Chapter One
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.
Two of us looked down at this flash flood from atop a safe, high
bank. Below us water funneled into Chaco Canyon, passing through a
set of mustard-colored cliffs in the barrens of northwest New
Mexico. The water smelled as ripe as garbage. It was incense to me,
a lurid scent that I have encountered only select times in my life,
brief hours of the desert erupting into sudden and monstrous floods,
where everything living and dead is channeled into a single slot. It
smelled like creation itself.
The flood thundered past buff-colored boulders that had fallen from
the cliffs into beds of withered greasewood and cracked clay soil.
My companion, a man named Adam, had never been to this part of the
desert. Standing above the flood, he glanced at me, astonished. It
seemed there should not be water out here, ever. I told Adam that we
were very lucky. You can wait years and not see something like this.
Or you can walk out on rattleboard roads that no one has driven in
years, and where you expect yet another dry wash, you find a bestial
river heaving with broken trees.
Adam stood with his arms draped at his sides. His face was red from
the heat. A tall man, Adam has a graceful manner, his hair long and
dark. He studied the water, which was actually more mud than water,
and then looked up at the sky. There was not a single cloud, no
possible source for this flood as far as he could see. The blue
overhead was bereft of any moisture.
One small cloud had passed while we were out walking earlier in the
day. It had dragged a quarter acre of shade across the desert, and
we had set off chasing it, sprinting to catch up so we could get
under its shade. Before we got there, the cloud lifted its skirt and
sailed off, evaporating into nothing. We were left empty-handed, my
oiled hat brim wilted in the sun.
Most people think this must have been better country to live in some
thousand years ago, back when an indigenous civilization of hunters
and corn growers assembled in a geographic province known as the
Colorado Plateau. The climate is no different now than it was then,
however, just as dry at times and wet at others, and prone to the
same scales of flooding. Rainfall has always been unpredictable in
this desert. Farming seasons expand and contract like an accordion,
leaving only slim margins for planting and growing.
The Colorado Plateau is the very edge of where one can even partly
subsist on agriculture. It is a 150,000-square-mile blister of land
that rises across the dry confluence of Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and
New Mexico. Its surface is incised with countless canyons and
wrinkled into isolated mesas and mountain ranges that stand suddenly
from the desert floor up to 13,000 feet in elevation. The
combination of irregular topography and infrequent rainfall gave
rise to the Anasazi, an indigenous people who knew how to move.
Small family groups and clans readily skirted around climate
changes, transferring their settlements to high, wetter mesas or
down to the sunbaked lowlands whenever the need arose.
In the late centuries B.C. and the early centuries A.D., the Anasazi
lived in small villages of semi-subterranean pit-houses made of
earth and wood, clusters of tiny domes the color of local soils.
They occupied any one settlement for no more than ten to twenty
years before moving on. Rarely would a person have been born, grown
old, and died in the same place. For more than ten thousand years,
the Anasazi and their ancestors walked the climatic tightropes of
the Colorado Plateau, chasing the rain, leaving their camps and
settlements behind. Sporadic farming began some four thousand years
ago as corn and other subsidiary crops slowly made their way up from
southern Mexico. But even with the onset of agriculture, the Anasazi
remained a wayfaring people. Farming came to a head about a thousand
years ago, and the Anasazi rose with it, reaching the civilized
heights of imposing public architecture and industrial farming.
Though still in motion, they began to settle in places for longer
periods of time, making their homes sturdier, more permanent.
Populations rapidly increased. Architecture flourished. Then
suddenly they were gone.
I glanced upstream, where the scalp of a thunderstorm barely peeked
over the eastern horizon. The flood had come from there, maybe
thirty miles away, and had picked up everything it could carry along
its way. It hissed with sand and mud, hauling across its back
bobbing clods of horseshit. A car tire rose to the surface and then
sank like a drowning ogre. Countless tiny moons of juniper berries
nodded up and down alongside aluminum cans with their identities
sanded off. We had to cross to get where we were going.
Could you swim it? I wondered. I knew better. I had once made an
academic study out of flash floods in the desert, adding my own
arcane contributions to the fields of hydrology and geomorphology. I
knew very well how nasty floods can be, full of chaotic undertows
and unexpected obstacles that may or may not break the surface at
any moment. But I felt pulled toward the water.
We were heading for an archaeological site on the opposite side of
this shadeless canyon about five miles downstream. The flood was
going in our direction.
I carefully studied the water, my eyes tracking its fleeing surface
puckered with whirlpools. There was a specific grit to the sediment
and softness to the bedrock that spoke of how water travels in this
region. The way shoreline plants were arranged in tiers and the
scales of the terraced banks told what it might be like to hitch a
ride downstream. I concluded that we had a good chance of surviving
as long as we encountered no boulders along the way, no
unanticipated waterfalls. Sometimes floods sing with catastrophe,
but this one seemed safe.
Without looking at Adam, I said, “Let’s swim it.”
Adam did not look at me either. He nodded slowly, watching as chunks
of shoreline crashed in, sucked immediately beneath the muddy froth.
He smiled wryly, unable to take his eyes off the water, and asked,
“So this is what you do in the desert?”
“Only when you get lucky,” I said.
Much of northwest New Mexico is a landscape of oblivion, an arid
sink bowing into the Colorado Plateau. Ochre- and straw-colored
washes loop in and out for hundreds of miles, many seeing running
water for no more than a day or two each year. In some places dusty
sagebrush steppes extend as far as the eye can see, and in others
scabs of badlands lie naked under the sun, completely devoid of
vegetation. Occasional black monoliths are visible in the distance,
wind-struck jags of rock standing several hundred feet tall like
lost chess pieces. Chaco Canyon lies here, in a basin a hundred
miles across.
Of the deserts I know, this barren quarter of the Colorado Plateau
is the most unfortunate. During freeze-dried winters, the snow
blusters about like dust, and temperatures can drop to twenty below
zero. Summers leave every stone hot to the touch. Looking for
remains of ancient cultures, one might expect only sparse ruins, if
any, ramadas of scavenged wood and impoverished households where
residents tied reed mats across doorways to keep out the incessant
wind. But the Anasazi left much more in their wake. Reaching a
feverish peak in the eleventh century A.D., they built scores of
masonry buildings, their floor plans as sizable and geometrically
abstruse as crop circles. Thousands of chambers, with ceilings
weighing up to ninety tons each, were constructed in Chaco Canyon.
To support these structures, 250,000 trees were felled in mountains
fifty miles away and hauled across the desert. The timbers were not
dragged. They were hoisted and carried in procession to this canyon.
At the time, much larger population centers arose elsewhere in the
Americas. The Mound Builder culture erected earthen pyramids with
ramps and flattened tops along the Mississippi River. In what is now
Illinois, the ancient city of Cahokia reached a population of
15,000, while in southern Mexico the stone temples of Chichén Itzá
broke the jungle skyline with monolithic stone facades. The gridded
avenues and pyramids of Teotihuacán near modern-day Mexico City
hosted about 150,000 people, while 350,000 lived in an urban center
at the south end of Lake Titicaca in Bolivia.
Chaco, on the other hand, had a relatively small year-round
population. Estimates range between a couple of thousand residents
and only a few hundred. In the larger cultural picture of North,
South, and Central America, Chaco was a relatively minor place. In
the sparsely populated Southwest, however, it was the preeminent
center, a shining anomaly of broad, clean streets, or processionals,
and ceremonial buildings that once stood like cathedrals in the
desert.
A traveler in the eleventh century would have approached Chaco
Canyon along one of many scrupulously engineered roads. Where roads
entered the canyon, stairways had been carved straight into the
bedrock walls to get from the surrounding desert down to the canyon
floor. There one would have found an oasis of curve-walled temples
and blocky residential compounds. Housing was built on the south
side of the canyon. On the north side stood public buildings two or
three times the square footage of the White House in Washington D.C.
Nothing like these buildings existed anywhere else in the Southwest.
These stately structures, now called great houses, were not
residences per se. More likely they were monuments, temples, or
palaces. Many of them had as few as ten residents for every fifty
rooms, and most of the rooms, by the nature of the artifacts found
in them, seem to have been used for religious or ceremonial
purposes. Deep inside catacomb-like chambers within one great house,
excavators have found the most highly decorated burials in the
Southwest. Two richly dressed skeletons were discovered lying on a
bed of fifty-six thousand pieces of turquoise, surrounded by fine
ceramic vessels, and covered by a sheet of ivory-colored shells
imported from the ocean six hundred miles away.
Great-house stonework was painstakingly created, as evidenced by
straight corners and geometrically perfect circles, which were then
washed with a glaze of plaster, resulting in an arresting, lofty
appearance. These buildings would have looked like multistory
thrones set along the promenade of Chaco Canyon.
During certain times of the year-perhaps on the winter and summer
solstices, or at the beginning of lunar cycles-people traveled great
distances to reach Chaco. Based on skeletal remains, these people
were physically distinct from one another, and based on languages
descended from that time, they probably spoke a variety of disparate
tongues. People from different regions would have been recognizable
by their manner, their facial features, and the weaving patterns of
their robes, sandals, and skirts. Perhaps these visitors came to
Chaco for religious reasons, attending festivals, partaking in
celebratory feasts during years of plentiful crops, or offering
their labor to help construct great houses.
In the middle of the eleventh century, the stonework alone at each
great house required hundreds of thousands of man-hours. Masons
broke rocks into thin, workable tablets, laborers hauled baskets of
wet mortar, and woodworkers stripped timbers and evened off their
ends with stone axes before setting them into place. Parts of older
great houses were demolished to make way for expansions, and
thousands of tons of rubble went into the new foundations. At the
same time, adjacent land was cleared for future construction.
Most of this activity took place in an area of about three square
miles, known today as Downtown Chaco, a term coined by archaeologist
Steve Lekson. It contains a couple of dozen residential compounds
facing half as many great houses, as well as tidy processionals
leading toward the center. Ten miles in all directions lies a looser
halo of ten more great houses and numerous contiguous living
quarters. Chaco, or at least parts of Chaco, keeps going from there.
Ancient roads radiate from the canyon outward to meet satellite
great houses scattered across the desert. The place was built like a
web, drawing people and their artifacts to the center, Chaco Canyon.
Whether people living elsewhere on the Colorado Plateau were
directly involved with eleventh-century Chaco or not, they could not
help being deeply affected by it. Year after year more travelers
came from the hinterlands. They left tracks of broken pottery along
the way-countless ceramic water pitchers and painted ollas dropped
and shattered across the desert. The roads they stamped into the
ground can be seen to this day from space. Chaco became the cultural
center of the Colorado Plateau, and thus it is the appropriate place
to begin the story of the Anasazi.
On the clear summer day when Adam and I visited, a mass of mud and
water shouldered through Chaco Canyon, taking no notice of the
toppled great houses standing on the dry banks above. The flood had
its own business more pressing and ancient than human civilization,
proud heaves of water undercutting the banks and dragging away dead
and dying cottonwood trees. The floodwater ran down a wash in the
middle of the canyon where we walked with accelerated hearts. We
felt the anxious intoxication I imagine skydivers feel the moment
before they jump. Quickly now, who knew how long the high water
might last? It could drain out from under us in half an hour.
The canyon floor was about half a mile wide, leaving plenty of room
for us to get away from the flood, which ran less than a hundred
feet across. We headed right for it, walking through greasewood and
saltbush until we found a place where we could get into the water.
We had gone back to my truck and picked up a watertight ammunition
box that Adam now carried. It was army surplus, about the size of a
lunch pail. Adam knelt and popped it open. We stripped off our
clothes and stuffed them inside, along with a pen, a journal, and a
bottle of drinking water. We left on only our boots to protect our
feet from whatever lay on the floor of this flood.
The sun burned our bare shoulders as we slogged through soaked clay
to the flood’s slipstream edge. I nervously rubbed my hands on my
thighs, glancing along the corridor of the canyon. Certainly, the
Anasazi had done the same, I thought. A thousand years ago someone
taking a message from one compound to another must have hopped into
a flood to speed the journey-or just taken an afternoon dip in the
cold water, joyous over its startling appearance in this landscape
where water is the rarest commodity. Maybe people used to flock to
these infrequent floods, running with baskets and pots to gather
mud, which they could use to make mortar or farming soil. Indeed,
earthen and stone-lined canals, where water would have been diverted
from the main wash toward nearby storage areas, have been detected
all around Chaco. Buildings went up in fits and starts, perhaps
matching sporadic flood cycles as millions of gallons of mud were
suddenly available for construction. These floods also brought down
precious water to be distilled for drinking. An event like this
would have been a wonder and the cause for celebration.
Adam and I continued along sloppy mud banks and through cold lagoons
where the flood swelled into the surrounding desert. The water had
the chill of freshly melted hail. Parts of trees spun downstream in
the froth. We waded in up to our thighs, and the current began to
pull on us. Just before it swept us off our feet, we dove forward.
Like busted rams of cottonwood trees, we were carried off.
Several million tons of sediment depart from the Southwest every
day, carried in warm, muddy rivers toward the nearest sea. The
entire landscape is falling apart, too dry to hold on to its soil,
too weathered to remain solid. In 1941 a 300,000-ton slab of canyon
wall toppled into the back of the largest of Chaco’s ruins, crushing
numerous rooms and throwing boulders into ceremonial chambers, where
they remain today like rough-edged meteorites. What you see in the
Southwest is temporary, everything caught in motion.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from House Of Rain
by Craig Childs
Copyright © 2006 by Craig Childs.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Little, Brown
Copyright © 2006
Craig Childs
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-316-60817-6
