The Way Out

by Craig Childs

  Dirk and I talked briefly last night about the last-ditch effort it would take to tuck our tails and back out. We agreed that this kind of failure would be too daunting—not because of the failed accomplishment, but because of the inability to come to terms with this landscape and, worse, to transform our knowledge into a pathway.

  I slide naked out of my bag to feel the damp, breezeless air. Warmer than usual, but still sharp with ice. I pull sweaters and a work shirt over my head, the smell of my body scrubbing across my face. It is a sour smell, a strange, personal pleasure.

  Dirk looks over. He has a pot of water heating already. He nods good morning. Steam spurts from under the lid.

  Into my pants, I am completely out of my bag, stepping into boots, their leather much more flexible than when I took them off last night. Everything feels moist. I head out the front of the alcove and urinate across a span of stone twenty feet below. I can see a little bit of sky between the canyon walls overhead. Aqueous clouds are moving low and fast.

  “Out of the south,” Dirk says to me as I come back in. “Smells like gulf weather. You want tea?”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  I throw the serape across the ground and sit on it, scooting small rocks out of the way with my butt. Dirk reaches for my metal cup, drags it through the dust to his side, and drops a paper tea bag into it. He pours boiling water out of the pan, grabs the cup around its cool rim, then passes it across. His motions are a performance. I have seen them over and over, as if he has found these small paths of least resistance and memorized them, perfected them. These are the tasks of sanity.

  The tea is too hot. I set it down to cool. Every morning, the same.

  “Smells like snow,” I say.

  Dirk looks at me. Snow, he thinks. He pours his own cup.

  “I scoped a route this morning,” he says. “Up out of the canyon behind us. It’ll take rope for the packs.” He sips off the top of his tea, then clutches it, warm between his hands. When he finishes drinking, he stands and says, “Let’s pack up and cross this route. Have breakfast up higher.”

  I cinch my lips, looking around. “Smells like snow,” I say again.

  “Well, let’s make this one push. Get ahead of it.”

  “I mean, it smells sooner than that.”

  He shrugs and goes ahead with his packing.

  When my tea reaches the right temperature, a hissing rain falls into the canyon. Dirk and I both breathe heavily upon hearing it, sighing out of both anguish and appreciation. The cliffs around us darken. The rock turns slick. Water begins to move. It is time to reform our ritual.

  For now, it is only rain. The sky rolls into a steady shower. A minute later its wind-brushed sounds are interrupted by sheets of water pouring off the cliff above us, pulsing into waterfalls. The water machine of the desert has been set into motion. Holes are filling, pouring over. Water has nowhere to go but down, always down, barely kept by this bare stone. Individual tones evolve into a single roar. At once, rivulets ride across the underside of our ceiling and pour onto the ground, led by drips and streamers. Water moves on every open surface. This is a country of floods.

  Is there never true quiet in this place? I wonder. Never a calm space? Every element shifts beneath us, new sounds and smells, sudden detours. We push our gear farther back, collecting it away from the splashes and inletting trickles.

  Then, snow. It blows in fat, driving away the rain. Slow, dense flakes twirl over the mouth of our shelter. Dreaded, but fantastic. The canyons fall away from our reach in that moment. I feel the depth of the desert, the immeasurable weight of it brought down like a stage curtain. We have found our way in, and the door has closed behind us.

  We cannot traverse this kind of terrain in snow. There is nothing we can do.

  I pull on my serape and walk with Dirk to one corner of the alcove so that we can inspect one of the louder waterfalls. It is deafening, more boisterous than any wind. We have to shout in order to hear each other. We stand behind its streaming wall as it smacks the stone surface far below us, the sound of cymbals clanging against rock, the thud of driven stones. We reach out our hands, letting the tips of our fingers feel the water. It is cold. A stream forms in the lower canyon, galaxies of spinning foam.

  Thick, dizzy flurries of snow. The flakes are like feathers. They touch rock and melt instantly into running water. I pull my hood into place and slip outside through the gaps between waterfalls. The sky is dirty with snow, gray piles of fabric collapsing upon me.

  Might as well take a walk in this new world. Turning back, I see Dirk still standing in the shelter, looking at me as if I’ve dumbly walked into a sandstorm.

  “Why not?” I ask. “The door’s open. Let’s have a look around.”

  Dirk thinks about it, then follows. Together, we work slowly down toward the floor of the canyon, every step slick. Where yesterday we had been skittering lizards, now we are infants learning to crawl, hands molesting the wet rock just to hang on. Old ways of moving are useless. Heavy-grained sandstone like this is marvelous on dry days, clinging to boot soles as fervently as we cling back to it. Wet, snow-slicked, every surface is a negotiation, a careful planting of the body. Our arms hover through flying snow as if grabbing ropes to balance ourselves.

  At the bottom, water holes are filling, reaching their rims, draining to the next topped with a frothy head. The clockwork of these water holes becomes clear, why some have been full in these past days while others are empty. There is a pecking order. Some holes are merely dampened, waiting, while others fill their deep, gluttonous bellies before overflowing. As they fill and pour down their pitcher spouts, speed picks up, holes filling faster, toppling over into each other. I am enchanted by the motions.

  We move along the canyon floor, quietly calculating the potential for a flood, watching for sudden exits and impending bottlenecks. It is not the right kind of storm for a big flood, but we walk alert anyway. My serape smells like a wet dog, like a just-watered garden.

  I stop at the siphoning drawl of a stream sluicing down to a pool. Ahead of that comes the bell chimes of a small rivulet jangling across rock. To have water out here, running water, is a blessing. But this snow, this clogging storm, will slow us down markedly. Already we are low on food and will soon have to make a dash south to cross our three chasms. We have discussed what needs to be done after the failure of our route yesterday. We have trained our fingers over the map, postulating future routes, marking them with a pen so that we can look at the map, look up at the real world, and look back at the map without having to find our place again. We found only two options, neither certain. We will lift our packs and move headlong into one of them as soon as we can. If it fails? Then option two.

  If the second fails?

  And now, snow.

  Snowmelt running across rock sounds like a madman whispering in my ear, clucking and laughing. There are so many adjustments to volume and tone that my senses are filled. I pause at each change to the sound, the increase of a waterfall, a sudden flush coming over a rock. My awareness is momentarily heightened, even above these past few days of travel. The easy ritual of making tea and drinking is gone for the morning. I look ahead for Dirk, who is nearly lost in the blizzard. Everything is in motion. The landscape throbs and recedes.

  Dirk stops at a water hole that is almost full and waits for me. Stars of air bubbles rise to the water hole’s surface below him. The water turns slowly clockwise. It is dark, heavy with dust and sand. Snowflakes dimple its surface. As we stop to watch, the water rises and pours over the lip, and the motion carries it to the next hole, where a raft of cream-colored foam begins to spin counterclockwise. This hole is much smaller and fills almost immediately, then spills into the hollow of a much larger hole below it, giving the water a clockwise whirl.

  I recognize the pattern. In the nomenclature of fluid mechanics, it is called a “vortex street.” The same kind of alternating swirls can be seen in smoke rising from a flushed candle as the filaments of vapo
r start to turn on themselves. This form is the delicate balance point between stillness and motion. It appears in the vibrating hum of wind across a tightwire. A car on a dirt road kicks up precise rooster-tail patterns in the floating dust. Cyclones and anticyclones spin from the earth’s equator, brushing storms clockwise and counterclockwise across the two hemispheres. There is a law to these things.

  Watching the water run, I am grateful for this order that I see. It defines for me how the world functions, that my being pushed one direction and the next in my life is not a matter of chance. Opposite forces drive each other. Dirk and I could not help meeting, coiling around each other, day and night, the known and the unknown, shifting and bending together into a circle. It was commanded by nature itself.

  Dirk watches the turning of the water holes. He sees a cause-and-effect maze, a pinball dropped into a trough, knocking over a line of dominoes, snapping a mousetrap, lighting a match, popping a balloon . . .

  “You know what it is about this place?” he asks.

  I know not to answer.

  “It doesn’t lie,” he replies to himself.

  Coming around to me, he skirts the courses of holes, water spilling beneath him, snow applauding his shoulders.

  “It doesn’t have the stench of human duplicity. Everything’s right on the surface. Here and now. You might misperceive a place like this. You might not have the proper intimacy to find your way through. The light might trick you, and you might get yourself killed. But that’s the whole thing—you get yourself killed. You make a misjudgment in a place that has hard and fast rules. There’s no deceit or artifice about it. That’s what this place is. One hundred percent. Intact.”

  I don’t believe him, of course. Humans, wilderness, desert—it’s all the same. How can we possibly imagine ourselves as unnatural? Nature is inescapable. Indestructible. We’re playing along just like everything else.

  Dirk comes right up to me, his blue, snow-dazed eyes brightly lit. Only a thin corridor of wind and snow separates our faces.

  “Fuck the map!” he shouts. “We got snow. Look at this shit. The world is over for us. We ain’t goin’ nowhere. We’re goddamned born again!”

  I look up through the snow, hoping to see cliffs, to get some idea of how much of this is sticking. If I could see that, then I could know what chance we have of getting out of here. But how long will this storm go on? I cannot see the cliffs. I only hear their shedding of meltwater, all spatters and growls. Yes, we are born again.

  We cannot push through this snow with any force of will. We must rely on the vagaries of weather and stone. Admiring his own sense of freedom, this peculiar feeling of helplessness, Dirk spreads his arms in abandonment, capturing snow across the stem of his torso.

  “You have to obey,” he says.

  Bulwarks of clouds fall away, tripping over cliff heads in their retreat. The sun emerges in long bolts of raw light. We stand suddenly caught in this changed world, the ground blinding with snow and light.

  “Just like that,” Dirk says from the canyon floor. I am up above him on a shelf.

  “You ever seen it clear out so fast?” he asks.

  I have, but I say no, because it is always this shocking, as if I had never seen such an abrupt change before.

  “Sun like this should melt off some of these south faces,” he says. “If it lasts, we’ve got ourselves a thin little escape here.”

  For the next couple of hours, this gap in the storm holds. Slabs of snow fall from slopes of rock. Some of the straight-south sides melt, but every shaded cranny still holds its snow. We take turns testing the next route, one at a time balancing through shelves and ice-strewn faces. In the afternoon my hands slide across rock. I am high above the floor trying to quiet my heartbeat, fingers dancing for something to hang on to, everything so cold and stiff and slick up here, even in the sunlight. I retreat, lowering slowly hand by foot by hand. When I touch flat ground again, Dirk is watching. I shake out my hands.

  I have done this very thing before, tested snow slopes in the desert through a gap in a storm. Moments like these always come, when it feels like a domestic journey and my senses are tools of repetition; it’s like kneading bread dough for the hundredth time.

  “Another half hour, maybe,” I say.

  Dirk looks southwest, toward the birthplace of this storm. Not much can be seen over these parading cliffs, but he can see the edges of bluish black, the next wave of clouds coming. Dirk thinks that if we can at least get out of this canyon, we will be in a better position to try crossing the three chasms from a different approach. I think we’ve got to wait until the very last moment.

  “Half hour,” he agrees.

  Half an hour passes. We load our packs. Garlands of snow remain along the northern and southeastern rocks. Time to move. The ascent is like balancing small rocks atop each other, the stack growing precariously taller. Soon we are edging around nibbled handholds, the canyon floor small below us. We climb slowly, but with quick intentions. The coming storm is dark with moisture. It obscures and swallows the high rock formations to the southwest. Like an advancing column, it takes one place after the next, rolling and splashing forward. A wet wind dives in front of it, flashing across our faces and hands. The smell of water, snow. We cannot be caught on this rock face when it arrives.

  Our route is not a sheer cliff. It bulges inward and out. Shoulders of rock lean overhead. We test areas with boot scrapes, backing off where it is too slick. Very little of what is possible to climb is left for us.

  The route becomes steeper than we can take with our packs. We slide out of our shoulder straps at once. Dirk pulls his rope, and I reach to take it from him. With the coil over my shoulder, I climb the nearest crack. My movements are swift, back and forth between the angles of an eroded wall. When I reach the top, I look southwest at once. The storm bucks its full weight out of the next canyon behind us. I send the rope down, and Dirk ties off the first pack. Pulling it up is a strain, my back given to the work. I drag the pack to my feet and plant it beside me.

  Taking apart Dirk’s bowline knot to release the pack, I feel the knot’s succinctness, a message sent up from below: calmness, accuracy, certainty. This will without fail hold the weight. It can be undone quickly. I let the rope back down, reading it as it goes, feeling Dirk’s hand clasp the other end, sensing his work in its tugs. Without looking down, I feel every turn to his hands: a swift tuck, an end of the rope sent through, the two-handed tug to lock the knot. He yanks the rope to let me know the knot is set. I pull it tight and haul up the second pack.

  Dirk comes. He is groaning with the climb. Veins stretch at his neck. “I don’t like this shit,” he sputters.

  I send a hand down to him, jamming my boots into a hold.

  “I’m good,” I say.

  We lock arms into a single bind, and I hold him as he climbs to me.

  Up through the cliff levels, we can no longer see the floor. We move through the canyon’s middle world, blind from both the top and the bottom, and gather in the shallow grotto of a ledge where we quickly strip gear off our backs to hand up the next crux.

  I grab Dirk’s shoulder straps, cold from sweat, and hoist his pack up to him, on and on, ledge by ledge. The rope comes out again. Dirk does the scramble this time, rope over his shoulder, as I stand waiting.

  Suddenly, I have nothing to do. Dirk is performing the work. I am helpless as the storm winds up the canyon, the wind hard now. I wait. I wait.

  I can appreciate this place in such a moment. We two are strangely small, squeezed between the force of the storm and the invincibility of the landscape. So small, I think. Are all living things like this? Do we all bend to fit, forming into the wind and shaping around the rock?

  Dirk shouts, “Rope!”

  The coil wings into the air. It slaps the ground to my left, and I tie one pack through its straps, snapping closed the waist buckle so its tines will not break. I send it up, and it floats over my head, grabbed up foot after foot. A minute
later, the next goes up. I climb behind, handholds gripped, pulled. I throw my weight, shoulder into a niche, next hand up. My body wants to fall, wants to tumble off this point, shredding all the way to the canyon floor. I resist, clamping my fingers into the smallest cracks, suspending myself. The wall becomes a misshapen ladder under my touch.

  I cannot find the last hold. My right hand pats frantically for it and finds nothing. Dirk’s hand is there that instant. I feel his skin, his fingers grasping my wrist as I do the same to his. He does not lift me. He just hangs on as I put my weight into him.

  On the top I do not take the time to retrieve my breath. I lurch my pack into place, and we are moving. The climb is over. We have reached a higher level, a new landscape of farther canyons. Obstacles spill around us, massive drops and exposures, and in this we see a sliver, a low, approachable canyon. Without agreeing on it out loud, we jog east along the easiest spine of rock from which to drop into it as the storm moves over us.

  We both see our destination at once. A span of ivory-red cliff has fallen and rests against its parent wall, a giant lean-to. We scramble up a flank of pale, cascading sand and drop into the mouth of the shelter.

  Dirk and I enter a stone-slab hallway, something the ancient Egyptians might have constructed, unnecessarily tall and elegant. The walls are enormous, each sheared absolutely smooth by some cataclysmic act of geology. The passage is long, the sound of wind muted behind us.

  Our movements change once we are inside. The sprint is over. The air is still. Time is different. It is not faster or slower than it was moments ago, but it is of a different quality, smooth instead of grainy, spiced with cinnamon instead of pepper.

  Female landscape, I think.

  We both let our packs drop onto earth made of drifted and settled sand. As dark comes on, we build a small fire of wood-rat twigs. A delicate cast of firelight leans up the walls, and the storm stays outside.