House of Rain

by Craig Childs

  Dick wiped dust off his knees and looked into the fading western sky—hot, bare stone as far as he could see.

  “How bad is it, really?” he asked.

  “I’m sure we’ll find better,” I said in reply.

  The next day, with this water heavy on our backs, we dropped into the sparse, dappled shade of a cottonwood tree that grew in the wash. We slipped our tired bodies onto the ground, jaws open, hands slack and pulling out gear that we could use as backrests, hard pillows. We had walked a number of miles already, and it was time to rest. I uncapped a bottle and drank. The water was hot and tasted bad. I stretched out on a thin bed of dry cottonwood leaves and squinted straight up through the sporadic shade and blistering green light between the branches above us.

  Some modern Pueblo people in the Southwest still use the kiva as their holy chamber, and among those who speak the language of Tewa, the kiva is called te’i, “the place of the cottonwood tree.” The kiva is thought to be a bridge between the underworld and the world above, and the hole traditionally placed in the kiva floor, just beyond the deflector stone and in front of the ladder, represents a place of emergence. In Tewa this hole is called p’okwi koji, “the lake roof hole,” which leads up from a mysterious underground lake. The kiva is where a radiant green tree grows in the sparseness of the desert, as if it were a flag raised on barren ground announcing the presence of water below, a sign of hope and fertility.

  On this July morning it was easy to envision how a cultural cosmos would be structured in this land, the most salient green of the desert luminous over my head, water pumping from vaults far below into thirsty cottonwood leaves above. This tree is a heavy drinker. It will wither without a steady, daily source of water. I lay beneath it, imagining an underground lake below my back. There was water down there, out of my reach but made apparent by this tree.

  The few flies that came by were exhausting to watch. They darted and spun around our bodies, landing to sip sweat off our forearms and cheeks. Ants mapped the skin of my hands, the rim of my right ear, and I did nothing to dissuade them. Unable to sleep but not quite awake, I lay on the ground as flies bit little plugs out of my flesh, my hand lifting to shoo them away now and then, my mind wandering into the long stillness of the day.

  For hours I watched the sun creep overhead. Thin tree shadows wheeled around my body. I did not carry a watch these days; there were enough markers of time on the land. But at one point the sun seemed to stop, the shadows no longer turning. High noon. I got up and drew on my hat. My stepfather lay half-asleep nearby. I walked into the open light across grill plates of bare rock, the underside of my hat brim glowing from sunlight reflected off the stone beneath me. Slight remnants of eight-hundred-year-old granaries hung from the cliff overhead, mortar footings and a few squares of abandoned stonework. Just down from these were tablets of rock art—markings of a mobile people, travelers who spent their years passing up and down Chinle Wash and all along Comb Ridge.

  I once worked at an excavation with an archaeologist specializing in the Hohokam culture, a desert people from far southwest of here, where the city of Phoenix now stands. The Hohokam were irrigators, large-scale farmers who did not move so much. My colleague had come to work at an Anasazi site in order to learn field skills, but he made it known that he believed these Colorado Plateau folk to be inferior to his Hohokam, who had developed an advanced social and political domain in order to properly allocate river waters among numerous irrigation communities. He saw these southerners as corporate entities—making decrees, balancing powers—while the Anasazi lived on the dusty edge of the world, honorable people no doubt, but bound to a desperate landscape. For as sedentary as the Anasazi might seem with their great houses and pueblos, they were still nomads, which lessened them in the eyes of my colleague. They were dryland farmers who rarely employed irrigation. In my colleague’s mind this northern desert, so bitter with its droughts and its few unpredictable rivers, did not allow them to become a great people.

  One day while we were eating lunch under a shade tarp at the excavation, I mentioned to him that it was their ability to move that made them great. Their resource was not annual irrigation water, but daily drinking water. Their decisions had to be implemented immediately. Whole communities had to be prepared to disband at the drop of a hat, while preserving an inner social structure that would allow them to come seamlessly back together years or decades later when conditions improved. I had my own bias, respectfully suggesting to him that this was a civilization on a sliding scale, able to contract or expand at a moment’s notice, abandoning regions for tens or hundreds of years before returning and building again as if they had never left. The people had a continuity that stretched beyond generations, a coherence of cultural practice surpassing time and place, calling upon memory, the very rudiment of civilization.

  My colleague stuck to his premise that civilization meant big business, booming agriculture, fields of irrigation canals. Civilization is defined in different ways by different people. To me it means an overarching social organization consistent across long spans of time and space. It is the formation of a cultural entity, incorporating diverse ethnicities and languages, where there is a single, standardized symbology—for example, the symmetrical geometry painted on pottery, or rock art images left all across the Colorado Plateau. This landscape engendered its own form of civilization, one tied inextricably to the chance presence and absence of water.

  Now, as I walked away from Dick’s and my resting spot, I watched for etchings in the cliffs and on boulders. More than that, I probed for any dark stain high in the rocks, maybe a tuft of greenery, some mark of water. My slow steps broadcast every turn of gravel, every soft press of sand. Time seemed to stand still. I came to an opening, a bend in the cliff where I could see most of the sky. Isolated thunderheads roamed in the distance. I stopped to watch these vaporous lakes glide by, while down here on the ground creatures like me were slowly dying, skin pulling against our bones. The thunderstorms were inaccessible, too far away to offer even the hope of shade.

  Did the Anasazi call to these lakes in the sky? I wondered. Did they cry the very name of rain, shamans mumbling in their dark rooms, while young, vigorous dancers sweated in woven, shell-stitched kilts, their steps sending them out of their minds, into a dream flying upward, a request sent to rain gods to please consider relinquishing their precious stores?

  I stood alone, my shirt in tatters, thinking my voice too small and far away to ask these distant storms to come to me and collapse upon the ground. The only sound I heard was the bumbling passage of a fly. It zigzagged along the canyon and flew a quick inspection around my head. Just as fast, it was gone, like a missile along the cliffs. Water, I thought. Water, somewhere.

  A spring, enough to sip or pat with my tongue. If not that, the carcass of a lost Navajo cow, its belly churning with maggots, a water hole in itself, if only for flies.

  I walked back to the cottonwood shade, where Dick barely opened his eyes. I slumped to the ground, giving myself once more to the crinkle of long-fallen cottonwood leaves, my body turned back into a riddle for the ants.

  When the sun finally moved from the peak of the sky, the cliffs began showing their shadows. Dick and I sat up and spoke a few cursory sentences to each other. We rose to this broadening light and cooked a macaroni and cheese dinner in a battered, blackened pot. After scraping the last burned flecks of pasta out of the pot, leaving it unwashed for the lack of water, we continued to move south.

  Dick was interested in the bedrock, in its composition, how it had originally been laid. His was not a stable earth, but one covered with rising blisters and sinking wells, and as we walked, he could see the ramifications of these actions, pointing across long arcs of thrusts and faults where global geological processes were making themselves known. Comb Ridge lifts out of the earth along a crack that goes deeper than any geologist has ever been able to see. There are unknown regions down there, monsters inside the earth that eat the charg
es of seismic waves we thump into the ground.

  In the past few days along Comb Ridge, Dick and I had walked by chunks of rock the size of buildings coughed up from the earth. Isolated volcanoes seem to have sprouted between the seams of the ridge—not volcanoes per se, but upwellings from deep in the earth, features known as diatremes, which erupted from below the level of magma where stone is no longer molten but plastic. In these diatremes we found beautiful little squares of garnet crystals and threads of greasy green serpentine that had been spewed up from 150 miles below the earth’s surface. With the tip of a sewing needle, we had plucked out a minuscule pinkish gem that under a hand lens appeared to be a diamond, something found in diatremes. Comb Ridge impressed my stepfather. It represented the mechanics of the underworld.

  Late in the day, as we walked along the scrolling meanders of Chinle Wash where it touched in and out of Comb Ridge, Dick told me that some people believe if you could drill a hole to the very core of the earth, the planet would explode, like a balloon popped with a needle. There is so much pressure in the middle that the earth might suddenly just blow up.

  Dick saw around us fractures caused by migrating continents, welling plates of stone moving across beds of molten rock. He told me that he used to take gravitational measurements, traveling to different places to read the shifting pull of the planet, and that the differences he noted were not just from place to place, but from hour to hour. Gravity, he discovered, changes within the earth as if tides were passing through the planet, waves of liquid rock rising and falling. He concluded, like so many geologists before him, that the ground is not solid. It is a thin sheet of fabric thrown over a heaving interior. Thus we see all of this at the surface—Comb Ridge tossed up, cliffs drawn along its edges, matter thrown through semivolcanic fissures. The Colorado Plateau, which Comb Ridge splits nearly down the middle, is a precise expression of movement, its solid bedrock a thin facing that reflects every change below.

  Like the cottonwood tree, I thought. The underground lake. The cosmology of this desert is constantly revealed in different forms. I looked up and saw rock art unfurling down a sunbaked cliff, and bits of fallen cliff dwellings hanging from shallow alcoves. The movement of people is one of these thin veneers across the planet’s surface. Flowing over the geologic ripples of the Colorado Plateau, people once slipped into these convenient spaces, journeying between gaps and along ridges as the earth flinched and rolled around them. The climate also nudged them along—rainy summers swelling their staying power, longer than average winters freezing them out of the high country and sending them down into the deserts. They must have felt the constant pressure of these boiling, dry storms and of the solid stone undulating beneath them. The hands of the world were touching them, leading them first one way and then another.

  It was an archaeologist named Nieves Zedeño who told me I should come walking along this line where Chinle Wash runs. Meeting her for lunch, I was prepared to take notes in my journal and record our conversation on tape. She told me to put away my notes. I looked up at her—Ecuadorian accent, dark almond eyes—and said, “Of course, whatever you want. May I use the recorder?”

  “No,” she said. “Just listen. I will send you the data. Just listen.”

  Zedeño pushed her salad out of the way and with her fingers drew an imaginary map on the table. “People were moving all the time,” she said. She laid out the geography for me, the southern and northern basins of the San Juan River, the Chuska Mountains, the mesas in the Kayenta region of northeast Arizona, everything that was Anasazi.

  She told me that she learned how pottery had moved throughout this region. Zedeño’s work was much like that of Donna Glowacki around Mesa Verde. Like Glowacki, she was performing neutron activation analysis on ceramic remains, determining where pots were made and recording where they finally came to rest. Whereas Glowacki had uncovered intricate movements within the confines of the Northern San Juan Basin, Zedeño’s research took in nearly all of the Southwest. The migrations she described to me sounded tidal, not happening all at once but occurring at increasing and decreasing intervals.

  “It was truly organic,” Zedeño said. “Almost beautiful.”

  As she spoke, her hands moved across the “map” she had made, defining larger cultural movements as waves of people drained off the Colorado Plateau late in the thirteenth century. In Zedeño’s mind, in her hands, was the entire geography of the Southwest pressed through a fine gauze of centuries and reconfigured based on data she and her colleagues had gathered on ceramics. Zedeño described for me the growth and subsidence of communities and cultures in this landscape, pueblos buried in sand, one by one, from north to south. By the fourteenth century, nearly everyone in the Southwest was moving, the whole culture upended. Something big had happened: drought. But more than drought. A call had gone out. It was time to go.

  Zedeño detected a strong southward movement of ceramics, entire households of pottery carried hundreds of miles from where it was made. People were vacating their homelands and heading for new population centers in the south, where they would have a better chance of growing crops. Along the way they left lines of pottery connecting one place to the next. These migrations, she explained, probably went back and forth, not a singular movement but an ebb and flow.

  Zedeño centered her hands on the table and named the key archaeological areas there: Cedar Mesa, Canyon de Chelly, Chinle Wash, Chavez Pass, Chodistaas, and so on. She described populations pushing through desert canyons and gathering on high mesas, surging back and forth, two steps south, one step north. Then she drew her finger straight down the middle, inscribing a line.

  “There is this blank area here,” Zedeño said. “I think if you looked closely along this line, you would find strong signs of movement. We just haven’t been able to devote the time that is needed.”

  The line she had drawn on the table was Chinle Wash, a north-south meridian starting in southeast Utah and cutting straight down through northeast Arizona.

  “I’ve been walking there,” I told her.

  “It would help many of us just to hear what it is like,” she replied.

  “This line’s a hundred miles. Three hundred if you follow it clear out. I’ve only walked small portions of it,” I said.

  “It’s a long way,” Zedeño agreed.

  “I’ve often thought about taking some serious time there,” Ioffered.

  Indeed, I had maps of this region on my walls at home, aerial photographs from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) pinned floor to ceiling. My study looked like the den of a madman, clear plastic sheets draped over wall maps so that I could connect place to place with penned red lines of genetic traits drawn from prehistoric skeletons, blue lines of ceramic distribution, green lines of architectural styles. I had delved into the geology of this region, seeing the surface of the earth there like a glass windshield and the landforms as hairline cracks creeping along it, arcing over hundreds of miles.

  I looked down at the table, coyly, as if letting her know the hardship, the weeks, the months it would take to fully examine this line of hers, to do her dirty work of walking. I studied the line she had drawn across the table. A dry place, I thought. Reservation land. Remote country. I had barely touched the place, just enough to know it was full of potential.

  When I looked up, I noticed that Zedeño had finished her salad. Mine was hardly touched. I told her that I would go there and walk. I would let her know what I found.

  I took many journeys along the length of Chinle Wash, and at different times, in different reaches, I came upon many archaeological sites—a D-shaped building still standing in the open, and numerous cliff dwellings tucked into recesses, some with roofs still intact, T-shaped doorways peering across the land. I saw strands of rock art all the way down Zedeño’s line, individual boulders marked one after another like signposts. Trails of broken red pottery denoted the movement of red ware production to the south from the thirteenth into the fourteenth century as people fled
the Four Corners, taking their industry with them.

  By far the hottest, most desolate journey was with my stepfather. Every day was the same, hiding from the sun after a few hours of morning travel, then waiting in overpowering silence for the sun to sink so that we could move again. One morning we climbed into the cliffs looking for shade. Ancient steps had been carved into a rock face, and we followed them toward a vaulted circle of shadow towering over us.

  The massive sandstone formations of southeast Utah tend to erode into concave shelters known as theater-heads—enormous round alcoves, ceilings one hundred, two hundred feet high. Breathing hard, veins standing out in our faces to shed heat, we reached the shade of one alcove, where we climbed into a hollow space the size of a concert hall. Boulders lay around us, and nearly all of them were scored with designs—snakes and spirals and enigmatic symbols the likes of which I had seen throughout the Anasazi realm. I thought, They spent their days here, too, getting out of the sun and lazily pecking at the rock. Some of the images were San Juan Style, and some were older, Glen Canyon Linear, designs cut like the rib cages of insects, centipede-like imagery. We peered upward and saw more figures inscribed along the back wall as far as a person could climb. Some were not so old. Domestic Navajo horses had been painted in white, looking fifty, eighty years old at the most. The horses had been painted so that they ran with heads lifted, trotting and alert, manes flying like banners. (The Navajo are unrelated to the Anasazi, having come from the north late in the game, after this place was essentially cleared out.)

  I peeled off my sunglasses in the shade and wandered along the curved wall, finding among designs of pre-Columbian headdresses and bighorn sheep the image of a colt walking beside its mother, one of the most pleasing sights in a rancher’s life. Humans have been coming to this shelter for some time, I thought, leaving marks of our aspirations on the wall, on fallen boulders. I dabbed two fingers of sweat from my forehead, planted them on the rouge bedrock, and made a smudge that faded slowly.