House of Rain

by Craig Childs

  It is said among indigenous cultures as far south as Mexico, Central America, and South America that within lone mountains like this lives Tlaloc, the oldest deity on these continents, the pan-American rain god. For the Olmec people the god was Epcoatl, the seashell serpent, and for the Maya Chaac, a deity living at the bottom of a spring-fed well. Among the Aztecs, Tlaloc wore a net of clouds and a crown of heron feathers.

  Offerings for Tlaloc are still left in the mountains of Central America. At high, prominent springs or caves in Guatemala or the Yucatán, one is likely to find the head of a decapitated rooster (replacing the turkey, which was commonly used in the past) along with pools of melted wax from votive candles. Mountains and their springs have always been sacred throughout the Americas. Even today among the modern pueblos of the Southwest, elements of the katsina religion mirror these Tlaloc cults.

  In the Pinalenos a ceremonial cache of painted bowls, baskets, and fat ceramic jars was found when a Boy Scout dropped his flashlight into a crack in the side of a mountain. The flashlight tumbled into the darkness. Someone going in to retrieve it found that it had landed near a collection of bulky, sealed jars. When the seals were broken and the bowls that capped the jars were removed, raw prehistoric cotton was found inside. The entire collection was soon crated up and helicoptered out, eventually taken to a museum. Radiocarbon dating of the stored cotton revealed that it came from the sixth century to the fourteenth century A.D. Cotton had been added to the jars from the time the first great kiva was built at Chaco up through the Salado era. Eight hundred years of pilgrims had carried loads of white, farm-grown cotton up this mountain and stuffed them into big globes of jars. Eight hundred years is a long time to be carrying anything into a not-especially-prominent cave high on a very tall mountain. This suggests a continuum, people walking on each other’s heels over the centuries to take offerings to the same place. Similarly, mountainside caves throughout Mesoamerica are known to contain ancient water shrines. Many of these shrines involve large ritual storage jars stocked with seeds and agricultural produce that are considered symbolic forms of water. For the Aztec, these jars were overseen by the rain god Tlaloc, who stored in them various manifestations of rain—beneficial rain, flood, dew, ice, mildew, and drought. The modern Tlaxcalan people of southern Mexico say that 14,000-foot Mount Malinche is home to a water goddess who lives in a cave among hundreds of great ceramic ollas. Under her command, spirits are said to leave the cave in the form of hailstones and return with various seeds, fruits, and grains that they place inside the ollas. Similar stories stretch from southern Mexico northward, from the Zapotec culture in Oaxaca to the Huichol, who now live in the Sierra Madre Occidental. Perhaps eight hundred years of cotton offerings found in ceramic ollas in the Pinaleno Mountains of Arizona belong to this meridian of traditions, indications of water stockpiled inside a rain deity’s house.

  Walt was looking for fauna as evidence of species passing through. I was looking for shrines that tell of people passing through carrying their cosmology with them, a religion founded on water, clouds, caves, and mountains. I knew of cracks and caves where ancient people had reached underground water, where they left beads and painted arrows as offerings. They had carved stairways in the rock to reach springs that they decorated with turquoise and miniature ceramic vessels.

  A group of Hopi men had recently traveled to this mountain. Knowing of it from old stories, they went to a dome of rock where offerings had been left in prehistoric times, and there these tribal representatives placed their own contributions. The Pinalenos were a momentous landmark along a complicated migration route that is remembered to this day.

  Some people turned back from southeast Arizona late in the fourteenth century. This mountain was a boundary where far-reaching Pueblo clans stopped and returned to the Colorado Plateau, leaving much of southeast Arizona abandoned in the fifteenth century. Migrants had shown up and revolutionized the place, only to have it fall out from under them, seemingly as a result of overcrowding and social collapse. But it was not just migrants who left. Nearly everyone living in this part of the Southwest walked away.

  The pressure of so many outsiders, and the accompanying shock of dramatic social upheavals, was simply too much to endure. The whole of the Southwest had united into something that looks like a single cultural body, where many different groups joined together under a rising ideology called Salado. But the integration did not last. The end result was that the entire Southwest was destabilized. Communities began falling apart. A century of woodcutting, hunting, and intensive farming had decimated the land during a time of unprecedented growth. Pueblos began competing for resources. This competition shattered critical trade networks, severing the cultural fabric that held these regions together. The sharing of resources, ideas, and artifacts in the area ceased. People began to scatter once again, heading for distant sanctuaries. Birthrates declined. People died younger as malnutrition coursed through their remaining settlements.

  The great pueblos of Grasshopper, Kinishba, and Point of Pines fell empty. Even Homol’ovi, far to the north along the Little Colorado River, was abandoned. Smaller, one-story pueblos in the highlands and in the southern desert were erected as a last stand, returning to an earlier form of settlement, but even those lasted no more than a couple of decades before this territory was vacated entirely. It is telling that most of these sites in the last years of occupation were blanketed with colorful pottery, stars fallen to the ground. Local settlements that had been inhabited for seven hundred years came to hasty ends, the final layers of their archaeological records heavily dosed with circus-colored Salado Polychrome.

  Much of the proud irrigation domain of the Hohokam fell apart in these years, a collapse even more remarkable than the fall of Chaco and the subsequent abandonment of the Four Corners. If ever there was a deathly wind to sweep away the lives of many people, it happened in the fifteenth century, and not during the so-called disappearance of the Anasazi almost two hundred years earlier. Often this final collapse is blamed on environmental catastrophe and overuse of the land, but the culprit was far more likely social upheaval.

  Can the caving in of Southwest cultures, the scattering of the ancient Hohokam in the desert and the Mogollon in the highlands, be blamed on the Pueblo diaspora down from the Colorado Plateau? Did the raving, polychrome ideologies of these northerners strike at the foundations of everything, their inherent restlessness and the Chacoan blaze in their eyes upset whatever balance might have existed in the Southwest? I believe this was the case.

  So much of the territory surrounding this mountain is marked by foreigners in the fourteenth century, prior to the evacuation of nearly every settlement: bird trade; multicolored pottery; big, high citadels peering across the land, kivas packed inside. The Salado reformation that encompassed the Southwest was the last thing to happen before everything fell apart. I am inclined to believe that the impetus for this change came from the north. The rising drought of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries had been a stone dropped in the cultural pool of the Southwest, sending people rippling southward in search of better climates and viable population centers in the fourteenth century. The ripples magnified into waves as other cultures were encountered, absorbed, and overtaken. Black-on-white pottery no longer adequately expressed what people needed to say, and they turned to color and consecutively larger vessels, as new pueblos appeared all over the land and new kivas erupted across central and southeast Arizona. This all rose to a peak like a fire, and when the very last point had burned, these places lay vacant in the fifteenth century, pueblos charred in rituals of abandonment.

  The northerners were too much. Perhaps they were too busy with religion, clogging springs and caves with shrines so that Tlaloc could hardly breathe, praying nonstop for the rains to come back. Or they were too loud, too quick to draw weapons. They needed too many timbers with which to erect great ceilings, too much water for mortar and cotton and corn. All of this ended with a final form of pottery, a late ver
sion of Salado Polychrome recently identified as Cliff Polychrome, with painstakingly intricate bands painted around exterior bowl rims and jar necks, as if people were frantically squeezing their signatures onto what little unpainted space remained, making their last desperate claims in a time of social collapse.

  Many people from across southern and central Arizona, both migrants and locals such as the Hohokam, turned to the refuge of the Colorado Plateau at this point. They walked to the Hopi mesas, where they returned to an old way of life, growing corn in fields of sand under a barren sky, pleading their ancestry so that they could establish a good place to live among ancient northern pueblos such as those of Antelope Mesa. The arduous journeys these people took to get out of southern and central Arizona to reach the Colorado Plateau became the sacrosanct tales of their place in the world—stories of pueblos destroyed behind them, teaching lessons of mobility, perseverance, humility, and temperance.

  Not everyone returned to tell their stories, however. Some went in a different direction when central and southern Arizona emptied. These people continued moving south. They had left the Colorado Plateau and were not going back.

  Later in the morning Walt and I found each other near one of the Pinaleno summits, where we walked together among brows of snow. As the sun lifted, the mountain seemed to be coming apart, its ice cap creaking open. April meltwater began to flow, snow-filled meadows flooding. Rivulets gathered into streams between dark trunks of spruce and fir trees. With no creek beds to follow, no ravines, water simply ran everywhere atop this mountain, overflowing their banks of snow. Faces of ice gaped skyward from beneath the clear sheen of flowing water, their frozen mouths and eyes wilting open, giving way to spring.

  We walked up a dirt road that led toward the top. It had become a gully of mud-water running in braids and meanders. The water quickly accommodated our passage, filling the holes of our prints. The forest around us roared with morning wind, trees bustling together, then springing apart. The skies were clear, wind sharp and cool. The sun burned into the snow, melting long rays out of the ice. What at dawn had been silent and unwilling was now leaping to attention, all eyes open and awake, rushing to the thousand tasks of April.

  Water flowing up here would never reach the desert far below. Whole rivers were disappearing into the mountain this morning, sinking into vaults and aquifers within. A number of years back, I studied the hydrology of the Galiuro Mountains—the range immediately west of the Pinalenos—where radiocarbon dating had shown that much of the flowing water was fifteen thousand years old. This is fossil water, leaking out from the mountains’ cavernous underworld; water stored since the last ice age and doled out in measured quantities.

  Each of these Sky Island ranges is like an iceberg floating on the desert—great caches of water encased in a skin of rough stone and pine needles. Water eventually relaxes off this busy surface into networks of unlit fissures, filling small spaces between grains of solid rock. The mountains become subterranean lakes. The interior stone becomes an invisible river. This, I believe, is the reason for shrines on the mountains of southeast Arizona: there is water inside them.

  Walt and I walked up the road of mud and snow, winding higher toward the peak. Above us the mountain lifted to a fine top, where a Forest Service fire tower stood in the wind. Built in 1933 to watch for fires in all the surrounding world, the tower is a steel lattice ninety-nine feet nine inches tall, capping the mountain with one last upward reach. The wind screamed through its crossbars and cables as we approached its stairs. Walt unhooked the feeble sign that read DO NOT ENTER.

  Narrow wooden steps made tight turns up through the tower’s insides. Our red-knuckled hands gripped the rails as the wind loomed across our bodies. I thought that the tower might snap into a thousand pieces, an antique hurtling off the top of the mountain as if made of balsa.

  There was so much wind that the air was filled with alarm, yet the skies surrounding us were clear. This was the wind du jour coming south-by-southwest, the same wind that sails across these mountains day after day, year after year. For decades it has been shrieking with hardly a pause across this high spoke of a tower. For thousands of years it has been bending these slopes of sea green trees.

  Climbing the stairs, I noted the manufacturer’s name stenciled onto the tower’s steel: AERMOTOR. Longtime manufacturer of windmills. Tower builder. The modern Southwest is covered with the company’s rickety metal temples: fans plunging metal rods into the earth in search of water, and high fire lookouts lined up perfectly from one viewpoint to the next, something future archaeologists could easily take to be a sign of a religion, a mass ideology. Shrines, if they didn’t know better.

  We plodded slowly up the steps, wind catching us off guard, tripping us as we caught railings and pulled ourselves ahead. My sense of height and depth increased with every narrow wooden step. The final turn of the stairwell ended at a shut door. The observation room was closed, secured with an old padlock.

  Walt and I stood together in this high cage of steel looking over the ring of the earth. We saw secluded mountains littered across the desert. Mexico loomed in the south, its rising mass of mountains dark where they led toward the Sierra Madre Occidental. Distances fell into gray shapes cluttering every horizon: New Mexico, Arizona, Mexico. We were both still, transfixed. Every wire and bolt head sounded with a tremolo whistle. I could hardly speak a word, braced next to Walt, shoulder against the tower’s metal frame for support.

  Lines of involuntary tears salted my face, and I could feel them tightening my skin as they dried. I squinted through the wind at the foothills of the Sierra Madre, far off in Mexico.

  PART EIGHT

  NORTHERN MEXICO

  THE FAR SIDE OF MESOAMERICA

  SIERRA SAN LUÍS

  There is said to have been a road through the Sierra San Luís, a prominent thoroughfare that existed until as recently as fifty years ago. Even buses supposedly took this road, rattling Mexican school buses transporting chickens and people between Sonora and Chihuahua.

  How quickly the land takes itself back.

  We could not see a road anywhere. Four of us had come in a caravan of two trucks, crossing washed-out rockslides in the bottom of a canyon where creek water parted around our grille plates. It felt safer to have two trucks driving so far into the Mexican outback: we could pull each other out of a quagmire with chains and tow straps. We drove a hundred feet apart, losing sight of each other around tight bends.

  There was no road at all, not even a hint of one. Maybe our map was wrong, it being an outdated map. We had seen old tire ruts about half a mile back, a heartening sign as we tried to drive as deep into this canyon as possible. When we could drive no farther, we would load gear into our packs, leave our trucks, and continue on foot. We pulled in the side-view mirrors so we could fit through narrowing canyon passages. Regan worked the steering wheel with jarring motions, and it seemed as if we would run out of passage at any moment—nowhere to turn around, radio antennas bowing back and snapping against overhanging branches.

  We stopped and got out in calf-deep water, walked a short distance ahead to judge the terrain. Two college students, both studying Southwest archaeology, had joined Regan and me. One was a stocky, darkly bearded man named Eugene, the other a leaner man with a van Gogh beard named Darin. Regan and I were working as their mentors, our official job being to teach a month of archaeological fieldwork, coming to northern Mexico in search of undocumented sites. The four of us stood on the canyon floor seeing nowhere to turn around. We talked about trying to back out but were fairly certain one or both of the trucks would become mired. We needed forward momentum and the grind of our lowest gear.

  Eugene, a man of grim, bearlike countenance, strongly objected to our using this creek as a highway. He was angry about it, saying he would not drive it another foot. “I’m walking from here,” he announced. “I’ll catch up with you up canyon somewhere.”

  “We’ve got to get these trucks out of here,” I s
aid.

  “Let a flood take them; I don’t give a shit,” Eugene said. I enjoyed the almost brutal forwardness of his company, never a word minced.

  Neither truck was his, of course, so he was free to say whatever he wished. I thought of taking his advice, if you could call it that, and leaving our trucks on the canyon floor. The one Regan and I drove was fairly old, its engine and suspension making many unwanted sounds. Not a good highway vehicle, but the only one Regan and I owned. The truck behind us was much newer, not entirely scratched and dented like ours. It belonged to Darin, who did not like the idea of a flood washing his truck away. This whole business of driving in these conditions made him nervous, the undercarriage of his truck scraped raw on rocks. He looked upstream, contemplating the so-called road, hands on his hips.

  “I don’t like this either, but I’m not leaving my truck in the bottom of this canyon,” he said over his shoulder, aiming the arrow of his voice straight at Eugene.

  Eugene did not care what we did. He said so. He dragged his pack out of the back of Darin’s truck, and when we got back in and drove ahead, he followed us on foot, like a straggling camp dog. Eugene and Darin had already been out for months taking notes on archaeological sites across the Southwest. The two worked surprisingly well together, having formed a relationship that was both efficient and biting. Meanwhile, Regan and I were coming up from the south, where we had been trekking through jungle ball courts and temples of the pre-Columbian Maya. We had spent time in Guatemala and Honduras, where, dazzled by the archaeology of southern empires, we had found ancient plazas as big as football fields and had strolled among pyramids where broad ceremonial roads had once been cut through the bush.