by Craig Childs
That was where my eyes lingered, to the south. The people I was following had gone that way. I stood for a long time at the southern window, hands clasped behind my back as I looked off the edge of the rim into vast, intersecting canyons tucked below. The first Spanish explorers in the sixteenth century called this region despoblado, having a very difficult time crossing it with their horses and ranks of soldiers and missionaries, finding it a dark and forbidding land.
“Fire’s picking up.” The voice came from behind me.
A spotter stood on the other side of the small room. He was aiming a pair of sturdy binoculars over my shoulder at a wildfire running about twenty miles to the southwest, out in the Hellsgate Wilderness. I could see it clearly even without binoculars. Black fists of smoke wrenched up from orange fronts of flame, white plumes shooting into the air bright as bone, entire stands of trees hastening to explode. The spotter was looking for finer details than I could see, judging the wind speed between here and there, calculating how many acres were igniting every minute, how quickly this fire might reach the rim.
Other wildfires burned in the distance, columns of smoke fifty, one hundred miles away, each angled uniformly to the northeast by prevailing winds. The spotter kept his binoculars trained on only the closest fire. The others were in jurisdictions of different towers.
Every summer is like this in the forests of east-central Arizona, wildfires coming like weather, triggered by dry lightning storms or runaway campfires. They all head north toward the wall of the Mogollon Rim. The spotter lowered his binoculars and sat back on a stool, the same stool he had been using for years, every day of the summer from light until dark sitting in a glass observatory.
“Still just a small fire,” he said. “We’ll see what it does.”
The spotter told me he had seen a wildfire last year jump from ten acres to twenty-seven thousand in one day. Smoke plumes had risen a hundred thousand feet into the air, their black bellies filled with lightning. “It was like the whole world was on fire,” he said.
Today was mild, fires moving at an even pace, waiting for a stronger wind so they might have a chance at fame and burn a quarter of the state of Arizona in one fell swoop.
A sudden gust of wind kicked up, and the tower bucked like a frightened animal. I spread my feet a little wider apart and leaned against one of the windowsills for support. I mean, hell, we were just in a little wood-and-glass matchbox on metal stilts tethered to the ground with four cables. The spotter chuckled as he checked the needle on his wind speed indicator.
“It’s just sixty miles an hour,” he said. “Ain’t nothing. You should be up here at a hundred.”
I smiled at him.
Clans that traveled south and met this rim must have been dazzled by the possibilities presented below. When they came—at first a trickle in the eleventh century, then a deluge three hundred years later—they would have looked over the Mogollon Rim into forested canyons running with water, where they would be able to grow corn fatter than anything eaten in years. In this country before them, drinking water could be used for cleaning hands and washing bowls, not just hoarded in ceramic ollas out in the desert. They would have a new life.
Excavations along the Mogollon Rim have turned up hills full of ruins, and inside of them are ample remains of migrants from the Colorado Plateau. The clans of Pueblo ancestors brought their entire, mobile civilization with them, their baggage packed full with pots of seed corn and woven rugs. They caravanned across the desert with their projectile points, balls of precious quarried clay for ceramics, and jeweled bone hairpins. Gathering at the Mogollon Rim, these travelers stayed long enough to assemble alliances. They mixed art styles with locals and with other migrants coming from other, distant places. The Mogollon Rim was a cultural threshold, a place to stop for a generation or two and take stock.
For the most part, Pueblo people were foreigners here, refugees from wars and drought in the north. Coming from the Painted Desert, the unforgiving country around Monument Valley, the waterless reaches of Canyonlands, and the wasteland of northwest New Mexico, they must have stopped speechless over this alien, green expanse. Some no doubt sharpened their blades, eyes narrow, looking for enemies in the obscuring terrain and forests below, watching for both hunter-gatherers and rival bloodlines that also had traveled down from the north.
Traveling south from the Mogollon Rim, one is faced with many options, as routes diverge quickly. The Mogollon Rim is a watershed, its drainages fanning out to the horizons. A route south along Tonto Creek leads to the lower Salt River, where in the fourteenth century the widespread, sedentary towns of the Hohokam had been established for nearly a thousand years. The Hohokam had a healthy population growing corn and cotton along more than six hundred miles of irrigation canals, and they may not have been entirely welcoming of expatriates from the north. A southeast route would have led these migrants down into cold, muscular rivers and creeks where the Mogollon culture—deer hunters and opportunistic farmers who had lived in the forest for some thousand years—held sway. The migrants must have looked across these rich, southern lands wondering what treaties could be struck with the people living out there, what battles must be fought.
These northerners stopped to take a breath before diving into the south, sending scouts ahead and marrying into other groups to establish stronger alliances and associations. Pottery was traded along the Mogollon Rim like calling cards as these travelers teetered on the edge, gazing over the swift drop before them—while everyone living in the south perhaps looked to the rim, where the desert wayfarers had massed, preparing for them as if for a coming fire.
When I called Jeff Clark, a researcher specializing in Southwest migrations, I was surprised to discover that he already knew I would be coming to see him. It was a cold call, no references, but he told me he had gotten word that a writer was traveling south, working site by site from the eleventh to the fourteenth century toward the Mogollon Rim. I asked who had told him.
“The archaeology grapevine,” he explained simply. “There’s a long chain of researchers looking at prehistoric migration. We keep in touch.”
Clark invited me to his office at a research center in Tucson, and when I arrived, I found his walls covered with maps. One entire wall was papered with topographic maps, all lined up so that a whole landscape ran seamlessly from floor to ceiling, from one corner to the next. I looked curiously behind his door, swinging it out slightly, and saw that he had kept going, continuing maps off the wall and onto the back side of the door, stopping only for the doorknob. These he dotted with stickers of different colors and sizes, indicators of migrant settlements, incoming pueblos from the Colorado Plateau. Clark had rebuilt a landscape of geography and migration inside his office.
Sitting behind a computer, tapping at the keyboard to find the right file, Clark beckoned me over. He said he had found some-thing crucial he wanted to show me. He explained that from data gathered by many archaeologists over the past century, he had been able to decipher a pattern of movement off the Mogollon Rim, an early-eleventh-century blueprint that established the course for the fourteenth-century migrations.
“Here,” he said, and pushed his chair slightly out of the way so that I could see.
The image he had pulled up on his screen looked like a weather map—barometric pressure gradients lined out like a storm cell hovering over central and southern Arizona, fingers of cold northern air pushing into warmer southern reaches. It was a map of people, though, not weather. Clark explained that he had been looking at the distribution of household vessels in the archaeological record—corrugated pottery used for cooking, a staple of ancient Pueblo people. This kind of pottery had first appeared on the Colorado Plateau in the early centuries A.D. Around the eleventh century, it started showing up along the Mogollon Rim and in the country to the south. Clark had produced the map we were looking at by plotting the spread of this pottery style. He drew the butt of his pen across the computer screen, pointing out paths of
ceramic distribution, the discrete corridors people and information must have taken down off the rim—some heading for the Tonto Basin of central Arizona, others working their way farther south toward the town of Safford and all the way to Tucson. This all happened in the days of Chaco, an early southward advance off the Colorado Plateau. These were exactly the same lanes of travel followed in the fourteenth century as whole pueblos and villages came over the rim.
One of Clark’s colleagues, a man named Patrick Lyons, had put together a similar map marking the thirteenth- and fourteenth--century appearance of ceramic plates with perforated edges, a style that originated in the cliff dwellings and pueblos of Kayenta, in northeast Arizona. The function of such plates is unknown, but a Hopi story tells of traveling clans carrying a small perforated vessel with which they could create springs as needed. Whatever they were, they stand out now as cultural markers of people moving off the Colorado Plateau. Lyons found that these curious plates began appearing in the south at the same time northern landscapes were being depopulated. He took this as proof that migrants were infiltrating sites hundreds of miles away from where they began.
When Lyons’s dots were connected, they matched the routes laid out by Clark’s study of corrugated pottery from a couple of hundred years earlier. These layers of maps show the exact routes taken by people walking hundreds of miles time and time again.
These were not lost and wandering tribes. People from the ancestral homeland on the Colorado Plateau knew exactly where they were going on their way south, their movements soundly articulated along established tracks of communication and trade. Migrants had safe and specific passages to follow, associations leading into the occupied lands below the Mogollon Rim.
“Seldom would they have entered unknown territory,” Clark told me. “They traveled to where they had ties, following lines set by other migrants who’d come through long before them.”
While the wind shuddered and howled around the fire tower, I swiveled a set of brass sights into place, lining up the spotting table—a circular map representing every piece of ground that could be seen from the tower. I wanted to set visual lines across the landscape, get a clear sense of wide-scale geography while I had the opportunity. By looking through a paper-thin gap in a brass plate, I aligned a taut, vertical thread on the other side of the map with the tip of the Sierra Ancha thirty-five miles to the south. I could see the nick of another tower out there. This was a line I had traveled extensively back in my twenties. During those months of hard foot travel, I had come upon many tall, narrow dwellings stuck high up in cliff cracks, blueprints of pueblos barely ascending from pine needle floors.
I rotated the brass sight along a ring around the map until I was lined up with a fire tower above Hog Spring Canyon east of here. Behind it lay Forestdale Valley, one of the richest archaeological regions in the rim area, its slopes heavily adorned with fallen fourteenth-century pueblos and kivas. Beyond that, directly on the other side of Baldy Peak in the east, I remember the sound of windshield wipers in a heavy rain. When I was very young, during a lashing summer storm, my mother had hitched a ride for us in a mail truck. I can still hear the driver singing in Spanish.
I had my own chronicles of migration across these vistas, personal corridors crossing those of ancient bloodlines. This whole place is a spiderweb of histories, threads of signals and recollections connecting numerous points on the horizon. I aligned the spotter down the throat of Canyon Creek, slightly to the southeast, where my father and I once found pottery broken in a creek bed, potsherds glistening under clear running water. And then I moved it to where my mother and I used to pick wild raspberries by the buckets and then went home to a cabin near the Blue River and boiled pots of jam.
The fire tower radio crackled, a message coming in from one of the other towers. A voice said, “Red flag day. Hold your post till nineteen hours. Pass it on to Deer Springs. Over.”
The lookout got off his stool and picked up the handset. He pushed the microphone against the corner of his mouth. His tone was direct and official, alert to the graveness of his job, as if he were standing guard between two warring nations, the Mogollon Highlands to the south, the Colorado Plateau to the north.
“I’ll keep my post here,” he said. Then he switched channels and called ahead, “Red flag day. Hold your post till nineteen hours. Pass it on to Gentry Tower. Over.”
The wind was increasing, the forest as parched as kiln-dried lumber, and small fires were finding footholds all across the horizon. Red flag day.
Another crackling voice came back, driven through a repeater antenna, Deer Springs responding to the call and moving the message ahead to the next tower. I rotated the sight on the spotting table until it aimed east along the Mogollon Rim to where the spotter had sent his message. Looking at the back of someone’s head, I thought. And that person looking at the back of someone else’s head ten miles away. I was impressed with the work here, this line of signal stations shuddering in the wind, this landscape covered with processions of memories.
That evening I walked along the edge of the Mogollon Rim, where a breeze rose cool across my face. The wind had died down since the afternoon. Through the soft hum of the breeze I could hear cicadas clicking in steep gullies of trees below me, a sound like castanets in the dark. Crickets also were singing, thousands of tiny bowstrings sawing back and forth to a single rhythm.
Dusk’s phosphorescent sheet faded from the western horizon. Night settled in. The crickets quieted as the temperature dropped, although it was still warm enough for just a light jacket. I scanned the distance for any sign of light—a ranch, a gleaming town. There was nothing down there, so few people living in this region these days that they evade the eye. All I saw were stars and the pulse of a wildfire in the blackness. The nearby fire the spotter and I had been watching looked as if it were floating in space, a glittering and unaccountable nebula. Softly volcanic light appeared through folds of smoke, while bright knife blades darted in my direction fifteen miles away. There came a sudden flare, a wind kicking up. I watched acres of trees ignite at once, columns of flames leaping a hundred feet into the air. The blaze would not reach the rim tonight, I figured. I could sleep soundly knowing that. Still, I watched the flames with caution as they hopscotched ahead. Soon they were blotted out by their own smoke, and all I could see was a muffled, glowing core.
BUILDING LARGE
ALONG THE MOGOLLON RIM
Aburned forest lay gripped in death. Black bones of trees stood naked across the land, eyes smoldered back into their sockets, arms crucified in the heat. They went on for miles, their shadows severe, their numbers teeming. A wildfire had breached the rim. It was two fires actually, both converging into a blaze of historic proportions, overtaking a number of Forest Service fire towers and reducing a good amount of east-central Arizona to ash and charcoal. The fire finally petered out as it made a run for the Colorado Plateau, where the desert spreads like a flat hand.
I walked through the remains of this fire, ground cool now, a forest of dead trees creaking around me like old men. I was walking a circle, tracing a ruin that stood from ash and charred, fallen branches. It was a great kiva, one of the largest ever built. All the grass had been incinerated, duff and pine needles turned to dust, so it was easy to see the outline of this twelfth-century settlement. It was positioned along an eastern reach of the Mogollon Rim toward the town of Show Low. Five archaeologists were digging in rooms adjoining the kiva. The fire had driven them off the land the season before, and now they had returned, digging deeper, pulling up ceramic vessels and fragile ceiling beams. When the settlement was established nine hundred years ago, the Mogollon Rim was a secluded frontier far from Chaco, Mesa Verde, and Kayenta.
With my hands clasped behind my back, I stepped over helter-skelter stones, kiva walls collapsed into a circle. I counted my paces until I made it all the way around, calculating a circumference of about 230 feet, putting the great kiva at nearly 70 feet across, bigger even than Ch
aco Canyon’s great kivas.
Fourteen great kivas like this one are positioned along the Mogollon Rim, creating a veritable island of ceremonial rooms built on northerly floor plans all alone in the forest. In the twelfth century, these were the first lifeboats to appear from the slowly sinking ship of the Colorado Plateau.
Sarah Herr, who has excavated a number of these remote ceremonial sites, believes that they were constructed by Chacoan exiles. “You can see in the way they built their kivas,” Herr told me, “they were not aware of certain ceremonial traits that were core to Chaco. They were not from the center. But in many ways, they are Chaco kivas, and they are very much out of place.”
Herr explained that these kivas lack the massive roofs customary in the north. They were probably equipped with a perimeter of timbered ramadas that would have turned them into open stadiums, precursors of the dance plazas that came later. Such an architectural change would have remarkably altered the feel of these structures and the ceremonies held there. Instead of being held down in the dim underground, ceremonies on the Mogollon Rim were plein air, full of light and sky.
Herr sees these large, open kivas as signs of migrants who were looking for a way to connect with one another along the margin of the Mogollon Rim. They were using the kivas to welcome others of their kind, gathering into congregations in a region where it would have been easy to drift apart into social oblivion.
“I think that these people were passing beyond their cultural threshold,” Herr said. “They were becoming a different culture here. Having to craft your life far from your home population changes you. Usually in the archaeological record in the Southwest, you get a sense of defined social structures, gender and age divisions. But my work here pretty much shows these divisions all breaking down. Everybody’s got to join in to make things work. Life is a little riskier out on the edge. Men have to start taking care of the children, doing more of the cooking. It must have been an amazing and frightening time.”