House of Rain Read online

  Copyright © 2006 by Craig Childs

  Photographs on print book pages ii, 70, 102, 116, 159, 170, 216, 247, 277, 306, 313, 357, and 426 copyright © 2006 by Craig Childs

  Line drawings and photographs on print book pages 16, 38, 51, 95, 126, 139, 187, 205, 237, 333, 382, 390, 411, and 441 copyright © 2006 by Regan Choi. Photograph on print book page 338 copyright © 2006 by Irvin Fernandez. Photograph on print book page 198 copyright © 2006 by Jonathan Till

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  First eBook Edition: February 2007

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group USA

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at HachetteBookGroupUSA.com

  ISBN: 978-0-7595-1857-5

  Contents

  Also by author

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  PART ONE: CHACO

  The Flood

  Alignment

  Identity

  PART TWO: THE ROAD NORTH

  Looking North

  Visibility

  Decline

  Crossing to the Other Side

  Continuity

  Moon Watchers

  PART THREE: HIGH MESA VERDE REGION

  Memory

  Movement

  The Art of Leaving

  Protection

  Devastation

  Loneliness

  PART FOUR: SOUTHEAST UTAH

  Escape Terrain

  Red

  The Great Wall

  Walking the Line

  PART FIVE: NORTHEAST ARIZONA

  Retreat

  The Last Cliff Dwellings of the Anasazi

  The Great Pueblos

  The Choice

  Outpost

  PART SIX: EAST-CENTRAL ARIZONA

  The Clock

  Watchtower

  Building Large

  Salado

  The Highland Pueblos

  Land’s End

  PART SEVEN: SOUTHEAST ARIZONA

  Flowers Along the Way

  Crossroads

  Mountain of Shrines

  PART EIGHT: NORTHERN MEXICO

  The Far Side of MesoamerICA

  The City

  Coming into the Mountains

  The Eye of Tlaloc

  Putting Back the Bones

  The Story the Conquistadors Told

  Afterword

  Terminology

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  also by CRAIG CHILDS

  The Way Out

  The Desert Cries

  Soul of Nowhere

  The Secret Knowledge of Water

  Crossing Paths

  For Regan

  Movement, clouds, wind, and rain are one.

  Movement must be emulated by the people.

  —TESSIE NARANJO

  The secret to a long life is knowing when it’s time to go.

  —MICHELLE SHOCKED

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would not have been able to get my bearings in Southwest prehistory without the assistance of Mark Varien, Steve Lekson, Barbara Mills, and Jeff Dean. Thank you for generously sharing conversations, letters, and time. Archaeologists and scholars throughout the Southwest proved most willing and thoughtful during my research, opening themselves to my inquiries and freely sharing their expertise. I am most grateful to Wolcott Toll, David Wilcox, Gwinn Vivian, Kim Malville, Rich Friedman, John Stein, Tom Windes, Dean Wilson, Kathy Roler Durand, Wendy Bustard, Gary Brown, Larry Baker, Paul Reed, Ron Sutcliffe, Scott Ortman, Donna Glowacki, Susan Ryan, Joel Brisbin, Kate Niles, Larry Nordby, Carla Van West, Dave Breternitz, Eric Hansen, Hugh Robinson, Catherine Cameron, Winston Hurst, Joe Pachak, Jonathan Till, Owen Severence, Nieves Zedeño, Kelley Hays-Gilpin, Bruce Anderson, Mike Yeatts, T. J. Ferguson, Sarah Herr, Karen Adams, A. J. Vonarx, Richard Lange, Charles Adams, Daniela Triadan, Chuck Riggs, Stephanie Whittlesey, Jeff Reid, Patty Crown, Mike Jacobs, Tammy Stone, Lex Lindsay, Jeff Clark, Patrick Lyons, Anna Neuzil, Bill Hartmann, Paul Fish, Ryan Howell, Todd and Chris VanPool, and Beth Bagwell. None of these people are responsible for the final content of this book, which is a synthesis of many different viewpoints.

  For access to archaeological collections, I am indebted to the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, the Edge of the Cedars Museum in Blanding, Utah, the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the Arizona State Museum at the University of Arizona, the Chaco Culture National Historical Park Museum Collection at the University of New Mexico, the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center outside Cortez, Colorado, the University of Colorado Museum, and the collection at Mesa Verde National Park.

  It is difficult to adequately thank various native people who permitted my curiosity and in return offered gentle, critical input. Respecting their confidentiality, I will not name them, and so I offer private words of appreciation.

  To many libraries my debt is profound. In particular, I am grateful to Marci Myers and her assistants at the Hayden Library at Arizona State University, as well as the Special Collections staff at the Cline Library at Northern Arizona University. Thank you also to the staff of two small public libraries in Crawford and Paonia, Colorado, for keeping me well supplied.

  I owe much to my editors at Little, Brown, both my mainstay, Terry Adams, and my copyeditor, Barbara Jatkola. For their editorial input, thank you also to Dawn Reeder, Bob Koehler, and Azucena Alejandre. I am grateful to my agent, Kathy Anderson, for, among many things, walking to the edge of a cliff with me and looking into the desert below, though your face was red from the heat and your heart was beating very fast.

  To my young son, Jasper, thank you for accompanying me into windy, hot, cold, dusty places, and doing so with delight, for the most part. Finally, I cannot offer enough thanks to my wife, Regan Choi, for your discerning reads, your inscrutability, and above all, your fearlessness.

  PROLOGUE

  The inspiration for this book came from a discovery. It was an ancient relic I found near a river flowing through the butte--studded desert of the Colorado Plateau. I paddled alone in a canoe for days into a deepening red gorge, cliffs passing slowly against each other, tributary canyons opening and closing as I traveled downstream into the wilderness. On those days I frequently tied my canoe to shore and walked into the surrounding country. I skirted rock shelves and found my way to the tops of cliffs facing stark landforms in the distance, a desolate territory of wind-sculpted stone and brittle scrub.

  As I walked, I carefully studied the passing ground for broken artifacts left by the Anasazi, a people once balanced on the imaginary tightrope stretched between B.C. and A.D. They were desert hunters and dryland farmers. Every day or two I came upon their rock art carved into cliffs and boulders—eerie, enigmatic symbols lining hallway canyons. I found miscellaneous human endeavors all about—hard snubs of pre-Columbian corncobs stored in a cave, a polished grinding stone facedown in the sand.

  I hesitate using the term pre-Columbian, defining the chronicles of ancient America by the arbitrary date of Christopher Columbus’s first visit in 1492. Prehistoric is just as troublesome, suggesting a time before history that passed pure and unnoticed. Yet these words, however insufficient, give an ample impression of antiquity, telling of a time long before the age of steel in America and before the domestic horse, an era predating Columbus prior to most notions of history.

  Time seems very thin in this landscape, as if one cou
ld reach across a thousand years merely by crouching over a lost knife blade made of crystal-shot jasper, feeling its edge still sharp enough to draw blood. The desert is a reliquary, its dryness and gradual pace preserving most of what people deposited on their way through. When the Anasazi walked away from this region some seven hundred years ago, they left it like a made house, everything in its place.

  Late on the seventh day of my trip, I nosed my canoe into a nest of boulders toppled from above. I climbed to the bow, its line in my hand, and stepped out to tie up. River water purled around the boulders with a gentle, talkative sound. Even in shade at the bottom of the gorge, the air was hot, rocks having been bathed all day in summer sun, now doling out the radiation in force. I left the canoe and went on foot, carrying what I needed—a bottle of water, a pocketed bag of nuts, knife, pen, and paper. I climbed into a net of fallen cliff slabs that revealed a slight break in the gorge. There was no trail, no sign that anyone had ever been here, until I stubbed something up with my boot tip. I knelt and dusted out a piece of broken pottery. The sherd was gray as an oyster shell, its surface neatly pinched into a simple, repetitive design: remains of a broken cookware vessel dating to around the eleventh century A.D. I set it back and came to all fours, lowered my head, and blew across the ground. The pointed teeth of other pieces started to show. I dusted them out with two fingers, revealing the broken ring of a corrugated jar.

  After studying this artifact for a moment, I dusted it back over. When I stood, my eyes were sharper than they had been. If there are broken vessels, I thought, there will be other things.

  I began discerning shapes around me. Fifteen feet away was a slumped masonry wall, nearly all of it buried by wind and dust. Next to it a slight depression no more than ten feet across sank into the earth—the pit of a circular room—and around it I saw the glint of several sherds from other pots. This had been a prehistoric household, three or four abutting quarters and storage rooms. Not far away was a bit of flatness in the terrain where rainwater runs off the cliff, likely a plot once used for growing amaranth, pumpkins, and corn. All the puzzle pieces I could see I put back together, reconstructing a home for ten Anasazi, twelve perhaps, an extended family. They cooked with gray pots and lived in circular pit-houses.

  After several hundred years of no one living here, the site had turned to rubble. Wood-and-mortar roofs had deteriorated and crashed in; doorways had fallen apart. I walked through these ghostly vestiges, things a person could pass right over and never notice. I glanced up to consider the cliff overhead, and there it was.

  At first I saw only a high stack of rocks, obviously set by someone’s hand into a crack. As I looked closer, I began to see the concealed outline of a tidy masonry structure that had been tucked behind a leaning flake of cliff. No bigger than a piano bench, it was a small Anasazi storeroom, a chamber known as a granary. Not necessarily for storing grain, it was just as likely a pantry for tools or special items set aside for the future.

  I immediately started for it, climbing hand over hand up the cliff base, feeling an anxious press of revelation as I ascended ledges and cracks. My breath tasted hot with discovery. I had found a secret. In past travels I had seen many granaries belonging to the Anasazi, but they had all been broken open, emptied by archaeologists, by pothunters, by erosion, or even, perhaps, by the residents themselves returning many centuries later. This one had been built so that no stranger would see it, like an attic accessed through a hidden door. I entered a gap behind a shadowed rock flake, and there I knelt before the structure. It was rectangular, like a cupboard. I touched its face with probing, diagnostic fingers, measuring it with my eyes—three feet tall, two feet wide, and three feet deep.

  I got up on my haunches and lightly dusted off the granary’s flat roof, which was undamaged. I licked my lips, feeling their dry chap. For some thousand years not a single breeze had entered the space within this chamber, no inkling of light. Residents living below had cached something that to this day had remained untouched. My imagination raced. What tightly woven baskets were here? What painted ceramics, what woven textiles, what stockpile of cobalt blue and honey-colored seed corn left many centuries before the boom of Spanish rifles?

  With a finger I traced through dust and fallen rock debris on the granary’s roof, where I outlined a rectangular hatch: the way in. I blew off dust, revealing a piece of flagstone mortared into place, used to seal the granary shut.

  This was no casual find. I had been looking for this for a long time, traveling untrailed desert for most of my adult life, poking into canyons and caves hoping to find intact signs of people here long before me. Their presence gave context to my brief life, to my civilization. They were the ticking sound of the clock on the mantel letting me know that time is truly passing, whole societies rising and falling to a believable rhythm. I had encountered their towering cliff dwellings like secluded castles and found their skulls eroded from the ground, eye sockets cleaned out by the wind. But never had I come upon a closed granary, a chamber untouched.

  I laid my hands on the smooth hatch stone, and then I knocked lightly, causing a hollow drumming within. I put my ear against the entry as if cracking a safe.

  I could split the seal with my knife blade, I thought. I would get my fingers under the stone and pry it out. I would see whatever was most valuable to these people. I was certain that upon opening this small reserve, I would understand what it meant to live in the era of the Anasazi, finding what was placed to ensure their future. I envisioned polished wooden knife handles, perhaps a filled, red seed jar with a tiny mouth, or woven pouches made of dogbane, each containing a different-colored artist’s pigment painstakingly gathered from a mineral or plant. There would be ceremonial artifacts celebrating a clan’s lineage, or precious tools and seeds stashed to ensure a viable crop upon their return.

  These people planned on coming back, but they were never seen here again. As the story goes, the Anasazi simply vanished one day. Farming implements were left in the fields; ceramic vessels remained neatly stowed in their quarters; ladles rested in bowls as if people had been swept from the land by an ill and sudden wind. The disappearance of the Anasazi has been hailed as the great mystery of archaeology.

  But I had been speaking for years with archaeologists who worked in the Southwest, and they told me the mystery was an oversimplified and outdated notion. After what they had seen in the field, none believed that the Anasazi had simply vanished. Inviting me into their studies and into the trenches of their excavations, they explained that there was not enough paper to publish all that they had found out about these people. There were not enough occasions to speak to the public of their countless conjectures. They had to keep to their discipline, digging deeper like eager animals, moles tunneling through the dark soil of time. But since you come asking about these ancestors, they told me, here, take these in your hands, as much as you can carry, and go. They glowed with excitement as they handed over hard-earned data, or they became deadly serious, or they simply gave me a name or two—Chacra Mesa, Peñasco Blanco—and sent me out the door, back to where I followed their clues and inquiries across the ground.

  Over time I began discerning trails of Anasazi movement in the wilderness, the directions from which they came, an almost biblical journey of an entire culture across centuries and limitless miles. There is far more to the Anasazi than what lies in the modern American mythos, bucolic museum dioramas of men in loincloths and women’s breasts bare in the sun. The land holds a far more complex and human story, evidence of migrations, upheavals, wars, and great alliances; lives of astronomers, weavers, merchants, and pilgrims.

  Sunlight receded, and a field of stars overtook the sky as I sat on a rock shelf over the granary, the dark gorge gaping below. Summer heat was still rising out of the rock. My head rested on my knees, arms drawn around my legs.

  I would be so careful with this if I entered it. I said this out loud. Going through someone else’s treasure, I would be cautious with my finge
rs, my words, my thoughts. When the first stir of air entered this masonry chest, I would not even breathe.

  But the granary was not mine to open. It was left by other people, a stockpile waiting for their return. As I understand more of the Anasazi, it is hard to say that they ever truly vanished. The farther I track them, the more it seems they are right in front of me, until I can nearly feel the body heat left in their footsteps. It is not unthinkable that a person might someday return to this granary, maybe a century from now, or a millennium, relieved to find an intact sign of ancestry deep in this river gorge.

  I climbed down to the granary and laid my hands on its door stone, feeling the grit of blown sand, the hardness of rock. I did not want to move from here, a person to be found in a thousand years, a statue kneeling at the brink of decision. I withdrew and climbed back to the ground, leaving the granary sealed as I started back toward my canoe, the obsidian night closing around me. At the river I untied the canoe’s bowline, stepped in, and swept the paddle into the water, setting a wake across a mirror of stars.

  To this day my imagination has remained within the dark granary I never opened, my hands still laid upon its smooth door stone. I ache to know what is inside. Instead of breaking the seal and unpacking its belongings, I wrote this book, setting out to find who the Anasazi were and what became of them. I traveled deeper into the land than ever before, hunting through villages where no one lives, looking for ancient walkways across the Southwest. I searched the history of these people to give this granary context, to return it to a place in time when a civilization danced across this desert like rain.

  PART ONE

  CHACO

  THE FLOOD

  CHACO CANYON

  It happened quickly, as if a diviner’s staff had struck the ground. Water flashed onto the dry earth. Its dark and wringing hands plunged over cactus and sage, welling around the trunks of sparse cottonwood trees. The desert groaned as its thousand parched mouths opened to an empty summer sky.