The Way Out

by Craig Childs

  Through the gunwales and the hull, I felt something from my father that I had not expected. He trusted me.

  With both of us in, I could feel the weight of water pressing in on the canoe. But it held. The Sportspal floated. With the most practiced of drawstrokes and sculls, I spun the canoe to and fro, never once tapping the tile decking. My father reclined, enjoying the fluid motions that I gave to him.

  Finally I set the paddle down so that it rested on the gunwales. The canoe did not move.

  “Your boat is good,” I told him.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  Then he said nothing, his body still and dark in front of me. The canoe floated, and we were silent together, the city sky overhead offering its few stars.

  DAY FIFTEEN

  Walking through this final chasm, I keep my eyes lowered, not so much out of gratitude or awe, but so I can keep moving. I do not want to be scrambling for my journal every second, gawking and recording. Even so, my head turns up and I stop.

  The ceiling of this bending chasm is a planetarium. With fingers ticking into my pocket, I fish out my journal. It is difficult to move down here not because of obstacles and impasses, but because my eyes drift and I have to write things down. I have never been good at saga crossings of the desert. I get caught in the middle of places like this, trapped by spaghetti canyons, frozen beneath the back-bending curve of a cliff because I do not want to walk away.

  Dirk and I have been uselessly scouting for routes out of this third chasm this morning. We have left our camp behind for the day. I am alone now. The very back of this bend glows with the underwater jade of whittled sunlight. My head tilts up as if I might rise out of my own skeleton. The stream’s ventriloquist voice curves into the rounded ceiling, and I am looking for it, expecting somehow to see a mirror of water running high overhead. I originally had a question about this landscape, looking left and right, wondering where in the terrain of his life my father had first made his fatal error, where he turned and got lost, and lost again, until he could never get out. Now there is only one way. The route is unavoidable. The chasm is no longer giving choices. This is the part of the maze where I walk ahead as if falling down the yawn of a well, the final corridor pushing at my heels, leading me along.

  Dirk is somewhere ahead. He left me here to my musings, tired of waiting for my journal scribblings to end. It is not possible to lose each other in this sole passage. I stay for a while and admire the formations high above, the pieces of boulder soon to divide and fall. I am in a bomb zone. Javelins of rock fallen from above stand nose-first in the ground, hard obelisks everywhere. Stream water winds among this breakage, sheltering itself as far back as it can reach. I pocket the journal and walk on from here, stepping through this red-rock dust of Mars.

  I find Dirk lying on his back in a tiger stripe of light, eyes closed to the morning warmth. He is in the single thin space between stone faces where sunlight is allowed through. It stabs its way down, most of the light lost against higher walls. I stop beside him, and he opens his eyes. He talks to me, using the gentle voice of a cloistered monk.

  “The strange place where my spirit goes . . .”

  I can hear that he has been waiting for me, that he has been gathering his words for my arrival, each one planted like a seed into soil.

  His meters go on. “Where ravens rip away the flesh and collect bones for the pile they dance around.”

  This is not someone else’s poetry, not something gleaned from the big book we brought along. These are his own words.

  Dirk sits up and stretches his back, making way for a story with his body. He tells me about an event from his childhood, a story I’d never heard. He once made a fish trap out of chicken wire and tossed it into a city canal where, for amusement, he would catch a perch, maybe a bass, then let it go. After giving the trap some time, he pulled it from the water and found inside of it a fish as big as a table dictionary. It was streaked and painted in colors, startlingly thin when viewed edge-on, like a plate. This was a fish of the tropics, he figured, like the legendary crocodile babies flushed down toilets, grown monstrous in the sewers. Stripes and bands leaped across the fish’s body as it struggled. The fish seemed to Dirk as jigsawed and brightly colored as classroom maps of the world. The trap was nearly too small. It was a miracle that he had caught this fish at all, that it was able to fit through the one-way opening.

  Without hesitation, Dirk slid the trap back into the murky soup of the urban canal. He ran and gathered friend after friend, knocked on doors, called into backyards, told everyone that he had caught a sunfish, whatever a sunfish was. He escorted his friends to the canal, and they were ready for a performance, for the stunning King Kong of fish to be revealed. Dirk was prepared to marvel at the emblazonry, giving to his friends what they had never before imagined coming out of this scrawny canal. Boys stood at the edge staring at the line that led into dark water. Dirk reached in, driven by seriousness, as if partaking in important scientific work, bringing a new species into the light of day. He lifted out the chicken-wire contraption. It was empty.

  Dirk held the trap for a long moment. There was no embarrassment, even at the laughing and scornful words of the boys. Dirk only stared in disbelief. The trap seemed uninspired, vacant. He could not speak.

  He still holds that empty cage in his hands. Even now he marvels at the impossibility of the fish’s escape. The fish had been so large, and the cage so small, and it happened so long ago to carry such weight in his memory.

  Suddenly, Dirk sweeps himself up, grabs his day gear, and slips the climbing rope around his shoulder.

  “Gotta move,” he says.

  I remain still for a moment. I stay with Dirk’s magical fish, imagining its escape, imagining young Dirk Vaughan enthralled by both its appearance and its disappearance, remembering, This is why I am with you; you are also pursuing the Great Carp. Then I quicken to catch up.

  The chasm will come to an end soon. There is a wall in the back, a stopping point that eclipses the chasm below. It is a clean slab rising far beyond reach through striations of claret colors, a thousand feet up to nowhere. But as Dirk and I walk, the chasm does not come to an end. It tightens. The bends collapse into each other, an accordion passageway, gathering on themselves the way a snake bunches against a warm rock, the clear blood of its stream pooling and falling down the center.

  For a short length, the chasm widens. We enter the thick of marshy vegetation on the floor. Horsetails shudder and grind like dry wheat. Whipping limbs of willows snap at our cheeks and earlobes, bringing tangs of pain. The floor is broad and soaked wall to wall, the watery bed invisible beneath rugs of dead plants, willows and reeds jutting upward. Dirk and I walk as if stepping through a bog: heel in first, then a jump and the dark soak of pants to just above the boot leather, next foot down through the sparkling floor of dead reeds into the unknown. Vengeful stalks of poison ivy are leafless and difficult to pick out in the winter. I walk with two hands in front of me, slipping open a passage.

  We narrow into a pen of low cliffs and minefields of cattails. We move carefully, not budging the cattail seed heads lest we be vomited upon by billows of floating down. The vegetation here is a jail, bars and crossbars blocking our movements. I stop in this cattail thicket. The pods are dry as punk, ripe and ready to explode. I cannot help myself. With the back of my hand I slap one of them, and thousands of starlike seeds burst into the air. They are immediately everywhere, and Dirk flashes me a quick scowl. What the hell?

  As soon as he looks at me that way I thrash through several other stalks to prove my point. Dirk gives me even more of a look, but then is distracted by the way the clouds of seeds float around him, rising over his head, passing between his fingers. He lifts his hands, not to shield himself, but to give context to the passage.

  There is an easy breeze not far above us, and the seeds loft into it. The chaos of this pillow fight is suddenly channeled into the air. Cattail vapors corkscrew upward. Drafts curl up through
the chasm, drawing the seeds into order.

  I crash through more and more cattails to watch the seeds fly. At first they hang in the befouled air at the chasm floor, clogging my nostrils, feathering my lips. Then they are snatched into the wind up higher, a pale, ivory dye turned sheer as clouds. Level after level, these tracers rise into different winds, spiral galaxies, and down-welling sinks, turning the sky into a map of wringing hands. I have never seen such a thing. I have seen cigarette smoke worried into question marks, and I have seen blood swirling through a clear stream, but never a chasm sky overflowing with arteries of wind and seed.

  Between the two worlds that my father spoke of lies this dust. Between Dirk and me, between the known and the unknown, is a fine mist that holds us together the way electrons are kept in each other’s company even as they threaten to speed away. It is the binding that I feel surrounding me. The order of the land is my reflection, my vision into my own life. It is a happenstance of arrangement, a native compulsion for structure in this universe. My eye is so easily caught by the extravagant flash of entropy and of gestation that I forget that between these two is inestimable dust, the floating seeds that trace for us the greater paths. Moments ago patterns had lain invisible in the wind, meaning nothing to me. Only this sudden passage of thousands upon thousands of cattail seeds exposes the implication.

  The seeds fly into an even higher wind, where they finally burst apart, grabbed and shoved by a mad, high gust that Dirk and I cannot hear from this far below. Some ribbons of seeds slide into still-higher winds that cross one atop the next. Overhand knots of wind and seed spread away to nothing, missionaries of cattails sent to far nations where some will plant and most will die. This is why children watch their lost balloons float away. It is why they accidentally let go of them in the first place. They stare up at the accelerated back-and-forth of their cherished balloon, the string dangling as it lifts away, hand open on the ground in astonished surrender.

  Dirk opens both of his hands to the air. “Life moves,” he says, turning slowly to watch the seeds. “Go into the world. Find your place. Set roots. Die.”

  Ashes

  Only a matter of months after my father died, I gathered some of his ashes in a pouch and walked with Dirk for a month across the desert in Utah. We used a series of stashed canoes to ferry the Colorado River and, days later, the Green River. We walked toward a specific place, a devouring land of steeples. We traveled between columns of rock, down in the snug spaces, the enclosures and cavernous passageways between. At dawn on the twenty-seventh day of our journey, Dirk and I planned to walk across a great bridge of stone. There, standing beside Dirk in the calm of a winter’s dawn, I would let my father go.

  But this was not how it happened.

  The night before there was a windstorm. In the dark, rocks screamed like animals. We sank our gear into boulders and meager overhangs, making sure not to bring out journals or anything small. Rock dust lashed our eyes. Dinner was abandoned in the hail of wind. We instead relied on sacks of dry, hand-snatched food. Both of us withdrew into cracks like crabs against the shadow of a hunter, bodies drawn tightly. Nothing could be spoken between us.

  I suddenly grabbed the pouch that held my father’s ashes and lurched into the open. He and I had not lived the way I had wished. We had not floated in peaceful air. The storm had often been upon us. This wind pulled fiercely at me.

  My body, everything I sensed and imagined, was a fabric of chromosomes, a walking, breathing phantom, a recollection of countless generations extending ceaselessly back. I was the utter improbability of survival. My bones were nothing but stories ready for the telling.

  Into the night-black of the storm, I staggered. I opened the pouch, standing hard in the wind, feet apart so that I would not be thrown to the ground. My father swiftly billowed into the gale. Fragments of his burned bones sounded like shells clattering away in the boulders.

  Still louder than my father’s bones, more deafening than his memories, was this wind. I no longer heard my rattle-bone father. I heard only wind.

  Take me, wind. Bury my stories in your howling. Turn me into your dunes, your incalculable grains.

  I could no longer stand against the force. I bunched the pouch into my fist and stumbled back to shelter.

  DAY FIFTEEN

  I stop for an instant in the quiet trickling of water. I turn once to see if Dirk is behind me. He is not. I continue, moving quickly, knowing that within minutes I will find the source of this stream, the upper end of the third chasm. The high wall I can see at the back is clean and parched, so I know that the water is coming straight from the rock face. I also know that I will reach a dead end, no way out. But I move toward it anyway.

  I have long been drawn to springs, emergence points where water comes to its first sun and shade. The Diné singer had mentioned the importance of the springs, how they stand as major intersections along the Protectionway ceremony. I have heard many stories of springs from numerous cultures. Even fountains in cities are gathering points, moments of grace within bedlam.

  I move swiftly, nearly running, dropping under the smacking limbs of sinewy willows, leaping from one side of the narrow stream to the other. A confluence of two canyons passes by. I glance once into the dry canyon at my right. It rises more steeply than does the watercourse. Its floor is made of dry sand. I file this impression without slowing: a swift twist of drainage, little hope of a way out. I pass on.

  Were the Diné here? Was this the sacred spring they came to? I have long been interested in such refugee ceremonies as the Protectionway, reading ethnographic reports on them as if the reports themselves were omens. At home I have a heavy antiquarian book on the Ghost Dance, a performance once meant to banish the Anglo invasion, to dissolve bullets in midair. I’ve come to wonder if those who died during the Ghost Dance, those cut down by rapid-fire weaponry during trances, were nothing but links in the prophecy. They were prophets themselves, opening the path for the next generation, ensuring that this ancient passage does not slip from memory.

  I am on the final track of this prophecy, following it through the centuries. Boulders lie along the main passage, nursing the small stream. I move through them, pushing off one, landing at the base of the next, hand on its face for a half second, registering the surface grain. My touch defines for me how the boulder is wearing, how different this angle is from the native layering of the bedrock. The boulder’s bedding of cemented sand will soon enough be thrown wide open by floods. I touch the next boulder, landing swiftly in a crouch on its roof, sensing how it resists my passing, how it endures erosion. This one will persevere, I think, its shoulder pushed into the floods, polishing rather than breaking apart.

  The water guides me upward as boulders grow far taller than my head and I no longer climb over their tops. I make the last bend, and the chasm swings open into the enormously round hall of a cul-de-sac. Curved like the rings of Saturn, ledges circle up the back wall of this final chamber. No route from here. This is the end. I expected as much.

  Instead of a crack to climb, I see groves of maidenhair ferns hovering about a shallow lens of water. The spring emerges not from below, but from all around. It spills in rivulets and seeps, an aria of drips dabbing into the greenery, spattering on fresh rock, filling the lens. My day pack slips off and falls to the ground.

  I remember what the singer had said, that the springs are places to leave your offerings.

  What do I have with me that I can leave here? I didn’t come prepared. A favorite lighter . . . my knife . . . a broken pencil . . . a sharpening stone. I mentally inventory my belongings. I have come here like a desert merchant, carrying across my shoulders the jangle and sway of curiosities. I have strings of glass beads marking times with my father. I carry textiles imprinted with journeys, bits of metal and shell jewelry murmuring as they mingle with my pace, each plucked from a corpse or traded with others I have encountered in the wilderness.

  My fingers habitually touch the smooth greenstone of
my necklace.

  This is the offering that I have carried.

  I stop at the thought. I have not had this necklace off since . . . when? Eight years ago, at least. It was carved by a Maori man in New Zealand, a sweet, effortless curve of stone that a friend brought back to this continent for me.

  The singer had said what should be done at this point, the offering. Rituals of sacred travel sometimes call for exact moves. What if the laws are not obeyed? I wonder. What if I left here without dropping any of these precious remnants of mine, without offering my green pendant? The singer will of course never know, not an old sheepherder who hasn’t visited for many years this thickness of sandstone labyrinths, layers upon layers, in which lies a single spring. Or will the weight shift in this place, like a boulder budging underfoot? There are ways to live, I think. Rituals of half-blind men speak to an oldness sometimes difficult to recall. They instruct the hands, bringing up memory.

  I lift my knife, reach to my throat, and with one stroke cut free the necklace. The stone falls into my hand.

  I run it back and forth between my fingers, feeling for the first time how worn it is. The eyehole has been fretted by its cord the same way the earth is trenched by water and wind. The swipe of my chest and the frequent dance of my fingers have been this stone’s weather. I slip it from its cord and step forward into the thicket of ferns. The pendant falls into its dampness.

  My breath feels cold. I am utterly exposed. I back away from the ferns, hands in front of me as if I have touched something that might tip, as if the canyon could capsize if I am not careful.