Slickrock Paradox

by Stephen Legault

  There was little reason to doubt the concern that Anton and Kayah Wisechild and this third man, Williams, would have had for the site’s archaeological value. Was it significant enough to stop a major resort development from going up on the adjacent canyon rim? It might not be, but this density of construction suggested that somewhere else scattered through Hatch and its side canyons were other traces of ancient Pueblo civilization: rock art and artifacts. Taken together, and given the pressure to preserve the Canyon Rims region within Canyonlands National Park, it might give pause to the regulator.

  Silas took out his binoculars and began to scan the multi-story ruins. The upper structures must have been accessible only by ladders because no handholds or footholds were visible. He examined the smooth surface of the slickrock and could see nothing to indicate another means of approach. In several places, near tiny ledges in front of the doors of the dwellings and granaries, the smooth surface of the stone had been scratched. It looked as if someone had jimmied their way up the slickrock walls to the granaries and cliff dwellings.

  He stood and turned his attention to the central kiva. This was new for Silas. He’d seen sites of settlements in the Grand Gulch and Chaco Canyon, where the kiva was an impressively designed sacred space. But this one wasn’t on anyone’s map. Circular in shape, the kiva’s still-intact roof was level with the surrounding canyon floor. The main structure had been dug by hand. The roof had then been constructed from timber dragged into the canyon, which would have been back-breaking labor. The roof had then been covered with chiseled stone. The small hole in the roof would have had a ladder descending into the sacred space. Another opening, not eighteen inches across, allowed fresh air to enter the structure.

  At just twenty-five feet in diameter, it was by no means a grand structure, but it was beautiful in its symmetry. Silas peered in through the portal. There was no ladder, and no obvious way for him to get down. He walked to the ground-level portal of the closest building, a low-roofed adobe edifice with four sizable roof beams and windows facing the morning sun. Based on what Anton had told him, he expected a great treasure trove of discovery within, pots, shards, tools, maybe even a basket. With some anticipation he stooped and looked through the low door. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dim light. He could smell the fecund odor of animal urine and stale earth.

  It was empty. He fished his headlamp from the top of his pack and put it on, its powerful beam cutting through the dusty air and brightening the corners of the room. There was nothing in this dwelling. He went to the next, and the next, and found the same thing. There was nothing at all.

  He felt a wave of disgust wash over him. Penelope had told him many times of how pot hunters and grave robbers plundered the Southwest of its rich archaeological, cultural, and spiritual history.

  A resort on top of the mesa above wouldn’t necessarily destroy this site, but the thousands of people who would be drawn to such a destination would demand trails, handrails, walkways, and even jeep access to something as spectacular as this ruin. It would be overrun, as Mesa Verde and Hovenweep had been. While its structures might be preserved by the Archaeological Resources Protection Act, the soul of the place would soon be shattered. Silas had heard the arguments before; had even had them from time to time with Penelope. Give thousands of people access to such a place and you allow them to view and maybe even learn a little from it; but in making it easy to reach, the feeling of discovery that he was now experiencing would be gone.

  He hadn’t fully grasped what Penelope, his own wife, had been arguing for all those years, until now. Silas wondered if she herself might have found this place. If she had, what would she have done about it? He had no doubt that such a discovery by his environment-avenging wife would have led to a tremendous showdown between her and those who wished to plunder this place. She and Jacob Isaiah would have had words, not all of them fit for family company. The BLM would have received an earful for even considering the proposal for a resort built near this delicate site.

  Silas was drawn back to the kiva. She would have loved this. Penelope had told him about the kiva in Grand Gulch, and what she felt descending into that consecrated space of the ancient Pueblo people. Having searched the other structures, he decided that he would have to see the interior of this one too. It occurred to him, given the state of plunder, that he should look for further evidence of comings and goings, but now his own footprints in the sand covered the site. He would be more careful as he entered the kiva.

  He slipped off his pack and took out the coil of eight-millimeter nylon rope that he carried with him. It was just eighty feet long, but for descending into slot canyons and safely getting out, it was perfect. Now he looked for a place to secure it.

  Several boulders near the mouth of the structure would suffice. Silas doubled up the rope and looped it around a boulder a few feet back from the kiva. It left him with plenty of line. He put his weight on it and it held. He decided to play it safe and slipped on his climbing harness. He knew he could just drop into the kiva, but he didn’t want to risk reinjuring his tender ankle.

  He donned his pack again and stepped to the roof entrance to the ruin. He dropped his cane down first, then slipped the rope into his belay device and leaned back over the door. He eased himself down over the rim and felt the cool air inside the kiva beneath him. He pressed his back against the far side of the opening and carefully let his feet fall out below him and then played out the rope, delivering himself gently to the floor ten feet below the kiva’s portal.

  He stood a moment and let his eyes adjust to the dim light. He could turn his headlamp on, but wanted to get a look at the space in the natural morning glow first. He immediately noted that this room, too, had been plundered of anything left behind by the ancient Pueblo dwellers. The floor was bare and in fact appeared to have been brushed or swept clean. He found the sipapu, the hole in the floor that symbolized the portal through which the ancient Puebloans believed their ancestors first emerged to enter the present world. Next to it was the fire circle, and then the stone deflector, which kept smoke from being drawn up through the ventilation shaft at the foot of the kiva’s wall. The deflector itself was constructed of four large stones, cleaved square, each measuring about a foot and a half by two feet. He looked up. The roof and its rectangular door, with his rope descending through it, ten feet above, seemed very high.

  He unclipped his belay tool and walked around the room. To the ancient Pueblo people the kiva was the center of cultural and spiritual life. As he slowly circled the space, running his hand along the smooth stone walls, Silas imagined men gathered there, sitting on the low benches along the walls or gathered around the fire. He circled twice, his hand trailing along the cracks and fissures in the wall, as if searching for purchase there.

  As he began his third revolution, his hand caught on something that wasn’t stone. He stopped and turned on his headlamp. In one of the deeper fissures in the stone, a space almost large enough to be a ledge, something had been wedged. He hoped that maybe the pot hunters that had desecrated this kiva had missed something. Tucked into the two-inch-high crack, where a stone had been removed from the wall, was a red notebook. He put his fingers around it and gently pried it from its resting place. It came out easily. It was solid in construction, with a thick fabric cover and a delicate but faded pattern of leaves on the cover. It seemed familiar to him, as if he’d seen it before in a storefront or shop. It was covered in a thin layer of very fine dust, and was devoid of marks from fingers or hands. He brushed the dirt off of it and noticed that the dust hadn’t soiled the cover.

  He opened it, and a shiver went down his spine.

  Inside the front cover were notes written in various pens and markers, but there was no mistaking the handwriting. He turned the page and there, at the top, was the familiar phone number. A cell number that he had called no less than a thousand times, almost all after his wife had disappeared. He turned the page again, and read what seemed to be a titl
e page: “Notes on Ed Abbey Country,” by Penelope de Silva.

  He sat down in the dust, legs splayed out before him like a child. He flipped the page again, but there was no date, just several quotes as an end page to the book, and then page after page of descriptive writing. He flipped back to the start and looked again at the inside of the cover. Mostly notes to herself, it seemed. Silas turned to the page of quotations and read the first one:

  I come more and more to the conclusion that wilderness, in America or anywhere else, is the only thing left that is worth saving.

  And then:

  I want to weep, not for sorrow, not for joy, but for the incomprehensible wonder of our brief lives beneath the oceanic sky.

  They were aphorisms from Edward Abbey, the second having long been Penelope’s favorite. It had been framed and mounted above her desk. It was from The Fool’s Progress, her favorite novel. He was holding in his hands a great prize, his wife’s record of her work here in the American Southwest.

  Still holding the book, he began to scour the kiva for other signs of her passage. Crawling on hands and knees he examined every crack and crevice for anything else she might have left behind. There was nothing.

  He sat down on the stone deflector, both deflated by disappointment and still breathless from what he had found. He opened the book and began to read. It was not prose—but merely a record of places that she had visited in the Southwest, a day or two from her Moab base, circling the Four Corners region that she had come to define as Ed Abbey Country. Her purpose soon became clear: these places that Abbey treasured, those within the national parks and monuments, along with many still unprotected across the vast swath of the Colorado Plateau, should become a single vast and sprawling national monument.

  Reading the notebook, it was as if the great mystery of his wife’s work was suddenly revealed to Silas. Her work, as she defined it, was to first catalog and then advocate for the preservation of these sites. Many, she noted in her entries, were threatened by such various development schemes: oil and gas, logging, mining, and dams. Others were threatened by such industrial tourism as Jacob Isaiah had planned, and others by off-highway vehicle use.

  Silas reflected on his own maps and how they corresponded with so many of the entries in Penelope’s journal. Now he would have to cross-reference the journal with his searching to ensure he hadn’t missed critical locations. He had the best lead yet as to what his wife had been doing, and where she had been doing it.

  He scanned the hundreds of pages of notes for any indication that the Canyon Rims region in which he now sat was on her list. Toward the end of the journal, several pages indicated that she had scoured these washes, based on rumors of a great Pueblo ruin, and had found several sites that were noteworthy in Trout Water, Hatch, and Kane Creek, but nothing that described the grandeur that surrounded him. He wondered how it was that she hadn’t made any careful notation of the extraordinary scene that was just above him, outside the walls of this very kiva.

  A chill swept over him. What if she had discovered it, and was preparing to make notes on it, when something had happened; when something bad had happened.

  He thumbed through the final pages. They seemed to be a departure from her normal recorded observations and strategies throughout the journal. Here she did lapse into prose, and then his eyes caught his name.

  If only my darling Silas was with me now, I would hold him in my arms and help him see that this world of rock and stars and sky is all that we need. Here I am completely at ease, and with him in my arms I would be completely happy.

  He put the book down and pounded his fist into the dirt. “Fuck!” he said. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” he yelled, this time more forcefully. The sound was absorbed by the kiva’s walls. In the silence, he heard the clink of rock against rock.

  He stopped moving, his fist still in the dirt. Had his shout sent vibrations among the ancient ruins, causing a rock to drop from the cliff? Not impossible; the whole place was just a pile of loose stone waiting for gravity to do its business. But he realized he had heard something else in the wake of his outburst. Voices? The Canyonlands often played such tricks: the trickle of distant water, the call of a raven high overhead or a black bird in the rushes; even the wind often sounded like voices. More than once he’d been shocked to hear his wife calling him from around the bend in a canyon, and when he’d rounded the corner, no one was there.

  He heard another stone tumble, and then nothing more. He stood and tucked the notebook into his pack. He would take it back to his camp and read it cover to cover. Then he would drive home and spend the evening transposing the locations from the journal onto his wall maps.

  He checked once more to see if he had missed anything. Satisfied, he took his jummars from the bag and clipped them to the line that hung from the opening ten feet above. He put his cane in his pack, and reached up as high as he could with the tools, meaning to make short work of his ascent. He gave a sharp tug to test tension on the rope, but instead of meeting resistance, he tumbled backward. A cloud of red dust floated up into the still air of the temple. He quickly stood up and pulled on the rope again. It was completely slack. He pulled some more and another five feet of rope joined him in the kiva.

  The loop that he had secured around the rock had come undone. He pulled and now he guessed less than ten feet of rope remained on top of the kiva.

  How had the loop come free? A final tug and the rope tumbled down onto the floor, another cloud of dust rising around him.

  He looked around. The ten feet to the opening in the roof was the height of a basketball net. Even when he was young he had never once been able to touch the rim of a regulation net, no matter how much of a running jump he took. At fifty-five, with a sprained ankle, he doubted he could now. The walls of the kiva stood twenty feet wide, so the nearest point to the gap was ten feet away. Even the best climbers in Utah would have a hard time “pulling a roof” that steep. And his skills were far from those of a good climber.

  He stared up at the opening, at the daylight beyond, and then down at the rope on the floor. The kiva’s sanctuary had become a tomb.

  HE DREAMT. THEY SAT IN the familiar comfort of Café Espress on San Francisco Street in downtown Flagstaff. He sipped his coffee and scrawled a note on a term paper. He became aware that Penelope was looking at him. “What is it?” he asked.

  She smiled sweetly at him, and then her brow furrowed a little, her dark eyes becoming serious. “What is it that’s haunting me, Si?”

  “What?” he said.

  “What is it that’s haunting me? At times I hear voices up the road, familiar voices . . . I look; and no one is there.”

  Penelope stood and walked toward the front of the café. She reached the door and swung it open and stepped out onto the street. A moment later he was behind her; but she was gone.

  He looked up and down the street but couldn’t see her. “Penny!” he shouted. “Wait!” He ran toward the newsstand on the corner, but she wasn’t there. He turned around, but she had vanished.

  HE WOKE, HIS back aching, his ankle on fire with pain. He’d spent the afternoon and much of the evening trying to climb the walls of the kiva. His fingers were bleeding and he had fallen and landed hard on his side and bruised his ribs again. Finally, he had lain on a stone bench against the wall and fallen into a restless sleep. Awakening from this dream, he recalled its signature, the feeling of it, so familiar. And her words; he didn’t even need to turn to a copy of Desert Solitaire to know that they were from the opening paragraph of “The Dead Man at Grandview Point.”

  It was dark outside. Beyond the roof of the kiva, he couldn’t see any stars. He turned on his headlamp and realized that the batteries were growing dim. He had a spare set, but he decided to save them and turned the light out.

  He would not, in all likelihood, die down there. He’d told Katie Rain that he was going to search for something. She also knew that he had spoken with Peter Anton. If he hadn’t called in a couple of days, mayb
e three or four, she would begin to wonder and try to reach him. When she couldn’t, she’d alert the authorities. Who, exactly? The BLM? San Juan County Search and Rescue? Unless Anton gave them the exact coordinates, however, it would be hard to find the box canyon he was in. Silas had walked right by it, and he was an experienced canyoneer.

  There was no reason for Silas to believe that Peter Anton would provide the proper coordinates, was there? Maybe this had been his reason for giving Silas the location of the ruins in the first place—to lure him into this remote corner of Canyon Rims, to trap him here and leave him to die. He shook his head. It was a thin thread of hope to believe that Katie Rain would send anyone to his rescue.

  He reviewed the contents of his pack. He’d tried two dozen times to get a signal for his cell phone, standing on the rocks at the back of the fire pit and holding the phone high over his head. He had two more thirty-two-ounce bottles of water, and enough trail mix for a few days. He could do without food, but the water concerned him. Even though the kiva’s temperature remained constantly at around sixty degrees night and day, the aridity of the southwest desert sucked moisture out of the body. Under normal conditions a person could last just three, four, maybe five days without water. If he drew out his ration he might last a week or ten days.

  It would be a desperate week to endure. Finding Kayah had led him to this kiva, where he had found Penelope’s notebook. Now the dream was enticing him to Grand View Point in Canyonlands National Park. In Abbey’s day a dirt road wove across the Island in the Sky, rutted and pocked and inaccessible after a hard rain. Today you could drive it in any old jalopy; or more aptly, in air-conditioned comfort in your RV or tour bus. Of course, Grand View Point had been the very first place he had looked for her. Three and a half years ago he had gone there, camped at Green River Overlook for week, and walked a grid back and forth across the torturous plateau until his feet bled. He had found nothing.