House of Rain

by Craig Childs

  Among the various ruins I had come upon in the previous days—mounds and bare walls standing in the desert—I had not imagined turquoise or brightly feathered birds hidden inside them. I had thought instead of their deepest rooms storing ceramic ollas filled with water. Most of the broken pottery documented along this road came from pitchers and water jars. I envisioned these roadside outposts as well houses—sunlight never allowed to enter and slow evaporation through clay, the cavernous smell of moisture. Maybe pilgrims heading to Chaco kept these outposts alive, hauling extra water and leaving it here like a toll as they passed.

  Highly decorated black-on-white ceramic pitcher from eleventh-century Chaco. In storage at the American Museum of Natural History. CRAIG CHILDS

  The presence and absence of water ruled the people of this landscape. They were an elemental people, their civilization poised on a sharp edge of nature, the environment swirling and booming around them as if they had colonized the face of the sun. No matter how illustrious the ceremonies, how colorful the processions, the priests or caretakers would have eaten sand in every meal, sweat dripping into their eyes in the middle of the day.

  With a knife I diced the freshly drained water jugs and packed them into my gear. I followed the modern dirt road for a short distance. Even though it was going the wrong way, east to west, its smoothness was appealing—a little taste of easy walking, no need for a compass in my hand.

  In the distance two parked trucks came into view. A couple of men, stick figures from this far away, leaned casually over the bed of one of the trucks. They must have been talking to each other. They were too far away to notice me until I got closer, and they both turned, old Navajo ranchers, heads leaning to watch my slow approach. My boots dragged a little; my shoulders were hanging. The man closest to me had working hands, gnarled knuckles bunching at the truck bed. The other wore a green shirt, scuffed leather boots, and thick glasses. He observed me as if through a telescope.

  We were within at least a quarter mile of the Great North Road in one direction or another—but I was not sure which direction. I stopped in front of the men, squinting in the sun. They looked me up and down. I had a tear in one knee of my pants from crossing a barbed wire fence, my shirt was caked with salt, and I was carrying only a small pack that had seen better days. I must have looked like a battered rowboat floating far out at sea. They looked the same to me. I nodded a greeting, showing them an open hand. Slowly they nodded back.

  “If I were heading due north from here, how far do you think until I hit the river?” I asked, my voice a little quicker and higher-pitched than I wanted.

  “The river?” one said, as if I were delusional, as if there was no river out here, never had been.

  Turning their heads to look north, they both shaded their eyes. There was no reason for them to know how far the river was from here, when dirt roads could be taken to reach a highway, and the highway followed north to the river. No one actually walks out here anymore.

  The conversation was short. There was no agreement about mileage. They said it was a long way. But it was good to hear human voices, a sound other than the wind. I said goodbye and kept walking. I felt rich with the weight of fresh water on my back. I could have gotten out a map, but I had not looked at the map in days, walking back and forth on a northward line searching for ruins, for broken pottery, for bits of glassy rock left by someone knapping a tool long ago.

  As I walked, I checked over my shoulder now and then. As long as I could see the two Navajo men, they stayed put, leaning over the truck bed, watching me fade across the sphere of the earth.

  DECLINE

  KUTZ CANYON

  Boots tied together at their laces swayed from my right fist as I traveled barefoot through a gusting sandstorm, my ankles stinging from blowing dust. It felt good to have these hot boots off, my feet free. On my back I carried my last gallon of water northward through Kutz Canyon toward the San Juan River.

  It felt like the wind was peeling me apart. A rip in my sleeve blew open like a balloon. I walked straight into the windstorm—the white zinc plain of the wash sent skyward. I passed a juniper tree uprooted by an old flood and left stranded like the rib cage of a mammoth. Other castaways lay about, tumbleweeds and dead shadscale, the wind constantly thinning their woody bones. The wash was smooth and wide, passing through a canyon made of slumped, dry clay—eerie pinnacles and misshapen gray faces of badlands.

  The last sign of the Great North Road was a weathered stairway some miles back with wooden laths barely preserved, the stairway’s remains eroding out of a badland slope. No one knows whether the road keeps going north. The land is too weathered to tell, divided into slender gullies too steep for walking. Airplanes have not been able to track the Great North Road through here, nor can satellites or ground surveyors find it.

  I reached down and flicked a piece of pottery out of the hardpan. It was a corrugated sherd pebbled by floods and wind, edges smoothed on its tumble from somewhere upstream. Transported over the centuries, it was simply another piece of the earth, a victim of erosion.

  I did not place this sherd back where I found it. I let it fall from my hand as I walked. The wind ticked it across the ground.

  Early in the twelfth century, things changed in Chaco, far behind me now. A hot drought rolled through—nothing out of the ordinary, but enough to tip the balance. Maybe the priests or governors who had promised rain and gotten it for centuries suddenly couldn’t deliver, still preaching at the sky, stomping their feet, but now dusty and ineffectual. Or the people’s focus merely shifted, the great houses of Chaco centuries old and not glimmering like they once did—at least not enough to rivet the attention of a nomadic people passing across the country. Chaco had grown beyond its canyon and sent out many tendrils. With the right combination of drought and timing, new great houses built in better-watered territory to the north began to prosper, stealing some of Chaco’s thunder.

  Chaco began to fade, becoming more of a residential site than the political-religious focal point it had once been. Its temples turned into living quarters, as people spilled into the once uninhabited spaces of Pueblo Bonito and the surrounding great houses, building hearths on the floors and remodeling spacious rooms into many smaller, more efficient chambers. Large-scale maintenance of these core great houses all but ceased, and their hulls began to creak from lack of care. Some rooms were abandoned, and their roofs weakened, rickety as mineshafts. I cannot help thinking that a slow despair crept among the final residents of Chaco, sharpened by the sudden cacophony of a crashing ceiling, a row of rooms caving in during the night, followed by a chilling silence.

  The exotic wealth that had flowed for so long ceased. The grip of overfarming tightened as the entire surrounding landscape was denuded of firewood that would make winter survivable. The skeletons of children buried in Chaco trash piles show severe anemia and other diseases of malnutrition in this period of decline. Violence erupted. Rooms have been found cluttered with bones bearing the marks of weapons. Burials were dug up, funerary objects disturbed, skulls kicked around like soccer balls. Some of these burials were robbed, or at least desecrated, while they were still fresh, bones still articulated with muscle and tissue, as if vendettas were being waged, clan histories destroyed in feverish acts of vandalism. I think of other times of social turbulence in recorded history, when rivers were turned into mass graves, bodies bloated downstream from the killing fields. What might be hidden in the downstream wash of Chaco, out where the floods form braids across the desert? Perhaps there lies the fate of Chaco. It was a good time to leave.

  And here lies the most common misconception about Chaco—the idea that it collapsed, that the Anasazi failed. Certainly, the canyon itself was not forgotten, nor was it ever entirely abandoned. Great houses saw occasional renovation and additions; the great kivas of Pueblo Bonito were refurbished with new paint and artifacts around the beginning of the fourteenth century. Any architecture added after the mid-twelfth century was modest,
a step down from what had come before, but the place did not collapse. People’s attention simply moved elsewhere, putting Chaco on the back burner.

  Motion up ahead startled me from my slow, steady pace. I stopped to watch a truck gradually emerge from liquid mirrors of mirages, its shape half-concealed by the gauze of the sandstorm. It was a water truck, its metal container pitted with corrosion where much of its white paint had flecked off. It was an old-model working truck crossing from one side of the canyon to the other, down along a road I imagined I would be seeing soon. I figured the truck was here to service well pads and unmanned compressor stations scattered throughout this region. In the past days of walking, I had seen crowds of pump jacks drawing natural gas from Cretaceous shales, greasy machines moving up and down like old men bending to pick pennies off a sidewalk.

  A few minutes later a pickup appeared, a Day-Glo flag hoisted high over the cab marking it as a company vehicle. A head turned in the cab window, a faraway face looking at me, wondering what queer apparition was floating down the wash this afternoon. The truck did not stop or even slow to see who I might be.

  I reached the road a few minutes after that. It was a gash of concrete running perpendicular to the wash, the sharpest possible angle of erosion. I stepped onto it as if onto a deck, slowed my pace, and then stopped in the middle. My toes studied the pocked surface where concrete was eaten away. The downstream side of this road was badly undercut from flash floods mining into concrete and rebar. A sturdy guardrail of pipe stood just below that, its posts gowned with water-driven debris. The pipe had been installed to catch vehicles that might be swept away in a flood, preventing them from being entombed somewhere downstream, doors sealed closed, cab filled to the roof with mud. What a feat of labor, I thought, just to get a simple road through this canyon.

  The road’s surface was marked with different ages of concrete, signs of patching and rebuilding. Even with that work, a crater had collapsed into one end of the road, big enough to swallow a truck, leaving just enough space to drive around it. The off-color patchwork of repairs reminded me of a pre-Columbian public water system in Chaco Canyon that had been rebuilt seven times after seven catastrophic floods. It is hard to hold your ground in this country.

  That night I dropped a quick and sparse camp beneath an overpass where a four-lane highway spanned the wash, the road from Aztec, New Mexico, to Albuquerque, a hundred miles or so away. Kutz Canyon was really not a canyon by the time it met this bridge. The wash had opened up, taking in some cottonwood trees and soft, bending thickets of willows. I sat eating from my bag of nuts as vehicles streamed across the bridge overhead, gas workers returning from the fields. They had no idea I was below them tonight, a troll under the bridge.

  I walked between the concrete piers in the dark, tracing its vaults with my headlamp. Stains of mud spatters went ten feet high where floods had come slapping and hissing in the past. The concrete pillars were covered with graffiti. As if touring the decorated caves of Lascaux, France, I cast my light along the spray-painted records of life here: Dorene Norberto, Andrew Charlie married 1983; Jenny Johnson, Andrew Charlie, married 1989; Liana Mae Cisco, Andrew Charlie married 1996.

  Beware of Andrew Charlie, I thought.

  After midnight the traffic ceased entirely, not a single vehicle to break the quiet. The wind had fallen off, replaced by the smell of water. I thought it might be the San Juan River, just a few miles away. But the fragrance was more like that of rain than river water. A storm was nearby. If I needed water badly enough, I wondered, could I follow this scent? How many miles would it take until I found the remnants of a storm, shallow lenses of water left in the desert?

  Perhaps this was why the Anasazi had moved. They had followed the smell of water, aware of the rains slipping away year by year, retreating from them into the northern highlands. Although there are signs of turmoil at Chaco, the end was probably not as catastrophic and unexpected as many think. It was a predictable end, a routine drought leading people away. At first people may have begun to leave Chaco by rooms, and then by clans, and then by whole villages. Only itinerant households remained in what had once been the triumphant center of the Anasazi world.

  A wind came through all night, sweet and cool with the smell of rain. I woke and gathered my camp beneath the bridge. The traffic had yet to begin, too early for the workers of the gas pads, only the lonely sound of a single vehicle speeding by. I could almost feel rain on my skin, a rare softness of moisture pushing from the west. The sky was still mostly clear but for a few dark, introductory clouds. A sizable storm would be here very soon.

  The wash that I followed turned into a mind-boggling field of mud cracks, dry plates breaking like piecrusts beneath my feet. Not far from the overpass I came to the steamship edifices of a gas processing station, its steel bellies rumbling and hissing behind a high chain-link fence. Hazard signs were posted all over as jets of flame shot from escape valves.

  Parts of northwest New Mexico are covered with natural gas fields, tens of thousands of pump jacks connected by freshly graded roads. Many of these roads lead to this refinery near the San Juan River, where in the predawn darkness sulfuric lights cast shadows across white arcs of steel. I had to stop and stare.

  I stepped up, captivated, draping my fingers through the perimeter fence. Daggers of flame torched the sky, roaring as they burst upward, venting overflow gas. Such incredible industry with not a single person around to pull a lever or check a dial. I was enchanted but repulsed. What have we made of ourselves? I wondered. What hungry, bolt-hearted machine? This processing station supported the wonders of our civilization, spitting fire into the air. After these many days of walking in the desert, existing only as a creature of flesh, damp eyes panning the horizons, I stood awestruck by this apparatus.

  In a disquieting way the refinery made me think of Chaco. I remembered rumors I had heard, remarks that Chaco should never have happened, that it is stained with a dark history, with sorcery that once delved too deeply into the supernatural. Some members of the modern Hopi tribe have mentioned to me that they will not visit Chaco Canyon, that an ancient incongruity dwells there. Chaco may have been like a Tibetan temple, with colorful ceremonies and festivals, but it was also like the Mayan world of the time, rife with ritualized violence and human sacrifice. The same knives known to have been used in Mesoamerica for cutting out beating human hearts have been found at Chaco.

  In the end Chaco burned. Kivas were set on fire and whole rows of houses with wooden ceiling beams and thatched doors went up in flames. It was a way of leaving things behind, the mark of an intense people on their way to someplace else.

  Once when I was in the field working with three archaeologists on a road network, we gathered for lunch behind the flat hillock of a nameless great kiva, taking shelter from the wind. Broken pottery centuries old was scattered across the ground beneath our packs. Each person had a particular lunch routine, repeated day after day: one man ate handfuls of nuts from a bag, the woman carved slivers of cheese with a knife, and a second man, older than the others, unfolded the wrappings of a sandwich he had made that morning.

  We had been out for days looking for undocumented Anasazi roads,taking bearings, standing lined out and shouting back and forth to each other.

  The older man, one of the most knowledgeable field archaeologists in the Four Corners, was master to the younger ones. This was obvious in the seating arrangement, the younger two sitting at a polite distance but still facing the master. As he ate, he told us stories.

  He talked about sites he had dug, artifacts that had come up from the ground cradled in his hands. Describing a particularly beautiful vessel he had seen, he called it ceremonial, saying it came from a special room in a ruin where priests must have handled it, priests he envisioned wearing turkey feather robes, their headdresses feathered like those of Mayan gods. As an older archaeologist, he was allowed to let his imagination wander, and we listened respectfully.

  His thoughts led him to
Chaco. You cannot sit with a Southwestern archaeologist for long before Chaco finds its way into the conversation. He wondered out loud if the priests of Chaco had locked themselves in their kivas and eaten nothing but corn.

  “Corn pouring in from all directions,” he said. “Served in beautiful black-on-white bowls. After long enough sequestered in there, they came out mad with visions.”

  He said he imagined Anasazi priests prophesizing in their robes, sending workers out to build fire signals and roads, aligning everything with the sun, the moon, the stars. He envisioned these priests occasionally taking out very sharp, leaf-shaped knives and sacrificing people by removing their hearts. Maybe it was all the corn they ate, he said. It drove them mad. He paused, with a wry grin, and observed the horizon. Sage folded and recoiled in the wind. I could not tell how serious he was. The others answered with reserved laughter, not quite agreement, but not disbelief.

  I sat chewing on a stick of dried papaya, listening. I thought about his conjecture; it did not seem possible. Too odd, I thought. Prophets ordering the construction of an extensive road network and stellar alignments of buildings merely because they had gone crazy locked in their great houses eating too much corn? Were his comments a prankish yarn, something to get a laugh, to see how the others would respond? His voice was hard to read. He had spoken with a quarter smile on his face.