drive about five miles down a nearby dirt road, park at the trailhead, then hike about a mile downhill into the canyon, where they could pitch a tent. The friends talked it over. So far, they’d slept in the tent only one time, outside Nashville, and they were now more than halfway to California. They wouldn’t have many more opportunities to rough it. After a fast consideration, the friends agreed: they were game.

  Eash gave them a camping permit to fill out, and Raffi wrote down the make and license number of their car, the number of campers, and both their names. In the box entitled “length of stay” he listed one day. When he was finished, the ranger removed the carbon copy and filed it in a nearby drawer.

  The last thing Eash did was read off a list of guidelines for backcountry camping. Most of them were self-explanatory, the kind of rules posted at national park trailheads across America: Lock your car, don’t build any fires (use a gas cooking stove), pack out what you pack in, don’t disturb any plants and animals, buy a topographical map. One of the rules, however, was emphasized above all others. It appeared in a typeface that was italicized, capitalized, and underlined: “There is no water in the backcountry. So you must carry what you need. A minimum of one gallon per person per day is recommended.”

  After Eash was done, the pair prepared to head off and make camp. According to the list Eash had just read them, there were two things they needed: water and a topographical map. While Coughlin waited, Kodikian picked up the topo map at the cavern bookstore, then went over to the gift shop to buy water. All they had at the display shelf were pints, which meant that he’d have to buy sixteen bottles to satisfy the advisory.

  He pulled three bottles from the rack.

  6

  Just past the visitor center’s west parking lot, a swinging cattle gate marks the beginning of Desert Loop Drive, the dirt road that leads to the Rattlesnake Canyon trailhead. Next to the gate is a brown park service billboard, covered by Plexiglas, with a brief description of the local ecology, a map of the road, and the same list of camping guidelines that Eash had read off earlier. Raffi and David passed this point sometime close to six P.M. Eager to make camp, they likely paid little attention to the sign, but it’s there to remind anyone passing it that they are entering an unmitigated wilderness of Chihuahuan Desert.

  A “hot, sandy place” is what the word Chihuahuan means in the language of the native Tarahumara Indians. It is not only the largest, but probably the least understood desert in North America. Unlike the Sonoran and Mojave Deserts to the west, it doesn’t look like what everyone expects a desert to look like. The Sonoran has the giant saguaro, that scarecrow of a cactus that children the world over know from Road Runner cartoons; the Mojave has the otherworldly Joshua tree with its spindly branches and starburst leaves, along with the dunes and salt pans of Death Valley. None of the cacti in the Chihuahuan get very tall, and sand dunes are rare. Vegetation carpets the landscape, but few plants grow more than two feet high. Almost all of them bristle with spines. The plant most emblematic of the Chihuahuan is the deceptively humble lechuguilla, a low-lying cluster of banana-shaped leaves that belongs to the agave family. It lacks the saguaro’s brooding menace, but each rubbery leaf ends in a point that can pierce denim as if it were tissue paper. Every twenty years, the lechugilla sends up a thin, woody stalk that resembles an eight-foot-high shaft of wheat. As Raffi and David drove deeper into the desert, the scattered blooms stuck up from the plateau. It was a surreal world of lonesome antennas.

  The origins of that world were far to the south, in Mexico, where a battle between land and sea had been going on for more than 50 million years. Its fronts are two mountain ranges, the Sierra Madre Occidental in western Mexico, and the Sierra Madre Oriental, in the East. Moist air from the Pacific, the Sea of Cortez, and the Gulf of Mexico pushes inland from both coasts until it hits the Sierras and rises. The air cools and condenses above the mountains, showering them with rain, and by the time it reaches the interior there is almost no moisture in it left. Squeezed dry by the two great ranges, it disperses over an area of roughly 220,000 square miles, like a giant, empty cup. Deserts formed this way are called “rain-shadow” deserts, but the term is illusory. It rains only ten inches a year in the Chihuahuan, and shadows don’t get much longer.

  Raffi and David knew they would have Rattlesnake Canyon all to themselves when they arrived at the trailhead. No other cars were parked in the small dirt lot that lies right next to the road, and it was late enough in the day to assume none would be coming.

  As far as camping gear went, they considered themselves well equipped. Desert survival books devote entire chapters pondering the precise list of items, right down to individual brands, without which people should never enter the open desert. Raffi and David indeed had some of the core items, such as pocketknives, hats, sunglasses, boots, flashlights, matches, Band-Aids, and cigarette lighters. But there were key items they didn’t have—a compass, a signal mirror, binoculars, a whistle, and a first-aid kit. The rest of their gear was standard camping equipment that’s good to have anywhere: for shelter, they had a tent, sleeping bags, and foam pads; and for cooking, they had a portable stove, fuel, three frying pans, dishes, and some Tupperware containers. To eat, they packed a can of creamed corn, a large can of beans, half a bag of hot dogs, some buns, and a few energy bars. Among the numerous trivial items they brought in were some playing cards and a few cigars. Raffi also brought along the journal and some pens.

  When they were ready to go, they locked up the Mazda, shouldered their packs, and struck off down the trail. It was all downhill, and as they hiked, every fifty yards or so they passed rock cairns—fifteen-inch-high piles of white limestone—that marked the route down to the canyon floor. Now and then the trail would skirt an overlook, and they would get a view of the terrain below. It looked like a lonely backdrop from an old western: a rocky moonscape of canyon, cacti, and bone-dry riverbed.

  After about twenty minutes, they reached the canyon floor, where they stopped to rest and drink some water. They both carried a pint bottle Raffi had bought (the third was packed away with their gear), and they chugged at them voraciously. Sunset was approaching, but the temperature still clung to the mid-eighties, and they had worked up a sweat on the way down.

  The terrain was now flat, and they could camp anywhere they wanted. But as tired as they were, they elected to move on. There were only two directions they could go: up the canyon, following a trail to their right, or down it to the left. The trail down the canyon—or southeast—would have been the logical choice. It’s the main trail, marked on the
map by a bold dotted line. The trail up and to the northwest is lightly dotted—a “primitive route” according the key.

  They took the trail less traveled. Turning right, they hiked up the canyon. After about a mile, they left the trail entirely, wandering another quarter mile up a side canyon to the west. The site they finally chose was next to a rock face on the side canyon’s wall, where an abutting horizontal slab of stone provided a natural bench. They leaned the packs up against it, set up the tent, and prepared to eat.

  Dinner was hot dogs and creamed corn. But as soon as they started to cook the dogs, they realized they needed water to boil them in. They opened the last full pint of water they had, poured it into the pot, and lit the stove. When the food was ready they had the first meal of their new adventure, quenching their thirst with a bottle of Gatorade.

  Satisfied, they kicked back on the rocks and talked. Dusk was settling in now, profoundly softening the character of the desert. During the day’s heat, Rattlesnake Canyon can seem hostile, but as the night’s cooling begins, colors deepen and change as rapidly as the temperature, and the earth’s iron reds and the cacti’s pale greens buzz and glow with an almost hallucinogenic depth. They say that if you stare at the desert around Carlsbad long enough, you can envision the time when it was all water. The Capitan Reef is there in the shapes. Stare at that lechugilla stem long enough, and after a while it becomes something tunicate, a lonely sponge rising from the ancient reef. That prickly pear cactus, you suddenly realize, is not unlike a fan coral, while mice, rabbits, snakes, lizards, and road runners dart among the scrub like fish in sea grass. The primordial liquid roof is gone, exchanged for sky, but the fundaments of form remain.