House of Rain

by Craig Childs

  But more recent investigations have revealed that people were indeed in motion across long distances in the fourteenth century and that colorful pottery was traveling with them. Salado has come back into favor, but it is no longer just an invading force. Now it appears to be a cultural revolution, less an actual people than a spread of ideas and artifacts across the Southwest as migrants established new trade routes between distant communities, opening lanes of commerce and communication. Salado was the new world order as the old-guard cultures of Hohokam, Mimbres, Mogollon, and Anasazi were swept up into a cohesive assembly.

  If you come down off the Mogollon Rim, major drainages will lead you to certain places, such as the Salt River, the Tonto Basin, the middle Gila River. In the fourteenth century, these were gathering places that became Salado strongholds, defined by how people once moved across the land. Safford was one such center, the southern end of Nieves Zedeño’s line, a bastion of Salado pottery, of innovative architecture and increasing populations.

  As I watched the rain from the Laundromat window, an old man sat beside me on an orange plastic chair at the front door. He was smoking incessantly, a gatekeeper whiling away his time to the sound of dryers tumbling clothes. With hardly a shine of recognition, he kept track of everyone coming and going. A Mexican woman was folding shirts on a table as if kneading bread dough, and across from her an Anglo man was trying to match his socks. Several Apaches draped bedsheets over their arms, smoothed out pants on hangers, and leaned against the machines as their clothes dried. Their children drove wobbling laundry carts like race cars between lanes of washing machines. The younger kids just stared at each other from behind their mother’s legs. The place seemed like a migrant camp, people from all the local ethnicities rubbing shoulders to do their laundry.

  The old man at the door stubbed out one cigarette and tapped another into his hand. He kept glancing at me and Regan and Colin. Not staring, just keeping track of us. We were rabble from the wilderness, flushed out by the rain and seeking shelter in town. He regarded us with a hint of distrust.

  I wanted to ask him if he had ever seen anything of archaeological significance around Safford. Usually old men in small towns love to talk about the mummies they’ve seen or the arrowheads they keep in a drawer at home. But this man did not seem to be in a mood for talking. I left him alone.

  I imagined an old man much like this seven hundred years ago. He would have been leaning against an adobe wall or sitting with legs folded beneath the shade of a ramada made from spindles of ocotillo wood. From there he would have seen the first incoming migrants. With the even expression of an oracle, he would have studied them walking down out of the highlands, seen them mingling in the markets. Their eyes would have been different, their clothing, the way they carried themselves, the weapons slung over their shoulders. They were people on a mission. Maybe their scouts came first, stopping to ask about living conditions, whether there was anywhere left to grow a little corn. And here, have a look at this pottery we’ve brought. Maybe we can trade it for venison or beans.

  The old man would have watched as his countrymen gathered to see cleverly colored globes of Salado Polychrome being unwrapped from traveling burdens. Everything changed at that moment. Everyone wanted one of those pots. They were the most radiant vessels ever seen.

  Handily, Salado Polychromes were easy to make. Their dramatic, painted designs required organic paints that could be gathered just about anywhere, while firing utilized low temperatures that allowed for mass production without a heavy impact on local fuel-wood supplies. These newcomers could outfit a whole valley with new multicolored pottery in nothing flat.

  Large Salado Polychrome bowl – the size of a large mixing bowl—a black-on-white-on-red form known as Gila Polychrome, excavated from near Safford. In storage at the University of Colorado Museum in Boulder CRAIG CHILDS

  These were not the sturdiest pots being traded. In fact, they were not always constructed from the best clays. What they lacked in quality manufacture, however, they made up for in color, size, and elaboration. Painted on the outside so they could be seen from afar, large jar designs leaped out as if dipped in neon. Sharply interwoven figures played around the exterior of pots and bowls, seamless balances of positive and negative space creating a geometry much like what was once seen on the Colorado Plateau. These designs looked like old northern ones, pumped with electricity, circles and spirals sprung wide open, stars and waves rippling. Encased within the larger images were intricate cameos of lesser spirals and squads of triangles on pots big enough to wrap your arms around.

  Affordably and rapidly made, these new pots swamped local ceramic traditions. They were soon being used in every known social context, appearing in equal abundance in burials, kitchens, living rooms, and ceremonial chambers. At a site in northern Mexico, sixty of them were found lined up along a wall like trophies. Their distribution was not restricted to the graves of males or females, to young or old, to poor or rich. Everyone had access. It was a revolution, and it soon stretched from Phoenix to El Paso, making its way to northern New Mexico and to Sonora, Mexico. One major production center appears to have been right here around Safford, the seat of Salado.

  The old man who at the time sat and watched this cultural incursion would have known where it was all going. The pottery was greasing the way for many more migrants. Sitting in his shade, he would have watched the newcomers erect their own audacious masonry settlements, completely unlike any of the cobbled, mud-wall villages that were here to begin with.

  These newcomers built a crowning pueblo atop a butte just outside Safford. This compound would have looked like a foreign castle peering down at the local farming peasantry below. The old man would have watched it go up, not surprised to see such a dominating monstrosity coming from these Pueblo people who brought with them stories of war and butchery, hardened travelers with exotic customs. For instance, whereas the locals still cremated their dead, these travelers brought full-body burial rites with them from the north. Everything about these migrants was different.

  The high pueblo they built just outside town is today called Goat Hill. When it was partially excavated, archaeologists found the remains of people who had come from three hundred miles away. In the open center of this circular pueblo, they uncovered a half-moon-shaped kiva that is similar to the Kayenta kiva at Point of Pines and to other kivas all the way up into southeast Utah. Like most Colorado Plateau kivas, this one had a bench along its curved interior wall, a ritual sipapu in the floor, a deflector and a shafted ventilation system, and what appear to be foot drums styled after those of Mesa Verde and Chaco. Also like other northern kivas, anchors were found in the floor where looms had been fastened. These asylum seekers were making ceremonial art, pottery, and textiles that they spread liberally among the locals.

  The fourteenth-century migrants came not all at once, but in orderly waves, as if their movement had been carefully orchestrated. A group from the Kayenta heartland was the first to arrive at Goat Hill, building an arc of rooms on the high western margin of the butte. Shortly after that, a second arc of rooms, built along the eastern side by a different group of migrants, completed the circle. This second group came with their own distinct architectural signatures tracing back to Antelope Mesa. Even though the two groups arrived at slightly different times, both came from northeast Arizona, albeit from different parts. Together they built one visibly cohesive core, the two sides of the circle meshing perfectly. Joined in the center by a D-shaped kiva, this pueblo seems to have been a planned reunion, something broken and then put back together in another place. It looks like a prophecy coming to pass.

  The migrants reconstructed their whole cultural world, not only around Safford but also along every primary waterway in southeast Arizona. The next river west of Safford is the San Pedro, flowing north out of Mexico to a place where excavations and surface surveys have revealed clusters of pueblos that look as if they were lifted off the Colorado Plateau and laid down here, n
early four hundred miles to the south. Their blocks of rooms are positioned in a way that suggests a sophisticated political and cultural order previously unknown in this southern region—the same order you see far to the north, where matrilineal arrangements of clans and societies are reflected in the floor plans of pueblos. These people were rebuilding their civilization down to every social detail, and they were doing it within earshot of many local communities. The Anasazi, thought to have vanished, were here in force, this time in the guise of Salado. Their uncounted Pueblo settlements sprang up in every valley of southeast Arizona. A Spanish expedition that came through in the 1540s encountered one of these pueblos after it had been recently abandoned, reporting that the “strongly fortified dwelling” looked out of place, more like ruins and occupied pueblos that the expedition had seen in the north on the Colorado Plateau. A journal from the expedition noted that this settlement, made of bright red earth, must have been built by “civilized and warlike foreigners [who] had come from far away.”

  Migrant enclaves from the Colorado Plateau stretched as far west as Tucson, almost a hundred miles from Safford. An excavation that took place a short distance from downtown Tucson unearthed what looks on the surface to be a Hohokam-style site. But inside they found many signs of migrants, such as slab-lined fireboxes and mealing bins that carry a strong Kayenta influence. People also kept birds in these rooms—hawks, falcons, eagles, domestic turkeys, and imported macaws—in numbers rarely seen among lowland Hohokam people. The place is inundated with hefty, colorful pottery and various subtle ceramic markers of travelers from the Colorado Plateau, such as perforated dishes known from Kayenta cliff dwellings and pueblos. It is also marked by northern-style burials juxtaposed with southern-style cremations. When tree-ring dates were analyzed from this site, they confirmed migration theorists’ suspicions: the trees had been felled for construction in A.D. 1320, the peak of migration in the Southwest.

  Many Hohokam scholars have preferred the notion that this seething rabble of migrants played only a minor role. They have viewed the Hohokam as a stable stay-at-home culture able to resist anything a migration-plagued people could throw at them. Their argument is steadily weakening, however. In the fourteenth century, northern pottery swept through even Phoenix, the Hohokam core, like a flood. The last known Hohokam sites are literally swamped with it. The presence of colorful Salado Polychrome at these sites has often been dismissed as having been acquired through trade from far away. But recent analysis shows that it is made of local clays, fired right on the premises.

  The long-enjoyed tradition of Hohokam ball courts—public grounds where games were played and ceremonies may have been held—came to an abrupt halt around the time the outsiders showed up. At that point Hohokam labor was redirected from building ball courts to building imposing mounds on which walled compounds were established.

  Were these new platform-mound structures defensive responses to invaders, or were they incorporations of a bold northern ideology? The Tohono O’odham, who now live in southern Arizona, call the people who ruled these Hohokam platform mounds siwañ, a word that is phonetically out of place in the O’odham’s Pima language. When spoken out loud, siwañ is nearly identical to shiwanni, a word from the Colorado Plateau and a Zuni term for their rain priests. Siwañ and shiwanni are similar enough in two completely different languages that they suggest a connection, a word left in the southern lands by northern travelers. The name of rain priests from the north was planted like a flag in the mighty Hohokam platform mounds of southern Arizona.

  With so many people coming and going, new trade routes were opening all over, moving raw goods and pieces of art to new places. More settlements than ever before were right next door to each other, ethnicities and cultures and languages heaped together and connected by traders and migrants. Everybody now had the same painted icons on the same colorful pots in their living rooms, a revolution of style regardless of what language they spoke or what ethnicity they belonged to.

  This was not, however, a docile revolution. All across the lower Southwest, settlements from this time period have a defensive appearance, and excavators have dug mangled human skeletons from the ground. Many communities established by migrants look like fortresses, placed in impregnable locations and built with defensible gated entries and perimeter walls. Wherever this new Salado culture appeared, migrants were there, a movable civilization with a smoldering history of burned-down pueblos trailing for centuries behind them.

  The old man I imagined in Safford would have recognized the first of these people to arrive, identifying them merely by the way they walked, by the gazes they carried. He would have seen their pottery and nodded slowly to himself, knowing that the world was about to change.

  At the Laundromat door the old man stubbed out yet another cigarette and started the next one. Smoke passed in and out of him until it seemed that he must consist more of smoke than of flesh. Every time the door opened with a new customer hauling in a bin of laundry, I was relieved for the fresh scent of rain from outside. The old man just watched, taking silent note of who was coming, who was going.

  When we had everything bagged up and dry, I made several trips to and from the truck, Jasper hoisted in one arm, laundry in the other. Outside the air was rich with moisture, tires hissing as traffic passed along the highway through the middle of town. Clouds were skidding around a massive, singular mountain rising over Safford to the south. Waterfalls were coming off this mountain, thin white streaks barely visible through the rush of storms. Just shy of 11,000 feet in elevation, the highest pinnacle of the Pinaleno Mountains stood over my head, 8,000 vertical feet off the desert floor, the second-highest mountain in Arizona. It looked like a thunderous god. I loaded warm stacks of folded bedclothes into our truck beneath it.

  I went back in for the last load, and as I backed out the door, I said goodbye to the old man, the first direct exchange we had had the whole time. He nodded slightly.

  MOUNTAIN OF SHRINES

  THE PINALENOS

  Iwoke from a bed of ice in the upper reaches of the Pinaleno Mountains. Powder frost slid from my bag as I sat up and looked into the blue hole of dawn. Heavy trunks of Douglas firs stood all about, dark against the brightening snow. I was surprised how late it was. I had slept in, and a sound had woken me. I turned and looked across the ice-crusted snow. My traveling companion was already up, his sleeping bag empty. The sound had been the scratch of his boots on hard snow. I looked around. He was gone, having slipped into the woods.

  The sky was visible all around, broken by ascending shafts of spruce and fir trees. I felt as if I had woken at the very tip of the earth. My companion was a man named Walt, a researcher studying the ecological history of isolated mountain ranges in southeast Arizona, ranges known as the Sky Islands. Walt was interested in how plants, animals, and insects use these mountains as migratory stepping-stones between the tropical south and the montane north. For certain species, for jaguars and butterflies, this is the only way to bridge the Americas, leapfrogging over the desert from the Sierra Madre toward the Rocky Mountains.

  Walt’s and my studies in migration overlapped like the weave of a loom, mine following an ancient passage of people and his tracing species of moths, birds, mammals, and reptiles. Knowing Walt, he was probably off listening for the first spring birdcalls this morning, walking across snow with a notepad open in his hands.

  I dressed inside my bag, a Houdini act with pants and shirt, my shoulders punching at the tight nylon enclosure. I had slept with all my clothes bundled around my feet. My boots were outside, turned upside down so frost would not collect in them. I unzipped and emerged into the forest on a snowy pillar of earth. My boots were stiff as wood. I laced them and moved away from my bag to the base of a tree, where I steamed the snow with morning urine. Heads of dead grass bent over, their seed husks encased in hoarfrost. I moved off through the trees, looking for the first place sunlight would clear off some of the cold.

  Slabs of light began
falling between the trees. The sun was rising. I walked into bright hallways, moving from one to the next, glimpsing through the trees the open veil of sky around me. In winter, subzero winds throw volleys of ice off this mountain into the desert below. In summer, the wind coils around this peak into fifty-thousand-foot swells of thunderheads. I have seen this mountain swallowed by its own weather, volcanic bolts of lightning flashing from under its hooded clouds. This mountain held the final shreds of winter in April, these banks of snow being the last of their kind so far south on the continent.

  When I reached a perch of snow and rock, the sky opened wide. I could see the full arc of the planet. Beneath me was a clear view for more than a mile down to the solid ground of the desert. Other Sky Island mountain ranges were scattered about, but none as tall as the Pinalenos. These others looked like buffalo shrugging their way across the land, hirsute peaks tethered to the desert by sinuous paths of greenery. They looked like veined organs, living things. Even from many miles away I could see where their pines fell into oak brush, narrowing down to luminescent green threads of cottonwood trees, then a haze of creosote bushes and the blank stare of dry, saline earth at the bottom.

  Towering above southern Arizona, this mountain must have been powerful in the minds of the people who once lived and traveled below it in pre-Columbian times. Its slopes are jeweled with ancient shrines, its summits made like altars, with potsherds shaved into the shapes of coins and left as offerings. Caves throughout the Sky Islands are stashed with wooden katsinas and painted offerings. Hanks of human hair are hung in natural subterranean passages, and precious stones are positioned around springs.