House of Rain

by Craig Childs

  For a couple of weeks I had been looking for a way up to the higher levels of this terrain, waking before Regan or Jasper stirred in our tent, my daypack loaded with a quart of water as I went out hunting for routes. The plan each morning was to make it back before Jasper woke.

  There were no trails, just courses of geology, aprons of boulders pulled down by gravity and erosion, and fractures leading into backdoor canyons. This morning I kept to this mid-level ledge, seeing how far it might take me. There was a fallen section ahead, the ledge gone. I grabbed what I could of the wall and stepped across, experiencing an instant of vertigo, the cliff gaping below me, before touching the other side.

  The ledge continued, a tricky little path littered with bighorn droppings, each dry pile a word of encouragement. The cliff bowed, offering a place for me to climb to a high platform of bedrock balanced between two side-by-side canyons. From here the world looked as if it was falling apart around me, broken and heaved pieces of earth shaped into narrow fins. I had not found a vantage this high in nearly three weeks of poking around. I stopped under the open stage of the sky, the desert falling around me into impossible labyrinths. This was one of my home landscapes, Canyonlands, to which I returned often to walk the corrugated desert surrounding the confluence of the Green and Colorado rivers. I once spent an entire winter traveling and sleeping among the cliffs and frozen water holes here.

  It is a place to disappear.

  This is where the far Anasazi lived. Most of their remains date to the thirteenth century. These people came scrambling out of the core areas, some from Mesa Verde, others from Kayenta, another Anasazi bastion due south, in northern Arizona. I once saw an artifact from Canyonlands kept in a small Utah museum. It was a ceramic effigy of a bighorn sheep, its body the size of a kitten, long and hollow; its white surface was heavily embellished with tidy black spirals of paint. This artifact was found partially buried in sand and flood debris in a canyon, picked up by a couple of hikers. Its workmanship was classic Anasazi—careful details in the ceramic face, the ears, the horns, and the stub of a tail—not necessarily something one would expect from such a recklessly complex country. The artifact stood on four stunted legs atop a freshly unfolded bed of newspapers in the museum’s back room, a new acquisition.

  The same museum also has an older, more cherished artifact, a resplendently feathered sash that was found in Canyonlands. This happens to be the finest and most well-preserved pre-Columbian item made of feathers in the entire Southwest. Kept under glass, the sash is made of blue, green, and mostly scarlet macaw feathers woven into a soft gray padding of squirrel fur. It was found in a sandstone cave in the southern reaches of Canyonlands, an artifact with roots in tropical Mesoamerica. I have gone back to look at the sash a number of times, my eyes entranced by its knots and the awe-inspiring, almost phosphorescent red feathers, nearly unbelievable in this subdued, pastel desert.

  These two artifacts, the ceramic bighorn and the sash, represent a geographic confluence between the north and the south. With their coiled, massive horns and acrobatic leaps through canyons, bighorn sheep are the quintessential beasts of the Colorado Plateau and especially Canyonlands, able to escape suddenly into the most imposing terrain. Depicted on tens of thousands of rock art panels, these animals must have held a prominent place in the minds of the people who lived here. Yet these people also must have been fascinated by the brightly colored feathers comprising the sash. These feathers no doubt came from the distant and perhaps legendary land of pyramids and jungles to the south. This broad spectrum is what it meant to be Anasazi.

  As I stood on this high point of stone, burgundy cliffs of Wingate sandstone rose behind me to the west, forming a palisade called Island in the Sky. Not far to the southeast, beyond the steepled country known as the Needles, the Abajo Mountains stood robed in snow. To the southwest I could see the tips of a convoluted region called the Maze. I recognized places all around me, each view full of memories. For years I had hunted routes in this territory, yet I had never before reached this bridge of sandstone. For a moment I stood very still, taking it all in.

  I was already too far along to get back in time for Jasper’s waking. I watched the rising sun, then turned around and quickly descended, level by level, into the shadows below. Sunrise turned back into the fine gloom of dawn as I dropped lower, back toward the night that seems always to be lurking along the canyon floors.

  I followed a canyon toward camp as it narrowed to a single pinch. This was a route I had used off and on over the past ten years, a thin outcrop of rock over a free-fall drop, the only way through. It is the checkpoint through which all travelers must pass when moving from one region of Canyonlands into the next. Dangling off this rock shelf, I would have to inch across it, then jump down to another ledge below. I took off my pack—no room to climb down with it on my back—and as I turned to make the jump, I noticed above me pieces of a ruin I hadn’t seen before, simple stones neatly placed, the grin of a low wall in an overhead cliff. I scrambled up to see if a human hand had really made this place. Teetering on the tips of my boots, trying not to leave footprints in the dust, I found a chamber filled with rubble, many of its facing stones having fallen away. It was Anasazi. Right above this pinch, they had built a guardhouse from which they could see anyone coming through, a natural bottleneck controlling the entire region.

  Among the archaeological sites I have seen in Canyonlands, many are positioned in a way that makes me think the Anasazi were constantly checking their backs, keeping an eye on crucial points of movement in these canyons. Pressed by the thrust of war and overcrowding in the thirteenth century, they vanished into this hard, convoluted desert to escape the burning pith of their civilization. If you wanted to hide somewhere, guaranteeing no one would follow, this would be the place to go.

  Perhaps the people living here were hunters and farmers who had lived in southeast Utah for generations. Only now there was no room for them to travel without running into danger—towers and pueblos burning in the distance. So they retreated into this warren of canyons, guarding its passages.

  I turned around and shot down from the ruin, jumping over the edge of the pinch. I reached back up with the full extent of my fingertips to grab my pack, then disappeared down the deep, stone rabbit hole below.

  Everybody was awake when I arrived at camp. The rounded shell of a small side canyon sounded like a nursery full of toddlers’ echoes. Friends had come to visit us in the backcountry, bringing their twin three-year-old boys down the Colorado River and up this dry canyon to camp for a few days. As I approached along a narrow, cobbled wash, the twins were pretending to be elephants, marching around and half-shouting, half-singing. I took Jasper, who was barely two, into my arms and kissed him good morning. Sweat still beaded on my brow, and the smell of climbing was strong in my clothing.

  Once I had Jasper and the twins were marching a cacophonous circle around me, Regan threw me a smile and disappeared alone into the rocks and ledges beyond our camp. This was our daily routine—one person in, the other person out.

  I joined Greta, the mother of the twins, who was cooking breakfast over a camp stove, our kitchen assembled under a slight overhang. While she stirred a pot of oatmeal, she asked me what it would be like to survive in Canyonlands. She thought that with the Colorado River nearby, a person might be able to live pretty well here.

  “This would be one of the worst places you could choose,” I said. “The Anasazi farmed here, but they were truly out on the periphery of their abilities. It took them several centuries just to get corn to the point where it would grow in sand off residual moisture from rainstorms, and I think even still, agricultural life was marginal when they tried it here.”

  She pressed on. “What if you tried to make a living off of drought-resistant crops—beans, amaranth, squashes, melons, corn? It seems like you could dig some ditches off the river and start up a nice life for yourself.”

  Greta, an attractive, sandy-complexioned woman in her thi
rties, was daydreaming, wondering whether she could make do out here. The desert was unfamiliar to her.

  “You can’t trust the river,” I said. I did not want to undermine her daydream, but she had asked. “It would be hard to know how close to shore to plant from one year to the next. One year your crops will get washed away in high spring runoff, and the next year they’ll be stranded and dry, not enough snow in the mountains to keep the river up. You’d be better off dryland farming at the mouth of a side canyon, where you can pick up moisture stored from flash floods, but then you’d have to plant fields everywhere, in every promising nook. Maybe one or two would turn out. The rest would get flooded out or wouldn’t get any water at all. It would just be a hard place to farm, I think.”

  Greta seemed disappointed with my answer. I knew what she was asking, though. She and her husband, Paul, had been contemplating the decline of Western civilization, wondering what they might do if one day the cities fell. They had moved from the city themselves, working their way out to rural western Colorado, where they were now learning the intricacies of farming and irrigation. Should a true apocalypse occur, they were hoping for a place more remote, a sanctuary. They had responsibilities after all, children who might suffer if the world turned bad. In times of political turmoil and war, a parent is likely to consider such things. Greta and Paul were not driven by paranoia. It was simply a concern quietly nagging at them. They wanted to be prepared for a dire recession, or martial law, or an unfavorable new world order. They had both been born to East Coast affluence, and Paul had worked in corporate America. He had assured me that if things turned sour, people below the top one percent of earnings were going to be left out in the cold. He knew well the gap between the chosen few and the rest of us.

  I was pretty sure Greta and Paul could not make it in Canyonlands, even as hardy as they seemed. Regan and I probably couldn’t either. At the moment we were all just explorers in this desert, with our space suit gear, our little bags of organic nuts and tins of fish ready to satisfy the slightest hunger. These convoluted canyons of bare stone would not yield easily to subsistence. Only the desperate, the terrified, and the truly adaptable would turn to this landscape as a place to live.

  Greta kept stirring the oatmeal, and she asked me about the Anasazi. We had found an arrowhead the day before, so she knew people had once been in these canyons. I told her that the Anasazi, at least the ones residing or passing through Canyonlands, had made a living from part-time agriculture and probably full-time hunting and gathering. There were probably other people here to contend with, the more northern Fremont culture reaching this far south. They had to work hard to survive here.

  “You find their caches every now and then,” I said. “Little masonry granaries full of corncobs the wood rats have eaten clean. They left things all over the place, even out here—broken pottery, abandoned villages.”

  They left things about, signs of isolated settlements, but now no one was here but us. In the end this place did not work for them.

  At nap time the side canyon fell silent. Regan offered to guard the tents and the sleeping toddlers while I showed our guests around. Greta and Paul wanted to see a bona fide Anasazi ruin, one not touched up by stabilization crews or reached from a marked trail. They wanted to see the real thing back in the wilderness. The closest site I knew was across the river.

  We uncovered a canoe that Regan and I had cached down in the main canyon among shedding tamarisks and whips of willows, and used it to ferry across the Colorado River, swollen with spring runoff. On the opposite shore under high red cliffs, we tied up to the arm of a box elder.

  We headed up through thickets of char-barked tamarisk trees, ducking down to our knees, clothes dusted with spiders and ants and powdery detritus. Continuing on through walls of desert olive, we reached an open bottomland of sand, saltbush, and greasewood, where lizards darted away in the light. I told Greta and Paul the site was up ahead, a place I’d found many years back while exploring the base of a teardrop-shaped butte.

  The butte hung over us, the slopes beneath it littered with thousands of boulders ready to move at the slightest provocation. We took a cut where the wind had hollowed a slender, dim passageway out of the rock, our shoulders brushing the narrow sandstone corridor.

  As we walked along a bare floor of sand, Paul craned his neck to look up at cracks of daylight overhead. He asked me what kind of archaeology I had found in the area.

  “If you go straight up about eight hundred feet, there’s an old hunting camp, probably pre-Anasazi, very hard to get to,” I said. “It’s on the top of the butte, escape terrain where bighorn sheep go to evade predators. I figure it was an ambush site for hunting sheep—some spear points and stone skin scrapers, a bunch of flaked stone, a few outdoor fire hearths. You see that sort of stuff around here.

  “On the opposite side of the river, there’s a ring of stones where a cliff dwelling collapsed, and it marks one of the few routes where you can actually get from the river all the way to the upper canyons.”

  “Do you have these places marked on a map?” Paul asked.

  I shook my head no and explained that these were just small sites, places better committed to memory than paper.

  “You don’t tell archaeologists?” he asked.

  “This is the middle of nowhere,” I said.

  “And you know they were Anasazi?”

  “No one else was ever here,” I said. “Fremont Indians, but it’s hard to tell the difference between their cultural remains sometimes. There were some uranium miners in the 1950s, but they didn’t even come this far back. The only ones before them were Anasazi in the thirteenth century around the time the cultural shit was hitting the fan in the Four Corners. They were looking for a place to hide.”

  Our passage opened to a tablet of cliff that had fallen facedown like a monolith toppled from a Greek ruin. We climbed over it and saw a natural hollow eroded from a cliff. In the back was a slim granary. Greta saw the structure as soon as I pointed it out; Paul had more trouble. It was unevenly built with large, uncut stones taken from the immediate vicinity and mortared with local silt turned into paste so it would look like all the natural jumbles of red rocks around it. For the most part, granaries you find in Canyonlands are the size of household refrigerators, sometimes as small as the average freezer—enough storage for a family or two.

  Eventually, Paul coaxed the granary out with his eyes.

  “There’s a bigger one around the corner,” I assured him.

  We climbed past the first granary, its darkened, rectangular entry situated on the opposite side, so it would not stand out to anyone passing by. I pointed out to Greta a large corner stone that had fallen from it within the past five years. The fall had left a big, fresh socket of mortar behind.

  As we walked farther into this natural cove, I said, “Over there you can see the bigger granary.”

  A well-concealed granary above the Colorado River. REGAN CHOI

  Paul paused for only an instant before he saw the masonry chamber across from us, as large as a Dumpster. Its rounded walls were made of red stones and mortar. Paul quickened his pace once he recognized it, crossing boulders and a thin gray ledge of limestone to reach it. I stopped to watch him, his demeanor, trained for authority and poker games, suddenly turning to that of an inquisitive boy, long legs and arms springing forward, greeting this ruin with arms spread wide. It was a subtle structure, nested into the cliff, hard to see, though large. It still had a roof, or part of a roof, made with slabs of mortar and narrow beams—a little crooked, but as straight as they come in this desert. Seeing the remains of the roof, Paul glanced back at me once with an inspired grin, then got about his business of exploring. Here was something he could appreciate—fine, inconspicuous handiwork.

  Greta approached the ruin more slowly, admiring the structure. I paused at the granary’s rough clots of mortar, each dimpled byfingertips eight hundred years ago, the whorls of fingerprints stillapparent on some. I had b
een here six or seven times over the years, but I couldn’t get enough of this large granary, an endeavor of people living on the far edge of their civilization, someone’s final hope.

  Paul asked what purpose it might have served.

  “A storehouse for a small community,” I ventured. “They had set up shop at the foot of this cliff.”

  “And this wood,” Paul said, studying what remained of the roof, “how old is it?”

  “Eight hundred years,” I said. “The dryness protects it. It takes forever for wood to decay.”

  Paul considered this and touched the wood with his hand. He nodded thoughtfully, understanding the wood’s antiquity through its feel.

  In front of the granary I squatted near a small chute, framed with two short wooden uprights. The whole granary looked like a prototype of a modern silo. But there was no grain inside, a surprising absence of corncobs for a building in such good condition. In fact, there was a dearth of any artifacts, only a smattering ofbroken pottery, indicating that occupation of this site had not been long.

  Canyonlands offers glimpses of life—some broken pottery, a few corncobs, the circle of a shield bearer painted on a bedrock wall—but rarely more. There are no great houses or roads, no T-shaped doors or truly D-shaped buildings. This was the northernmost dead end for the Anasazi. Some had come this way, but they did not stay, and they were not here with their full cultural complement. These refugees’ bloodlines may have finally ended here.

  Most archaeologists who have spoken to me about this region have a bias against the hard barrens of southeast Utah. When the map of Anasazi occupation is drawn in academic papers and textbooks, it barely reaches this far north. This region is thought to be too cold, too hot, too dry, and too remote. If you are looking for grander traces of the Anasazi, you must go south, across Salt Creek, with its painted handprints and carefully constructed granaries; over the high ground flanking the Abajo Mountains and farther into southeast Utah, along the looping, pale meanders of White Canyon, where kivas begin to appear, some with their original ladders still in place; then along Comb Ridge, toward the Neapolitan sandstones of Cedar Mesa, where murals painted inside cliff dwellings have a surprising freshness. Nearby you will find the last of the great houses and the path many Anasazi took when they finally exited the Four Corners. By the end of the thirteenth century, even the refugees who had fled to Canyonlands were gone, their granaries deserted. Their bid for survival in this complex landscape failed as the core of Anasazi civilization marched south, leaving this place even more remote than ever before.