The Way Out

by Craig Childs

  The map tells of inclinations, of potentials, but not of what is actually here. True topography falls between all these printed lines. The real landscape is made of replies and commands. It is made of our hands touching rock, our eyes discerning shadows, our minds sent ahead to find the way. The aimless movements we make during our days are painstakingly intentional. The color of stone is as much an informant as the shape of a cliff. The shape is as instructional as how much water is left in our packs, as the free fall of an exposure, as the sharpness of a kernel of sandstone caught in my boot and digging at my ankle. The route binds all of these variables. Where is it?

  “There’s a trend here,” I say, running my finger along a southwest-to-northeast axis obeyed by several canyons on the map. “Looks like a fault system along here. Enough to carry us across.”

  Dirk looks from the here I indicate on the map to the one out there. Our view is blocked by overlapping barriers of sandstone, unknown canyons in between. “That doesn’t tell me how we get off this piece of rock.”

  “Rope,” I say.

  His face crunches as if I had told him that we could sprout wings. “Forget it.”

  “Then we have to jump.” I grin at him.

  “You go ahead and jump, Mr. Wizard. I’m getting through here alive.”

  Dirk takes the map for himself, studying it more closely. “Now wait a minute. This canyon here”—he points to it on the page. “This doesn’t match up at all. Doesn’t seem like the map could be right.”

  While he wrestles with this, looking around him and then back to the map, I continue scanning in front of us.

  “No, not right at all,” he mumbles. “Look at this. It shows a canyon coming around over here and that one . . .” He points, but loses himself, the chess game taking on too many levels and dimensions at once.

  I gesture down a descending curve of sandstone, smooth in the sun. “What about over here?”

  “The hell you say,” he blurts. “There’s no way I’m going down that with my pack. No way in hell. I know where my heart would be the whole time, throttled up into my goddamned throat.”

  “What if it goes, though?”

  His voice starts drifting. “Moving every second with someone zeroing a gun right between my shoulder blades? No fucking way out of it but death. I know my limits.”

  “But what if it’s our only way?”

  “Only way to where?”

  I just look at Dirk. He knows what I am talking about. This route may be what we are stuck with, climbing down an insanely steep passage to start our way in.

  Dirk reads my face, my mouth, my eyes. He sees me as a reckless person, someone willing to risk death just so I can validate my being alive.

  “I know your dark side,” he accuses. “You want to haul our packs into the abyss and rope them up the other side with loops of intestine extruding from our rectums.”

  I shake my head at that. But he is right. I want strain and fear. I want to tease the edge of death so that I am forced to clean the clutter out of my head. I want to be whittled down, get rid of this sloppy flesh of mine and get down to my bones, the only things that are finally true.

  I used to walk the bombing ranges along the border of Arizona and Mexico, the Sonoran Desert, the Desert of the Fist. I walked for weeks and months in this endless terrain. My cadence of footsteps turned into the sound of a relentless chore. My head swayed in the heat, and at times I feared that I was stumbling in endless loops, days of gratuitous circles. Then, invariably, I would come upon an unexploded missile planted in the earth, a remnant of military exercises. It was like finding a white sand lily. I would kneel beside these exiled weapons and lay my hands on them as if palpating a shark. Then, to see if the warheads would wake, I would heave back on them with all of my weight.

  A flash of light. A plume of dry smoke that no one ever sees. My remains evaporated in the solace of endless country. Each time I did this the warheads remained asleep, of course, and I opened my eyes to find myself still alive. The desert would lie around me in divine silence. In those moments the stillness of the air seemed purposeful, intentional even.

  Dirk sees my breathing, the hunger in my eyes as I look down. He studies the route in front of me, and then my posture. My body tells him that I am ready to plunge down these slight ledges below us and vanish into the dark. He is not interested.

  “Listen, I’ve seen this beast already,” he tells me with a tired voice, dropping the map to his waist. “You remember what I did for a living?”

  I just stare along the slope, remembering what Dirk did for a living. Is he going to flaunt this at me? He once taught himself to believe only in right and wrong, and he falls proudly, easily back on his former beliefs. But now he is hounded by the desert like a stone reworked by the wind, the sharp corners of his oaths dissolving every day. I want to remind him that he was a cop for the sheer acuity of the experience. This is also why he came to the desert. He came to feel uncertainty, and the certainty that is found within. He came for the wish that if we climb down this sloping cliff we will be carried by the land. He came for this risk of not only finding himself, but reaching beyond himself.

  I say, “Don’t start flashing your badge at me.”

  “No, listen. I was the guy who came in and cleaned up after people had their powerful and terrifying experiences,” he says, his voice going off somewhere. “It was all just blood and broken glass. That’s it. You think it brings you some kind of quick-thrust enlightenment, that if you delve into some dark horror you will receive promised salvation.”

  Dirk gestures his chin at me, saying, “You think if you cross over the edge, you’ll go right through death, and there you’ll see the Giant Carp opening its mouth to vomit out the true meaning of the universe for you?”

  I do not look at him, even as his eyes shoot into me. There is no venom in his words. I know he is not lying. He wants to make sure he does not die here. He trusts his old ways.

  “Self-knowledge is not commensurate with self-destruction,” he continues. “I saw where people had their revolutionary moments. Whether it was something criminal or drug related or just out-and-out stupid. All I saw was destruction. I have no doubt that there is this incredible emotional momentum behind each situation, but there is this other thing called the here and now. The here and now was my job.” A finger stabs straight down. “Come in and stop the momentum. Grab somebody by the shoulders and wake them to the immediate consequences around them.”

  Dirk returns to his examination of the map, his voice calming. “I don’t want to go on some mad venture down that dome just so we can talk to the Giant Carp. I think we can find another Giant Carp somewhere over this way.” He waves with the map and starts walking back to his gear.

  He stops and looks back at me, concealing himself in one of his accents. “We ain’t here for no walk in Central fuckin’ Park,” he calls. “Let’s go.”

  “Hand!” I shout.

  Dirk’s hand shoots out like a dart, meeting mine as my foothold gives below him. My body and the weight of my full pack falls into him, my second hand knotted into a crevice.

  The foothold is a small chip of cliff that slides away, grumbling against its parent rock as it tumbles and shatters down the Dome of the Giant Carp. We did not take my original route off the dome, but maybe this is just as bad. I kick and wedge, dragging myself back up to Dirk, flopping onto his ledge.

  Rarely do I lose a good foothold like that. Once a year, maybe. I can’t get the rhythm of my breath back. The solid earth has collapsed beneath me. What can I trust now? I look at Dirk. He is laughing. I have to laugh with him to defuse the adrenaline. We are always this close to each other. We are children growing up together, and like me he wants to learn the reach of his body, the design of this world that he has been born into. He wants to get off these cliff bands into the canyons below, where he can walk freely. I am breathing evenly now. I scoot back from the edge and stand.

  Skirting down elsewhere, Dirk finds a s
tairstep of giant ledges, one leading to the next, and chains of boulders heading toward an open, barren park.

  “Gentle as a mother’s love,” he gloats as he rides down the rocks in front of me, arms spread for balance.

  We need this, finally, a gentle route that cleanly ends our day. The smooth stone field beyond us opens into a number of farther canyons heading off like highways to unknown points beyond. We come to the base of a rock eminence, a giant obelisk left by the wind. Along its warm south face of apricot-colored sandstone we lay our packs. Immediately we see colorful flakings of rock left on the ground. Toolmaking. I doubt that they are of Diné origin. More likely, they come from before the Diné, hunters on their way through this landscape a thousand years ago. Lifting one of these hunting stones to my eye, I imagine that cultural affiliation is of no matter here. Maybe these fluted, chipped stones are like the ropes of DNA that we carry from one generation to the next, the same hunting stories constantly written across this desert. Dirk’s and my movements become instantly fluid, relaxed once we know that people have been here before, even if a millennium or two ago.

  We grab empty water containers and head off, following the angle of the closest canyon in search of water. Our route will be proved here, I think. We will walk and see that this route leads straight across. Walls will open because this is how the land has broken itself, the direction cleaved into the earth. This canyon will be the needle that sews us through the country.

  The canyon steepens as we follow it. Its walls lift and curve overhead. Cold air washes up from below, and I am struck by apprehension. Why is this cold air here? It feels as if I am descending into a root cellar.

  The floor becomes narrower and more complex, funneling us into pour-offs and lodged boulders. Obeying our different ages, our preferences in stride and handholds, Dirk and I separate. Soon I am in front of him, out of view. The canyon falls with such drama that I move by impulse alone. I do not think I can stop.

  In front of me a black seam lies in the earth. It is slender, an unimaginably deep gash bisecting my path.

  Wait. There was nothing like this on the map.

  As I come closer I find myself within the gouge of a landmark deeper than anything Dirk and I have seen. I cannot call this a canyon. It is a different species altogether. The closest name I can possibly conjure is chasm. I inch closer to it, peering over its edge. There are slight ledges, barely enough to hold me. I am far below the nearest sunlight and far above the floor with its shadows piled one on top of the next. I am nowhere, tucked within the wings of an impassable slash.

  I lick my wind-brittle lips and lean out my head as far as it will go without pitching me over. Motionless gulfs of dark water lie below, and there is no way to reach them.

  I would be relieved for at least a choice—turn left or turn right, upstream or downstream. But there is no choice here. How did they do it, I wonder, the Diné refugees who came through here, who lived here a hundred and twenty or so years ago? I know that they found a way. Maybe that is enough.

  The stories that have survived from those refugees tell of mythical expatriates wandering ragtag in the wilderness. One of their stories that I remember, a tale reduced to religious figures and symbols, is about two sisters who became lost in the desert. After some time of walking, hungry, thirsty, and forlorn, the siblings arrived at a country of holy people. What now might be mistaken for towers of rock, for the spans of sandstone arches, for deep pools of water holes, were then and still are the bodies of these holy people. The sisters were taken in, comforted, fed, and given water to drink, but it was made clear by their hosts that the two sisters did not belong here. The girls asked repeatedly if they could stay, but the holy people were People of the Water, Táyi’jí dine’é, and they said that this was not a good place for their kind. In the same breath, they said that they would provide a miraculous means of returning the girls safely to their origin.

  The two sisters were sent home. They told others of their survival, and their account was absorbed into the oral history of their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, passed on even now into my own memory.

  My eyes fall into this chasm in front of me. It is overburdened, its wings monstrously heavy. Its eyes are dark alcoves recessing into the walls. Above this drop, my water bottle and day pack hanging off me, I feel as if I’m balancing cups and saucers in my hands. The Diné families must have felt this same precarious balance as they moved into this landscape.

  I hear Dirk from behind, and I slowly turn my head to look at him. He is glancing around as he comes, nodding Yes, yes. Here is something beyond us. Here is something that does not bend to our will no matter what we do.

  “It cuts us off,” I say, the low tone of my voice echoing as if I have called into a drum.

  Dirk scratches down to my ledge, stands beside me, sticks out his head to peer over the balcony.

  “It’s not what we thought,” he says.

  “Was this on the map?”

  We scramble back up to safer ground. Dirk reaches back, unzips one of his pouches, and pulls out the map. He unfolds it, and we each take a corner and review our location. There it is—a thin meeting of contour lines that suggests a long crack in the planet. The tightness of this chasm hides itself on the paper. There are three of them, now that we are looking. Three chasms in a row lined up like a gauntlet. This is the first. The second and third lie even deeper, farther than we can see.

  Dirk and I unclip our gear and leave it on a shelf. We slip off one ledge to another, dropping in and out of cracks, scouting for a possible route. Alone again, I see below me a tower of cliff that has broken away. A fissure runs down its side. If I could get myself to the platform atop this tower, I would be able to see clearly if the fissure turns into a chimney, and if the chimney leads to the floor, and if the floor goes somewhere. Never would I consider such a maneuver with a full pack, maybe not even with my day gear, but now I am curious and moving lightly. I might learn something.

  With my face pressed to the cliff’s curve, I lower myself. As a rule, going down is more difficult than climbing up. Gravity will help with the return trip, giving me better traction. But going down . . . About to lose my grip, I push off, skidding down a short distance. I land on the platform below.

  I remain crouched at the center of this leaning rock slab, a place as wide and flat as a writing desk, a hundred feet or so tall. My heartbeat is quick. Coming down here might be an unnecessary risk, but now I can see along the chasm’s gullet, how it bends out of sight upstream and downstream. From here, at least, I can clearly see the cold lagoons of water at the bottom. This chasm has no give. It is pure erosion. I can see no way of crossing it, making this pillar of rock feel like a spike rising through the rings of hell. I am enchanted and horrified at once.

  I stand and step to the edge. Lines of rock cracks fall away from me, light-headed fractures gathering below until this tower melts back into the cliff wall. I walk around the perimeter. The fissure I had hoped would work vanishes over the side. It is useless to me.

  I return to the center, feeling for the gravity of this tower, testing it with my presence. I come down, balling my weight again into a crouch. I remember when I was young, seven maybe, I used to sleepwalk. I would wake up in strange places around the house, on top of cabinets and furniture, in closets, not knowing where I was or how I got there. One night I came suddenly alert while crouched on a flat surface. I was in my underwear, the baggy white cotton briefs that boys are often condemned to. I began feeling around, discovering that I was perched on a platform in complete darkness. There was no way down. Even by slowly working my hands I could not find an exit. I made myself small, imagining that I was balanced on top of a slender pillar that stood in infinite space. Dread washed into me.

  Eventually, a faint light became visible. I recognized a window blinded by drapes. The surrounding room slowly surfaced. In my sleep I had climbed onto a desk in the house of my mother’s boyfriend, got myself up there using
a chair. Even knowing where I was now, it took me some time to shake off my fear. I crawled tentatively to the edge, foot down onto the chair for safety.

  At the tower I bunch my hindquarters and leap like a spider throwing itself to the wind. I hit the wall, every part of me grabbing, using my momentum to bound upward. I snatch a good handhold, swing up to a ledge, and stop there to breathe.

  This chasm below is untouchable.

  Dirk and I retreat into the night, setting up camp in the security of the sharp-edged hunting stones we had found earlier. The night is comfortable. No wind. All is frozen. Not Arctic frozen, but merely stiff, a temperature best not touched to the lips. Dirk has arrayed his life around him, a snug spot for sitting and sleeping cleared of stones. My pack remains strapped and full from the day. Dirk says that if I get the pot out he’ll cook dinner. I’m huddled away in the dark, buried in a Genghis Khan assortment of warm clothes, using a small lamp to chase my pen across journal pages. I look up at the cold and intimidating form of my pack. It will be a commitment to dig into it.

  “Yeah, dinner,” I say.

  My pack is lying on its side. A few items are scattered around, nothing that can blow away: a knife, a water bottle, my day pack. I walk over to it, kick it to loosen the straps, and start pulling things out, hauling the cooking equipment over to Dirk. Within half an hour we are eating steaming, mashed beans with hot sauce and rice cooked in water found in a nearby canyon.

  “You know what it is?” Dirk says, tapping the air with his spoon. “I’m feeling constantly on guard down here. We don’t have any of our usual bail-out points. Not like up north. I don’t mind if our routes fail there. We know the rocks and the canyons well enough to get back out. But here . . . failed routes add up pretty damn quick. I feel like a cat. I’m not hissing yet. I don’t have my back up. But my tail is fuzzed out, on alert.”