The Way Out

by Craig Childs

  “No blunders here,” I warn. “Clean out your mind.”

  Once I am on the open face there are no ledges, no knobs of rock exposed, not even enough to grasp with the tip of a finger. We are crossing the face of an enormous globe. I creep with hot breath. My boot soles test by the half inch. I let my eyes turn down once, only for a moment, and I see the last visible surface curving away below me, sliding over this palisade of smooth stone. I would plunge into shadow, I think. I would disappear.

  From above, to my right, comes a sickening rasp of fabric. I hear Dirk. An inhuman language jets from between his teeth. I know the sound. He is falling.

  No.

  I cannot turn my head quickly without throwing my balance. My forehead plants against the rock, and I turn only my eyes.

  Sharp hisses and consonants scratch from Dirk’s mouth as he starts to glide by my side. His fingers drag down the rock. Anything to anchor himself. Any sound. Any muscle. His left leg extends below him, boot catching at aberrations. Missing them.

  I whisper, “No.”

  Dirk’s leg bones will spring up through his chest, I realize. His ribs will decorate the remains of floods. He will be gone.

  I cannot reach for him. I can hardly watch him. His pack carries him. Too much weight. He fights uselessly against it. Every muscle leads to the points of his fingers. I can see the white of his bones, knots of knuckles hard as coal.

  I knew this could happen. I always knew we could die. My friend. This will be all I know of Dirk. My beloved. He will die quickly, and I will waste in this hall of mirrors. In the lifetime of hunting for his body, I will perish.

  My eyes drop as far as they will go. I cannot move my head. I feel Dirk’s weight, an invisible rope from the center of his chest to mine. I have never felt it like this, tangled into my organs, pulling me. I press my body even closer into the rock so I am not pulled off, so that we do not both plummet, tied to each other with this unseen accord.

  Remember who you are! You are not the man who is falling! Keep your hold! He is dead!

  All the same, I do not let go of him. My chest strains against his fall.

  I hear the sharp bite of his air. It is the last sound, all of his life given to the rock. Dirk’s fingers catch. He wills himself into the bending cliff face. He stops, his face crushed by muscles, spit spattered in front of him. I hear the breath of survival, quick, curt outpourings. He is poised at the final edge.

  I let out a breath.

  He is not free yet. The shadow gathers beneath him. Dirk cannot wait. He slides his first boot across, fingers crawling. By tiny increments, he moves. Below Dirk is a shelf, no longer or wider than the handle of a spoon. He reaches it and balances there, spreading his arms and hands against the wall. He presses his cheek to the cold rock and breathes. He is a small, scared child clutched to his mother’s legs.

  I see Dirk’s mouth open to the rock, his lower lip wilted, his saliva bright on grains of sandstone. I wait. Dirk looks up to me and nods. Ready to go. There is nothing to say. No moment to waste. We climb across the shield in tandem, him just below. The rock lets us off at the shelf of a canyon, a place that leads down again, perhaps to the second chasm. Dirk shakes out his hands, bottoming out a thermometer’s mercury, expelling his fear.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah. Yeah. Okay.”

  “I really thought you were gone.”

  “Yeah . . . I know.”

  We look into this next level. The only thing to do now. We’ve got to get out of here. Our minds scour in front of us, sent ahead immediately like small dogs to scout what we cannot see and return with word of banks and routes. Some questions drift into unforeseen places and do not come back.

  Backtracking would be suicidal. Even if we could press back to where we began this morning, to the great Egyptian hallway of a shelter where Dirk and I kept our fire last night, we would be weaker, hungrier. We would sleep too long. There is only this way now.

  Within minutes we reach a narrow enclosure of cliffs with a barricade of boulders wedged between. Water lies below. The rope must be used. Leaving my pack behind, I climb down the wall, but it steepens and fear shrinks my blood, contracting into my body again. I am too tired for this. I want a clean route, one with promise and ease, no more challenges. Please. But who am I begging? The land lies motionless.

  I try climbing face-forward, a foot lowered for my heel to find purchase. This doesn’t work. I inch myself around, my face to the wall now, and reach down with a boot toe, then a hand. Not this way either. Like a dog turning on its tail to sit, I circle on the rock, beating down the grass of my doubt. I am unable to find the perfect center of gravity. The water below is murky from the storm: It conceals whatever boulders I might fall into.

  Of all the options available, how do we know that this is the way? There are keys, like the boulder-jammed canyon we started with this morning. This gap is filled with boulders in the same way, which means that housecleaning floods are not frequent in here. Which, in turn, means that this canyon is not solely flood-formed, that it is an irregularity within the geology, a fracture that could have some continuity. Continuity means passage, so we follow. Still, I wonder about our decision to come this far. How do we know?

  “I don’t like this,” I call up to Dirk, who stands with our two packs on a ledge, busy with the rope for lowering. “No, this isn’t good . . .” I give him my entire litany, the procrastination against what must be done.

  But I cannot keep making these dog turns on the wall. I have to find the way. I commit my body. A hand goes down, needing to find something. Right there I reach an invisible hold. Just a divot worn into the rock face. I use it and slide my foot down. Right there, again, is another hold. And then a hold below that, and another.

  This is a stairway. These were constructed. Someone carved them. I lean over, seeing a row of hand-formed holds leading down the face. This is where the people before the Diné once came through, chiseling at the rock to make their path.

  “Wait a minute,” I say, making sure that I do not speak too quickly. But I am certain. This means that people used it as a pathway. If it had been yet another dead end, they would have left no sign of themselves. Instead, they eased their route through here by constructing a passage. Finally, something in this land is made on a human scale.

  “I can see steps down here,” I say. “There are steps carved into the face.”

  Dirk stops his rope and looks down at me.

  “This is the way!” I exclaim. I stretch my head farther out to examine the entire set of small cavities. “Holy shit. This is it. This is the crossing. There are steps all the way to the floor.”

  Dirk nods, says, “’Bout fucking time,” and returns to the rope.

  Like me, he knows exactly what this means. We have reached an axis point, one used long ago. We are not lost. If this is the axis, then we know we will reach across these two remaining chasms. This is the promised way to the other side.

  The Protectionway is prophetic. It tells of an ancient path hidden beneath pedestrian walkways. If you slip beyond the guard of roads and trails, so far past ordinary layers of living that you imagine yourself hopelessly lost, there you will find a way. It is a tale that is so old and familiar that it could be easily dismissed as nothing but a charming metaphor, hope for the hopeless, yet in the throat of this canyon, the pathway is suddenly irrefutable. Stone-clawed ladders and steps lead along like a path of bread crumbs. I am traveling this prophecy, reaching ahead for its next grasp, scaling down rung by rung into . . . what?

  The steps are old, deeply worn by weather and passage. None is any deeper or rougher than the sidewall of an eggshell, barely wide enough to hold two fingertips at a time. I wipe the sand out of each. There is an order to these steps, a demanding sequence, left hand to right foot to right hand to left foot. They are designed for the exact weight and angle of a human body on this very wall, each placed just so, barely enough to allow a reach to the next. Whoever made these steps, ma
ny hundreds or thousands of years ago, understood the art of human movement. Soon I am hanging over the pool of water, and the steps lead to my right, avoiding the water, water that has gathered in this same place for thousands of years.

  Hand by foot by hand I reach the floor. From there I call up to Dirk, ranting about beauty and order and the way through, announcing to him that this entire landscape is a prophecy: the foretelling of fault lines, the divining course of ancient humans. Dirk is nodding his head impatiently. He has yet to climb this mystical little route of mine, and to him it still looks questionable.

  Dirk shoves the first pack over, and it scratches its way down. Its weight fires up the rope into his arms, straining his back. The rope sends out, and the pack catches on a meager ledge. Dirk snaps and pulls, mumbling at the pack, “Walk, you bitch.”

  The bitch walks. It steps from the ledge, and Dirk wrenches back so that the pack does not plummet and pull him off. It floats into my hands, and I carry it out of the way, sending the rope back. Same with the next pack. Dirk follows with the anxious stretch of an overexerted climber. He does the same dog turning, afraid to put his weight down, unable to see the first hold.

  “Right here?” he asks nervously.

  “Right there.”

  “Right below my hand?”

  “I can see it from here.”

  “Damn it. This is a close fucking cut.”

  “Trust it, Dirk.”

  Finally, he commits his weight, leans into the air, and his hand slides down until it finds something. Then he is in. The path becomes him, stairstep dishes leading one to the next. I watch Dirk and think, How many bodies have traveled here? In the last thousand years, perhaps very few. There came the refugee Diné and the singer who hid here from the Indian school. Before them were the Paiutes, who were chased here by the Diné, and before them, the makers of these faintly carved stairs. These first people found themselves in a land so complex and difficult that they had to cut their way out of it . . . or into it.

  Dirk touches ground. We carry our packs down the dense canyon interior, again finding trains of carved steps that lead us along walls into the hole of the second chasm.

  We reach the bottom. It is very late in the day, and the light is fermented with cherry and dusk blue. I am ready to lay down gear in this dragon’s gut of a chasm. I want to rest.

  I let down my pack and wander weightlessly along the scoured stone basin. My hands hang like bells at my sides. Dirk watches me go. His posture is uncertain, asking why I have stopped, where I am walking to. He follows.

  The chasm deepens ahead of me, so massive and tightly cut that it seems catastrophic, the result of some immeasurable violence. The sky has become overcast. The only way to know this is by the altered color of evening, darker than it should be right now. I walk slowly beneath this gauze of shadow and light—can it even be called light? The chasm skinnies into a fall, a sensuous, female descent of dishes and lips down to the black of nowhere.

  In my mind this is the darkest of all three chasms, the impenetrable center. There is one crossing left, one chasm we know nothing about, but there will be no way to reach it tonight. I want to remain here. The route has led to the gloom of this innermost space where the walls twist among one another.

  Dirk comes to my side. I recognize the question in his silence as the two of us look over the edge into the velvet blue within blue beneath us.

  “I want to sleep in this place,” I say.

  Dirk is quiet. He doesn’t like the idea.

  There is an invisible point below us where I can no longer peel one shadow from the next. One stone wall becomes the other. My eyes are gripped by this chasm’s architecture. Yes, I will have to sleep down here. I have walked all this way to find myself at the bottom of the earth, a razor cut through the palm of this landscape. This is the outermost of all edges, the realm where unnamed comets sway beyond the planets. The shapes and layers of darkness are so massive and overwhelming here that I cannot possibly deny them.

  “We’ve never been in a place like this before,” I say.

  Dirk’s hand touches his face. He looks for the sky, then glances behind us. There is no way he is sleeping down here.

  “Listen, I don’t want to be the one pushing the issue,” he says, “but it’s late. We’re tired. A storm might be coming, and this place is as bald as a cue ball. Doesn’t look like a flood kind of storm, but I don’t know.”

  I say nothing as Dirk talks our way out of here. I could sleep alone, but no, not without Dirk. I need my knife.

  Dirk looks at me once, then continues his investigation of the space around us, voice vigorous but tired. “I have the energy for one more hard push; then we can stage ourselves for the last crossing. Set a camp up higher, the first place we find. But I’m not sleeping down here. This place is too . . .”

  His eyes search.

  Too what? I wonder. I wait for the next word, but even Dirk does not know.

  “If the sky were clear . . . ,” he says, waiting again for me to assist his sentences. “If there was someplace to sleep down here . . .”

  Why this place? I know better than to believe I have found the ultimate verge here. The steps I have taken across this land, through my life, have told me that every edge is the farthest. No one place is greater or more influential than another.

  Dirk moves closer. “Craig,” he says.

  This is where you failed, my father. You stopped at this notion. You found yourself in the tortuous bed of the maze. Was it for fear or laziness that you never moved again? Did you believe that you had found the bottom of all possible depths in your life and that that was enough, that you had discovered pure hopelessness and it was too good to abandon? You were frozen in gorgeous, horrible despair as if caught by a snake, your eyes fixed on some dark point. Is this how you died?

  I feel my breath. I look at Dirk. “Let’s get out of here,” I say.

  Dirk nods with certainty, motivation. Work to do. Canyons and cliffs to climb before dark. He turns for his gear, and I follow.

  We launch packs onto our bodies and scramble against the night, rising up a side canyon that crosscuts this second chasm. This route sends us across massive bridges of stone that arc over smaller canyons, formerets and buttresses holding up the next layers. By dark we have climbed into the highest arms of this chasm. We are both moving slowly, scanning the ground, nearly shoulder to shoulder. We are looking for water and a place to sleep.

  Walking just ahead of me, Dirk comes to a leaning boulder and throws his weight on it. His shoulders fall as he sits to rest. The shape of the land is barely visible around us. I round to the side of the same boulder, lean my pack against it, and slide to the ground. We will sleep here. The air is cold on my face, but not yet freezing. By this time of night I usually have my sleeping camp set, my pack contents strewn, and I’m wearing layers of everything I brought. Now, I only have on a single layer, my body hot from the climb.

  Rising up from the second chasm, I feel as if I have just walked from the grasp of the predator. Throughout my life I have been performing this dance of predator and prey. I have been honed by it, turned lean and quick in my steps. There are other, less-threatening landscapes to traverse, other ways of life that would keep me warm and not hounded by falling rocks, but I have found this to be my home. I am more certain here than anywhere else, yet I know that a handful of sand is no greater than the blade of a knife.

  I want to tell Dirk about these thoughts. I open my mouth, and instead of them coming out in a rational stream of conjecture and conclusion, another story emerges, the only way I have of speaking my truth.

  I say, “I was in this altercation with a drunk guy once.”

  Dirk’s head sways slightly toward me.

  “I took his car keys away from him so he wouldn’t get anyone killed. He pulled a knife on me. It was this big knife with a curve to it.”

  I show Dirk with my hands and can barely see the acknowledgment of his expression.

&nb
sp; “Maybe he was bluffing. He’s just waving this thing around, saying he’s gonna cut me. I should have backed away, but I leaned right into him. Right into his face until we were breathing on each other. I told him to go ahead. Cut me. He keeps threatening me, and I’m just bizarrely calm, telling him to do it if that’s what he’s going to do.”

  Quiet for a moment, I hear Dirk pondering my tale. I add, “You see a knife, you get as close to it as you can. Dealing with a madman? Get so close that you are staring right into his eyes, until the situation is so ripe you can smell it.”

  Dirk finally responds. “You’re a downright foolish boy. That’s all there is to it.”

  “Foolish?” I ask. “I was alive . . . engaged . . . utterly present. Not necessarily foolish.”

  “Necessarily? No. Foolish? Yes. Getting up in the face of a drunk man who’s got a knife?” Dirk asks, and then plants his answer: “Foolish.”

  “I judged the risk. I was telling him, You can’t harm me with that thing. You might cut me open, but you cannot use your knife against me. We are both using it now.”

  Dirk shakes his head. “I’ve seen the situation before. I’ve had to deal with the knife and the drunk man. Stay away from that shit.”

  “But there it is,” I point out. “You didn’t stay away from it. That’s what you and I do. We get up in the face of it.”

  Dirk is not looking at me as he rests against the boulder. The night saturates his view. He sees shapes, barely makes out the farthest landmark, the Diné’s cliff-stripped Head of the Mother beneath thinly clouded moonlight.

  Dirk’s left hand claws through his hair, feels his sweat turning cold. He has spent these years pursuing the madman with the knife, shooting at him, running him down in car chases, trusting his life to him in the wilderness. He wonders how he can possibly explain to me his fear, this feeling of his manicured illusions falling away. He survives against his memories by organizing them the way a person might tend a garden, planting in perfect rows, keeping out the weeds, watering exactly when needed. Meanwhile, Dirk is devoted to this country and its disheveled order. He sees the desert in all of its flagrancy and subtlety, captured by the twists of juniper trees and the marvelous, appalling bends of canyons. He remembers that, indeed, he chose to hunt the knife-wielding drunk man, and he still calls himself sane.