House of Rain

by Craig Childs

  The walk I was taking must have occurred thousands of times, tens of thousands of times, in the past. People traveled from neighboring pueblos, down from the rim, and up from southern deserts. I noticed a few sandy-colored potsherds as I walked, evidence of northward travels from the low deserts nearer to Mexico. People had come from all over to trade at this highland pueblo, to participate in dances, to ask if they could live on nearby property.

  I dug several nuts out of my shirt pocket and walked on, chewing as lines began to appear around me, boxes of many former rooms pushing up through sage and yucca. I was now walking through the drafting-table design of an expansive compound, Kinishba’s ruined rooms. I sensed manners and social regimentation in the way the site was laid out. It was not the monastic atmosphere I had once imagined in the halls of Chaco, but a busy, orderly setting, an urban trade center. Everyone had a place, some families having doorways that opened prominently onto plazas, others living in smoky, poorly lit rooms deep in the pueblo’s interior.

  I approached the still-standing hulk of Kinishba. Two stories of reddish brown stonework remained around an open plaza, the walls thrown open to erosion, construction timbers sagging into their rooms. An archaeologist named Byron Cummings had built this place, not, as one might imagine, the prehistoric cultures that were here originally. Cummings actually restored this portion of the ancient pueblo in the 1930s, constructing a new Kinishba atop the old one, much the way Earl Morris had rebuilt the great kiva at Aztec. He followed the older building’s footprint and salvaged its stones straight out of the ground. His re-creation was now falling apart, returning to the state Cummings had found when he had first arrived. No one was here to maintain it.

  I entered this new Kinishba through heavy blocks of building stones. Many were still carefully masoned into place, and just as many were prostrate on the ground. Cummings had done shrewd work, tapping small chinking stones into place and mixing red mortar out of local soils to match the pueblo that had once stood in this basin. He had built these long, elegant walls along the tracks of the older walls below and had cut fresh timbers to support the roofs above. I passed through interior rooms where ceilings had fallen in, allowing light to enter from second-story passageways. Sunlight pierced splintered beams, illuminating masses of stone rubble on the ground.

  The ruined, rebuilt, and again ruined fourteenth-century pueblo of Kinishba. REGAN CHOI

  Cummings had intended for this to be a national park. It was to be a living museum, a monument to prehistoric Kinishba. But visitors never came. Cummings had erected a caretaker’s house, and it too was abandoned. With no one to patch the occasional leaks and structural failures, many of the roofs caved in, and the walls began to fall. This ghost that had been conjured back to life began sinking once again into the earth, physically neglected like everything before it. It is the rule of this land, of its many meeting places. We keep coming, yet we do not stay. We keep building, and we leave ruins behind.

  As I walked through the masonry wreckage, I thought that Cummings had truly succeeded in building a monument to Kinishba. This has become a memorial to migration, a testimony of movement. Both arrival and desertion are honored.

  Doorways opened around me onto floors marked with drip lines from leaking roofs, tar paper rotten and hanging where repairs had been attempted. In the corner of one room was the black charcoal scar of a campfire, remnants of a recent squatter who had lived here for some time. The name Duane and the date, 82, were carved into the wall.

  I stepped out through a collapsed doorway onto the rectangular arena of a plaza. The space was as sweeping as a ball field, its grounds studded with translucent stalks of grass dead from the winter. Fresh tufts of green were already popping up. From the middle of the plaza I glanced at the surrounding forests, wondering if the man with the tennis shoes was watching me. I felt safe now, standing within a crumbling pueblo. I thought people must have felt something like this in the fourteenth century, guarded from the dark and unknown forests by a stonework castle.

  LAND’S END

  POINT OF PINES

  Afire tower stands at land’s end. It is a spoke of steel around which the weather flows, the plate glass windows of its observation room looking north at the green rug of the Mogollon Highlands and south over a sharp rim down into the desert of southeast Arizona. The tower is a sentinel, part of a chain that once relayed messages of oncoming wildfires across the country. Now it is a broken link, abandoned. The temperature gauge, wind speed indicator, and radio have all been yanked from the walls, leaving a tangle of wires hanging out. The fire-spotting table is gone, and the stool for the spotter was taken away long ago.

  If the door had not been locked, I would have stepped inside to get out of the freezing wind. Instead I huddled on the south side as a storm came down from the north, blasting wind through the fire tower’s metal shafts and cables. Wildly driven snowflakes raced past me at 7,550 feet, my hands stuffed into my coat. The observation room jerked fiercely in the wind, and I with it. I felt as if I were standing atop a lighthouse shoved out into thundering surf, storm waves driving against it, the foundations shuddering. The trees below faded behind a gauze of blowing snow in a late-spring storm, a freak blizzard.

  This is where the chief pueblo of the highlands was built, a place now called Point of Pines. In the fourteenth century, it held the largest, most centralized population in the area, nearly two thousand rooms sprawling from a core pueblo into nearby satellites. Archaeologists working here in the 1950s discovered the remains of an enclave of migrants out of the Kayenta region. When these migrants arrived from the collapsing settlements of the Colorado Plateau at the very end of the thirteenth century, there was already a thriving pueblo here, local highlanders living in a group of modest one-story structures. Sixty or seventy families from Kayenta showed up and built a number of pit-houses around the most central pueblo at Point of Pines. After establishing this base, they quickly got about building their own multistory compound, sticking it like a gaudy church right in the middle of this preexisting community.

  Culturally, the people already living at Point of Pines were about as far from the Colorado Plateau as one could get, with virtually no northern pottery or northern architectural traits. If anything, they had closer relations with people in the south, possessing some sandy-colored pottery that had originated along the Gila River down in the lower desert. These locals were entirely different from the Pueblo migrants, who came in with large, brightly colored vessels and architecture that towered stories above the natives’ one-story buildings.

  The stonework employed by the migrants was neatly banded, not in the least resembling local building techniques. It looked as if a Kayenta edifice had been picked up from the Colorado Plateau and was then wedged into this settlement like a trophy home. Built right into the original pueblo, its rooms averaged six feet wider than those in the local dwellings, and its numerous doorways and windows mostly faced inward, blocking access from the surrounding community. This was hardly an ethnic neighborhood; it was an encroachment.

  At about the same time, an underground kiva was constructed a short distance away. It was D-shaped, a half-moon, unlike any other kiva known in the highlands. It was identical to kivas from Antelope Mesa and regions well up into Cedar Mesa in Utah, and similar to D-shaped buildings in Colorado, such as those of Sand Canyon Pueblo. Notably, its floor plan looked like a miniature version of Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon. These migrants had brought all of their cultural baggage down to Point of Pines and set up shop in a clearing immediately north of where the fire tower now stood, just a five-minute walk away.

  I perched on the tower’s trembling deck, looking across the world, fully aware of why these northerners had come to Point of Pines, why they had erected their palatial compound here. They were tower builders. People from the Colorado Plateau were accustomed to elevating themselves, dating back to the high, eleventh-century great houses they had built around Chaco Canyon and even the sixth--century kiva
they had built there five hundred years earlier. This jut of land was perfect for them, an ideal place for a pure Pueblo establishment. It was classic Anasazi.

  If one were to extend archaeologist Nieves Zedeño’s cultural line south from Chinle Wash, it would pass through the great kivas at the Mogollon Rim and continue straight to Point of Pines. This was a clear destination, a place written in the earth like prophecy. Southwest geography is riddled with meridians, lines to follow, and archaeological evidence merely highlights what is already there.

  These northerners came directly down this line off the edge of the Mogollon Rim. They brought with them strains of corn, beans, and squash that were previously unknown here, products of the Colorado Plateau, and they did not share. None of these strains have been found in any of the surrounding sites.

  They did not share their pottery either. Excavators at Point of Pines were first clued in on the presence of outsiders when they found stores of colorful vessels that looked utterly out of place among the simpler, monochromatic wares abundant in the area. They dubbed this new pottery style X Polychrome, now known as Maverick Mountain Polychrome, a derivation of earlier pottery made in the Kayenta region of northeast Arizona in the thirteenth century. Even though these northerners lived at Point of Pines for thirty years, their native pottery was not incorporated into surrounding households. In such close quarters this degree of isolation had to have been forced. A feeling of strangeness must have hovered in the air every day, a sense of life in this pueblo being out of balance.

  This life continued for thirty years, long enough for people to get comfortable, for children to grow up and have children of their own. After thirty years, however, occupation by the northerners came to a sudden and fiery end. I once saw the remains of that end in a series of bins in an archaeological collection. The bins were filled with masses of burned corn excavated from Point of Pines, the kernels turned molten and fused together. Each room belonging to migrants was burned early in the fourteenth century, many of the chambers loaded with freshly harvested corn. Excavators found bodies in the burned wreckage, in one room a man, a woman, and two children sprawled on the floor. A skull was unearthed, its shell blackened and popped open, revealing a powdery gray lump inside. The lump was a carbonized brain, evidence that these people had still had their soft parts intact near the time of the fire. It seems that they had been burned alive or shortly after their death. Curiously, none of the surrounding rooms lived in by locals had been damaged by the fire. Only the proud migrant enclave had been burned.

  Fourteenth-century Show Low Polychrome vessel near Point of Pines. IRVIN FERNANDEZ

  When I went through the museum collection of charred corn—shapes made grotesque by the extreme heat—I could not help recalling children burned alive in the Four Corners and a history of sites across the Colorado Plateau that had been torched in autumn or early winter after the corn harvest was in. Corn burns much hotter than wood, a high enough temperature to shatter rock and melt adobe walls. The great house of Chimney Rock had been burned full of corn, as had the largest pueblo on Antelope Mesa and myriad others.

  Fire followed these people down from the north. On the Colorado Plateau fire had been used as a ritual, people igniting their kivas before leaving. Fire also had been used as an act of war. At Point of Pines it is not clear what this conflagration meant, but it was no accident. The blaze had gone from one ceiling to the next. Lex Lindsay, an excavator who had dug these rooms in the 1950s, told me that the fire had to have been intentional, that the ceiling timbers had not burned all the way through before the next rooms had ignited, as if arsonists had been running ahead through interlocking doorways, plunging torches into caches of corn, smearing wooden posts and beams with pitch and lighting them. As the upper stories collapsed into flames, the imperious enclave crumbled, and the reign of the Kayenta migrants came to an end at Point of Pines.

  It has been assumed that the highland locals were the culprits, able no longer to put up with these migrants who had overstayed their welcome, but there is nothing but circumstantial evidence for this. Lindsay told me he wished he had brought in an arson specialist, but the site is buried again, the whodunit mystery left unsolved. Looking into the remaining bins of black corn, I wondered who else the guilty party might have been. Maybe it was another group of outsiders, people bent on vengeance for some past transgression that had occurred on the Colorado Plateau.

  The migrants who built this place had shown up a short time after the height of the massacres in the north, coming here quickly, making a straight push more than three hundred miles south from their homeland, and finally taking refuge in another culture’s pueblo as if hiding out. If this was the case, these migrants may have set up their first pit-houses at Point of Pines as a probationary settlement, demonstrating their worth to the locals, perhaps as masons, potters, weavers, or the keepers of particularly useful ceremonies. Once they were allowed into the pueblo itself and began construction of their own site, they might have maintained their distinctiveness in order to keep their value in the community, refusing to water down the very traits that made them valuable to begin with. Meanwhile, an enemy group from the north may have tracked them here, taking thirty years to reach Point of Pines on their own path of migration and revenge.

  One theory I have not heard about the catastrophe at Point of Pines is that the fire might have been started by the northern residents themselves, that internal factions may have clashed after being cooped up together for three decades. Maybe it often happened this way among Pueblo people, disagreements flaring up within these inward-facing rooms until a decision was made, the whole place set on fire, people killed, and then it was time to move on. Restless and bickering, these northerners may have been ready at any moment to burn their homes and move away.

  Shortly after this conflagration the rooms were rifled for any remaining tools or vessels—perhaps survivors digging through cooling ash for whatever they could find of their previous lives, or locals coming in to see what goods might be left. A few shanties were set up in the rubble, cramped quarters occupied for less than a year, and then the ruins were entirely abandoned.

  After that a wall was built. It surrounded the remaining pueblo, the most substantial perimeter wall known in the fourteenth century. It remained in place for well over a hundred years while the locals went about their lives. Perhaps the wall was erected to discourage reprisals for the burning. Or it was a message: Point of Pines will take no more of these northern people, these people of fire.

  PART SEVEN

  SOUTHEAST ARIZONA

  FLOWERS ALONG THE WAY

  BONITA CREEK

  The storm did not let up. Below the snow line it turned into a lazy rain, showers passing quickly between beams of sunlight. The canyons trickled steadily day and night, threads of fresh water spilling toward the desert to the south. The back roads were terrible. I drove with my family across the southern end of the San Carlos Apache reservation, clods of mud kicking up into the truck’s undercarriage, the backs of the side-view mirrors plastered with reddish brown mire. My feet danced between clutch, accelerator, and brake, as I spun the steering wheel back and forth. The rocking motion put Jasper to sleep. Two stuffed animals were pushed in around his head in the car seat to keep him from jiggling awake.

  Regan is better at this kind of driving than I am, but she seemed content to lean against her window and watch the slow progress of canyon heads coming up around us. Lackluster volcanic walls lifted, and the road cut back into them, where decades ago it had been blown out with dynamite and bulldozed. I downshifted the truck through a creek at the bottom, parting water around the headlights, steam huffing up from under the engine as we climbed the bank on the other side. A switchback carried us up to a place where Regan took her socked feet off the dashboard and asked me to stop. I did, and she pulled out a small pair of field glasses to scan up higher along a crest of cliffs. Watching through the windshield for dwellings, she had spotted a row of alcoves, on whic
h she was now focused. Tattered bolts of clouds tore around the cliffs.

  “Anything?” I asked.

  She put the binoculars away and said that it was hard to tell, probably better if we kept going and found a place for the night. It was getting late.

  As we came down into the next drainage, the truck slid on a steep, slick track. Regan sat up into her seat belt. I kept nudging the wheel, tapping the brakes, gritting my teeth. Canyons opened around us as the road teetered between them, hollow banks of cliff trilling with rainwater streams. My hands buzzed nervously, gripping the steering wheel too tightly. The truck angled off of center and slid down heedless of brakes. I tugged the steering wheel to keep us barely in control.

  “I think this is our place for the night,” I muttered.

  Regan reached down to the floor and got out her boots. “Sounds like a good plan,” she said.

  It was about as far as we had intended to go. At least we were in the right drainage, heading for a deep, midnight canyon that led to where a prehistoric shrine of ceremonial objects had once been found.

  The windshield slashed with rain, wipers throwing water back and forth. As soon as we came to a terrace, the first flat place to camp, I plowed to a halt. No need to get off the road—no one else would be coming through. Even if we wanted to, we were not going to be able to drive out for at least two days.

  I shut off the engine, and Regan laced up her boots. The rain played a snare drum on the roof. After sitting for a while, waiting for the rain to slow, I smudged a view hole out of the fog on my window. Outside were groves of prickly pear cactus, their pads big as dinner plates. Mesquites with bony limbs stood around them, half shrub, half tree. We were nearly down out of the highlands and into the desert of southeast Arizona, a much warmer place than the highlands or even the Colorado Plateau.