Journal of the Dead (7 page)

The problem was that, come spring, the standard route into Colorado—the old Santa Fe trail—would be clogged with herds belonging to competitors. They needed a different route, one with a reliable water source, and decided that it was worth the risk to head due west to the Pecos and follow it north. They struck out in the spring of 1866 with eighteen armed men, successfully avoided Indians, and made a fortune. Afterward, their route was known as the Goodnight-Loving Trail, and in its wake, determined settlement in the Pecos Valley was under way. A year later, after Loving died from a Comanche arrow wound, Goodnight teamed up with the legendary cattleman and fellow trailblazer John Chisum, and the pair began grazing eighty thousand longhorns along the Pecos not far from what is now the town of Carlsbad.

To the Mescalero, the sudden presence of thousands of cattle and hundreds of “white eyes” on the Pecos was an outright invasion.
Led by the brilliant war-chief Victorio, the Mescalero entered into a ferocious resistance that tied up settlement in southern New Mexico and west Texas for almost fifteen years. Only after the U.S. Army hired Apache guides and posted detachments at every water hole along his raiding routes were they finally able to defeat Victorio. The last battle he fought before retreating to Mexico took place in 1880, when his band rode into a trap just across the Texas border at Rattlesnake Springs. Heavily outnumbered, Victorio is said to have fought the soldiers only in the hope that he could push them back long enough to draw water from the spring.

The drive from Austin, Texas, to Carlsbad, New Mexico, was 550 miles—an endlessly repeating conveyor of baked Texas flatlands and lonely, windblown ranches. By late afternoon, Raffi and David had crossed the Pecos, and found themselves speeding through Eddy County, New Mexico, which was founded by a man who had come from as far as they, Charles B. Eddy. An adventurous, stone-eyed New Yorker, Eddy came to New Mexico in 1880 and began ranching right where the city of Carlsbad now sits. He, too, fought for water, and in his case it was the Pecos River itself that he was after. Four years after he arrived, a devastating drought killed a third of his stock, and Eddy decided that the only way to survive was to use the river to irrigate the surrounding desert so it could be farmed. In 1888, he teamed up with some locals to form the Pecos Valley Land and Ditch Company, and embarked on a massive construction project that eventually brought water to twenty-five thousand acres. At the time, the area was part of the infamous Lincoln County, and if Eddy had any doubts that he was
in the Wild West, he needed to look no further than his principal partner: Pat Garrett, the same man who, as sheriff seven years earlier, had put a bullet from his Colt .44 through the heart of Billy the Kid.

The pair made a good team. The combination of Garrett’s western know-how and Eddy’s New Yorker’s flair for selling saw the creation of a town out of more or less nothing. Eddy printed up brochures he ran in East Coast newspapers, advertising of a “land of milk and honey” along the Pecos, and a trickle of settlers soon followed. Ironically, the very water they were harnessing wiped out much of their efforts in 1893, after the Pecos flooded. The irrigation system would be rebuilt and expanded in later years, but after that the residents of what was now called Eddy County decided that they could no longer base their livelihood on the rise and fall of the Pecos. Looking for a more permanent draw, they turned to the river once again, this time hawking its curative powers. A local wag had noticed, or claimed, that the Pecos near Eddy had nearly the exact same mineral content as the famous spa in Karlsbad, Czechoslovakia, and the town seized on the opportunity and quickly renamed itself after it. Soon the ads were once again flowing in the East Coast papers, but unfortunately the spa idea never quite caught on. Carlsbad found itself limping toward the next century.

In 1898, a local cowboy named Jim White noticed an unusual smoke column percolating into the desert sky, and he hiked over to investigate. Drawing near, he realized to his awe that the dark cloud was really a stream of bats—over a million of them—emerging from what appeared to be a bottomless hole in the ground. Intrigued, he returned a few days later, roped down into the hole,
and discovered what he immediately recognized as one of world’s great geological treasures.

“I came to more and more stalagmites—each seemingly larger and more beautifully formed than the ones I’d passed,” he later told a biographer. He continued:

Once again, water had played a central role—in this case an epochal one—in the creation of the caverns: twelve million years of rainfall seeping through the limestone remains of a prehistoric coral reef that once stood on the edge of the biggest water of all—the Permian Sea. The water and limestone combined to form sulfuric acid, which gnawed away at the reef drop by drop, countless billions of teeth of time that left behind magnificent underground chambers as megatherial and as stupefying as time itself.

Nobody believed the cowboy’s tall tale about stumbling through the belly of God, of course. The only man who listened was Abijah Long, a guano miner who cared little for the caves themselves. Hiring Jim White as his foreman, Long leased the land, and the two set about turning twenty thousand years of bat guano into fertilizer for Californian farms. White never lost sight of what he considered the real resource—the caves themselves. Whenever he had a free moment, he continued exploring them and gave tours to whoever asked. For twenty years, he wrote letters trying to get scientists, newspapermen, and the government interested.

When the Department of the Interior finally got around to sending a dubious inspector to New Mexico to check out White’s claims, he returned to Washington a humbled man: “I am wholly conscious of the feebleness of my efforts to convey in the deep conflicting emotions, the feeling of fear and awe, and the desire for an inspired understanding of the Devine [sic] Creator’s work which presents to the human eye such a complex aggregate of natural wonders…” he wrote in his official report.

Calvin Coolidge finally declared Carlsbad Caverns a national park in 1930. It had taken Jim White nearly thirty years of letter writing, but at long last, thanks to the most dogged booster of them all, Carlsbad was fixed on the map. Salvation had come from beneath the very desert they had fought to tame. A dying town built on flimflam, false promises, and failed ventures had finally found a great emptiness that it could sell forever.

It was close to five P.M. when Raffi and David finally pulled up to White’s City, a cluster of tourist shops and motels that clings to
the park entrance. They were road weary, nursing the dregs of a hangover from their night out in Austin, eager to find a place to camp and rest. At the Texaco station just off Highway 62/180, they asked Brian Laxson, an attendant, if he knew of any nearby campgrounds.

“There’s an R.V. park, and you can also camp up at the caverns,” Laxson told them. They decided that the second option, camping in the park itself, was the best choice. They’d be closer to the caves, and it would be cheaper. They hopped back into the Mazda and wound their way up the seven-mile road to the visitor center.

Carlsbad Caverns’ visitor center sits atop a broad plateau—a remnant of the ancient Permian reef that overlooks the surrounding desert for miles. Getting out of the car and stretching, they saw a flat and limitless peel of rusty land, an immense griddle with a horizon that stretched all the way back into Texas. The air conditioner in the Protegé had been set on high; now they abruptly felt the Chihuahuan heat, mixed with the tarred air of the hot summer parking lot.

It was a cool seventy inside the visitor center. The day’s last tourists were exiting the cave elevators, a pair of ingeniously convenient lifts that descend 754 feet straight into the Big Room, a cavern so colossal that it takes an hour to walk its perimeter. The walls of the visitor center were covered with geological exhibits and photographs of the wonders below: towering stalagmite columns, gypsum crystals suspended by threadlike stalks, flowing draperies of sandstone so intricately textured that they resembled forests, broccoli, ice-cream cones. It would have to wait for the morning.

At the information desk, a young ranger with a dark, seaman’s beard was fielding questions from a line of tourists, most of them
interested in that evening’s bat flight—an event that Raffi and David would have wanted to see. In just about an hour, over a million Mexican free-tailed bats would begin their nightly exodus from the caverns’ natural entrance—the same wondrous spectacle that had lured Jim White to the caves a hundred years earlier. Long since then, the park had constructed an amphitheater around the caves’ mouth, allowing visitors to sit comfortably and watch the show unfold. At first, what seems like a few dozen bats whirl around the hole; then, as darkness thickens in the New Mexico sky, so does the bat cloud. They come out in waves of tens of thousands, the buzzing of their wings incessant as the streams grow denser and denser. Finally, they become so concentrated that individual bats lose all identity within the whole, fading into what seems to be a long, giant serpent, winding its way to the southeast, where the bats disperse to spend the night feasting on the insect blooms of the Pecos and Black Rivers.

Unfortunately, hanging around for the bat flight didn’t mesh with David and Raffi’s plan. Sometimes the exodus could last over two hours, and by the time it was over, it would be too dark to make camp. When their turn in line finally came, they asked the bearded ranger, a twenty-three-year-old student from Purdue University named Kenton Eash, what they needed to do in order to camp.

“The nearest place is Rattlesnake Canyon,” Eash explained, pulling out a map of the park’s main roads and trails. To get there, they’d have to drive about five miles down a nearby dirt road, park at the trailhead, then hike about a mile downhill into the canyon, where they could pitch a tent. The friends talked it over. So far, they’d slept in the tent only one time, outside Nashville, and they
were now more than halfway to California. They wouldn’t have many more opportunities to rough it. After a fast consideration, the friends agreed: they were game.

Eash gave them a camping permit to fill out, and Raffi wrote down the make and license number of their car, the number of campers, and both their names. In the box entitled “length of stay” he listed one day. When he was finished, the ranger removed the carbon copy and filed it in a nearby drawer.

The last thing Eash did was read off a list of guidelines for backcountry camping. Most of them were self-explanatory, the kind of rules posted at national park trailheads across America: Lock your car, don’t build any fires (use a gas cooking stove), pack out what you pack in, don’t disturb any plants and animals, buy a topographical map. One of the rules, however, was emphasized above all others. It appeared in a typeface that was italicized, capitalized, and underlined: “There is no water in the backcountry. So you must carry what you need. A minimum of one gallon per person per day is recommended.”

After Eash was done, the pair prepared to head off and make camp. According to the list Eash had just read them, there were two things they needed: water and a topographical map. While Coughlin waited, Kodikian picked up the topo map at the cavern bookstore, then went over to the gift shop to buy water. All they had at the display shelf were pints, which meant that he’d have to buy sixteen bottles to satisfy the advisory.