House of Rain

by Craig Childs

  Thirteen major cliff dwellings stand in this canyon where I traveled, their arrangement forming an arc that seems to have protected a central pueblo about ten miles back. Just above my camp, atop spindles of rock, are masonry turrets, twenty outposts peering down into the canyon. All of these were short-lived sites, occupied for thirty or forty years at the most. It is difficult to say whether residents walked freely out of these cliff dwellings or whether their heads were impaled on their own wooden vigas by local hunter-gatherers who may have had no love for pushy northerners on their land, resisting the onslaught of this new Salado culture.

  Nobody is here now. Deep in the Apache reservation, one must follow game trails or paths of tumbled boulders to get around. Sitting alone in a dark canyon with a pot of dinner before me, I felt emptiness where alliances and wars once took place, dark eyes of ruins standing high above me in the night.

  One side canyon was clogged with catclaw bushes. I shoved through them in the morning, the backs of my forearms marked with dots of blood as I pushed ahead. The catclaws gave way to a small brook and badges of shade beneath oaks and the stiff netted leaves of hackberry trees. As I headed upstream, my boots became soaked as they crushed through dead thatches of riparian grass. I was traveling up a steep tributary in search of a cliff dwelling I had heard of, the largest in all the Mogollon Highlands, now guarded by the wilderness of the Apache reservation.

  Terraced pools of water led the way, gentle sounds, falls and burbles. I followed these to a rock outcrop, a short cliff, and in its face was a cave. Spring water spilled from the cave’s mouth. I dropped my pack at the entrance and stepped inside, the ground and the walls gnarled with gypsum, calcium, and ivory-smooth travertine. Water dripped from the ceiling, filling the cave with innumerable small sounds and leaving everything thoroughly coated in white as it dried. Star-pointed sycamore leaves that had blown into the cave were turned to sculptures all over the floor. I moved cautiously, careful not to snap any of these fragile stone leaves with my boots.

  A narrow thread of a stalactite, thin as a pencil, descended fifteen feet through the dim, nearly touching the floor. I reached out and lightly touched its cold form with a finger, realizing it was a plant root dangling down from a crack, flash-fossilized by calcium in the water. The cave was like a house of wax, everything captured in place. Rivulets of water trickled down the walls. The water seemed like a blessing: so much prosperity.

  I knelt at a clear pool in the quarter-light, took water in my palms, and washed it across my forearms. The cuts from the catclaw bushes came to life as soon as I bathed them, tracks of blood skittering across my skin. I cupped a mouthful of water and drank. It tasted like good, earthen water, like rusty pipes.

  I left the cave and carried my pack farther up the canyon to where a community of cliff dwellings began to show under rock overhangs. It looked as if an entire town had been built along the south face of the canyon, masonry structures in various states of disrepair, the ground below them dressed in shattered polychrome vessels. I passed over potsherds that were red as watermelon and embellished with black and white paint.

  This cluster of sites, some 175 rooms in all, was first documented in the 1930s by the esteemed archaeologist Emil Haury, then a young, pipe-smoking man with a tattered hat and a notebook in hand. Haury was one of the earliest Southwest archaeologists to notice signs of prehistoric migration, and this canyon produced his first strong pieces of evidence. He dug up skeletons and artifacts that looked to him like those of northern Peublo people, those he called Anasazi—skulls permanently flattened on their back sides from the use of cradleboards in infancy (an attribute customary among Colorado Plateau people), tools and weaving styles reminiscent of those seen in northeast Arizona. But Haury saw far more than migrants. He excavated ample signs of local groups that had been living in the area for many generations, people he called Mogollon. The cliff dwelling appears to have been constructed by both natives and migrants, a mixed house, the essence of Salado.

  Haury dug up finely woven cloth and cotton-spinning tools here, suggesting textile manufacture among the residents. He found numerous ceramic vessels and baskets, an arsenal of hunting and fighting weapons, and a ceremonial room with objects still neatly placed on an altar. This had been a complicated settlement with many family names and occupations, their customs drawn from distant places.

  Haury’s black-and-white photographs from the 1930s look exactly like what I saw as I ascended this canyon: ledgy rock formations, isolated blocks of cliffs, and prehistoric structures both large and small bound into south-facing exposures. I passed beneath a diamond-bladed sun painted on a rock face, its red and white rays alternating inward along rings of concentric circles. As I began to count the rings, I noticed another painting just beyond. It was a mural, a pictograph of what looked like a woven blanket, rectangular and four feet across, something hung on the wall at the back of a room. It was neatly packed with geometric designs—red alligator teeth, oval tick marks, red squares with turquoise interiors and within them yet smaller red circles like inlays of jewels. Thirty-three squares in four rows. Eighty-one red teeth along the upper and lower selvages. A left-to-right symmetry cut in half by turquoise lines meeting in a split globe at the top. No space on the rock remained unpainted. Even the background was washed with a flat, white clay.

  I had never seen such a mural anywhere in the Southwest. Even Hopi kiva murals do not have such sharpness. I realized I was walking into a vital settlement that had been arranged so that a person must enter through painted walls, colorful standards.

  I continued up the canyon’s slope into the marmalade light of late afternoon and reached a massive core of residences. I had been searching for this enclave, knowing of its existence from Haury’s reports, and still I was stopped short by the sight of it, suddenly faced with three-story walls, square buildings butted into each other, wooden vigas protruding from stone-and-mortar facades twenty feet tall.

  Some walls were as clean as canvases, plaster the color of caramel dried and crackled from age. Where the plaster had deteriorated, I could see methodical stonework beneath—thin, banded rocks with only a skim of mortar between. The masonry looked almost Chacoan, so finely done, although this nucleus of buildings appeared nearly two centuries after Chaco’s decline, most of the construction occurring around A.D. 1320.

  As I began walking along these buildings, window-shopping, I saw the labor of many different hands, sundry architects and stonemasons. Front walls made mostly of adobe—thick, bread-loaf walls with very little stone inside—stood flush against almost pure rockwork. The adobe reminded me of southern techniques, more like those of low-desert Hohokam than high-desert Pueblo folk. Meanwhile, adjacent masonry looked as if it had come straight down off the Colorado Plateau. I was seeing a collision of large cultural groups, a much greater melting pot than I had witnessed in the north, understanding now why archaeologists had invented the term Salado. A name was needed to describe what happened at this time in this place. In the fourteenth century, the Mogollon Highlands were a key political, cultural, and probably religious boundary. The entire Southwest from Mexico to the Four Corners was fusing along a rugged, shared margin of forests and mountainous canyons. This cliff dwelling stands at the crux.

  This is also where strict archaeological definitions and labels lose their potency. Things were never as simple as Salado or Anasazi. Where or when did one end and the other begin? In the thirteenth century, during a time of increasing cultural movement and unrest on the Colorado Plateau, Mesa Verde and Kayenta rose to power with their massive cliff dwellings. Shortly after their fall, fourteenth-century Salado cliff dwellings appeared just to the south beneath the Mogollon Rim. These events are not isolated from each other, but are strung together like a row of falling dominoes, Anasazi turning into Salado. An exodus was under way, gathering new members and probably losing old ones; expanding, contracting, and pushing ahead with shields, pueblos, polychrome pottery, and cliff dwellings. A vigorous cultur
al force was dropping through the Southwest, following the rains.

  I entered a front door, ducking into shafts of eclipsed light beneath a splintered ceiling, stepping lightly on a floor of dust, rubble, corncobs, and broken pottery. I could tell that the site had been excavated, the floors not as heaped and disorderly as untouched sites. Haury had been here.

  One room led to the next. A hatchway in a floor dropped to a lower level, which turned through another doorway, and another. I passed interior walls painted with faded designs—a spiral, a geometric stairstep, a human figure with a hand upraised. In one room I found a shield figure done in bold white paint, the circular shield itself fringed with a sophisticated design.

  It had been a long time since I had seen a shield figure, the last one being in the mesas of Kayenta—a big white circle on a wall above a cliff dwelling. There are others in southeast Utah west of Comb Ridge, a plethora of them painted and pecked into the cliffs around Canyonlands, and a small number roughly cut into the wall plaster of Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde (there are also many later shield figures near the Rio Grande in northern New Mexico). I laid out a map in my mind, locating every shield figure I had ever seen, defining a geographic pattern, the realm of northern Pueblo ancestry linked directly to that of Salado. Nearly every shield figure I knew of was associated with a nearby cliff dwelling, and they all seem to represent conflict, people moving into the land with shields raised or backing against cliffs, fighting for ground.

  I moved beyond this shield figure and into a room deep within the dwelling, where I swept a colorful piece of pottery out of the dust, another bit of artwork. It was a small part of a broken bowl, only a thumbnail, its exterior painted with a series of white forks and simple bands. I flipped it over to see what had once been painted inside the bowl, like turning a playing card to find its rank and suit. The inside looked very different from the outside, an elaborate play of colors and designs typical of a style known as Fourmile Polychrome. If the shield figure represents conflict, this style of ceramic speaks of alliance.

  Fourmile Polychrome appeared in the Mogollon Rim country early in the fourteenth century as migrants entered the region. Its bowls are known for their complex interior designs, no two the same, as if they were private art meant to be seen solely by small audiences, by the people looking into them. Meanwhile, the exteriors are consistently simple, conveying a message of uniformity. This inside-and-out code seems to say, We are all the same people on a larger scale, while in our confidential, personal places we are very different.

  This ceramic style is a fusion of patterns from the Four Corners and from the classic Mimbres icons farther south, hatchwork and white outlines known from Kayenta. The actual technique of making these bowls was shared only among small groups, specialized families or clans. Poorly executed replicas of Fourmile Polychrome have been found, where potters attempted to duplicate what they had seen at a glance, finding the finely tuned Fourmile composition difficult to match. One misplaced line would throw off the poise of the entire design. Many such imitations were probably discarded even before they were fired, the potters stymied.

  I envisioned the whole of this vessel made in a quiet room, woven drapes drawn across the door. I saw a woman painting its surface with a brush made of elk hair, paint permitted in the smallest doses, mind steady and not the slightest tremble in her hand, maybe a quiet song guiding her through the design. The paint used was mineral based, sharper in appearance than the more common organic paints of the day. Bowls were fired at a high and steady temperature, giving them a solid feel, a ring to the tap much like that of the coal-fired yellow wares from the north.

  The sherd in my hand gave me a glimpse of what had once been a gorgeous bowl filled with colors and geometry. It was like holding a piece of a code, a single word of an ancient language.

  A curator at the Arizona State Museum in Tucson, where I was working in a basement full of shelved artifacts, came to me near the end of the day and said there was one last thing I should see. He had already brought at least fifty pots down from storage, and I had spent hours sketching them and rubbing the exhaustion out of my eyes. It was not that the work was dull. Every pot that came to me elicited a burst of anticipation, the art of yet another highly skilled pre-Columbian potter revealed. But my eyes were tired.

  I could not say no to the curator, of course. This vessel he wanted to show me had come from one of the canyons below the Mogollon Rim, and as far as he was concerned, it was the finest artifact in the collection. I stood from my worktable and followed him.

  The curator, wearing sneakers and suspenders, led me through corridors of basement shelves overburdened with artifacts, bowls stacked inside bowls. Almost everything we passed had come from excavations in central Arizona, rows of colored pottery. In a back corner the curator unlocked a vault and swung its heavy door open with the full weight of his body.

  In the vault, he passed over a vessel shaped like a duck and a bowl painted with an expansive black bat inside it, the bat’s body and wings filled with spirals and crosshatches. He reached to a shelf nearly over his head and slid out a large, saffron-colored bowl. When he turned the inside of it toward me, I was immediately transfixed. I saw many things in its design, patterns within patterns. It was a Fourmile Polychrome.

  Black and white paint nearly filled the inside of the richly colored bowl. Spars and slender lines crossed each other around an ecstatic arch decorated with black lattices and crosshatches. The painstaking symmetry that I knew from the Colorado Plateau had been taken to a new level, the image within the bowl made asymmetrical but ultimately well proportioned, an extraordinary level of creativity. The inside of this bowl was a place of secrets, designed to be seen only by people close enough to be served from it—family and guests.

  I felt as though I were prying, staring blatantly into this confidential vessel. I did not look away, though. The designs were too magnetic. What intimate proclamations were they making? Filled with food, the bowl might have been presented in a ritualistic fashion, as in a Japanese tea ceremony. As each morsel was taken, a communiqué would have begun to appear in the bottom of the bowl. Nothing needed to be spoken, the images arranged in a certain manner perhaps to deliver a message: We know the Snake Dance. We claim lineage to the dry red river. We will overrun the land.

  I remained at the cliff dwelling into the night, staying awake and listening to springs drip in the dark canyon below. I did not build a fire or light my stove. I simply sat outside the ruin and watched constellations wheel around the canyon. I kept my body tight against the air, which lingered around freezing, my arms together across my chest, my hands clasped below my chin to keep the cold off my throat.

  Sometime in the night I stood. My clothes were loud as they rustled for the first time in hours. Stretching out my legs, I entered the dwelling through one of its many doorways. Cold air drifted from room to room. I felt my way with a hand in front of me and with careful, shuffling steps. I hunkered down in the middle of the room. Stars appeared through decayed places in the roof. I pulled a lighter from my coat pocket and flicked on a single small flame. It was enough to cast a dome of light. I lifted the lighter overhead.

  Most of the room’s ceiling had caved in centuries ago. The ceiling of the next story also had fallen through in places. I let my eyes trail across interior details: splintered ends of timbers, a small grotto built into the corner like a shrine, and vertical posts standing in the rubble. I followed the lighter from room to room, crawling from door to door under fallen roof timbers. The small flame illuminated a tunnel in the back of the dwelling, a hidden corridor standing nearly two stories tall. It ran about fifteen feet before closing into a small closet of a room with a short doorway for an entrance. I crept along the narrow passage and entered the back room, finding a low ceiling not much higher than the doorway.

  When I entered the chamber, a chill ran up my spine and into my shoulders. I had brought secret little fears with me into the room— fear of the dark, fear of
the unknown, fear of ghosts, fear of what happens in the murky hours long before dawn in a coffin of a ruin. I let each fear pass over me until it subsided.

  This concealed room and its passage seemed too clandestine for merely a household storage area. I imagined that it was a place to hide the children and the precious seed corn. I thought of fire drills I had learned in school, and bomb drills, dropping to the floor, hiding under a desk. Had the people here, living along a contested frontier, done the same? Middle of the night, torches lit, children all running for this hidden passage? I heard the soft padding of bare feet as they filed into this chamber, where they fell silent until someone told them they could come out. Were they given piki bread made of corn and fire ash as a treat for a job well done, for being prepared in case an enemy attack should happen some night?

  I brought the lighter down to see the floor, then turned it back upright so that the flame would not dip too near my thumb. Corncobs were everywhere, each chewed clean of its kernels by rodents.

  These people had been seeds, I thought. A cultural bank for the future planted among the cliffs. They had brought everything with them, an ancestry of genetically specialized cotton and corn, languages and dialects preserved from the old country, and family histories kept like a map of trails through hazardous topography. They had come to conceal themselves, to hide among springs and cliffs, all the while dragging with them an entire civilization. A people of giant stone pueblos was not far behind.

  THE HIGHLAND PUEBLOS

  KINISHBA AND GRASSHOPPER

  My walking changed entirely when I realized someone else was here. As far as I knew, no roads or trails were nearby, yet I found on the ground the fresh prints of someone wearing tennis shoes, someone no more than half an hour ahead of me. Traveling across the White Mountain Apache reservation, I was in a pine forest at dawn, walking now in the opposite direction from the shoe prints to try to get away. I had been moving freely, perhaps not as aware as I should have been, but now that I knew another person was nearby, I walked as if through a city at night, eyes training on every shadow. I ducked into a space between trees, and a twig caught on my shoulder. The twig bent. I flashed out a hand and grabbed it before it snapped.