The Way Out Read online

  Copyright © 2004 by Craig Childs

  Line drawings copyright © 2004 by Craig Childs

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group USA

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroupUSA.com.

  First eBook Edition: September 2007

  ISBN 978-0-316-02888-2

  CONTENTS

  Epigraph

  Dedication

  Prologue

  PART ONE: The Desert

  PART TWO: Crossing

  PART THREE: People of the Water

  Epilogue

  Copyright Acknowledgments

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  ALSO BY CRAIG CHILDS

  Soul of Nowhere

  The Desert Cries

  The Secret Knowledge of Water

  Crossing Paths

  This book is dedicated to Laura Slavik, the indomitable.

  Dirk: Highland Scottish; A double-edged fighting knife worn close to the body, often fashioned from a broken sword.

  Craig: Gaelic; Of rocks and crags.

  PROLOGUE

  There is a dead man in the desert. His eye sockets are jeweled with broken stones that have randomly fallen from above. He lies curled on his side, the long bones of his legs pulled toward his chest as if he had fallen asleep in a clamshell. He is my barren saint, my man of patience waiting out the epochs in a dust-dry natural rock shelter. How he died? Impossible to tell and irrelevant. It is how he lived that brings me here. How these bones carried a man in this land.

  I have walked to the skeleton before, kneeling beside his intricately derailed spine. I have touched his bare forehead, imagining his life in this same land. There are patterns I have recognized on his teeth, a certain smoothness to the wear that names him as a hunter-gatherer, a person who lived here seven hundred years ago, a thousand maybe.

  Not far from him now, I am traveling across a bizarrely eroded tableland. I have come alone. In the white, tasteless heat of August in southern Utah, the dead man’s bones are a point on the compass that I move toward. I carry very few belongings: no stove and no map. Water bottles are mostly empty. There is a bag of nondescript nuts and dried fruit. For sleeping I carry a threadbare serape. My pack is light.

  I know other people who travel this way. They are companions of mine, itinerants roving the landscape, engrossed in a world beyond civilization. We keep boats hidden near rivers to use as ferries. Our food caches wait buried in sand so that we can eat chocolate and rice in the weeks and months of our walking.

  I pause to scan the terrain ahead, considering the choices. I can walk among lopsided boulders or cut in and out of shallow canyons. A sand wash looks as though it eventually pours down the throat of a cliff . . . better not to go that way.

  This is my life. It is what I do. I am a navigator. Any work I have ever taken—researching obscure fields, occasionally guiding extended tours on the pale and sandy rivers that sweep this desert—has kept me close to this place. Between jobs I survive by drinking from water holes in the far country, mapping canyons and routes for my own curiosity. Passages appear between staggering cliffs, and I follow them. I vanish layer after layer into shadow and sunlight. After weeks of walking in this kind of territory, there is no doubt about my place in the world. I am here.

  One of these other travelers should be coming into view soon, walking toward me from the south. I lift a pair of binoculars and try to sight any movement in the distance, an off color in the blush of desert, a moving shadow. He is a close friend. We had planned on meeting at the skeleton, spending a couple of nights together, then continuing on our separate ways.

  I do not see him out there, so I move over a ridge, into the shade of an alcove. With my pack resting behind me, I sit in red sand that is as fine as flour. My hand flattens to hold my body. When I lift it, there is a perfect print, revealing even the lines of my palms. The dust adheres to my skin. I am marked by this place, as if by birth. My life holds the reflection of this desert as much as I bear my father’s eyes and my grandfather’s lips. Each of us is born to a particular place, a landscape that lies in our oldest memories. Some of us remain in our places, while others flee. I am one who remained.

  Looking out from this curve-ceilinged shelter, I am surrounded by a terrain worn back to its primary shapes, one geologic moment away from eroding into nothing. The wind has left globes of stone, a landscape of moons lying about, some of them weatherworn into crescents and some left whole and round. Nothing is hidden. Every fault and fracture is revealed. I am sitting in some geological notion, a weakness in the stone that the wind has gotten to, hollowed out so that a space remains.

  Blocks of dark rock stand on the farthest horizon, forty, fifty miles away. I know each of them by shape, split-topped buttes two or three weeks of walking from here. Between here and the buttes I see the dark teardrop of an alcove no larger than a poppy seed in the distance. I remember its floor: pieces of pre-Columbian pottery painted with black designs on white-slipped clay, and tiny flowers of mouse prints in the blow sand. Beyond this distant alcove, I see broken cliffs. They hold a thousand-year-old ambush site where stone weapons lie derelict on the ground. Bighorn sheep still use this old hunting route, stepping into its high passages, shattering purple knife blades and crystal-white arrowheads under their hooves. Not far beyond that is the place where I once carried a handful of my father’s ashes for twenty-six days and finally let them go. It is also where my friend, who is walking from the south to meet me, came after he killed a man.

  This is a storytelling landscape. There is no way to move in complete silence. Shadows shift. Eroded towers of maroon and rust stand around in conversation. Up close: a tale of four boulders, four that were once one; an overhead wedge of sandstone fallen and toppled into pieces like building blocks. My boot prints come around these four boulders and lead to me, a man in a rock shelter. I turn my head to look south, toward the skeleton. Invisible to me, my friend is out there at this moment, moving through the heat.

  We have traveled many times together, this friend and I, clothed in thirst, our fingertips raw among rocks. We have come here hoping for moments of exquisite beauty, for the shuddering sensation of extremity. We have pushed with our backs against the door of the land, opening it slightly more each time to let the wind, the light, the strange shadows fall onto our arms and our feet. This shifting landscape compels us in one direction and the other, wearing us down to our essence as we move.

  We carry our memories into this place as if cupping water in our palms, guarding them as we walk. When we stop to rest, we open our palms and drink. We share stories, and our words are worn down by the wind and by the desolate matrix of cliffs and canyons. The stories erode into their finest grains, and then we can pick through what is left of ourselves. We come to this place to understand what has become of us.

  PART ONE

  THE DESERT

  Now at Earth’s lips,

  Now at my lips.

  — Diné Blessingway ceremony

  DAY ONE

  Winter, now. The desert races past.

  Driving is a blessing of speed you don’t get from walking. I lean into the seat with my boots against the dashboard and watch this oceanic country of southern Utah surge and collapse around us. Canyons fall away, inhaled by red earth. Dirk Vaughan’s hand drapes the steering wheel, his fifteen-year-old Bronco moaning to the road. He drives like an old street cop, body hanging relaxe
d on its skeleton as if loosely prepared for impact, his eyes scanning easily, seeing everything. We pass a semi painted in the highway grime of snowmelt, nipples of soiled icicles hanging from its frame. Dirk’s posture does not change as we speed around it, the signal flicked on, wheel nudged, accelerator touched, signal flicked the other way. He has been in sixteen car accidents in the forty-five years of his life: a reckless teenage rollover, numerous impacts maneuvered in close quarters with a patrol car, and high-speed collisions that left cars welded together. I have never felt safer in a vehicle with anyone.

  The stereo is rattling badly. Rap music he brought along. I listen to the rainfall percussion of words.It’s Dirk’s Bronco. He can play whatever he wants.

  Outside the window is the wilderness. It is the place beyond the road where a raven hangs tethered in the wind, its talons bunched into fists over red dirt and villages of blue-green sagebrush. For ten years Dirk and I have been walking this country together. He often talks about traveling in this place as if it were a sex act. He speaks of fluids and the enchanting touch of skin, making love with a woman of solid earth, drinking out of the belly curves of her water holes, sinking into her flood-carved folds of canyons.

  I treat my travels in the same way I did when I was a child, walking with my cigar box of pencils and erasers and paper out the school door at lunch, past the tetherball and four-square games, past the blacktop to a patch of unmanicured dirt where I could alone pursue the inquiries of ants. I think of this land where I travel not as a woman, but as a moment, an instant in which a breath is drawn, a still point that ends only when forgotten.

  In this place, Dirk and I have reached for each other across wind-spanned cliff faces, shouldering the weight of the other up to safe ledges. If it were not for Dirk, I imagine nothing would be left of me but a cautionary tale, a boy who learned to fly and then tumbled helplessly out of the sky. And if not for me, Dirk would still be living like a cop, a man clutched hungrily over his retired badge, alone in the wilderness.

  We are driving now toward a sanctum of desert canyons in the south. It is territory foreign to us. From the air, from the maps, this unfamiliar region looks like the miscellany of a plumber’s yard—a geological mess of standpipes, tubs, sink traps, and spouts trash-heaped all over one another. I have imagined for years what this far place, a cavernous domain of sandstone, might look like from the ground. Natural bridges and barren holes and shafts of shadow played against sunlight in the deep canyons. This is what I envision ahead of us. Usually Dirk and I are in a specific part of the desert, a few thousand square miles in Utah where we have named the canyons and mesas for ourselves. This will be different.

  Snow as dry as sawdust tumbles at the windshield. A squall briefly passes the highway. The road swings around cliff heads, beyond the brief tempest, taking us down a canyon, through a small town where I’ve stopped numerous times for Navajo tacos, the restaurant and the gas station owned by the same man, whose face is always waiting in the window. Many of my memories lie along this road. I used to drive here at the beginning and end of each work season, back when I earned a living guiding on rivers to the south. I once drove out alone to spend an entire winter in that nation of salmon-colored mesas to the west, walking the cold desert as if I were a long-distance trader, my wares banging against my back. When I was younger, there were journeys along this road with my father, his truck loaded with guns and whiskey bottles clacking in a box like explosives, a boot-battered copy of Walden on the floorboard.

  Past the town, barbed wire goes by, gates rigged shut. Faint two-track roads stab away, overgrown with smoky-green rabbitbrush. I know where the roads go: That one bucks over groves of bedrock; the next leads down a canyon to a wall of nine-hundred-year-old rock carvings of bighorn sheep and spirals and humans with spears.

  Music scratches out of Dirk’s tinny speakers. He sings along only to the lyrics he most wants me to hear. His fingers work a rhythm over the steering wheel. I see him glance my way, and he says, “People in the city just don’t see the minutiae the way we do.”

  He waits, and when I say nothing in response, he continues, his steering-wheel hand flashing as he talks. “Wilderness. You need to be fucking awake out there. It’s truly too much goddamned work for people. To go out and survive. To truly live and not get killed. Too much work.”

  His voice jousts around as if he is in a knife fight. I don’t bother arguing with him. Not now. We will be on foot soon enough, and I will be on my own home ground.

  “Wilderness teaches you to see this”—he gestures at the road, at the burgundy streaks of sand wind-pushed across asphalt, canyons carved out of plateaus in the distance. “It requires that you be awake.”

  But I cannot listen quietly to him. I shake my head.

  “I don’t think it’s so different for people in the city,” I tell him. “Some see the minutiae, some don’t.”

  “There you go with that magnanimous Buddhist bullshit of yours,” he says over the music. “All the same . . . the world is one.”

  I half shrug. “I don’t think it’s that. Everything is different.”

  “There it is again. It’s all the same . . . it’s all different.”

  All I can do is look through the window. Dirk is not ready for convincing. There is a commotion ahead, birds on the side of the road, something dead. A hawk is guarding a road-killed animal. Three ravens challenge it, hopping and calling with flushed throat feathers. Suddenly the ravens are in the air, black capes sweeping away from the Bronco’s speeding grille. The hawk sees us, eyes besieged, thinking us the next threat. It opens its ivory-banded wings, its beak wide with a screech we cannot hear. It does not fly off. We speed past it.

  “Too close,” Dirk complains. “It’s gonna get hit.” He puts on his signal.

  I say, “I’ll get it.”

  Dirk pulls over on the shoulder, his body still relaxed, unmoved, hand circling the wheel. We sweep into a U-turn, and the hawk lifts away, driven by us from the kill. I jump out and move toward the lump of a dead prairie dog, its stomach opened from the impact of a car tire. The air is winter cold with wind, its light stretched into ocher. A sandstorm is coming.

  Dirk steps out. He is a white man, his beard gray in patches. The wind picks up blond-brown hair, and he reaches up with a hand the way women often do, tucking it behind his ears with the comb of a finger. A single green bead hangs at his throat on a strip of leather, and a simply curved earring is drilled into his left earlobe. His clothing is practical, forty dollars invested in a pair of softened canvas pants that he has been wearing for years, any repairs cleanly stitched by his wife. His frame is average like mine, but ten years older, body sturdy from working as a wilderness outfitter in southeast Utah, from hefting boats and field equipment onto his shoulders along the desert-rimmed Colorado River.

  While I fetch the dead prairie dog, Dirk looks up at the ravens spiraling over his head. The hawk circles among them in the opposite direction, turning Dirk’s sky into a clockwork of rival orbits. He thinks that even in the city, even when he was a cop, he would have noticed such a thing. He would have stopped on the street, eavesdropping on the birds, wondering why a hawk is flying among three ravens. The ravens, he thinks, are nothing but smart, cackling jesters. The hawk, on the other hand, is a pure, voiceless spear thrown through the air. The ravens will find their food anywhere. They’ll steal who knows what from trash bins. They’ll shamelessly tug at plump weeks-rotted carcasses. They’ll fashion fishing hooks out of gutter metal. Meanwhile, the hawk knows only the bright flash of blood and the kicking of death. No doubt it was called in by the skitter of a car-struck rodent, came down and clipped its spine, fixing the prairie dog’s life with a kind of precision that the laughing ravens do not know. This is what these turning shapes in the sky tell him.

  I carry the prairie dog by its hind legs, its body going long, its wet gray intestines unwinding toward the ground. Along a barbed-wire fence off from the highway, I glance up at the ravens who are watch
ing me and imagining my next move. They have their choreography well prepared, reviewing my motions on the ground while one by one cutting off and confounding the hawk. The hawk seems baffled inasmuch as a hawk can seem baffled.

  I lay the prairie dog down gently so its body is elongated on the ground. I can feel its bones, the slender, miniature toes in my hand, the brads of knuckles. My thumb rubs between them, and they slide back and forth, sheets of muscle still free. It has been dead no more than half an hour. I apologize to it for the clumsy speeds at which we drive, bullets hurtling blindly down the highway.

  I come back around to the Bronco, and Dirk is squinting upward. Without looking away from the movements overhead, he says, “Gray hawk. North for its range. But I’m pretty sure.”

  I have no idea. “Hawk,” I confirm.

  We get back in the Bronco and leave the bird scene behind. Dirk asks if he has ever told me his story about the horse on the side of the road, and even though he has, I say no. I’ve heard most of his tales many times. He is my storyteller, the man who carries me along the roofs of buildings, through gunfire, into places I would never travel on my own. I’ll hear this story again.

  He talks like a theater performer, hands slicing at the air, different voices assumed to tell different parts of his tales, a Southern accent called up for his ain’ts, street smack for his motherfuckers.

  He tells me about a horse. He gives me the introduction, how people kept horses in Denver in pockets of semirural land swallowed by the city. These animals were obsessively brushed and washed like beloved poodles, but they were horses nonetheless, large, easily frightened beasts that should never face the roadside horrors of humanity.

  “So the thing gets out,” he says. “Who the fuck knows how. Someone left a gate open. It’s running around at night terrified, headlights coming at it. Pow! Nailed broadside by a sedan, clipped right at the legs. Its back end was hamburger.”