Finders Keepers

by Craig Childs

  I cradled the pipe, the stem nearly as long as my forearm. The coolness went out of the wood as my hands moved over its surface, oiled from more than a century of touch. I saw in this object the sparkling flare of photographers illuminating the face of Sitting Bull as he posed with this very object in his hands, a man who in his youth knocked a Crow warrior off a horse and took his father’s name, who one day handed this pipe to his son, One Bull. I saw the Indian Wars, and Custer going down in Sitting Bull’s dream, and then in his reality. I heard General Phil Sheridan’s infamous rejoinder, “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.”

  I listened to the pipe’s wood for a cold, rainy morning, December 15, 1890, when two shots were fired by police, one into Sitting Bull’s side, the next into his head, finally toppling this legend from his horse.

  “Would you have left this, too?” Fenn demanded. “Would you have walked away from it if you found it somewhere?”

  No, I wanted to say. Yes. My God, it was beautiful.

  “Why shouldn’t we be able to touch this?” he pressed. “What is wrong with giving you this feeling? It is a privilege.”

  I was astonished that it was here at all, that the pipe had survived wars and uncountable years when it must have moved through many hands, often at risk of disappearing. How long would this have gone on before the connection of memory broke forever, leaving another of the countless shadows with nothing to cast it? It was not luck that brought the pipe to Fenn, a man who, if nothing else, could tie the loose ends of time back together. Fenn had been looking for it all along. While private collectors tend to be vilified for destroying history, without Fenn, the pipe’s connection to Sitting Bull might have been lost.

  Where might it go from here? Who could know? Fenn said it was a question he asked himself ten million times, and he had no answer, no institution or heir picked out. It was as if all he could see was the pipe’s past, the future a mystery he did not care to unravel. This is where he ultimately wanted it, in his possession, where a person could hold it, taking in history with all his senses. At least now the world knows where Sitting Bull’s pipe was in the summer of 2009: in my hands.

  CHAPTER 15

  LETTING GO

  I have my own private collection that spans the American Southwest in its tiers of canyons and sharp-sided mesas. A gray ceramic olla lies upside down like a helmet in Arizona beneath a needle-tip peak, and three hundred miles away in a cave a pair of Apache water baskets are seated in a nest of wood-rat droppings. A painted clay canteen rests on its side under a sandstone band shell in southeast Utah, one horizon north of a red seed jar off in the shade of a boulder. In between are three wooden knife handles of Anasazi origin, sanded and stacked and ready for stone blades to be inserted and bound with sinew, waiting there for someone who never came. My landscape is a map of objects like these, compass points and ancient benchmarks found among the dust and spiderwebs of ten thousand cracks.

  “They are just objects,” a friend said to me. “They can’t have been that important if somebody left them there.”

  But objects stretch beyond their physical boundaries. Their character lies in their placement on the earth, the way they are set down by hand or dropped from a pouch. This is provenance at its best.

  An archaeologist once told me that because I would not reveal the locations of artifacts I had found in situ, I was no better than a common vandal. He protested that I was dooming my finds to looters by leaving them unidentified and unresolved. As we sat in his office, his computer like a big blue eye behind him, he did not seem bitter about this, just mystified. I shrugged uncomfortably, feeling as much at a loss for words as the day Ugly Man had stolen the bow.

  I said, “I think they’re fine as they are.”

  “And if they are taken?”

  “That’s the risk.”

  “Risk for what purpose?”

  For the place and for the artifacts themselves. Our ravening fingers have lifted almost every last hidden thing. My pursuit of artifacts had so far been my business alone, a preoccupation with discovery and antiquity, and the least I could do after I found them was leave them be.

  I said none of this to the archaeologist. Instead, I merely told him that since I was the one who found them, I got to decide. Finders keepers, you know. In Greece you are required by law to report finds as, say, you dig skeletons and vases out of your basement while doing plumbing repairs. But not in the United States. Here it is still legal to walk away and say nothing.

  I have never marked these artifacts on any maps. This is not out of secrecy or for fear someone will abscond with my maps and snap up every bread crumb I found. I simply figure that I will remember the way. If I don’t, problem solved. They slip back into oblivion. I am in love with the fate of artifacts, especially when they pass beyond our reach, and only rarely do I return to these sites.

  An exception is a crackerjack basket that lies deep inside the wildly eroded geography of the Colorado Plateau. The basket is of a style dating back 1,500 years, and it waits there like a prize. A person can reach it only by crossing a buckled canyon in the high desert, something out of an epic tale—ledges and pitfalls, sandstone dragons guarding their keep. The dominant rock formation, Wingate sandstone, is the color of dried blood, and it breaks away into blocks several hundred feet tall. In its perfectly vertical state, this formation is a bitch to navigate unless you know a route. I know one.

  I was out with Regan in late October. We were way out of range of pothunters; people can’t even get in here by helicopter. We crept down a bedrock face, hands reaching to each other, packs lowered on a sixty-foot tether. I was coming to get a sample from the basket for carbon-14 dating. I needed just a little nip. An archaeologist had expressed interest, so I said I would return with a piece, as long as no location was revealed.

  I thought I knew the route but it was deceptive, my recollection not as keen as I had hoped. It had been several years. I led us out onto a ledge as wide as a diving board, but it quickly whittled down to the width of a two-by-four. Regan was standing at my heels looking around my shoulder.

  “Wrong way?” she asked.

  I stared at the ledge in front of me, which tapered to a teaspoon handle. The earth gaped below, four hundred feet of ledges and free fall.

  Interpreting my dumbfounded silence, Regan turned before I did, her shoulders brushing against the cliff face as she set off looking for a better route.

  “I think there’s a way back here,” she said.

  I remained at the lip, with my eyes fixed on the exposure.

  “Yeah,” she called back. “Here it is, over here.”

  I turned and looked for her, but she was gone, already on the way down.

  My misdirection had lost us about half an hour, long enough to screw the rest of the day. It got late, orange shafts of sun cutting into the canyons below as the shadow of our cliff leaned across the earth. Half an hour of backtracking was too long. Dark was coming, and we needed at least two hours to reach the next stage of land below. Regan cracked a half smile when our situation became obvious.

  “Let’s find a place to sleep,” I said.

  Easier said, of course: we were on a crag-faced rock several hundred feet tall. The only possibility was a ledge where a chunk of wall had fallen away. You could lie on it lengthwise, but your arm would hang over. Good enough. Getting there required a small commitment, a step over an abyss ending on a tiny clip of rock—not something to attempt while wearing a pack. Regan stepped across without hers, her boot sole landing perfectly, hands against the rock to hold her steady. She turned to me as I unloaded our packs, handing belongings across.

  That evening I cooked noodles in a small pan with easy turns of a spoon, my legs folded beneath me. Regan was sitting on her sleeping bag, leaning on her palm while light withdrew from the canyons below. She and I had camped many places in our lives, but never together at a vista so serene and so violent, two feet of flat, several hundred feet of vertical. The ledge sharpen
ed our awareness, forcing us to think before making a move. Do not set down a pen or a journal; do not stand up quickly.

  An evening-cool breeze swept across us as we crawled into sleeping bags head to toe. I placed a rock under my left hip, a little reminder not to roll in my sleep.

  I have never slept so well, so beautifully, as that night. You have sound dreams on a ledge, still as a mummy, hands crossed on your chest. It was like being suspended by a silver thread over the desert. In the first light of morning I woke refreshed as Regan prepared tea with great care. We sat side by side, sipping and watching the sun rise below us, our legs in sleeping bags as we dangled our bones over the edge, the basket way down there.

  I originally found this basket while traveling with three companions. I had pulled off my hat and stuck my head in a crack to see if anything was there. Noticing a dim shape, I reached back and touched the curve of it. We took it out, photographed it, spent a couple of days sketching and admiring it, then put it back, with no mention that we were there.

  One person who roams the area around the Colorado River in Utah likes to slide curt little communiqués into artifacts: You were not the first to find this. Please leave it the way it was when you got here. Sometimes I am a bit put off when I find this memorandum, this note claiming possession of a site, clearly reading Mine! Once I even thought of tearing up a note and returning the place to the way it was before it was found, but I folded the paper and put it back exactly the way it had been. After all, the note writer and I wanted the same thing.

  One of the most venerable guardians out here is a man in his late fifties named Fred Blackburn, who has traveled hard in the Four Corners for thirty-five years. Possessor of a gravelly voice, there’s a bit of respectable redneck to him. Back in 1974 Blackburn was the first federal ranger at Grand Gulch in Utah, where he battled the black market at a time when drug runners were starting to moonlight as pothunters.

  Now long retired from rangering, he leads surveys on the Navajo reservation, carefully choosing which sites to report and which never to mention. The best place for an artifact, he believes, is where it was found, and he does not want to draw unnecessary attention to still pristine locations. Sometimes things disappear quickly when word gets out, so he is careful about what he reports.

  It is not the black market alone that rankles Blackburn. He is also unhappy with government archaeologists and bureaucrats who have pulled out some prime pieces, ostensibly to protect them from being stolen. One artifact he is particularly embittered about is a wooden staff. He found it in an area he was surveying in Utah, a place where he kept coming upon rock art panels showing figures with staffs, their tops curled over like shepherds’ crooks.

  The staffs—said by some descendants to be objects of power, things that were themselves considered alive—captured his imagination. Blackburn had seen them in museums and in a photograph of pothunter Earl Shumway lying in a burial he’d just emptied, but he had never found one in the field himself until, looking for shade, he climbed back into a broken-down cliff with some of his surveyors.

  “I looked down in the crack and there was one of those damn staffs,” he said. “Like it was presented to us.”

  I have actually seen this staff and admired its finely knotted wood. It does not look like local wood; maybe it’s creosote bush from the south (Blackburn wonders if it comes from Mexico). One end is sharpened and worn as if it had frequently been stuck upright in the ground (perhaps with feathers hanging off it), its head flattened and rolled over. Altogether this staff is about four feet long. Smoothed by much touching, it rests in a drawer at the Edge of the Cedars Museum in Blanding, Utah. It is there because after Blackburn reported it, a local Bureau of Land Management archaeologist insisted that it be removed and protected from thieves.

  Blackburn seethed as he talked about this episode. “In their panic to preserve they lose half the story. All they’re getting is the object itself with a little provenance.” People seeing the staff do not naturally know about nearby rock art or the sheltering wall crevice in which it was stashed.

  He said the archaeologist on the case wanted only to retrieve the staff after it was reported. Blackburn was even invited along on the expedition to fetch it, but he gave a flat Hell no. “It’s criminal as far as I’m concerned,” he said.

  The archaeologist went on to write an exhaustive report on this staff and other finds like it, a stack of paper almost two inches thick that preserves what context she could.

  I asked Blackburn if he ever returns to the site.

  “No,” he retorted bitterly. “Anymore, I stay away from that area. I don’t want to go back.”

  Blackburn has an alternative. He and his field colleagues have proposed what he calls an “outdoor museum.” Its premise is simple: leave everything where you find it. That’s all. If you want to see it, find it the way everyone else has, by walking. He said he had recently found twelve jars weathered out of a wash together. I asked him what had happened to them, and he said, “They’ve probably washed away by now.” He added, “It’s not just about the artifact. I don’t think we’re mature enough as a nation to understand this yet. We’re still in Manifest Destiny mode.”

  It could be rationally argued that Blackburn’s outdoor museum is the most destructive of them all, because it will ultimately result in total obliteration. If artifacts are simply left in the ground, their decay is guaranteed, and if no one else ever sees them, they are forever out of the loop of contemporary understanding. But why must they be in the loop? Must we command every piece of antiquity we encounter? Blackburn argues that there is value in the untrammeled process. His approach allows these artifacts to fade naturally out of existence as we take ourselves out of the equation. This Zen approach makes the hoarding of archaeology seem desperate and reckless. I admire Blackburn’s fidelity to natural processes.

  Here is how I would like the story to go: I mentioned our finding the basket to a government archaeologist, who then asked if I could get a sample for him to radio-carbon date, and sent me on this mission.

  Here is what really happened: I never personally met the archaeologist. He was alerted to the basket’s presence by a couple of buddies of mine who were with me when we found it. They showed him pictures, and he was quite interested, but then bemused when they refused to give an exact location. He responded with a couple of questions and a thank-you. When they recently told him I was heading back into the area and that I would be happy to pick up a sample for dating—another pin to add to his timeline of this region—he said, Sure.

  The basket was tucked down inside layers of gloriously eroded landscape, one rock formation beneath another. Climbing off the night’s bivouac ledge, we reached a blackbrush flat far below—finally a horizon to walk on, but it soon fell into a pit of canyons with more cracks to slip down, more jumping for footholds. The next night we spent atop a big mushroom of sandstone, and the next near a spring spattering out of a nest of maidenhair ferns.

  From the spring we shimmied up a crack, popped through a gap into an isolated canyon on the other side, where we moved along an upper level, eventually entering a hanging side canyon. Inside this side canyon lay the basket. Getting there was like opening a combination lock, turning a key just so.

  Just as I had the first time, I got down on one knee, pulled off my hat, and stuck my head in the crack, peering into a dim slot. There was the shape in the back, the basket turned upside down exactly as I had seen it when I was last here. I reached in through strands left by black widows, brushing past pendulums of dangling dead things, and picked up the basket with the tips of my fingers.

  It was about the shape of a medium-sized mixing bowl, and it had been used by people in the earliest centuries AD. Its style—yucca strands woven into a nearly watertight coil, with a faint decorative band near the top made from brown-dyed fibers—dates to a cultural era known as Basketmaker. Somebody put it here because he wanted it kept safe, choosing a shelter that let in not even a skim of ligh
t, a place that collects less dust than a display case. I held it to the light and slipped it into a silk scarf to keep my skin greases off it. Its inside was hung with a light tracery of spiderwebs that I cleared with two fingers. I handed the basket to Regan, and she cradled it—sturdy enough that you could toss it on a counter and fill it with apples. You’ll hardly find such a good basket in a museum.

  I think again of Will Tsosie, the Navajo archaeologist from northern Arizona, who once said to me, “In order to be alive, all things must die.” He was stating his belief that objects should live out their lives and then be gone. It is a sentiment he shares with Fred Blackburn.

  There is something to be said for letting things stay in situ as long as they possibly can, even if it means that a hunter might show up tomorrow and take them, or that they are swallowed by weather. We have no choice but to live among contradictions. If anyone tells you there is only one right answer to the conundrum of archaeology, he is trying to sell you something. At this point, considering all that has been removed, it is worth leaving the last pieces where they lie. As for what is already out of the ground, by all means, move it around, whether you repatriate it or pass it on to the next collector. I’m not proposing anything radical. Don’t go to your nearest museum and cut out the glass as I once did, imagining that you can set the world back to the way it once was. That time is over. Let us at least appreciate all that has been gathered, and for the rest, let it lie.

  Regan and I took pictures of the basket from various angles, close-ups of its dusty coil weave and the thin, faded band ringing it. We encircled the artifact with a tape measure and marked down a rough circumference of thirty inches. When we were done, I took out a pair of tweezers and twisted off a little piece of frayed material, a small theft. The sample was no bigger than a pencil eraser, just enough for a radioisotope reading. It was a momentary entitlement. I transferred the snippet to a strip of aluminum foil that I folded and slipped into a plastic specimen case.