by Kurt Caswell
Rain slammed the windshield in waves, the wipers cranking at a furious pace. I had two options: back down the precipitous road to the flats and wait for the water to subside. Or go for it. I couldn’t sit here any longer. The whole mountain seemed to be coming undone. Another boulder, a chunk of something, came over the cliffs through the air, hit the roadbed in front of me, and was swept away over the edge.
I jammed the truck into four-wheel drive, engaged the clutch, and, lurching forward, gained as much power and speed as I could. The truck hit the rushing column of water, and mud splashed up on both sides, mud and water and noise. The engine whined. My hands clutched at the wheel. I felt the force of the water pushing the truck sideways in the road toward the canyon edge as it seemed to reach up to swallow me. I cranked the steering wheel over toward the wall, turned the truck against the force, and pushed, pushed, pushed forward through the flowing mess until I felt the water against me soften, then release, and I slipped out safe on the other side.
I drove the rest of the way in and parked in front of my little cinder block duplex. It was still raining hard. I stepped from the truck into the pooling water on the asphalt. My legs were weak, adventurewoozy. Was I standing on dry ground? Water flowed down the roadway in front of my place and dumped into the ditch at the cattle guard. I took up my bags of groceries and hurried inside.
Leaving the bags in the kitchen, I returned to the front windows to watch the storm. My big blue canoe, a college graduation gift from my father, lay upside down in the hallway. The irony of hauling my boat into this desert was not lost on me, yet somehow I felt comforted by it. I had grown up in a country of water and green trees, and just because I lived in a waterless place right now didn’t mean I had to give up hope. Good thing, too, because for the moment, there was water here. There was water everywhere.
I stared out the windows at the flowing water, water flowing out the drive, deeper and deeper moment by moment, faster now, and more powerful. I watched as it gathered around the rear wheels of my truck, pillowed up against them, pushed at them as the truck vibrated and rocked with the water’s force. A river! A real river with waves that curled back and frothed into white caps, right in front of me, flowing down the road. A big pickup truck appeared in front of my windows, the water up to the running boards. I could see the driver at the wheel, Dean West, the maintenance supervisor. He drove out to the cattle guard, and then turned the truck around and motored back up against the current. The berm behind the school must have given way, and now the rain collected by the big mesa behind us flowed through campus instead of around it.
I watched as the water rose higher and higher, almost to the top of the rear tires on my truck. For a moment I wondered if the whole truck wouldn’t be dragged out and swept away. I saw pieces of plywood borne off down the road, a Styrofoam cooler and its lid, a broken lawn chair tumbling in the current. I panicked, opened the front door, and looked on helplessly. What could I do against water like that? Hours passed. Minutes went by. A raven flew overhead. The water slowed. The waves settled out. And soon that river flowing down the road smoothed into a broad plain of trickling water, washing the desert clean.
FOUR
WALKING
I left the windows open all night listening for coyote songs across the moon. Black beetles crept in without invitation, making foot trails over the butter I absentmindedly left exposed on the kitchen counter, and the land, too, sifted in on the wind, covering everything in fine dust. That dust, I knew, was the blood and bone of that great mesa, the refuse of an ancient seafloor laid down eons ago. It didn’t look possible to climb to the top of the mesa. It looked like an impenetrable fortress, a place only ravens and vultures could know. In my mind, it loomed large and dangerous, but also inviting, and voices from my reading urged me to venture out:Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it . . . but by sitting still, and the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill . . . . If one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.
—Søren Kierkegaard
What gives value to travel is fear. It is the fact that, at a certain moment, when we are so far from our own country . . . we are seized by a vague fear, and an instinctive desire to go back to the protection of old habits. This is the most obvious benefit of travel. At that moment we are feverish but also porous, so that the slightest touch makes us quiver to the depths of our being. We come across a cascade of light, and there is eternity. This is why we should not say we travel for pleasure. There is no pleasure in traveling, and I look upon it more as an occasion for spiritual testing.... Pleasure takes us away from ourselves in the same way as distraction . . . takes us away from God. Travel, which is like a greater and graver science, brings us back to ourselves.
—Albert Camus
The morning came, a Saturday, and I put on my hat to shade me from the sun, and my favorite boots, and took up my walking stick. The boots I had bought in Rome on a three-month tour in Europe. I selected them for the rugged sole and the figure paddling a canoe pressed into the leather near the ankle. Made by Sisley, “for town and country walks.” I had put them on at once, and had passed off my old boots at midnight on a friendly bum in the Marseilles train station who claimed a former life as a salvage diver on wrecks off Gibraltar. He’d spent so much time at depth, he told me, that he had developed a particular problem with his bladder, which required him to piss about every fifteen minutes. To affirm it, he did just that, off into the empty tracks, looking both ways for trains and policemen.
How did my students spend their weekends? Not doing their homework, I was convinced of that. Did they stay indoors and work in the kitchen? Did they help the family with wood-getting and pinyon-gathering? Did they roam the restaurants in Gallup selling turquoise and silver? Did they play? For my part, I wandered.
I walked out of my trailer home at Borrego and into that vast wild land. I came by a row of three trailers. A dog, short and powerful, came fast out of a little wooden box next to a pole, snapping and snarling and barking as it lunged, its teeth a white menace. I jumped, for I hadn’t seen it. I watched as the dog came to the end of its chain, hung there a moment against the force of it, and then fell back, barking as it regained its feet. The adrenaline went through me like a tornado and I stood there a moment, panicked and pissed off, while the curtains at the window fluttered where someone had taken a look outside. I walked on, doing my best to act like I knew where I was going, like I belonged here, and like the dog was nothing to me.
I slipped through the gap where the two chain-link fences met behind the school, just enough room for me to pass, but not the cows grazing out on the wide flats to the south. I walked out into the stone forest in the New Mexico morning, a collection of rock and juniper moving into pinyon and ponderosa pine at higher altitudes. The monsoon clouds would build fat and purple all day, and later, the sky would come down and lay flat against the barren earth. But I had hours yet to explore this land before the storm. From here, I entered a deep inlet where the great mesa drew into the shape of a C, and where the water poured off in heavy rain and flowed like the Columbia out of the wash onto the flats below. I walked in, and deeper in where the mesa wrapped silence inside itself at the edge of an echo and rose and towered burnt umber over my head. I leaned back and looked up. The light, stuck fast against the stone, caught my eye, ruddy and soft, and, arching my back to see the high edge of where I was going, I exposed my chest and throat and face to the sharp sun. Standing between these sunburned walls, I listened to the greatest silence I had ever known. No birdsong. No insects chirping. No wind in the conifers. Nothing at all, and in that empty nothing, a presence too, unknowable, indifferent, and sad. Yet I felt happy indeed to be out here walking, out here and away from the impossible world of my classroom, which each weekday morning I woke to face wit
h dread. I took a step, and that one step, my boots on the hard rock and course dry grass, was a clamor in my ears. It crashed against the walls and rebounded in the hollow air.
Inside the shade of this deep inlet, the moister air made me feel a little more at ease, safer, somehow in the middle of something blue. I could taste moisture on my tongue. I knew if I knelt and dug with my hands like a badger into the soft dry sand at the bottom of the wash I would find water, maybe enough to drink. I followed the dry wash lined on either side with scattered yucca, the plant Edward Abbey supposedly called “bayonets in the night,” and short, leather-leaved plants, intensely green, I could not identify, greasewood maybe, up into the thickening trees in the protection of the mesa’s shadow. I had to duck under a juniper branch here, around a boulder there, and along a long collection of debris: metal roofing, torn stumps and branches of trees, a few tires stowed here and there by rushing water in a storm. Had someone hauled this stuff out here to dump it? Or did someone live up this wash at one time, and had these remains of that life come rushing down the arroyo with the water?
In the depths of the shaded grotto, the mesa loomed like a curtain around me, dark and huge and edged in yellow light. It seemed I had two options. I could scramble up the southwest side, up the steep track of boulders through the thick trees where the water washed into the wash when it rained. The boulders looked bigger than I was tall, and it looked like I would have to negotiate each one, up and around them, or balance as I climbed over. Or I could take the northeast face, which looked easier, a broad, sandy slope with only intermittent boulders and trees. I went that way, and walking out and up it, I happened onto a trail of easy switchbacks all the way to the top. It looked like the daily route of deer, given all the cloven tracks in the trail. I walked alone in my comfortable boots, back and forth across the slope. My foot hit a loose stone and I rolled it back and almost fell. Regaining myself, I watched the stone come out from under me, rolling, rolling, and tumbling over the edge. Chink, chink, chink, chink. Gone. I moved around the scaly branches of juniper, brushing against the fragrant olive green berries, the scent of gin blossoming in my nose. Switching back again along the trail, sweat warming and cooling my back and brow, focusing on my feet to keep my footing, I stepped up and over a sun-twisted stump, raising powdery puffs of fine dust beneath my boots. Then there I was on top of the world.
Looking back, I surveyed the trail I had followed, winding down into the arms of the shaded inlet. The trail flowed back through geologic time, down through the ages of the Mesozoic, 245 to 66 million years ago, during which the great continent Pangaea was breaking apart and spreading over the face of the earth. That era is made up of three periods: working back from the most recent, the Cretaceous, the Jurassic, and the Triassic. The mesa top, where I stood, was the floor of an ancient sea during the Cretaceous; the red sandstone cliffs that line Interstate 40 to Gallup mark the Jurassic; and the Triassic lies beneath that, marked by a layer of soft mudstone that erodes relatively easily, undermining those great cliffs that crack and sliver off into the Puerco River Valley. This ancient sea was alive with swimming monsters, such as the snake-like mosasaurs and the long-necked plesiosaurs. On land, reptiles ruled, among them turtles, snakes, lizards, and dinosaurs—Apatosaurus and the fabled Tyrannosaurus rex. People at Borrego said that I would find dinosaur tracks up here, but in all my wanderings, I never did.
During the Cretaceous period, the North American continent was inundated by water. The sea came from the north, out of the Canadian Rockies, and filled the world with water as far south as the Gulf of Mexico. You remember Noah’s story? Fossil cephalopods and clams are visible up here on the mesa, even to an eye as untrained as my own. Cephalopods were snail-like swimmers with highly complex chambered shells. By the end of the Cretaceous, the inland sea had retreated, and with the exception of the nautilus, which has a shell of simple, smooth partitions, the cephalopods died out.
I wanted to see the lay of the land to the south, the view from on high. I followed the edge of the grotto around. I cruised over the smooth tanned rock as fast as I dared, almost running, the ground a clean field of sand and crumbling sandstone punctuated with boulders, and I leaped sometimes over dark gaps and across fissures, my body warm and sweating and fluid so near the mesa edge. Weird shapes carved by wind and rain rose up out of the rock as I negotiated around or over them, my boots comfortable and stable on my feet, the sweat broken over me like holy water, my wide-brimmed hat shading my ears and eyes from the sun. I wasn’t thinking at all as I walked, at least I didn’t think so—not worrying about anything, anyway. I felt like a cloud flowing over the hard ground. I felt good, happy for the first time, maybe, since I’d come into Navajoland.
I haven’t got any special religion this morning. My God is the God of walkers. If you walk hard enough, you probably don’t need any other God.
—Bruce Chatwin
I stepped down off the higher ledge into the final flat leading to the end of the road, the far southwestern edge of the mesa. At that place, I would be able to walk no farther in this direction. As I bent low to pass beneath the crowded branches of a village of juniper huddled together against the sometimes wind, the underbrush exploded. It was the streaking tail-end of a coyote, gone before I could see it, or after, I wasn’t sure. Before I could think, I broke into a run. I ran as fast as I could in my heavy boots, leaping sun-rotted logs and cacti, and bursting through juniper boughs. I followed the delicate foot marks in the soft soil, catching one in my view every few steps. I saw it again, a streak of silver-gray, coming around a copse of trees, as I chased it out onto the narrow peninsula of rock, out to the very edge. I didn’t know why I was running after a coyote, or what I would do if I cornered it against the sky where the cliff dropped away. I was just running across the roof of the world, the sun pouring in like honey, my boot-sound fading into the moment, into the distance behind me. I couldn’t hear anything anymore, the noise of the world dropped away with all my troubles, all my worries, all strife, everything and nothing but the running rhythm of my boots and my breath and my heart. I broke out at the edge of the mesa, the extreme edge where beyond there was only air.
The coyote was gone.
I looked down over that edge, two hundred feet below, three hundred, maybe more, to the sandstone talus turning to sand, and beyond that the broad expanse sweeping out in every direction. I half expected to see the body of the coyote down there broken on the rock. But there was nothing. Where that coyote went to, I could not tell. The cliff face was sheer except for a narrow ledge of rock a few dozen feet down. Yet to jump down and balance there without going over, even for a coyote, appeared, to me, impossible. And once down, what then? Maybe it circled back along the edge of the mesa, then behind me, and off into the trees. Or perhaps it was hidden in some little crevice I could not see. Or did it vanish the way birds do, flying off into the distance?
I stared out across the great landscape from the mesa top. I could see the tiny school below to the southeast, the great white water tower, my cinder block duplex, and my silver truck. Was that my silver truck? Looking out northwest, I saw the long thin dirt road winding away, past the Trading Post, forking and running out across the dusty land to Crownpoint. To the east, the mesa top led away through the trees and cactus. I felt a great sense of relief, and even power, knowing that this mesa was not a fortress after all, and I was not a prisoner. In later months, I would come to depend on this mesa behind the school as I would on a companion, a dark sentinel standing watch as the harsh sky swept in around Borrego and buried it in white snow. Walking here would become a kind of religion for me, the place where I sought refuge from long days in the classroom, from the tragedy and poverty of my students’ lives, from loneliness and from being alone.
I found Kuma on a little ranch near Los Lunas south of Albuquerque. He cost me fifty bucks. I kept that part secret, as no respectable Navajo would pay money for a dog, I had been told, because as one man said, “Anybody can have
a dog on the rez, and sometimes you have two or three, even if you don’t want ’em. There’s always plenty of ’em about.” And few Navajos kept dogs as companions, at least not here at Borrego. Dogs were for working, mostly for herding sheep, maybe cattle, or perhaps tied forever to a sad tree to guard a house or hogan. Any dog left to its own designs was vermin to be kicked and cast aside where it lived out a life of hunger and disease at the edge of a Navajo town, haunting gas stations and tourist campgrounds for handouts. It was unlikely that these wandering animals lived very long, for everywhere in Navajoland, dead dogs lie wasting on the roadsides.
Kuma was an Australian cattle dog, or blue heeler, a mixture of collie stock from Scotland and the wild Australian dingo. Bred for working cows, heelers have great endurance in hot, dusty conditions. They are also known for their intelligence, loyalty, and speed. They are fine guard dogs too, very territorial. Their ears stand straight up like coyote ears.
I called Sakura in Hokkaido to tell her about the dog. I wanted to name him Kuma, I said, the Japanese word for “bear.” She suggested Tsuki, which means “moon,” because it matched the place where I got him, or Kaze, which means “wind.” The name Kuma was overused and clichéd, she said; maybe it was like naming a dog Fido or Rex. But in Hokkaido I had known an Ainu dog named Kuma, and the word brought back memories of that place and of the indigenous Ainu people whose cosmology was defined by the Hokkaido brown bear. I missed living in Hokkaido, and having a dog named Kuma would be like carrying with me a piece of that experience, a piece of that landscape. Besides that, when I took him to Ganado for the first time, another teacher who worked with Mary said, “Oh, he looks just like a little bear!” and that was enough for me.