Journal of the Dead (8 page)

He pulled three bottles from the rack.

J
ust past the visitor center’s west parking lot, a swinging cattle gate marks the beginning of Desert Loop Drive, the dirt road that leads to the Rattlesnake Canyon trailhead. Next to the gate is a brown park service billboard, covered by Plexiglas, with a brief description of the local ecology, a map of the road, and the same list of camping guidelines that Eash had read off earlier. Raffi and David passed this point sometime close to six P.M. Eager to make camp, they likely paid little attention to the sign, but it’s there to remind anyone passing it that they are entering an unmitigated wilderness of Chihuahuan Desert.

A “hot, sandy place” is what the word
Chihuahuan
means in the language of the native Tarahumara Indians. It is not only the largest, but probably the least understood desert in North America. Unlike the Sonoran and Mojave Deserts to the west, it doesn’t look like what everyone expects a desert to look like. The Sonoran has the giant saguaro, that scarecrow of a cactus that children the world over
know from Road Runner cartoons; the Mojave has the otherworldly Joshua tree with its spindly branches and starburst leaves, along with the dunes and salt pans of Death Valley. None of the cacti in the Chihuahuan get very tall, and sand dunes are rare. Vegetation carpets the landscape, but few plants grow more than two feet high. Almost all of them bristle with spines. The plant most emblematic of the Chihuahuan is the deceptively humble lechuguilla, a low-lying cluster of banana-shaped leaves that belongs to the agave family. It lacks the saguaro’s brooding menace, but each rubbery leaf ends in a point that can pierce denim as if it were tissue paper. Every twenty years, the lechugilla sends up a thin, woody stalk that resembles an eight-foot-high shaft of wheat. As Raffi and David drove deeper into the desert, the scattered blooms stuck up from the plateau. It was a surreal world of lonesome antennas.

The origins of that world were far to the south, in Mexico, where a battle between land and sea had been going on for more than 50 million years. Its fronts are two mountain ranges, the Sierra Madre Occidental in western Mexico, and the Sierra Madre Oriental, in the East. Moist air from the Pacific, the Sea of Cortez, and the Gulf of Mexico pushes inland from both coasts until it hits the Sierras and rises. The air cools and condenses above the mountains, showering them with rain, and by the time it reaches the interior there is almost no moisture in it left. Squeezed dry by the two great ranges, it disperses over an area of roughly 220,000 square miles, like a giant, empty cup. Deserts formed this way are called “rain-shadow” deserts, but the term is illusory. It rains only ten inches a year in the Chihuahuan, and shadows don’t get much longer.

Raffi and David knew they would have Rattlesnake Canyon all to themselves when they arrived at the trailhead. No other cars
were parked in the small dirt lot that lies right next to the road, and it was late enough in the day to assume none would be coming.

As far as camping gear went, they considered themselves well equipped. Desert survival books devote entire chapters pondering the precise list of items, right down to individual brands, without which people should never enter the open desert. Raffi and David indeed had some of the core items, such as pocketknives, hats, sunglasses, boots, flashlights, matches, Band-Aids, and cigarette lighters. But there were key items they didn’t have—a compass, a signal mirror, binoculars, a whistle, and a first-aid kit. The rest of their gear was standard camping equipment that’s good to have anywhere: for shelter, they had a tent, sleeping bags, and foam pads; and for cooking, they had a portable stove, fuel, three frying pans, dishes, and some Tupperware containers. To eat, they packed a can of creamed corn, a large can of beans, half a bag of hot dogs, some buns, and a few energy bars. Among the numerous trivial items they brought in were some playing cards and a few cigars. Raffi also brought along the journal and some pens.

When they were ready to go, they locked up the Mazda, shouldered their packs, and struck off down the trail. It was all downhill, and as they hiked, every fifty yards or so they passed rock cairns—fifteen-inch-high piles of white limestone—that marked the route down to the canyon floor. Now and then the trail would skirt an overlook, and they would get a view of the terrain below. It looked like a lonely backdrop from an old western: a rocky moonscape of canyon, cacti, and bone-dry riverbed.

After about twenty minutes, they reached the canyon floor, where they stopped to rest and drink some water. They both carried a pint bottle Raffi had bought (the third was packed away
with their gear), and they chugged at them voraciously. Sunset was approaching, but the temperature still clung to the mid-eighties, and they had worked up a sweat on the way down.

The terrain was now flat, and they could camp anywhere they wanted. But as tired as they were, they elected to move on. There were only two directions they could go: up the canyon, following a trail to their right, or down it to the left. The trail down the canyon—or southeast—would have been the logical choice. It’s the main trail, marked on the map by a bold dotted line. The trail up and to the northwest is lightly dotted—a “primitive route” according the key.

They took the trail less traveled. Turning right, they hiked up the canyon. After about a mile, they left the trail entirely, wandering another quarter mile up a side canyon to the west. The site they finally chose was next to a rock face on the side canyon’s wall, where an abutting horizontal slab of stone provided a natural bench. They leaned the packs up against it, set up the tent, and prepared to eat.

Dinner was hot dogs and creamed corn. But as soon as they started to cook the dogs, they realized they needed water to boil them in. They opened the last full pint of water they had, poured it into the pot, and lit the stove. When the food was ready they had the first meal of their new adventure, quenching their thirst with a bottle of Gatorade.

Satisfied, they kicked back on the rocks and talked. Dusk was settling in now, profoundly softening the character of the desert. During the day’s heat, Rattlesnake Canyon can seem hostile, but as the night’s cooling begins, colors deepen and change as rapidly as the temperature, and the earth’s iron reds and the cacti’s pale
greens buzz and glow with an almost hallucinogenic depth. They say that if you stare at the desert around Carlsbad long enough, you can envision the time when it was all water. The Capitan Reef is there in the shapes. Stare at that lechugilla stem long enough, and after a while it becomes something tunicate, a lonely sponge rising from the ancient reef. That prickly pear cactus, you suddenly realize, is not unlike a fan coral, while mice, rabbits, snakes, lizards, and road runners dart among the scrub like fish in sea grass. The primordial liquid roof is gone, exchanged for sky, but the fundaments of form remain.

Dave pulled out his camera and took a shot of their tent, neatly set up in a New Mexico canyon, so far from where they had started their journey. The friends had come a long way—about twenty-seven hundred miles in only six days. They felt as if they were still racing down the highway whenever they closed their eyes to sleep. All that distance felt like quite an accomplishment. And there was still plenty more country to come. Tomorrow they’d get to see the caves, then head over to the Grand Canyon—wonders of nature they knew they’d remember for the rest of their lives. And there was California, which they’d make by Saturday. But thoughts of seeing the Pacific wore a wistful lace: that would quite literally be the end of the road, and they were old enough not to have many illusions. Their friendship as they had known it for the last few years would almost certainly be radically diluted by distance, time, and life’s new courses. Oh, they’d promise to keep in touch, maybe even talk about taking another trip in the future or seeing each other over Christmas, but odds were that they’d never spend so much time together again.

As the sky blued into black, they chatted and passed the
Gatorade bottle back and forth, finishing it off as the Milky Way pooled bright above them, bridging the gap between the shadowy canyon walls with impossible clarity.

Morning in Rattlesnake Canyon has its own kind of charm. Mule deer clop over ridges, desert cottontails freeze and scatter in the scrub, kangaroo mice seem to bounce on air as they jump across the canyon floor. When the friends woke up at around eight the following morning, the animals of the desert were preparing for bed, finishing up the night’s foraging before the day’s heat sent them to shade.

“Leave no trace,” one of the park’s camping guidelines had read. Raffi and David did their best to follow it to the letter as they broke camp. They bagged up all their garbage, patrolled their gear, and as they started back to the car, they were pleasantly satisfied that the little side canyon lay almost exactly as they had found it.

It was perfect walking weather: seventy-five degrees, with a few clouds low in the sky. As the friends ambled along the canyon floor they took their time and enjoyed the rustle and hum of the desert wildlife. Dave wore his camera around his neck and kept an eye out for potential shots. So far, he’d taken far fewer photos on the trip than he’d expected, and now that he was in the West he was hoping to make up for it.

After hiking just over a mile, they came to a cairn on the edge of the riverbed. Next to it was a path through a small brush field that appeared to head toward the canyon’s eastern slopes, which they remembered coming down the previous evening. They also remembered thinking that all that easy downhill going would be
uphill going the next morning, so now they paused to rest and pulled out their water bottles.

There wasn’t much left from the last night’s hike and then boiling the hot dogs—about a half pint each. But there was a full bottle of Gatorade waiting for them back at the car, only minutes away. They polished off the remainder to fortify themselves for the climb out.

Setting off again, they followed the trail into the brush field for about a hundred yards, and were quietly surprised when it took them right back into riverbed. Another fifty or so yards later, they both started to get a funny feeling. None of the surroundings seemed familiar.

“The trail out must be somewhere back in the field, because this one looks like it just keeps on going down the canyon,” they reasoned.

They promptly about-faced and paced off the entire path again, this time meticulously scanning the canyon slopes to their left as they searched for more cairns marking the trail out. But all they saw was an unbroken face of cactus, brush, and limestone boulders.

They stood at the edge of the brush field and thought it out: if they didn’t recognize anything after the field, and there was no junction in the field itself, then the only logical conclusion was that the exit was even farther back, probably no more than a few hundred yards. They left the field and backtracked up the canyon floor, confident that their logic was sound. After reversing a hundred yards or so they saw something that seemed reassuring: several cairns, lying in a wide spot in the bed, a flood wash where a small side canyon joined Rattlesnake’s main channel. They were looking for a junction, and the cairns sitting in this natural convergence
seemed to suggest that the exit trail passed through the area as well. Knowing that their car was to the east, they resumed searching the slopes in that direction for more cairns, expecting to see one any second. But once again, they were mystified to see none.

They pulled out the topographical map Raffi had bought the night before. Published by Trails Illustrated in 1996 and designed in collaboration with the park service, it was a high-quality rendering of the entire park, made of ultrathin, waterproof plastic. On one side were extensive maps of the caverns, while the other offered a detailed topography of the park’s backcountry, complete with trails, roads, springs, riverbeds, and explanatory text. The $7.95 Raffi had shelled out for it the night before had seemed steep, but now they were hoping it would pay off.

They’d both seen topographical maps before, but neither of them had actually used one, and at first glance it was intimidating. Unfolded, the map was about twelve square feet with intricate, hair-thin contour lines exploding everywhere. But they knew the basic idea: the denser areas represented rapid increases in elevation, the wider lines were more gradual. Each 2 × 2-inch square represented a square mile, and there were more than 130 squares in all. They located the road and the trailhead where the car was parked, then followed the dotted line of the access trail down to the Rattlesnake Canyon trail, which they knew they were standing right on top of. The entire trail fell within four square miles—a mere eight square inches in that vast spread of paper, and they kept squinting among the swirling lines, then looking back at the giant, three-dimensional world surrounding them for points of reference. There were about five peaks nearby, but establishing their relative height was nearly impossible while looking up at them from the constricted
confines of the canyon. The map quickly became an exercise in irony: the rendering of Rattlesnake Canyon would have made a lot more sense if they weren’t in the canyon already.