House of Rain

by Craig Childs

  Salmon Ruins, forty-five miles north of Chaco, has a bracket-shaped floor plan with a long back wall, two straight wings of room blocks to either side, and a kiva compound in the center. Compared to Chaco, this is a later style of great-house construction. New generations of masons and engineers cut off the majestic curves of their earlier great houses and replaced them with more efficient lines—the new planimetric fashion of the twelfth century. Here the layout of great houses looked more like graph paper than half-moons, but only the exterior shape had changed. The core was basically the same in square footage, placement of kivas and interior plazas, and layout of surrounding rooms. The new and the old great houses could be fit snugly inside each other.

  The south wall of Salmon Ruins sent me to a highway where cars swarmed on their way to work, morning traffic loud and relentless. As I turned onto the asphalt shoulder, I wondered how many of these commuters had any idea that a great house was located here—a pinnacle of prehistoric architecture a stone’s throw away. Eastbound vehicles streamed with rainwater, windshield wipers slapping furiously. Westbound traffic was dry. As I walked, the sky broke open. Louder than the cars came the roar of fresh, hard rain. I swung a black waterproof poncho over my head and my pack as one of the largest storms of the decade descended on the Totah.

  CONTINUITY

  AZTEC

  Billowing in my black rain poncho, I must have looked like the angel of death crossing the bridge over the Animas River, choked and throbbing with flood debris below. An archaeologist I knew at Salmon Ruins had given me a ride ten miles up to the town of Aztec, New Mexico, to spare me the walk in the rain. He dropped me off at a grocery store, where I bought a loaf of bread I now had tucked under my arm beneath the poncho. I watched half trees tumbling through the water below the bridge, the heft of their branches pounding against pilings, sending concussions up through my soaked boots. All across the Colorado Plateau the storm sent floods down, stories I would be hearing for years from companions of mine who were out in the weather that day. It was a day long to be remembered.

  The wind swept up through my poncho, turning me into a swirling black apparition. The rain fell steadily. I tore the bread off in hunks, eating it as I went, taking small, even bites, chewing thoroughly. I had been subsisting primarily out of a light pack of nuts and honey for some time now. I tried to hold back and not devour this sweet, crusty bread too fast. Cheap bread, grocery store bread, but a feast nonetheless. Vehicles hissed by, sending up veils of water that blew a lush and cool wind into my face. Such a fertile smell had probably not visited the town of Aztec for a year or more.

  When I reached the other side of the bridge, I turned onto a muddy neighborhood street that was being dug up for repairs, the construction halted on account of the storm, backhoes gathered like sleeping crabs. Had they found anything? I wondered. Down in the earth, had the teeth of a tractor bucket drawn up a skeleton or severed a broad black-on-white serving bowl? Every house was built on top of an archaeological site sealed closed by concrete foundations and streets. After Chaco this was the next-largest, most intensive concentration of people and architecture in the region. It was built not long after Salmon, the next step in a journey.

  I did not avoid the mud. I strode right through it, resolved that I could not get any wetter, my pants already drenched well up toward my knees. I walked across the parking lot of Aztec Ruins National Monument, where the only vehicle was a ranger’s truck. No one was visiting in the rain. Inside the front doors I pulled back my hood and tucked the bread into my other armpit as I worked a hand into my pocket. A man in a snappy uniform alerted himself, rising to the front desk, where I stopped and withdrew a few dollar bills, damp and in disarray. I had carried this cash all the way up the Great North Road knowing I would need it upon reaching Aztec. I tried to flatten the bills, ironing each one out in my hand, but they were hopeless, and I, the angel of death, began to look confused and foolish, so I just handed them over. The cash register drawer chimed open. The uniformed man knew who I was not by name, but just as a traveler from the outback. He gave me a comforting smile, smoothed the bills himself, and slid them into the cash drawer.

  Inside the visitors’ center was a small museum full of artifacts and an informative movie, playing for nobody, in another room. I passed these by and walked out the back doors, returning to the rain. A short distance away were the dark and drenched remains of a great house, the West Ruin of Aztec. I stopped at a pair of vacant benches that faced the body of the ruin. The site looked like stacks of opened crates, their neatly tabular style of masonry a perfect imitation of Chaco, and of Salmon Ruins. Thick wings of outer chambers guarded numerous kivas within. On adjacent grounds other great houses remained unexcavated, their prominences visible among tall, water-heavy trees. This was a tight community of ancient structures, but only one had been unearthed, this West Ruin, left out in the rain. The others were untouched, waiting to be excavated another day, or perhaps never.

  Aztec’s great houses mirror those of Downtown Chaco. They were designed to match Chaco down to the exact square footage, angled toward and away from one another in the same fashion as Chaco’s great houses, even elevated around one another in a similar way: one representing the position of Pueblo Alto, another emulating Pueblo Bonito, another Chetro Ketl, and so on. This was an almost exact duplication. The distances between prominent kivas are nearly the same as well, the directions of lines formed by various walls repeated to within a small degree of accuracy. John Stein, who surveyed both sites, told me that Aztec reproduces Chaco one to one. “The West Ruin at Aztec is the dimension of Pueblo Bonito,” he said. “All the architectural arrangements, the critical dimensions of symmetry, the proportions, the actual size, are based on the Bonito formula.”

  One hundred years after the peak of Chaco, Aztec was built to the codes of the same architectural paradigm. In essence it was Chaco picked up and moved fifty-five miles north along the terraces of the Animas River, where a new locus of power replaced the old one in a carefully manufactured gesture of continuity.

  During the dry years of the twelfth century, communities of the Colorado Plateau could no longer afford to keep pumping Chaco full of corn, pottery, and other finely crafted wares. Times were lean and more utilitarian. A new center was needed, one closer to reliable water sources. The decampment of well-established communities around Chaco for these newly constructed ones in the north implies a decree, almost a form of far-reaching government.

  The principal governor for these people was climate. Anasazi social networks responded to the Colorado Plateau’s kaleidoscopic weather with impressive uniformity. Where many people see the failure of the Anasazi in the fall of Chaco, a different story is revealed in the Totah. Chaco was merely reborn during a rising drought. Formalized links of continuity were built into the system, allowingpeople to slip out from under environmental pressure and establish themselves elsewhere with their entire culture intact.

  As I walked through the rain, I thought that in the twelfth century, people would have dreamed of water like this, a great house dark and drenched. I felt embarrassed almost, moving through musical, pattering sounds, rain guttering down off the hood of my poncho. I should be drinking it, I thought. I should be placing bowls under the eaves. A quarter of the year’s precipitation was falling in a matter of hours.

  A wet chill leaked through my clothes and my shirt cuffs began dripping. I needed shelter. Nearby was a restored great kiva standing round as a layer cake. It was built on the footprint of a former great kiva, surrounded by the ruins of the original great house, and its flat, circular roof was in good condition. It would be dry inside. I stooped into the kiva’s doorway, moving quickly through streams coming off the roof. As I walked down wooden stairs into a dim enclosure far below, I draped my poncho over one arm to let it drip. The stairs led into an underground court, where four pillars reached some thirty feet from ground to ceiling. It was like walking into a grand ballroom.

  The wooden steps wer
e warped from tourists, creaking as I descended. The air inside was still. At the bottom I stopped on hard-packed dirt and sand and peered around the cavernous chamber, its ground as dry as a tomb. Coming in here felt familiar. I had taken similar refuge from the rain before, pushing open the big wooden doors of city churches, finding myself in rows of silent pews. I moved over to a plastered masonry bench running nearly two hundred feet around the circumference of the kiva, broken only by two sets of stairs opposite each other. I set my things down on the bench.

  I was born to an era of stadiums and concert halls, and already today I had entered a grocery store larger than nearly anything the Anasazi ever built. Yet as I lowered my pack onto the bench, I was struck by the vastness of this chamber. In the twelfth century, it would have pushed the boundaries of what any human had ever built in the Southwest, large enough that nine hundred years ago it would have filled one with a feeling of awe, or bewilderment. In a landscape dominated by a bold and inescapable sky, entering this underground rotunda must truly have stirred the senses.

  On this day Aztec’s great kiva was vacant, and my footsteps sounded hollow as I stepped away from the bench and began pacing around the building. I tried to keep my movements conservative, as if I should not stir the stillness. A misty blue glow floated down from overhead, a faint light coming in through the smoke hole in the roof, illuminating high, whitewashed walls down to an even, horizontal line below which the walls had been painted cherry red. Additional light entered through T-shaped ports encircling the kiva, sharply cut vents leading to half-moon-shaped exterior rooms.

  When this great kiva was first excavated, all that was found was the circle of its bench and a chest-high crop of walls with niches and what might have been wooden ladder rungs leading down to the floor. The masonry pillars had mostly fallen over, leaving four distinct stalks rising several feet out of the rubble. The floor plan was found intact, though, concentric rings of walls and rooms laid out like a coliseum. When the excavator who uncovered this site in the 1920s, Earl Morris, got to the bottom, he turned right around and rebuilt the entire kiva. It was his passion, perhaps the final archaeological obsession of his life. If anyone knew how to return a great kiva such as this to at least a facsimile of its original self, it was Morris. By the time he did this reconstruction in the 1930s, he had dug more sites in Anasazi country than anyone preceding him, loading museums with artifacts and becoming the first to excavate all the way to the floor of a great kiva. He knew how the walls should be painted and how the complex wooden ceiling might have been fashioned.

  Gary Brown, the archaeologist who had driven me up from Salmon Ruins this morning, was a fan of Morris’s. He told me that Morris had continued the reconstruction even when funding was yanked and his work crew dwindled. Morris was disturbingly brilliant, Brown said, weather-beaten and painfully passionate about archaeology. Brown told me that the great kiva had recently needed repainting and that he painstakingly re--created pigments Morris had used, matching their chemical components in order to remain true to the original effect. The story struck me as peculiar: a modern archaeologist trying to re-create a dead archaeologist’s work, which itself was a re-creation of something the Anasazi had built nine hundred years earlier. Ancestor worship, I thought. Not ancestors by ethnicity but by place and architecture.

  Excavators working on kivas repeatedly find the remains of previous masons and kivas directly below. These older kivas were often purposely destroyed—roofs burned, walls pulled down—and then new kivas were built on top, as if in a ritual act, or at least to signify a changing of the guard. Of the thirty-seven kivas excavated at Pueblo Bonito, at least twenty-two had received substantial renovations. Several were razed to their benches before being rebuilt. A kiva at the Chetro Ketl great house next to Pueblo Bonito drops down three stories through eight cycles of reconstruction, each kiva sitting slightly askew on top of the last. The original ceiling atop Aztec’s great kiva was once supported by four massive timbers, and at some point the timbers were burned along with the entire ceiling, all of which was replaced by a new twelfth-century ceiling held up by four stone pillars, a feat of tremendous human and natural resources. Centuries after that ceiling collapsed, Morris came and rebuilt it again.

  Even the pre-Columbian plaster on most kiva walls tends to be ten or twenty layers thick, each added at a different time. Murals of fantastic imagery are buried beneath one another, each painted layer as thin as gauze, barely covering the mural painted before it.* These kivas seem to be corridors through time, underworld passages kept in the same place but destroyed and rebuilt year by year, generation by generation, or even culture by culture.

  If archaeologists were to unearth Morris’s great kiva centuries from now, they would have a heyday, finding a 1930s reconstruction atop a twelfth-century original that itself had been built upon previous versions of itself. Just like the overpainted murals and the nested versions of kivas found all across this region, this would be a clear example of continuity. Nine hundred years after the site was abandoned, someone came and rebuilt it. Future archaeologists excavating this great kiva might notice that the fine facing stones used for its superstructure are original, gathered from the building that preceded it. Meanwhile, the stones selected for the wall cores were imported from twelfth-century ruins along the La Plata River twenty miles away, as if this site were built to tie history together, to renew time.

  Two kiva circles nestled in room blocks at twelfth-century Aztec. REGAN CHOI

  I tilted my head back and looked up into the cat’s-cradle shadows of the ninety-ton ceiling above me, timbers crossing back and forth in a work attesting to Morris’s engineering talent. Morris had fit the crossbeams together on paper, then hoisted them into place with a Navajo crew.

  The percussion of rain increased on the great kiva’s roof and then let up, giving a slow rhythm to the day as I walked steady circles around the pillars, then sat for a long spell looking up through the faint shaft of light coming down the center. Thunder sounded through the walls. A shadow fluttered at one of the entrances, and the park ranger appeared in his raincoat. In the middle of shaking off his coat, he stopped, surprised to see me here. He recognized me, the angel of death who had come in from the rain a few hours earlier.

  He asked if everything was good, and I told him I was doing fine, thank you.

  “Would you like music?” he asked.

  I looked up at him from the ground floor.

  “Music?”

  “Flute music.”

  Then he laughed knowingly, saying, “It comes with the kiva.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Why not.”

  He pressed a button mounted on a post, put his coat back on, and went back out into the rain. A cascade of flute music emanated from speakers tucked among the ceiling beams. I stood still for a moment, a little surprised, recognizing immediately that the music was played not on a Native American flute, but on a traditional Japanese shakuhachi. I would later find out that the performer on the recording was Navajo, playing a song called “Zuni Sunrise.”

  This kiva was tangled in eclectic ancestry, unrelated histories passing in and out of each other, brought together by this place. What was it Einstein said, that time and space are the same entity? Does that mean that if you stand in one place and are a keen enough observer, you can see clearly through time’s entire lineage?

  The flute music finally came to an end. I was grateful it was over. Its tones had highlighted a few too many of the memories here, and I could barely make my way through their muffling, ironic weight. I began walking once more, hands behind my back, my pace slow and even, as if I was touring an art museum. I listened to the older rhythm overhead, one that must have been heard occasionally in the twelfth century, the sweet dance of rain falling on the roof.

  MOON WATCHERS

  CHIMNEY ROCK

  Icarried Jasper on my back as I walked with Regan along a mountain trail in the late-afternoon light. The trail led to a sledge of cliff, an eroded r
idgeline standing at nearly eight thousand feet in southern Colorado, not far northeast of Aztec. Upon this ridge called Chimney Rock, the Anasazi had outdone themselves. Here they had erected a multistory complex like a trophy, the highest and one of the most isolated great houses. It was built in the eleventh century during the height of Chaco and has since been beaten into ruins by weather.

  Yesterday’s storm left the atmosphere as clean as museum glass. I could feel it in my lungs, the sharpness of a world reborn—summer shaken out, folded, and put away for another year as the brisk garments of autumn were laid across the land. A brushstroke of snow ran clear across the southern Rocky Mountains before us. A few clouds remained, stragglers caught in high, forested basins and up against timberline slopes well inside the state of Colorado. Engorged rivers slowly subsided, leaving wreckage strewn for hundreds of miles.

  Regan bundled Jasper into her coat, and we approached the great house, its exposed rooms as orderly as the slots in a cash register drawer. All around us lay the pastel sky of early evening. The Piedra River snaked southward, opening a gap in the land through which I could see the barrens of northwest New Mexico, the land of Chaco and the Totah. Strolling around this great house on such a high point, I was reminded of Buddhist prayer flags and stupas erected in stiff, mountainous winds, claims of holiness and splendor soaring above the earth.

  Nearly two hundred people had come this evening, their casual movements pressing against the sunset sky. They were here to watch the rising of the summer’s last full moon—people carrying ticket stubs showing that they had paid their ten dollars and signed waivers freeing the Forest Service from any liability in case they stumbled off the edge of the ridge.