The Way Out

by Craig Childs

I am met with a sense of inextinguishable patience. I bring my light to the red violin printed on the black widow’s belly. She is poised at the tip of my light, every change registered by legs more slender and precise than any tool humans have ever made. She is infinity, I think. She sees all. She contains in her stillness every disenchantment and sudden ecstasy. I turn the light toward the male. He is still waiting for his move. Go, I think. Gather yourself and go. It is the only way you will find what you are looking for. And she will kill you.

  I return to my sleeping bag and pull on my clothes, take a slug of water, and from there walk alone toward the roadblock chasm that had stopped Dirk and me yesterday. I just want to have a second look, a pause before daylight, before we set off to scout the next route. The sky rises prismatically, with violet, sienna, and a cool, thoughtful pink. I leave these colors for the dim below. This canyon I am entering is the one that I had believed would be our salvation. I stop at one of its inset water holes, pull back the hood of my serape, and kneel to drink. The water tastes of rock and algae, a good taste, different from other holes, robust to my tongue. I slip the warm hood back over my head and continue.

  Dirk is conspicuously gone. I had not realized until now how closely we have traveled these past several days, leaving company only long enough to dig a hole or shit on the drying south slope of a boulder. Urination has been candid, done in front of each other like scratching the back of the head, forgotten as soon as it is done. The terrain is so unfamiliar that without much thought, we have not stepped away from each other. Even this morning, apart feels barely affordable, though I am pleased to walk alone.

  The final passage drops into a thickening center. The chasm surrounds me, walls of shadow far over my head and far below. The air is cold; it’s as if I’m standing in a room of ice. A hollow sound rises from every move.

  The map tells us that we must make three crossings. Three crosscutting chasms like this lie in our path. I can feel them now, like three new moons in my sky. I feel as if we have begun to sink beneath the surface, digging ourselves in as we struggle. This first chasm is darker in the morning, less forgiving than yesterday. I reach up and toy with the carved greenstone hanging around my neck.

  I brought the map, and it seems no more useful down here than sheets of paper towel. It is stuck into my belt, and I had planned to stand here with it open to see where I am. I do not slide it out. Opening it would be loud and showy. Instead, I pull back my hood, my head free in the cold air. I listen unencumbered to nothing. I come to my haunches, a crouch for staring down the barrel of a canyon, a skeptical, curious posture, poised to lean as easily forward as back. I am a mound of wool laundry balanced within the abyss. My gloved hands gather beneath the serape.

  Eight days in, I think. The orderly atlas we are trying to make out of this place is not coming together. We need to internalize the rhythms of this geography so that we are not continually reinventing our steps. Instinct is required; we must travel as if we belong here. Instead, there is an awkward discord thrumming in our heads. We search for patterns, but we are thrown. We follow fracture lines, and they shift as soon as we make their acquaintance, abandoning us on piers and ledges. What other language is there besides geology to follow? I wonder. What am I missing?

  I remember a game that my father used to play. It might have been nothing more than a parlor trick, a sleight of hand that I never caught. I watched him carefully when he did it because I knew if it was not a trick, then my father was indeed immortal.

  He would write a number on a piece of paper and give it to me, a long and random number like 12,876. Then he would ask me a series of maybe twenty questions with numerical answers, answers he could not have known—the age at which something transformative happened to me, an estimation of miles I travel in a year, and so on. In the end, when he had not looked at my numbers, I would add them, and without fail they equaled the one he had given me.

  From then on I believed that invisible cords ran through the world, connecting impossibilities to each other. Otherwise, how could my father have reached the number on the piece of paper? There was no random luck to it. He had found the secret order to the universe.

  My father performed this trick on three occasions that I remember, and I asked him each time how it was done. I pestered him for weeks, but he only smiled, said, “It’s in the numbers,” and no more. He once played it with three people at the dining-room table, a grand master of ceremonies asking his wife historical dates (her being a history buff), asking me questions about stars and geology, and asking my girlfriend at the time, who was a rural cowgirl, questions about horses and livestock. The numbers came out exactly as he had written them on three different pieces of paper.

  If his game was nothing but a rabbit in a hat, I still could not find the trickery in it. Eventually, my father stopped playing the game. If I ever asked him about it, he became quiet, inward, then angry, so I stopped asking.

  Looking down through this chasm, I think of my father’s number on a piece of paper. I think of it as a destination.

  With a quiet voice, I ask, “Where is it? Where is the way?”

  I look up and around, my hushed request reverberating unexpectedly like a chant.

  When I return to camp, I find Dirk coming up from his own dawn journey in a nearby canyon. He says he saw a way, a ledge leading to a nose of rock, leading off somewhere else. A possibility.

  We start gathering our gear. This will be Dirk’s day with the giant book of poetry. Before packing it into his gear, he flops it open. Half a book of pages drapes either side of his forearm as he reads,

  As to the mind’s pilot, intuition,—

  Catch him clean and stark naked he is first of truth-tellers; dream-clothed, or dirty

  With fears and wishes, he is prince of liars.

  The first fear is of death: trust no immortalist. The first desire

  Is to be loved: trust no mother’s son. . . .

  Walk on gaunt shores and avoid the people; rock and wave are good prophets.

  We load camp and carry our full packs a short distance, stash them in the side of a canyon, and continue with only enough for the day, scouting the next leg.

  In this landscape of remembering, the light is bent and pressed like steel glowing beneath a hammer. Folded and refolded, it is a light of subtle strength carried into back canyons, shifted to cobalt and the wine red of worked leather. This land is a governor of light, a prism, a divider. The ground is made of shapes and mirrors, great lenses of sandstone gathering shadows that play off each other. Even in the still cold of morning, the colors are exaggerated, the way they are during a forest rainstorm.

  As we move along Dirk’s imagined route, in and out of shadows, I am concentrating on the number my father used to pull out of his hat, the number that will show us the way through. A simple wave of a conductor’s hand might bring the three chasms together in an hour or two, putting us on the other side. The walking should be delicate, a run of catwalks and meager paths. Everything is vertical here, a warren of cliffs. The miles are a fractal between them, the span of the entire earth held in a cluster of crystals in the palm of a hand. We are treated the same as the light, split into our constituent parts, sent this way and that.

  As we come down a bony canyon, our motions are articulated like those of a cat on patrol. Weight softly shifts from foot to hand to foot. We are walking slowly now, admiring the titanic scenery, as if we have enough time for leisure, as if we have found the way already.

  When we reach the floor of a nearby canyon, I stop and hold up my hands where I can see them.

  “The light is different down here,” I say.

  Dirk does not hold up his own hands. He looks at mine for a second. Then, in a menacing gang member’s voice, he chants, “The streets look safe but they narrow.”

  His voice lingers. A warning.

  We are in the ribbon of a flood path. The walls have the consistency of flame, flickering in and out of each other, dancing and pulling,
one becoming the next. Not far down from here, we arrive at an untouchable slope of stagnant water holes. The holes are black. As we look over their edges, a pebble comes loose from one of our hands and drops. It strums the water of a pool twenty feet below.

  Suddenly, there comes the sound of a bird, the downplaying, chromatic scale of a canyon wren. The call builds on itself note after note, as if the damper pedal of a piano has been floored, rising through the canyon in clouds of tone. One bird fills the entire space. Our heads turn every which way trying to find its source. I hear the flit of small wings. Dirk lets out a long breath.

  We head upstream, and this puts us onto a shelf on the other side, tweaking down to a thin line, not enough to hold even our boots. I try some unlikely option above it, climbing while Dirk watches, a spectator with hands on his hips, calling to me from below. “Even if you find a way up there, I am not following you.”

  “Just let me check it out.”

  “You hear me? I’m not with you on this.”

  I get up high into this route, overextended, full of fear. No handholds. I climb down jittery, flashing a sheepish glance at him.

  “Not the way,” I say.

  We backtrack to a break we had seen in the canyon wall. It takes us up a cliff-cut ravine full of boulders. They are enormous, entire pieces of planet fallen inward. Climbing not on them but among them, I throw a hand down for Dirk, who is struggling. We lock arms. We do not make the weak link of a handshake. We grab each other’s wrists so that we will not slip apart, making a knot of ourselves. With a shoulder blade and a boot, I anchor into the earth. His weight comes onto me for an instant as he lets go of the rock. His free hand snaps up, jams into a crack, and then he lets go of me.

  I scramble back out of his way.

  Climbing this chute of loose boulders is an act of pure meditation. Every rock has a center of balance. Information bypasses the fat of our brains, straight to the spinal cord, absorbed by our skin, carried into the bloodstream. I land on a tractor-sized boulder. It groans to life and begins to tilt. Before it can lean into a fall, I negotiate it back into place with a quick jerk of my shoulders, listening for the dark-throated clack of resettling. I jump off to the next one.

  The boulder field strings us up through a crevice. There we reach a notch that drapes over the top and down the back side of a cliff. Dirk and I both begin nosing around the broken rock and flat spaces of the notch. Some sign of animals should be here. We have seen hardly a scrap in these days, but a pass-through like this is nearly a guarantee, a place where animals must leave some remnant of themselves—a dropping, a track, a scraping away of small stones for sleep. If we find any of these prizes, then we are given a clue.

  “Come on,” Dirk says impatiently, hands braced on knees as he scrutinizes a wind bowl of sand. “Give me a track.”

  I come to my haunches and lift a powdery white plug of animal scat from pale dust. It is seasons old. Dirk steps over and crouches beside me.

  By its shape, this dropping is certainly from a predator. I imagine the animal’s movements here. I think of its eyes situated toward the front of its skull and of the way its head turns, scanning the territory. It is a coyote or a fox or a mountain lion: an animal that lives like a sheathed knife waiting for the flash, hungry. I follow its daily habits, finding in my mind how it travels through here, where its routes are, how far it goes to find prey, its sleeping places, its pathways. It rests in quiet oblivion, sometimes in the open on a sun-warmed rock, where a rabbit or a songbird would never pause. Each of these images tells me what the land ahead will be.

  The weather has been at this scat for a while. The original shape and size are difficult to read. No seeds or threads of grass: It is all digested meat. No wings of grasshoppers or little mouse bones: an eater of big things. No fur: a fresh kill, meat taken first. Cat, I imagine. Cats are exclusive about their eating habits. I hand it to Dirk.

  He is immediately focused. I see him spreading his map open in his mind. Bobcat, he ponders. Mountain lion, even.

  Mountain lion. The idea brings up certain images, an entirely different way of travel than the open lope of coyotes or the quick darts of foxes. A mountain lion’s terrain is made of holes and cover and shadow, an intricate place of hiding and watching. This animal has to have room to move, plenty of routes and back routes, an onionskin landscape peeled open.

  Dirk leaves the scat and looks across the ground for more data: If there is a predator, then there is prey. If there is dark meat in the dropping, then there are others. Nearby he finds a few cracked seeds of bighorn droppings. He holds one in the air as if inspecting a diamond.

  I move over, picking up a second of these dark, round nuts, a nipple pinched from its end. Bighorn sheep. I crush it between my fingers. It is sawdust. The animal is long gone.

  Dirk turns the dropping between his fingers. Speaking to it, he asks, “Sure . . . but where did you come from? Where did you go from here?”

  “This is the clue we get,” I say, standing, clapping the dust off my hands. I am already sure that this is the way. We might as well head back, grab our packs, and haul them through this pass, adding ourselves to the parade of creatures. “There has to be a way through here.”

  He glances up at me. He is not certain that this is the way, but he sees in my eyes reassurance, validation of these clues we have found. He thinks that he never would have come to this place alone. This maneuvering that goes on between us, hands reaching to hands, possibilities verified in glances and words, has magnified his abilities. Alone, he is an ordinary man. He lives in his fears and his own hoarded memories. When he comes to me, he feels the broken and jutted pieces of his life fit into mine, forming something whole. We become the light and the dark, carrying inside each of us a part of the other. Together, we are no longer ordinary men. We will find the way.

  Leaving the animal droppings in their places, we cross through the notch, coming around on interior ledges to the edge of another canyon. I had not imagined that there would be something deeper, something less passable than the one we just crossed. But it is here, a parting of stone as fathomless as a glacial crevasse. We would need a bridge, a rope across, something other than what we have.

  I had just begun to fill in spaces on the map at the pass, but now I have to reconsider. Where did these animals go?

  Trying to enter this new canyon, Dirk and I climb into palaces of newly shattered boulders, haphazard explosions that lie along a steep cleft. All the boulders are sharp-edged. Sharp means freshly fallen, homeless, no time to erode. It means that everything is delicately loose. The chaff of boulders clatters down between our steps. I glance at Dirk’s posture to see what he thinks. He is glancing at mine.

  Soon Dirk is below me. I leap off a boulder above him and it falls. I shout. It starts a slide, picking up everything it touches. Dirk flies out of the way, jumping from the electric smell of impact. We each take to bedrock ledges, where we watch the mobilizing mess I have created. A hundred centers of balance fall away as rocks explode into each other. White flashes of powder shoot into the air.

  From the canyon floor that we cannot see come distant detonations. Echoes rise into a sound storm. The high pitches of rocks striking water pools are covered by deep cleaves, boulders cracking in half. Thick plumes of dust burst upward.

  This is too much noise. I feel like the male black widow, small and so thin that I am almost invisible. I have tapped the web. She knows that I am here.

  This is not the way.

  Dirk and I retreat up the cleft and traverse a high sidewall, hands slapping for holds. Friction-climbing. Heading up, we first have to go down. Left takes us right. Out leads back in. This landscape, I think, is a riddle, as truly contorted as a Zen koan.

  The cliff steepens. I feel something cold, the subconscious shiver of a nightmare. The depths are increasing around me. We work across the rock face, following whichever step is most secure, constructing an improbable stairway.

  Dirk throws himself up the
wall above me. The point above him narrows to a single edge blending into a higher cliff, which blends into a still-higher cliff. If we can climb up and over this point, it will lay us into a canyon just to the east. Still, we will have to backtrack the entire distance at the end of the day to retrieve our packs. We’re getting too deep.

  When Dirk reaches the very top of this point, his body suddenly shrinks. His head faints into his shoulders as he turns and crawls down toward me like a crab. A half-made word spits from his mouth, and he sits immediately on the nearest foothold. He does not look at me.

  I have never seen him cower like this. I cannot alter my momentum without losing my grip, so I pass around him, not asking what he has seen. I will see for myself.

  I clear the top. Where there should be a short climb off the back, I freeze at an open fall. This piece of cliff we are on is separated from its mother rock. It stands completely alone, soon to topple.

  Instantly my muscles seize, and a cord of breath untangles from my lungs. My body dwindles back. We have reached the tip of a needle. This was supposed to be the point of delivery, the line of travel we follow to cross chasm after chasm. But it is nothing. It is an end. I feel suddenly unmoored, set loose. I am no longer on solid ground.

  I recoil from the tip and crawl down to Dirk.

  “Shit,” I say.

  He mutters, “Tortuous fucking place.”

  I settle onto a ledge, fondling the stone at my neck as if it were a rosary, scanning the utter lack of routes around us. I reach down and unclip my day pack. Carefully, I pull it around front. I open the zipper slowly, every motion weighed out. If a pen were to escape my hand, a bag of nuts, my water bottle, it would float free. It would ride down the face, disappearing into this land of giants.

  I look over at Dirk. His eyes are staked down by something far away, something that is not there. He had not been expecting this. He is no longer scanning for possibilities. This is not where he should be.