by Craig Childs
I dropped to my hands and knees to start my work. The woman glanced at me and nodded a greeting. She was an archaeologist from Jalisco, Mexico. She told me in her accented English that she thought what we were doing was a pain in the ass. In Mexico there are no such regulations, none of this guarded language. Bones are bones. Death is death.
I said nothing.
Bones stuck up around me like bedsprings. I tapped lightly at the ground with the edge of the flat-bladed trowel, listening for hollowness. Finding the right place, I picked at the soil, loosening pieces with the trowel. After several minutes I had revealed another few inches of the floor. It was made of flagstones, just as the excavators had thought, the stones smooth and jigsawed together. It would have felt pleasing to step on them barefoot. I kept hearing the hiss of sand slipping in through the tarp, slowly filling the room.
As I worked, I thought of another story I had heard, this one from the thirteenth-century bloodbath of southwest Colorado, beneath Sleeping Ute Mountain, where signs of cannibalism and extraordinary violence had been uncovered. Excavators had found a kiva packed like a barrel with human bones, apparently victims of a prehistoric massacre. They had strung a tarp over the kiva for shade in the summer heat. The day had been absolutely calm, not even a breeze. The digging crew had been taking a break for lunch when out of nowhere a dust devil rose straight into the sky. With a horrible roar, this astonishing wind grabbed the tarp from the kiva, jerked out every stay, and ripped grommets wide open. The tarp launched as if it were wrapped around a comet. Just as suddenly, the wind subsided. The tarp fell to the ground out in the desert, crumpled like a wad of newspaper.
I imagined the looks on the workers’ faces, the stillness as they stood in the silent heat of their excavation. I could feel the pressure increasing in the air over my head. It seemed as if the wind might suddenly pop the cork on this ceremonial room, sucking up the tarp, the woman, these bones, and me, hurling us into the sky. I moved by quarter inches, making a meditation out of this unhurried and tedious work, not wanting to wake the ghost of these bones, if there was such a thing.
Sleep, I thought. Do not wake. Keep dreaming your dreams of the underworld, of plant roots grinding through the earth. We will be done in no time, gone before you know it, and you will be buried once again.
The scattering of these bones had been the last thing to happen here. They were right on the floor. The possible stories this skeleton held were endless: a murder in a deserted house; a body thrown into an abandoned room; an old man taking shelter in the skittering snow of winter and dying alone in the years after his pueblo was abandoned, no one left to bury him.
Based on Hopi stories and archaeological finds, it is believed that Homol’ovi was abandoned after a series of devastating floods. Cropland was destroyed by the rampaging Little Colorado River late in the fourteenth century. Pools of stagnant water would have gathered behind logjams and in flood-scoured holes. There would have been an infestation of waterborne insects, black waves of mosquitoes and deerflies in the desert. I thought of this person dying in the grip of chills, a once beautifully woven blanket pulled up to his trembling lips.
The woman from Mexico sat facing me. Our tools rested on the ground while the tarp rumbled overhead. There was no need to talk. The wind outside held our full awareness, as if we were waiting for a tornado to snatch us up. There was nowhere else to go from here. This room was dead, bones everywhere.
The flap opened above us, letting in a spray of sand. The man with the clipboard climbed down the ladder and squatted among the bones. He glanced around and saw that our further digging had only confirmed his fears. The skeleton was completely scattered, no way around it.
“We’re going to close off this room,” he said. “We’ll start backfilling it tomorrow.”
All this work, I thought. So much desire. Digging sixteen feet straight down by one-eighth-inch increments, only to reach the floor and have to cover it back up without answering the many questions of archaeology.
I picked up my tools and climbed back into the wind, struck suddenly by the hot, open sky of Homol’ovi. Survey markers whipped furiously like prayer flags. I walked the black metal dustpan back to the two women huddling on the ground like desert scavengers. They had most of the yellow bowl exposed and had started on a gray hulk of a corrugated jar nearby. I set down the pan, then followed a path of survey flags down off the hill, looking for solitude, ten or fifteen minutes away. Digging in graveyards is exhausting, the atmosphere at the excavation an unsettling combination of obsession and restraint, as we all picked and scratched ever so gently into the ground.
Eventually, I came to a thicket of coyote willows. Inside I pushed through tamarisk trees, their exotic, feathery branches draping across my shoulders. The air was still inside these desert trees. I reached a lagoon of slow, clear water. A few bubbling islands of green-velvet algae drifted out in the middle. This was why the pueblo had been built in this location. It was an oasis, a fitting place for the water-god katsinas to have come dancing.
I knelt at the water’s edge and cupped my hands beneath the surface. The water was tepid and smelled like fish and cow piss. Still, it was good water, moving gently toward the red-stained bed of the Little Colorado. Water trickled out of my hands, sounding jubilant and silver-toned. I rubbed my knuckles clean and rinsed my forearms, scraping with fingernails to get off the embedded sweat and wind-dust of Homol’ovi. The dust dripped back into the water, blood-colored beads turning to threads beneath the surface and disappearing.
PART SIX
EAST-CENTRAL ARIZONA
THE CLOCK
AT THE EDGE OF THE FOREST
Iheard voices, and I woke. It was just before dawn. An inkling of light touched the sky outside the tent. The wind was fierce, belting through a copse of juniper trees and piñon pines. I could barely hear them, the men talking, coming closer.
Regan and I were camped with Jasper, who slept between us, covers pulled to his chin. We had come to the ruins of a fourteenth-century pueblo positioned on an ecological boundary south of Homol’ovi. The dry lands end here, and a dense pine forest begins, one that goes on to blanket an eighth of the state of Arizona. Beyond Homol’ovi and the Little Colorado River, the land becomes a single bare platform of slowly lifting desert. Over twenty miles the elevation increases enough that juniper trees begin to appear. Ten miles after that the first piñons darken the horizon, and in another ten miles a wall of heavy ponderosa pines overcomes the landscape. The desert ends, and right at the edge of these big pines are the ruins of this pueblo.
No one but us should have been here this morning, miles from the nearest paved road.
“Did you hear that?” Regan whispered.
“Yeah,” I whispered back. “Someone’s here.”
“Three of them,” Regan said.
I immediately slipped into my clothes; pulled on my socks, then my boots. Warm hat. Gloves. We were nearly at 7,000 feet in elevation, the morning brisk. The voices were starting to fade, heading off the other way. I laced my boots faster.
“Archaeoastronomers,” I whispered to Regan. It was the only thing I could imagine. I knew of a few rock art panels in the direction the men were heading. Maybe they were coming up to check the sunrise, to see how its first light interacted with the rock art figures. Why else would someone be here before dawn?
“I’ll follow them,” I whispered again, zipping open the tent door. “I’ll be back.”
“Or they’re pothunters,” Regan warned.
“Yeah, I thought about that.”
True, they might have come with shovels and screens, maybe guns—diggers looking for artifacts to sell on the black market. But it seemed somehow more likely that they were archaeoastronomers, judging by the hour of their arrival.
“I’ll just see what they’re up to,” I said, and I zipped the door closed behind me.
The three voices had gotten well ahead of me in the chill wind. The men knew exactly where they were going, no
pausing or looking for directions. They had been here before. I took off after them.
In the first light, pieces of pottery began appearing up the slope I was following—black-on-white, black-on-red, yellow ware. Back in the fourteenth century, people had been living in settlements all around the central pueblo, now little hills and collapsed walls. When I neared the top of the mesa, I stopped in shadows, where I could see two of the three men above me. One carried camera equipment. They moved informally, unaware that I had followed them, that anyone else was out here at all. Their shoulders were jacked up against the wind, their heads down as they moved. They unloaded their gear in an upheaval of large basalt boulders covered with rock art.
I looked for shovels, screens, perhaps a weapon that might identify them as pothunters. Nothing of the sort. They had a sole purpose. They had come for the sunrise. The two men sank down in front of a tall block of a boulder black as charcoal, taking shelter, their gloved hands tucked into their coats. I approached through the trees, slowly, my hands at my sides.
As I walked into the open, a forest became visible. It swept the countryside south of here, a dark green sea unlike anything one encounters on the Colorado Plateau.
The man with the camera saw me first, a clean-shaven face caught suddenly at the sight of a stranger coming out of the woods. The slightly older man, with a trim gray beard, saw me next. Both their faces went half-blank with confusion. I could see in their eyes that this site was not public knowledge.
I opened a hand, unarmed, friendly. I had to shout over the wind, asking if they were here for an alignment. The photographer did not move. The bearded man stood up. He seemed to be thinking, There are enough oddities and coincidences in the world, why not a man appearing from the woods who knows these ancient maps?
The photographer rose behind him. We peeled off gloves to shake hands. They introduced themselves, both from the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff, a photo archivist and an archaeologist. They were here for the sunrise. And the third man? I asked.
The photographer said, “He’s the steward for this site, working with the Forest Service, and he’s kind of old, so it’s taking him a while to get up here.”
“And you’ve come for an alignment?” I asked again.
The archaeologist, Jerry Snow, told me that the rock art panels seemed to be a kind of calendar. He had been coming for years, charting different sunrises, documenting the way first light strikes various images carved in the rock.
I explained that my wife, son, and I were camped down below, that we had heard them come through, figured it could mean only one thing. They laughed. Snow said that there weren’t many of us in the world. I nodded even though I was not one of them, not an archaeoastronomer. I was at least in on the secret, peeping into this subculture of people documenting prehistoric astronomy, inscru-table alignments once established with the turning sky.
The third man approached with some difficulty, planting a thick walking stick ahead of him. He came out from around the black boulders, his peaked hood protecting his ears from the wind. When he approached me and stopped, his body was like a truck lurching to a halt. I could not read the age of his face back under his hood—seventy years old, maybe eighty—but his expression was serene, not at all surprised to see me here this morning. He introduced himself as Joe, the steward for the place, assigned by the U.S. Forest Service. With a handshake I felt his large hands, a working man. He overlapped his hands on the knob of his wooden staff.
I thought there had probably been stewards here for generations, for centuries, wizards and eccentrics, dawdling rubes waving their sticks in the air, plodding up here to make sure the light was still coming on schedule. Joe smiled under the shadow of his hood, his shoulders heavy over the walking stick.
Snow, the archaeoastronomer, pointed out various facets of the rock art panel, touring me through tightly scrolled spirals and distinct but hardly identifiable symbols.
“Most of the activity seems to be based around this central spiral,” he said, pointing at it on an east-facing plane of basalt with numerous figures carved into it. He explained how just before the summer solstice, a perfect sliver of light comes across the large spiral in the middle, and its tip touches the very center, like the tip of a knife.*
This morning he did not know what the sun would do. We were halfway between the spring equinox and the summer solstice. Snow was documenting every increment of seasons he could think of.
“Of course you’re welcome to be here and watch the event,” he said.
“Thank you,” I replied, mulling his words. The event. He did not know exactly what would happen, but he knew that the sun would rise and illuminate this rock art. Event enough.
Not three minutes later, the sun lifted in the east, a luminous orange turtle. The photographer swung out his tripod, although it would still take some time for the light to thread through these boulders and touch the appropriate spiral.
Snow asked, “What time you got?”
The photographer pushed back the sleeve of his coat and said 5:53.
The sun lifted through a haze of dust that was being blown some sixty miles away in the Painted Desert. There was enough dust in the air between the sun and us that I could look straight at it for a second or two at a time. I was amazed at the sun’s roundness, the perfect globe it formed above the horizon.
I now saw why people had carved their images in this location. The full distance of light was visible from this knuckle of a mesa, no rooftops or heads of trees to block the view. Sunlight came directly from the other side of the planet, striking a gallery of symbols positioned on the line where the desert to the north gives way to the forest in the south.
What time you got?
6:03.
The sun began beating back the dust storm, its light becoming too brilliant to face. We shielded our eyes and turned away, feeling warmth soak into our bodies.
What time you got?
6:04.
Shadows cataracted across the rocks, lining up with various etchings. Ducking my head, moving lower, I made sure my body did not block any of these images. Keys were turning all around me, locks opening as the light passed over lesser spirals and figures of animals. Snow lifted his hand and watched the shadows of his fingers, playing with the light, seeing how many seconds remained before it reached the central spiral. He pulled out his tape measure and took quick measurements. Joe stood back, watching, a gnome with a peaked hood and broad shoulders.
What time?
6:10.
The light rolled quickly down the spiral, and within a minute it severed the image exactly in half, one side in light, the other in shadow. The photographer moved from place to place, crawling over the rock, taking pictures from different angles as the clockface revealed itself. The straightedge formed between light and shadow cantilevered across the boulder, one by one touching other images carved in the rock. As each figure came into alignment, it seemed to be a coordinate on a Cartesian chart—the abscissa of the shadow line, the ordinate of stone.
“This is what I was hoping to see,” Snow said, and he began describing each figure, telling me how the figures fit in certain houses of the sun, how they are addressed by the light in orderly, annual sequences. Basically, Snow was describing a form of astrology, perhaps used in its oldest and most original sense: a study of celestial motion.
The light show ended when all the carved figures were fully illuminated. We moved down off the boulders into a bit of shelter below, where we sat shoulder to shoulder as if we had known one another for years. Joe kneaded the handle of his walking stick. The light kept coming, falling across pine forests the color of mint, showing the way to the Mogollon Rim.
WATCHTOWER
MOGOLLON RIM
There is a line that splits the Southwest in half, a clean, undeniable boundary. The Mogollon Rim (the Spanish double l pronounced as a y) is as abrupt as a deep-sea trench dropping thousands of feet into cliffs and sheer ravines. This geographic line c
uts across Arizona’s midriff, a split that extends from the Nevada border in the west, where the Grand Canyon ends, to New Mexico in the east, along the upper San Francisco River. North of this split lies the high, arid landscape of the Colorado Plateau, an evenly laid country of buttes, mesas, isolated mountains, and gulfs of desert. To the south the terrain wrinkles and folds into green mountains and dark, water-fed canyons. It is as if along this rim the world divides.
A chain of towers stands on the brink of this division, modern signal stations erected in a row, sentinels keeping watch for fires. On a summer day I stood in the observation room of one of these towers, a wood-frame box teetering 120 feet off the ground on a lattice of metal legs. A set of winding, open-air stairs ascends the tower, accessing this room through a hatch in the floor. A circular fire--spotting map takes up most of the space inside, leaving a small margin around it, where I stood nearly up against the glass looking across the very curve of the earth. Hundreds of miles spread around me, nothing but forest to be seen in all directions, a verdant topography of pine, spruce, fir, and oak patched with radiant, grass-colored aspen groves.
I stepped from one window to the next. Wires and cables howled manically in the wind as I stared into the abyss below. Although I had lived and traveled in the country surrounding the Mogollon Rim, never had I climbed one of these towers, never seen how truly immense this forest is.
David Wilcox, a researcher out of the Museum of Northern Arizona, once told me that the Mogollon Rim is where the Pueblo world divides, as if snapped like a ruler across a knee. Wilcox had opened a map and chopped his hand along the rim, showing how the cultural Southwest was split.
“This was the true division,” he said. “When you look at how the Southwest shaped up, you see that people eventually fell away from the Mogollon Rim to the north and centered on Hopi, Zuni, Acoma, and along the pueblos of the Rio Grande. Meanwhile, another segment of the population fell to the south.”