They got out of the truck, stretched, and started pulling gear out of the bed.
“How come we’re hiding?” Sophia asked.
“I don’t like people to know about these sensitive sites.”
“But it’s public land. I’m not criticizing, I’m just trying to figure out what places like this are for. I’ve got my ideas, but I’m interested in yours.”
“Well,” he said, opening the top of his pack, “it is public, but that doesn’t mean we have to advertise. We’re supposed to preserve the resource, and sometimes the best offense is not even being on the map. GPS coordinates don’t come with safety instructions.” Sophia looked at him with a squint that Paul noticed. “Swallow Valley is special because it was lost,” he said.
“It’s not on any of the official maps or the inventories I’m working with, but it’s everywhere in the oral history,” she said.
“Not anymore. Everyone around here has gone silent. They’ll talk your ear off about UFOs and Aztec gold, but ask them about Swallow Valley, you get nothing.” Paul said. “Only one guy would talk to me about it, but he just died. I thought we might come up here to honor him. He had maps he drew himself. Wouldn’t let anybody see them. You had to be on the inside. The Paiutes are the only ones who know more about this place than him, and they aren’t talking to anybody either. I don’t blame them. Every time they do, they get burned.”
“With nobody talking, we’re going to lose the knowledge,” Sophia said. “In a generation it’ll be gone. This is our Library of Alexandria.”
Paul looked at her and grinned.
“What?” she said, then she opened her pack. “I have a tent. I thought we could split the weight between us.”
“Maybe we could do without a tent on this one,” Paul said. “We’ll be hauling these bags up a lot of cliff faces. Any extra weight we take in there should be water.”
Sophia frowned and pulled out her tent and stowed it in the cab. Sophia showed Paul his box of things, and he quickly parceled out what he needed, taking note of the books. He held up the one she’d recommended. “I’m looking forward to this,” he said, “and to these.” He held up the Jolly Ranchers. “Thank you. These are my weakness.”
They loaded the water into the center of the packs, then packed around it. Paul carefully loaded one last red stuff sack into his bag, checked it, and cinched everything down.
After an initial scramble over some boulders and a low cliff, they made their way through the high chaparral. Paul navigated by sight toward a mesa in the distance that was flanked on either side by miles of running cliffs forming what would have, from the air, looked like a long funnel. Small clusters of sage and agave transitioned to larger juniper, which burst into the mechanical racket of cicadas as they passed.
Paul’s pace was indomitable. Even so, Sophia sensed that he was throttling back. She tried not to take it personally. He’d have to throttle back for just about everyone. He looked like a creature who could walk forever. Antilocapra parkrangerus. As they hiked, Paul asked her to say more about her research, what she’d been seeing in the data she was gathering about the degradation of sites on the monument.
“It’s complicated,” she said. “And I’m trying to avoid confirmation bias.”
“Bias about what?”
“The belief that people ruin everything.”
“They do,” Paul said, then he corrected himself. “We do, and I hate that there’s a term for it.”
“Right? I feel like I’m a scorekeeper for the Anthropocene. It’s like watching a house burn down.”
“And taking notes.”
“Crazy notes. Never-ending notes.”
Paul stopped and turned. He bit the rubber tube of his hydration bladder and sipped. Without a word, he pointed toward the west, where they’d come from. They’d gained enough elevation to bring them high above the valley floor. From this position, they could see the high voltage lines in the distance, small now like toys, running to the horizon where the dark green of the mountains was broken only by the defiant red escarpments of the cliffs to the north. Paul noticed the tiniest thread of smoke rising in front of the Vermilion Cliffs. “Huh,” he said. “A fire in Cane Beds.”
“I saw that earlier.”
“I hope they get it under control, or it’ll run wild across that grassland and up into the Kaibab Reservation.”
Paul turned to the south and the ridge dropped away precipitously, revealing at some distance a lava field that drew a sharp line of contrast against the tawny desert floor. “This whole area has seen volcanic activity in the last two hundred years. If you look across the plateau to the first escarpment there, you’ll see the cinder cones. They’re like the most geometric landforms out there.”
In her mind, Sophia repeated the word, “geometric.” These were the sentences she liked.
“What?” Paul said, distracted by her pause.
“Keep going,” she said. “Talking, I mean. I’m okay to hear more about all this.”
“That lava flow has some interesting history. Paiutes used it as an escape route or a place for ceremonies. They have almost invisible pathways through the middle of the lava that they made by carrying tens of thousands of basket loads of cinders in there. And over there, a few miles past, that’s where a crazy old hermit lives in a school bus. This place is a lot of things.”
“What’s that?” Sophia asked, pointing to a cluster of houses.
“Carvertown,” Paul said. “It’s a little bit militia, and a little bit rock and roll. Just kidding, the Carver family’s been ranching out there since the 1880s. They think of us as the intruders. Over there across from Fandango Wash is another recent volcano. People call it El Sombrero, you know, for ‘hat,’ but the root word actually comes from the Spanish word for shade.”
“Ha,” she said, “I’ll bet it throws great shade.”
“Not at midday,” Paul said.
She was about to explain her joke, but instead she said, “I think most people imagine you as some kind of stoic protector, but really you’ve got some solid natural history standup moves.”
“I’ll be here all week,” Paul said, sipping from his tube and continuing on. After a time, she thought about how easily her body assumed the pace and the weight of her pack. She felt as strong as she had ever been in her life, and she thought about how this research project would be over before she knew it, another passing moment among many. She wished she could more easily switch to geologic time and recalibrate. These bursts of pressing human concern needed proper perspective.
They hiked on through the scrub, climbing higher and higher, boots crunching in the sandy soil.
“How do you know we’re going the right way with no trail?” she asked.
“The layers,” he said. “Each band is a different kind of rock that cuts through the whole area. If you know the shapes of the exposed layers, it’s kind of like a map, or a slice of a map.” He held his hands out like he was casting a spell. “We’re on the Kayenta Formation right now. It’s the blocky stuff, kind of crumbly. Lots of broken ledges. The Navajo Sandstone—which is a lot thicker—that’s above us. It used to be part of a massive sand desert.” He pointed to the high cliffs ahead with tall vertical cracks. “It starts red and turns gray at the top. Above that is the Carmel Formation. We came up through the Wingate. You can kind of piece the whole area together in your mind and see where we’re supposed to be going.”
“So, you’ve been there before?”
“Not really. But it’s been described to me.”
“So, you’re in the know?”
“A little bit. More than I would have thought.” Paul stopped and unzipped a pouch on the belt of his pack. He took out two Jolly Rancher candies and handed one over. She got grape. “You have a green apple?” she asked, handing hers back. Paul dug around until he found one. She took the tiny brick, unwrapped it, and slipped it into her mouth. The acidity drew saliva into her mouth like a pump, and she closed her eyes to focus on
the sensation. In the dry air, the effect was like a sugary sweet heartbeat against her tongue. She opened her eyes and saw Paul watching her over his lowered sunglasses.
“Shut up,” she said.
“It’s good, right?”
“I had no idea,” she said.
Paul pushed his sunglasses back up onto the bridge of his nose and held out his hand. “I’ve got a place for the plastic,” he said. His hand stayed out until she placed the wrapper in his palm.
The sun dropped halfway to the horizon as they came to a vertical cliff that went up about twenty feet. It was flat with no obvious handholds except for a corner that was almost ninety degrees. Paul carefully set down his pack and tied one end of a length of parachute cord to the top loop and took the other end in his teeth. He placed both hands against the rock, then one foot, followed by the other. Before she could process how he was doing it, he was at the top, sitting on the edge, hauling up his bag.
When he untied his pack, he dropped one end of the cord. “Tie it on. I’ll haul it up.”
Once her bag was clear, Paul said, “It’s called stemming. The trick is to get the friction from your feet. You’ll think it won’t work, but if you get out of your head you’ll be fine.” She started the same way: hand, hand, foot, foot. Her weight pressed her palms and soles against the sides of the corner. Bit by bit she inched her way up. When she came to the top, Paul’s voice broke her focus. “Inch your feet up and you’ll come right over.”
She didn’t think it would work, but suddenly she was sitting on the edge looking down. She noticed that the massive boulder they had just climbed was not brown like the surrounding stone. It matched the red rock from above.
“Nice climb. I knew you wouldn’t have a problem,” Paul said.
“I wasn’t so sure,” Sophia replied.
“You’re really good . . . for a gym rat,” Paul said.
“Thanks?” she said, and he shrugged, grinning.
She could see they were now in the new layer of Navajo Sandstone, and the whole environment had changed. The shapes, scale, colors, and rhythms of the fractures in the rock were different. Across the expanse to the east were a series of buttes, the color bands matching the rock she was on: orange separated by gray, topped by a buff-colored layer at the top.
They hiked on. After a few minutes, Sophia asked, “Is it true that you jumped into the Colorado River in some kind of sea monster outfit?”
“Who told you that?”
“Everybody.”
Paul paused. “It was a dry suit with hand paddles. I wanted to see if I could go rim to rim on my own without a bridge.”
“I see,” she said. “And the pilots say they take you and your bike places and just drop you off, you know, in the middle of nowhere.”
Paul filled his cheeks with air, then let them deflate. “Yeah, I wish they’d stop telling those stories.”
“It’s a pretty wild mythology.”
“Honestly, it makes me feel self-conscious. I should tone it down.”
“You know they’re not making fun of you. You’re like their Captain America. I didn’t mean to make it feel weird. I wanted to see if it was truth or legend.”
“Everybody’s a hero,” Paul said. “That’s my message.”
She watched his face when he said it, and she could see that he was telling the truth. As the way rose higher, they came to a boulder field and hopscotched across the stones’ bald backs. After the boulders, they traversed a long ridge of stone that curved past protean columns of rock that seemed more like frozen gas than eroded solids. Eventually, they arrived at the mouth of a slot canyon that was plugged with rockfall.
“This is the technical part,” Paul said.
“What have we been doing for the last three hours?”
“The approach. This is as far as I’ve come before.”
Paul opened his pack, removed a red stuff sack, and set it aside. He then hauled out ropes, harnesses, and an array of other equipment. He arranged all of it carefully on a black nylon drop cloth. He carefully repacked the stuff sack into his bag. “This is the route we talked about. We’ll climb two pitches here, then on into the great unknown.”
As he set up for the climb, he talked through the route, suggesting that he’d climb lead, and she would clean. She mostly climbed routes that were top roped, so this would be a new challenge, something she had wanted to try for a while. Paul handed her a harness and shoes, then looked upward. “The first pitch will end at the midpoint of that rubble.” He pointed to a place where the rock curved under, casting the faintest of shadows. Sophia nodded and donned her gear and stowed her boots and socks in her pack. They went over their belay signals, then roped up.
Paul climbed easily and with a lightness. He moved so quickly she had to work constantly to keep the rope from going slack, but her hands fell easily into the quick rhythm of it, the pull of the ascending rope offset by the weight of the brake side threaded through the figure eight. At intervals, Paul would stop, select one of the wired nuts, slip it into a crack, test it, clip the rope into place, and climb on. When he completed the first pitch, the rope went slack, and they began hauling up their packs on the length of static cord Paul sent down. Sophia tied on Paul’s pack and tugged the line. The pack floated into the air and spun as it rose. Moments later the unknotted cord descended.
“Now yours,” Paul called out.
She repeated the process.
With both packs up, Sophia then tied into the rope and felt the slack come out of it, the tension transferring to her pelvis. She loved how the climbing shoes transformed the smallest protrusion or horn of rock into a platform with its own kind of certainty. By moving slowly and methodically, she found herself rising quickly, the tightness of the rope giving her confidence. Climbing made her acutely aware of her balance and strength, but she was always surprised at how engaged her mind was. She didn’t zone out. It was like solving a massive three-dimensional puzzle. When she came to one of the colored wire stoppers with its carabiner, she removed it and clipped it to her harness. She did not feel an immediate mastery in this cycle, but she found a peace in it.
The belay ledge was small, but Paul had everything organized, and they were able to reset and trade places. In a few minutes, Paul was climbing again, setting protection, clipping in, and climbing on. Soon he disappeared from view, and Sophia only knew he was there by the tugging and resistance on the other end of the rope. The process repeated itself, bags first, Sophia’s leading the way, since it was the last one tied. Because of the angle of the cliff face, her pack swung out into space and spun in the air as it ascended. When the cord returned, she tied on Paul’s pack. As his pack went out and up and across the overhang, it caught on a small tree growing impossibly from a void in the sandstone. He raised and lowered the pack a number of times to no avail.
“Hey,” Paul yelled down. “My pack is caught. I think if you lean out, you might be able to unsnag it.”
“I don’t know if I can,” she said.
“It should be okay,” Paul replied.
“How about I get up there, then we figure it out?”
“It should be okay if you just nudge it a little,” he repeated.
She climbed up to the overhang and strained to reach the pack, which was just out of reach. “Can you just pull harder?” she said.
“I don’t want it flying around,” he shouted.
She tried again and almost reached one of the straps before she lost her grip and fell. The rope caught her, stretched, and yanked her against the rock. Immediately, she was upside down, heart pounding, her whole body electrified with adrenaline. The swinging of the rope dislodged Paul’s pack, and the small tree that snagged it fell past Sophia and into the space below before hitting the ground. After a few inverted seconds, she fought her way back into position and found new hand- and footholds. She clung there with the belay line slack as Paul hauled his pack to the top.
When the belay was ready, Sophia shouted, “Climbin
g!”
“Climb on,” he called back.
As she climbed, she ignored the suggestions Paul made, using the anger to help her focus.
At the top, Paul apologized for the accident.
“Was it an accident?” she said. “Because—I don’t know—it seemed like something else.” Sophia untied the rope and sat on a rock to remove her climbing shoes. Her heartbeat felt audible, her jaw tight. After a few moments, once she relaxed, she began to hear the insects again, and then the taffeta of the wind through the vegetation, and finally, somewhere farther up the canyon, the dry croak of a raven.
___
Dalton told LaRae that he had to run a personal errand, and after that he was going to stop by the Beehive House and pay Raylene Cluff a visit.
“You want me to call ahead?” LaRae asked.
“It’s better if I just drop in,” he said.
“They told me they’d prefer a heads-up.”
“That’s why I like to drop in,” Dalton said, winking.
“Before you go, I wanted to let you know the trailer fire over in Cane Beds is out. They also said they’re okay if you still want to take a look at what’s left.”
“Thanks. I’ve got my eye on it.”
“But Cane Beds is in Arizona,” she said.
“When two weird events pop up in the same week, I lose interest in jurisdictions.”
LaRae thought about Dalton’s answer and looked like she might ask another question, then decided not to. “I’ll hold down the fort,” she said.
Dalton drove into town, letting his to-do list wash over him until he got to Red Cliffs Realty. He looked up and down the street to see if anyone was watching, and there was nobody he knew on the sidewalk, so he went inside. The only person in the office was the receptionist. She was young and he didn’t know her.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“I guess I need to sell my house,” Dalton said.
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