by Craig Childs
The rain turned into a light sprinkle, and Jasper woke in the quiet. The stuffed animals fell from around his head as he let out a frustrated moan, trying to lean forward but finding himself restrained. He let out an angry shriek.
“All right,” I said and opened the door.
I stepped out into a squish of road mud, then immediately onto a firm, gravelly surface, a rocky transition soil between desert and mountain. The air smelled of damp mesquite, a touch of cold. I needed to set up our tent and the stove, fill the water bottles for the night. I headed for the back of the truck.
The rain remained soft throughout the night. It pattered on the tent like a small animal coming and going, a gentle rhythm that rocked us to sleep. In the morning the rain had pretty much stopped. We got moving early, loading Jasper into a framed pack on my back. We set out for the day through shafts of fog and splintering gates of gray-black stone. The praying leaves of jojoba bushes surrounded us, and we tried not to touch them, endeavoring to stay as dry as possible.
A procession of boulders led down to where the valley pinches into a canyon. Below us, the canyon looked like a dark well, the entirety of the valley taken in by a sliver in the earth. We followed. It was a sluice, a hallway tightly wound into volcanic rock of many colors. Jasper rode silently behind me, the motion quieting him as we skittered down the rock. Walls rose high over our heads, quickly sinking us into a geologic gut.
I was surprised to see a canyon this narrow and deep around here. Its shape reminded me of certain places on the Colorado Plateau, features of geography that some call slot canyons. You do not see many such canyons in this part of the Southwest; the geology usually will not allow it. But here the rock had the right consistency, resisting and yielding in the right proportions, enough to mirror the path of running water. Colored in earthen pastels, this rock was once the molten interior of the planet, boulders of the inner earth ripped from their foundations and carried upward in a boiling froth of gas and magma. We walked among many shades of a volcano’s basement: waves of red tuff, gunmetal basalt, and smooth, black rock shot with white crystals. The black rock was still wet from the rain, and I reached out to touch it as I passed. It felt as slick as a frog’s belly.
The canyon had a liquid flow, squeezing down into a thin, turning corridor. A boulder nearly a full story tall had fallen into the canyon and was wedged over our heads, an iceberg of volcanic rock. Even Jasper craned his neck to see what we were staring at. The dark hulk hung over us, thousands of tons suspended in perfect tranquillity.
Two flycatchers dove out from beneath this pendulous chunk of earth. Their wings and their startling chits sliced the air around us. They had built an April nest. I could see a small lip of grass and bovine hair pouting from under the wedge high above. The birds had tucked their fragile eggs under the boulder, a cunning place to hide their beloved future. We moved on, letting the birds go back to their nest.
I kept seeing Regan ahead fading in and out, turning corners, swallowed by this place as Jasper pointed ahead each time, ex-claiming, “Mama!” Along the floor red penstemons grew from wet gravel, their leaves beaded with rainwater. I stopped at one of the flowers, knelt, and took a red trumpet between two fingers, where it rested like powdered velvet. As I lifted it slightly, a pearl of water came loose, rolling down the crease of my fingers into my palm.
Much older flowers had once been found here. They were discovered in a ceremonial cache, a treasure of small artifacts stored in a polychrome jar. Forty-one finely articulated wooden flowers, di-vided into three separate clusters, had been kept in this jar. One cluster had been painted a rich sky blue, another a pale turquoise; the remaining three had been left the natural dun color of their wood. At the museum that now houses this cache, I had touched one of these ancient flowers in the same way that I touched the penstemon in the canyon, two fingers in a cotton glove slipped under a petal, lifting a paper-thin scale of colored wood to feel its give.
The curator had immediately stepped forward, lifting his hand to stop me.
“No, no,” he said. “If you want them moved, I can do it.”
I withdrew my fingers and looked at him. He was poised as if I were touching the rarest da Vinci. He had allowed me to handle many artifacts, trusting me with bowls and baskets and fine wooden tools, but not these. I apologized.
He took a half step back.
The flowers were out on an examination table, lying on a thin white cushion. Their petals were made from thinly cut wedges of wood, each sewn to the next with a fine-spun cotton thread. Among such finds in the Southwest, it was the most intact, so delicate and undamaged.
Originally, the flowers had been stored inside a large tomato--colored vessel—a wide-mouthed jar, its body plump and painted with geometric details. An inverted bowl had been placed over it to protect the treasure within. The jar, now kept like an estranged parent in the ceramics room, was of the style once called X Polychrome, which belonged specifically to migrants who had moved into Point of Pines in the fourteenth century. This cache had belonged to people who had come from Kayenta. They had hidden it in a cave above Bonita Creek in southeast Arizona, perhaps a crucial store of artifacts spirited away just before the burning at Point of Pines.*
Along with the flowers, the jar also contained sixty-five miniature baskets, each hardly larger than a silver dollar. These baskets were arranged on the examination table beside the flowers. A dark, pitch-painted brown, they were nested into each other and sewn one to the next through their middles.
Next to the baskets on the table were other contents of the cache: wooden buttons painted green and black; eight wooden cones; a bird-shaped pendant; three terraced headdresses made of painted wood.
I felt as if a holy ark had been opened, a precious cache of religious objects. I was not sure if it was sacrilege to look so blatantly at these relics, or if we were being appropriately solemn, the curator ready to stay my hand at the slightest transgression.
Only three caches of this nature have been found in the Southwest. One was discovered in a cave just east of Comb Ridge in Utah: a prehistoric jar hidden in a high sandstone escarpment that required a rope to reach it. Within the jar were fifty halves of small, round gourds strung together much the way these flowers and the miniature baskets were bound. There were also four wooden birds and various wooden fetishes tied together.
A second ceremonial cache came out of the Kayenta homeland, found buried in a cave up in the red cliffs of northeast Arizona: a large corrugated jar containing twenty-six painted wooden sunflowers of excellent craftsmanship. The cache also contained a set of hand-s-omely carved wooden birds and a number of wooden cones almost identical to those found along Bonita Creek, three hundred miles south of Kayenta.
The similarity of these three discreet caches found in southern Utah, northeast Arizona, and southeast Arizona is significant. They form a path from north to south, from the Colorado Plateau down to a gateway canyon beyond Point of Pines.
The cluster of turquoise-colored flowers had in their center a bundle of wooden buttons painted a luminescent silvery blue, the color of a night moth. These little nubs of painted wood were positioned to represent the flowers’ reproductive organs, their seat of nectar. I smelled them, just in passing, and they smelled of dust.
I let the penstemon slip off my fingers and hurried ahead to find Regan. She came into view where the canyon spread wide open, a private passage revealed wholly to the sky. Stone turrets stood hundreds of feet above us.
Birdcalls emitted from ahead in a lavish corridor of trees lining Bonita Creek. Over it a black hawk cried from up in the white limbs of a sycamore. There were slender willow switches and sprays of yellow flowers along the creek. Nearer to the water I lowered my pack to the ground, soft and russet-colored from autumn leaves that had fallen five months earlier. The sun was just starting to come out. Regan and I pulled Jasper free and put him down. His little boots sank into the leaves. His hands plunged immediately into wet sticks and grass, his
eyes two strokes of lightning contacting the earth. No stone or leaf escaped his fascination as he plowed through the underbrush.
I followed him with my warnings, my hand clearing his path through the wet grass. At every other step, I peered up through the smooth, bone-white sycamore branches, their mad weavings holding up the sky. Gazing through them, I noticed the tight cluster of a small cliff dwelling in a high cave above the creek. The structure was difficult to make out, blending perfectly with the cobbled rock face, shrunken back into the shadow of an overhang. Its chambers were smoothly plastered, making them appear like rounded bread loaves—no longer the banded masonry one sees in the north.
Migrants entered southeast Arizona from the Colorado Plateau in the fourteenth century, pushed by fires burning behind them, by a search for water and good growing conditions, or merely by a need to keep moving. As they journeyed through a landscape of intermarriages, conflicts, and alliances, they changed, picking up new traits and genes. What remains of what was once called Anasazi is difficult to know, turned into Salado, introduced to a new world. The presence of painted wooden flowers hidden in a jar and buildings suspended in the cliffs suggests strong, direct ties between the Colorado Plateau and southeast Arizona. In one form or another, the legacy of Pueblo ancestry was still alive this far south.
Jasper teetered through the plants. He led me to the creek, where a lush arbor closed in above us and water shot due south, murky with rain and runoff. Rainwater, dabbed off the grass, appeared on Jasper’s face and shirt. He snatched a stick off the ground and chucked it into the creek. It landed along a slow edge of the water, where it turned like a compass needle waiting for a direction. Then it touched the current and sped downstream.
“There it goes,” I said, dropping around Jasper’s body, containing him in my arms.
I cocked his shoulders so that he could see where I was pointing. The stick swept down a tunnel of alders and sycamores. It clipped through stripes of sunlight on its way to the desert, the Gila River, the land beyond.
“Bye-bye,” I said. “Tell it bye-bye. There it goes.”
Jasper flexed his hand in the air, waving goodbye to the stick.
CROSSROADS
SAFFORD
In a sheeting rain I stood illuminated by my truck’s headlights. Water drained off the hood of my poncho. I held in my hands a pair of tent poles, nearly wishing for this rain to end but thinking better of it. It would end soon enough, and a featureless Southwest drought would return.
All the way from Bonita Creek, gunning the truck out of slick canyon roads, I was ready for dry ground. The driving became easier as we dropped into the desert—no more mud, just crushed rock for soil. We stopped ten miles outside the town of Safford in southeast Arizona to set up camp.
Now I was putting tent poles together in the white flare of headlights and erecting our small, waist-high tent on the gravelly earth, my hands coming up caked with wet grains of rock. When I pulled the sleeping bags and pads out of the back of the truck, I walked them over to the tent with only cursory cover under my poncho. Everything was damp already from days of travel and storms. Besides, tomorrow we would be in the town of Safford and would find a Laundromat. We planned to throw everything we had into the dryers, boots and all.
I made the bed inside the tent, a cozy little space, sleeping bags laid out like blankets, a bottle of drinking water at each of our heads. The one thing we had kept dry was the bundle of baby things. I pulled out a toy animal and inserted it into one of the tent pockets. As I carefully unfolded a little striped sleeping shirt and a wool cap inside the tent, my hood pulled back to keep it from dripping, I thought of early photographers on global expeditions hiding their precious glass plates from the weather, of botanists pressing plants in the wild jungle and sacrificing everything to keep their samples safe. In this case baby gear stood above all else in importance.
I backed out of the rain fly and zipped the tent closed behind me. I crouched for a moment in the glare of the headlights, looking into sharp, twisted shadows of intermittent creosote bushes that perfumed the air with a familiar sweet and bitter scent, the smell of rain in the southern desert. We had passed completely out of the highlands into a new territory.
I walked to the truck and cracked open the driver’s door just enough to reach in and shut off the headlights. Darkness returned to the outside world. Regan and Jasper peered up from reading a book beneath the dome light. It was Regan’s birthday. I had told her I’d set up the tent tonight.
Regan smiled, pleased to be dry with her son. Ducking down through waterfalls and cliff dwellings below Point of Pines and following the sopping path of Bonita Creek for a day, we had not been dry for some time.
“Tent’s ready,” I said. “Happy birthday.”
While Regan managed the impressively mechanical chore of getting a one-year-old situated in a two-person tent, I went to check on another truck parked near us. A bumper sticker read TREE HUGGING DIRT WORSHIPPER. I pulled my arm out from under my poncho and knocked on the camper shell.
“Come in,” a man called from inside.
I opened the door and found Colin, the traveling companion who had moved through the Kayenta region with me. He had come to meet us and help with the management of a small child in the backcountry. A tall, lean man, he reclined in the cramped camper reading a book by headlamp. He lay in a nest of climbing rope. Wadded up behind him was a thin, greasy sleeping bag. In his twenties, he worked as an itinerant climbing instructor for Outward Bound. He spent his off-seasons in the wilderness and was just now returning from a few weeks of highland travel. No baths or showers in that time but for creeks and rain. He smelled like a wet dog.
Colin put down his book.
“Rain,” he said.
“Bunches,” I replied. “All cozy in here?”
Colin looked around, giving his camper shell an honest assessment.
“All’s good,” he said.
He was just a few inches too tall to stretch out completely in his truck bed, so he lay with his body crimped at the knees.
“How’s the leg?” I asked.
“It’s got screws in it,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone.
He had taken a fall in the wilderness—broke his femur and had to crawl out on his hands and one knee. That was eight months ago. Scrambling around the backcountry for the past few weeks, he’d managed to break off one of the screws holding his leg together.
“I’m mobile enough, though,” he added. “The leg feels okay.”
I rested my arms on the rim of his tailgate for a moment. The roof of his shell hissed as if sand were being poured over it, the rain keeping up a strong pace.
“Into Safford tomorrow,” I said. “Let’s get some food. And find a Laundromat, get all our things dried out.”
“Good plan,” Colin said. “Carne asada burritos on the east end of town.”
Colin needed a new tire on his truck, the one on the rear driver’s side thin to the metal. A trip into Safford was a necessity. And we all needed to load up on supplies before making the next push into the backcountry. Safford assured us we would get what we wished for: hot food, tire shop, pay phones, library, Laundromat.
The Laundromat in Safford was humid. It smelled of powdered detergent, cigarette smoke, and hot dryer lint. We waited for our gear to dry, boots clomping around and around in the dryer. We were travelers and we looked it, completely out of place. Colin was wearing camouflage pants and had a big knife on his hip. His cowboy hat was limp from use. He walked through the Laundromat with the supple grace of a rock climber, a mere trace of a limp in his left leg. Regan looked even more peculiar, the only Asian in the Laundromat, perhaps in all of Safford. She had an air of purpose as she toted Jasper on her hip, our son gleeful in his overalls, gripping a headlamp in his fist, his favorite toy. I looked like a grizzled bear, standing at the front window, watching the rain, pondering the world buried beneath this building as if I were devising a crime.
The main street ha
d recently been widened, and an archaeological recovery crew had been brought in to deal with whatever artifacts were unearthed. One of the archaeologists who had worked on the project told me that they had found prehistoric settlements everywhere they had dug, the place just filthy with signs of occupation, communities dating from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. Every few feet a new prehistoric find had been unearthed in the expansion work. Excavators had come upon a small pueblo built by locals in a thirteenth-century style common in southern Arizona, where adobe walls were erected atop cobble footers. Encircling this site were numerous fourteenth-century pit-houses of northern design—migrants positioned on the edges of a local pueblo. These migrants had installed a number of open-fire ceramic kilns, and, curiously, the nearby pueblo had been full of what appeared to be migrant ceramics. The style of pottery brought by these travelers from the north is known as Salado Polychrome—big, colorful pots that were well received.
Safford lies along the Gila River, a major east-west corridor that was fully occupied long before those migrants arrived early in the fourteenth century. The Hohokam irrigation empire west of here, in the Phoenix and Tucson areas, had a strong influence on the Safford region, and there is ample pottery from the Mimbres region in southwest New Mexico. Pueblo people out of the north, carriers of Anasazi ancestry, walked into a heavily occupied valley, its slopes terraced with hundreds of small farming communities. Field houses and single-story adobe settlements were all over the place. This was already one of the busiest crossroads in the entire Southwest, and when these migrants arrived, everything changed; it became Salado.
Scholars in the mid-1900s thought the Salado had been an invading army, a prehistoric group that appeared from the north and decisively conquered southern lands like Huns. In this vision the Salado overpowered local social regimes and replaced them with heavily consolidated settlements awash in multicolored pottery. As the whims of archaeology changed, however, this theory was abandoned, and the very idea of a Salado culture began to fade. The concept of migration was replaced by notions of in situ development, each group staying put and working through its own local process. The thought of conquering Salado forces plunging across the land was simply too Hollywood for archaeologists of the time, who explained the rise of polychrome pottery as a matter of trade, not migration or invasion.