Interior Grand Canyon
February
AS SOON AS THE WATER TOUCHED AIR, IT ROARED LIKE a violent god. An underground river struck sunlight, thundering from the face of a cliff. I could hear it a mile away, the sound lifting from an envelope of canyons, shuddering against boulders and eventually, from far enough away, turning to a distant, static hiss. The water came from somewhere inside the planet—no one knows the actual source. Experiments have been performed on these explosive springs at the north walls of the Grand Canyon, traceable radioactive isotopes scattered in the water of the country far above to see where they might emerge in the desert five thousand feet below. The isotopes have only van ished, drawn into puzzling underground passageways, taken to some remote spring and spilled onto the ground unrecorded.
I came to the floor of the Grand Canyon, following canyons and the side canyons of side canyons for three weeks. On this day I hiked toward the source of unusually clear water cascading like an alpine creek in the desert: water born from a distant, bolting spring. I reached its origin, which was a waterfall pouring straight from the rock, and stood just beyond where it struck the earth with such force I could feel an erratic heartbeat in the ground. The vision was incongruous: desert cliffs rising thousands of feet, bare and dry as chalkboards, and out of one, the emergence of water. It plunged hundreds of feet from the high face, pounding against several ledges, then rumbled into boulders with the strength of a river. What was more incongruous than the sight was the sound. This was a spring by definition, a tap into an underground water source, not bubbling and singing like the larger springs I had seen, but bellowing furiously at the air.
For fifteen minutes I climbed a series of narrow ledges until hugging the final wall, fingers crimped to the rock as this waterfall sprung three feet to my right. The falls dropped about forty stories beneath my feet. Just at the point of discharge, where water appeared from rock as if from the touch of Moses' staff, I could see an opening in the wall where dollops of flying water met their first bluish light.
There was madness to this. The water seemed desperate to get out, to be born, wanting. Mad with ignorance, too, it knew nothing of the outside world, completely pure at this very second. Just at the entrance came a deep, hollow sound, like a bow dragged across a string bass. It sounded frightening, as if I were too close to something I should be watching from a distance. To get inside of this spring and its cave I would have to enter through the waterfall, through the sound, wedge into that hole, and work against the push of water. My first thought was that I would instantly be blown out, sent sailing down with the falls. My second was that I would not be able to turn and exit the cave without losing my grip. I was already testing my body by hanging on this edge. Mist skated against me. The trembling of stone and water worked into my bones, into my face pressed to the wall. I clutched the rock for several minutes, ducking my head into my shoulders, wincing at the force. Wind leaked out of the hole, from around the edges. A wet, steady wind.
I inched closer, creeping to a thin spine of rock, reaching my right arm until it touched water, until it recoiled and tugged at the muscles in my chest. Moving this fast, the water felt like a stinging flood of pea gravel. I dropped my foot and worked my way to the next ledge below, backing away from the spring.
Returning to the base of the falls, I stared at threads of mist trailing into the sky, feeling the shivering of the ground. I studied the dry cliff, the mentally agonizing anomaly of a spring out of a wall. And what is behind this? What is in the dark, inside of the rock where the water has no idea of daylight?
I waited a year. Came back in February. The man with me was a friend, Keith Knadler, a tile setter and river guide out of southwestern New Mexico. We had both traveled the backcountry together and had, at different times, approached this one spring, both of us climbing to the same rock spine, plunging our hands into the flow. He is the one who first told me of this place. Now we brought the equipment necessary to enter the cave: wet suits, webbing for climbing, and metal chocks that could be slid into cracks as anchors.
We entered the Grand Canyon midday with heavy packs, finding a way through a deepening gorge off one of the northern rims. The Grand Canyon is arranged so that down the center flows a single river, about three hundred miles in length, and feeding in from every side along the river's length are six hundred more canyons, some twenty or fifty or one hundred miles long, then thousands of canyons feeding into those. We were coming down one of the thousands across difficult terrain without trails. Boulders stared up from the floor of our canyon, looking back to where they had started, maybe one hundred feet higher. Many were freshly shattered, plugged into the sand, or broken across each other. Everything above was poised for falling, leaving the bottom clogged. It was the scent of a crime scene, blood trails still wet, the powder of boulders yet to blow away. Packs were slung over the wreckage, handholds taken as we lowered crack by crack, short, agonizing leaps made with the weight of full packs driving tendons and small bones into our ankles. Keith was tall, lithe. He moved cleanly. I followed his feet and his hands, trying to take after him, to move without doubt. We vanished into this interior web of canyons on each other's trail.
During these first days of a weeklong trek to the waterfall, our eyes adjusted to the dimness, pupils wide to screen out engulfing shadows. In the canyon's dusk, every color shifted one notch toward the darker blue end of the spectrum, an effect I have seen elsewhere only at the ground level of Wall Street in Manhattan, where buildings crop the light of the sky until the value of each color—people's skin, sidewalks, and granite facades—is forced to the blue. At each sharp turn, where cliff walls caved into the floor, the boulders rioted. They threw both sharp edges and smooth, slick faces. These we climbed silently, as we found small holds, sliding our gear down, hoisting it up the other side. I had my boot on a hold no thicker than a matchstick, my right hand groping around, Keith about four feet straight above me, when I felt the weight of my pack. It tugged and I shot a glance over my shoulder into a dark pool directly below. I teetered for a second, gritting my teeth, feeling the edge of a fingernail split against the solid limestone. Without looking down, Keith said, quietly, almost so that I did not hear him, “You've got to really want it.” He knew exactly where I was. He was talking about these handholds, and about climbing. I obeyed, taking the next hold as if there was no mistake, finding a strong grip above that one and pulling myself up, the pack heavy as a sack of iron. At the top we pushed away flood debris and slid down the opposite side into deep mud. Then, in a pen of boulders, we rested, sitting against the steel-cold limestone, backpacks slumped into one another to prop us up, our faces expressionless, arms poured limp into our laps.
The two sides of the Grand Canyon, the north and south divided by the Colorado River, have different spring water. Here on the north side, where the Kaibab Plateau flushes out large underground volumes, the taste of springs does not alter much from place to place. On the opposite side, below the South Rim, I have found that water tastes different at nearly every canyon. The earth there is tilted differently, changing the entire network of springs. Most South Rim water comes out slowly and tastes ancient, biting at the tongue like seawater. It is old water, having seeped twenty-five hundred feet into the ground to wait indefinitely in underground baths of minerals before leaking out. High calcium-magnesium bicarbonate concentrations are easily detected in the mouth, easy to spit out. The water on this side, beneath the North Rim, does not wait. The angle of rock formations sends it down rapidly, sometimes exploding it from the faces of cliffs.
One upshot of salty, laggard South Rim water is that it is not markedly radioactive. The water is old enough that it shows no sign of the decades of nuclear weapons testing. Unstable isotopes, embedded into the atomic structure of the water, cannot be filtered out as springs percolate through the ground. So the South Rim aquifer shows no trace of the nuclear age, having received its water long before people began tinkering with atomic bombs. Meanwhile, North Rim water is hot with tritium, as irradiated as most tap water and bottled water—not especially dangerous to human health, but notable on a Geiger counter.
This is not to say that all the springs on the sides of the Grand Canyon are rooted into only two distinct wells, one being salty and prehistoric, the other being fresh and radioactive. The underside of the Grand Canyon actually looks like a motherboard of circuitry with lines crossing from one region to the next, springs interlaced where they meet underground. Some springs will not alter their flows for a hundred years, while others nearby perk to each rainstorm and die with every drought. For the most part, though, springs on the north side carry young water, no more than forty years old. Springs to the south probably date back thousands or tens of thousands of years.
The main canyon below us took on its own springs as we hiked farther inside—North Rim springs that were clean, easy on the tongue. They welled out of bare rock, draining to the floor, eventually filling the canyon with a clear creek. This troubled our work. It sent us higher onto shelves. It filled our boots with water, causing us to skid and slosh.
If a hole is dug this deep anywhere on the planet, water will probably come out. The Grand Canyon is a hole over five thousand feet deep, nearly three hundred miles long, its side canyons severing aquifers left and right. This kind of hole opens underground floodgates in almost every canyon. No other desert in the world has such a blatant show of spring water.
The waterfall
Each day about 400 million gallons of water spill from rocks into the Grand Canyon—enough, statistically, to supply several hours of showers, irrigation, car washes, toilet-flushing, lawn-watering, and faucets left running to the entire population of California. But when engineers stand on the high rims with drilling rigs, even with so much water beneath them, their target is elusive. Caverns and subterranean hairline passages break and turn around one another, some of them filled with water, others abandoned and dry. So to find water, it is best to come all the way to the bottom, to the interior desert canyons where it appears. The cruel complexity of buried joints and faults reveals itself in sweet, graceful gestures, having evaded the poking of well drillers who go three thousand feet for water.
Most of the water used by humans in the Grand Canyon is indeed drawn from these desert sources. In the central Grand Canyon, a waterfall appears from a cave, a place called Roaring Springs, turned into the public water supply for both North Rim and South Rim developments. I traveled there ten months earlier, to where power lines slung down thousands of feet, sweeping over cliffs to a pump station and helicopter pad. The mouth of the cave was penetrated by a pipe that rerouted much of the water down to the pump station.
The station processing the spring water held an assortment of hex wrenches, hard hats hung from pegs, grease guns, and hand-turned valve wheels big as car tires. Display boards flickered with lights and commands. The pump housing, which now contained the spring, had been constructed by Bethlehem Steel.
As I walked through the pump house, I found myself staring at a sign. It read:
DO NOT LOOSEN TWO-BOLT CLAMP BEFORE CLOSING LINE SHUT-OFF VALVES AND DEFLATING CARTRIDGE
The sign seemed out of place because it said nothing of an underground river or the darkness within. I had arrived on a day when the pipeline broke open, so the pump had to be shut down. I hiked with the station operator, a man named Bruce Aiken, up the steep embankment to where Roaring Springs emerged from the cave and entered a series of pipes. He came to adjust the flow while the break was being repaired.
Surrounding the cave were stairs and platforms made of metal grates, sealed off with a locked gate and barbed wire. Straight into the mouth led a red, corroding pipe with a T-joint sending another pipe into an adjacent cave. A smaller pipe led a quarter-mile inside, used for water quality testing. My immediate thought was that, shoved into the cave, the pipes looked like some grotesque catheter.
I climbed the stairs behind Bruce as he unlocked the gate. With rigid grating, all cave entrances had been closed around the pipes to keep bats out. Their guano might contaminate the water supply. As Bruce spent half an hour adjusting the valve handle, restarting the water to both rims, I opened one of the bat grates and peered into the darkness. The water moved steadily, its surface silken. I reached in and touched it.
I know of a single spring on the east side of the Grand Canyon that shoves 100,000 gallons a minute out of one hole into the desert. The Hopi of northern Arizona call this spring the sipapu. It is symbolized by the hole dug into the center of each of their ceremonial kivas, the hole from which they climbed into this world from the drowning dark of the last. It is nothing like a water hole that sits waiting in a rainwater depression. It is literally bursting, throwing itself from the hole. The affiliation the Hopi have claimed with this spring is not happenstance. It is the sipapu, the place, and is not mistaken for any other spring nearby, and no other tribe has claimed ownership to it. It could be said that the Hopis' emergence from the sipapu is merely unsubstantiated myth, but in the area of the spring archaeologists have consistently found prehistoric pottery that can be traced only to the Hopi culture.
Fourteen miles, twenty-nine canyons, and innumerable springs to the west of the sipapu is another noted spring. The Zuni, who now reside primarily in New Mexico, claim this as their emergence point. Springs here are so unique, so individual, that there is never cultural confusion between one and the next. Hydrologists have found that the reservoirs beneath these two ceremonial springs originate in entirely separate parts of Arizona. Their waters differ in age, in fact, by thousands of years.
We came to a spring that flushed probably ten gallons a minute to the canyon floor from a heavy garden of willow, columbine flowers, horsetails, seepwillow, cattails, and maidenhair ferns. It was young water, fair tasting. Scrambling into the vegetation, we hunted its source, relieved to be free of our packs, finding any excuse for a break. We spent fifteen minutes getting poked and scraped until reaching a dense mat of monkeyflowers. Pushing away the covering revealed a single, fist-size hole. Water swelled from inside.
It is always like this finding the source of water—a second of silence, the clandestine enchantment of encountering something small and sacred, then down on knees to see where it actually appears, how far inside I can reach. Without discussion I rolled up my sleeve and stuck my hand in. I looked up at Keith, who was waiting to see if something would happen. Nothing did. He nodded, so I stuck my forearm farther into this tunnel of roots thin as dental floss, following a passage straight down. I drew my forearm out, rolled my sleeve farther, and slipped back in, finding small pebbles held in suspension by the water's force. Then I pulled off my shirt and moved my entire arm in until I was flush to the earth, my hand prodding into the underworld.
Keith took his turn at it. He got his elbow down the hole, then jumped back, yanking his arm out with a panic. He studied his hand for a moment, as if he had burned it, but could not find the injury. He flexed his fingers. “I have this distinct memory,” he said. “I was very young and I stuck my hand down a hole in my neighbor's backyard. I got down to my armpit and something grabbed me.”
“Something?” I asked.
“Something, someone, I don't know. I can't really explain it.”
“What kind of hole?”
“The kind of hole kids stick their hands into.”
“Why did you stick your hand in it?”
“Because it was a hole.”
I stood still, reviewing his words, looking for deeper meaning. There wasn't any. His logic was clear. The Hopis and the Zunis struggled to get out of the hole, climbing up to this world of light and air, while we struggle to get back in.
This spring was part of a larger network. A hundred yards downstream we found a massive deck of ferns out of which poured a shower. The ferns had gathered over time, collecting among their leaflets tons of blow sand, precipitated minerals, roots, rhizomes, twigs, leaves, and dead insects. The spring sank into this flying buttress and disseminated through it. Out the underside came streams of a spreading waterfall, pouring eight feet into the creek below. A forest of triangular leaves shivered against the droplets, hanging pillars of ferns sending streamers to the ground.
Keith and I stripped naked and stepped underneath, scratching at our flesh to clean off the sweat and mud, feeling the sting of wounds penetrated by fresh water. We scrubbed our scalps with fingernails and opened our mouths, letting them fill like bowls before swallowing.
The place sounded like a steady winter rain in western Washington, overflowing the roof gutters, slapping the garden stones all night long. But it had not rained in this part of Arizona for months. The desert could be seen beyond: ladders of prickly pear cactus hanging from rock ledges, and simple, dry daggers of agaves sending seed stalks to the air, blooming only once in a life that could last decades. There was blow sand out there that would slide like flour through fingers. The world beyond was slow and sere. Here it was sudden and quite alive. Our arms reached upward, into the rainstorm, brushing the luxurious undersides of maidenhair ferns, pulling rivulets down to our faces and chests and legs, turning our bodies into connection points, like spark plugs or lightning rods. We carried water.
The main canyon became ridiculously huge and dark. It led us through days of work, sometimes five straight hours of walking the pointed tips of boulders. We set camps under ledges and in gravel heaps left by floods.
On the fifth evening we had climbed from the main canyon and were now diving in and out of one canyon after the next, walking up one, down another along a washboard of chasms. We reached the narrowest slot so far and slept inside, on a lip where water spilled above and below us. I set my bag on a smooth back of sandstone, my left arm nearly in the water, feet pointed downstream. Water came around my right, too, leaving me on an island about four feet wide. We were only cutting across this particular side canyon, not needing to travel along it. Still, I kept looking down there, wanting to get inside, listening to the roaring siphon of water. Overhead was a view of the Pleiades and Hyades star clusters framed by the walls as if they had been cut out of the sky to be stuck onto a bulletin board.
I had studied the canyon closely during the last light of the day, while after dinner we walked its ledges without gear. Carved in a chocolate- and cranberry-colored sandstone, the canyon was darker than those of the blue-gray limestone. Sandstone resisted water differently, curving like child-bearing hips into a narrow abyss. My body wished to be inside. Not just my eyes with their cursory craving, but my flesh. Water ran into it, forming clamorous waterfalls that vanished around the next bend below.
Above were handprints. These made the canyon even more peculiar, more curious to me. They were left by the Anasazi, predecessors of the Hopi and Zuni, the pre-Columbian culture that first built kivas, and the hole to symbolize the emergence from the sipapu. Possibly the prints were eight hundred years old. Hidden among ledges, they had been painted on outcrops and within recesses hundreds of feet up from the floor. They were made of white paint sprayed against hands so that negative impressions remained, both of children and adults, all of the handprints with fingers spread as if holding up the rocks. They were probably sprayed when paint was blown from a person's mouth, a mist of white drifting away with the constant canyon breeze. I had seen many such paintings throughout the desert, but always they had been at functional locations, places where people could live, or at least hold an audience or build a granary. These prints were more geographic. In a place consisting of only rock and water, nowhere for a person to live, they seemed to be a recognition that this canyon is different from the rest.
I did not observe the prints one by one. Instead I stood back and looked across them, changing my vantage by sitting on a boulder or down by the water until I could see more of them. From numerous ledges they overlooked the canyon like spectators. More handprints appeared the farther I looked. It was not the sense of antiquity that was so striking, but the feeling of importance granted here. Of the thousands of canyons and side canyons within the Grand Canyon, this one became the focus of such attention.
Every other slot canyon I had seen, so carefully hewn to such depth and narrowness, had been dry, or held only the murky, stagnant water of past floods. This one cradled a clean stream, every drop of it spring-fed. It rounded inside as if it were a woman's voice singing down a stairway. Eight hundred years ago the Anasazi knew this was distinct and marked it so.
The next day I suggested entering this canyon of handprints, even though we had planned to only walk across, using this canyon as a bridge to another. Just to explore, I said. I pulled my wet suit out, so that I could last for more than five minutes in this cold spring water. Keith was in a different mood. The trek had worn on us both, but had taken particular vengeance on him. His right Achilles tendon had swollen as if filled with hot sand. The back of his left knee was red, something torn beneath his skin. He decided to stay high, to take the time to dry his gear and study these handprints. He rigged a hand line at one of the interior rims for me, anchoring it to a metal chock he inserted into a crack. “Okay, this is just a guide line,” he told me. “Don't put all your weight on it. I'll be up here for an hour, then I'm coming looking for you.”
“An hour,” I confirmed, feeling taken care of, tugging at the line to test it. I looked up a last time to a constellation of white handprints over our heads, then climbed down on his line. The line ran out before reaching water, so I inched across a ledge and jumped in. The wet suit, a Farmer John variety, came over my shoulders to leave a circle where my chest and throat met. The water was cold, in the low fifties, so I tried not to go in over the circle, not to let the water touch my bare throat. I dog-paddled to a shallower reach, then waded into the canyon with water running nearly to my waist, pushing me along. The canyon bunched tight. I followed archways and dark, narrow tubes of rock, feeling exact hydrological values around my thighs as the water raced past.
The canyon turned into stone carvings, shapes swelling, masking the sky, marking water's passage with involute profiles. The entire canyon floor was an adaptive geometry to the motion of water; each of the shapes, the shallow cups and yawning bends, documented the curve of water's energy. Canyons this intricate are not grotesque like most active geology—the scrambled heaps of mountains, tossed boulders, and rock slides. This is the finest of geomorphology, like wing prints against snow. The stray, momentary strands of moving water leave no impression in the rock. They are too transient. But the fundamental and insistent currents leave signs, so that the bare feathers of moving water are recorded here.
I thought briefly back to Cabeza Prieta, and the recollection startled me. Water had been written all over that landscape, but very roughly, shown in shapes visible from above, in an airplane, where washes and canyons would appear orderly among the fallen blocks of mountains. To have imagined this kind of water and this kind of delicate canyon from Cabeza Prieta would have been almost a sin. It was difficult enough to imagine water there at all. The austere point that water had brought itself to in those water holes was now being traced in cursive, spelling out novels on down the canyon. But still, handprints had been painted here, just like the single handprint painted near the monumental tinaja of Cabeza Prieta. The different brands of water undoubtedly produced different cultures, but the recognition was the same.
At a waterfall dropping maybe twenty feet, I removed a coiled length of webbing I had carried around my left shoulder. The falls formed where boulders clogged the floor, forcing water to run across their roofs. I stood on a boulder's point looking down, unraveling the webbing.
The webbing reached to the frothing pool below. I anchored it to a stack of boulders and tied into it seven loops as handholds, measuring them out with my eyes, carefully tugging each one tight. As a backup, I secured an extra anchor using a small wire stopper with a metal block on the end that fit down a crack in the rock. I climbed into the waterfall, putting my full weight on the loops. The waterfall pounded at my head like fists. I sputtered, looking for air, blinking water out of my eyes. Cold water filled my wet suit, drenching the exposed flesh of my throat, causing a strong breath to leap like a ghost from my mouth. My hand groped down for the next loop. My feet searched the slick rock for something, a crack or nub or any slight imperfection. Then down to the next loop, my legs entering the concussing pool at the bottom. My feet traced the fine lips of holes and tureens in the rock, seeking different currents, finding a place to stand. Once I let go, the webbing snapped out of my hands and bucked as if being tugged by an animal. I continued from there, ducking into lower causeways.
Eventually there came a pool too long and deep to swim. I would lose my body heat. I moved to the tip of the last boulder, looking down the corridor. When I glanced upstream, I saw handprints just beside me, fingers spread just like those painted up high. For a second I was confused by these. No one would have painted anything down here, not this low in the canyon. All the other handprints were high, out of view from here. Paint could never hold against floods. The rock cannot even hold.
Then the paint faded, soaking into sandstone. It was water. The handprints were mine. I had been moving with my wet right hand along the concave wall, using it not as a support but as a reference point.
My handprint was larger than those of the Anasazi, but it had the same configuration, spread as if meaning something: studying the shape of the rock, telling a story about a passage, announcing that the forms are all the same—water, stories, the body. The prints faded into the coffee-colored sandstone. I turned back. My hour was up.
On the sixth day we took a route across a high saddle over numerous feeder canyons. The top was a region of boulders, great red sandstone balls and disks worn from sitting out, hot in the sun. When we came to the cliff edge over one of the canyons, we heard the roar. It was the waterfall I had seen a year ago. Walking off the edge, down through crumbled boulders, we reached a point where we could see it emerging in a clean free fall, then bursting against ledges, sending a rampage of water out of sight into the descending canyon. The full length of the falls was about four hundred feet, with numerous shelves, breaking it into white explosions aside long, diaphanous skirts of water. It emerged from the cave, appearing out of a strikingly green beard of moss and other plants, an absolute anomaly up on the cliff.
We disposed of all gear except what was now needed and climbed toward the waterfall from the southwest, taking a ledge that clung to the wall. The ledge petered out, leaving a small clip of rock at eye level that could be pinched with both hands to support our bodies. We used this pinch to swing over an eighty-foot drop, blindly planting our feet across where the ledge restarted. Gear was shuttled ahead, passed from shelf to shelf while our faces and fingertips hugged the wall. It would have been safer to bring equipment—carabiners, anchors, harnesses, rope—but the weight would have been too much. It would have stalled us long ago, so we brought what we could. After suiting up with headlamps, webbing, and wet suits on one of the larger shelves, about a foot and a half wide, we climbed to the final spine of rock, where last year I had huddled, fearful, reaching my arm into the water.
It was quiet work here. We had fear, of course. My breathing was quick. My chest ached from nervousness in the sticky wrap of the wet suit. At the entrance, from the spine, we rigged a piece of webbing that could be grabbed in an emergency, if we lost footing and got sucked into the waterfall. Keith called it the “Oh, shit” line.
It was important to move straight into this, not to hesitate because of fear or too much caution. We would never make it in if we delayed here. For days now we had recited our mantra of We don't have to enter the cave. We could just get there and look through the entrance, deciding that we had seen plenty, that it was too dangerous, and walk back with clean consciences. We knew that these words were lies, becoming more and more lies as our days wore on our bodies. We came to enter the cave, to walk inside of a spring.
I took the line in my left hand and reached with my right foot into the brink of the waterfall, facing into the cave. Water separated around my calf, sending sprays into the air. I watched over my shoulder to see down about forty feet where the spray twisted and rejoined the falls. Once I had my next foot in, I was able to brace my hands into the entrance of the cave, swift water rising to the tops of my thighs, then bulging to my hips as I pushed forward. The water could not have been much warmer than a glass of ice water.
Keith was just getting his hands around the corner, looking toward the dark. Half in and half out, I turned to look at the daylight, to make sure we knew what we were doing, that we were making the right decision, and our eyes met once. “Pierce the veil,” Keith commanded. I nodded and turned inside.
It was firehose water, charging from a crack. Nothing was soft in here. The rock, a hard limestone, was sharpened into small thorns and razors. If I were to lose my grip, I would be hamburgered before getting another hold, before getting washed out of the waterfall. Immediately my wet suit ripped where I brushed against one of the thorns. My fingers hunted out smooth places, cautiously fitting into niches, then taking some weight.
This was nothing like yesterday's sensuous, refined canyon, hugging me down through its narrows. This was absolutely raw. The water had not yet learned about daylight, about carving a path with all of its slender grace. Its knowledge was primal here. I searched ahead with my headlamp. Within a minute I left the last remnants of sunlight and turned off my light for a few seconds. Complete darkness. I waved my free hand, saw no motion at all. The boom of water stole my remaining senses.
My headlamp on, I glanced back once to see if Keith had entered. He was gripped to a wall, pulling himself ahead, making the same moves I had made. I recognized his reach, and his recoil when he tore his wet suit on a thorn.
The water did not slow as I moved farther inside. Deafening and inarticulate, the sound was terrifying. A hundred opposing currents twined up my body, to my crotch, my navel, my chest. They fumbled like mad hands demanding, racing around my legs, yanking at me, vanishing behind me toward the exit. My body hardly dented the water's boiling surface. Rivers burst from multiple corridors, pouring from crescent hallways as if bulkheads had blown in a sinking ship.
“Choice!” I shouted.
Keith, an arm's length behind me, yelled, “Which is bigger?”
I threw my arm out to a passage on the right.
“Take it!”
We followed these rifts for at least a hundred yards, turning back at dead ends, the cones of our headlamps shifting from water to ceiling to water. I could smell our bodies, the saporous, fertile stink of life floating aside our breath. Nothing else alive or dead in here. We came to a low archway, our lights piercing the turquoise interior. There was only enough headroom in front of us for breathing, no way to tell how far the passage led around the next bend. I looked toward Keith, shining the light at his chest so it would not strike his eyes.
The sound ahead was like wind pushed down a glass tube. “Should we keep going?” I asked.
We were spidered between knobs and walls, holding ourselves in place despite the current so that our limbs made strange angles against the rock. Keith crouched until his shoulders met the river's surface. He studied the passageway.
I did not want to drown in a cave. It was one of the more horrible ends I could imagine, pressed to the ceiling as my headlamp shorts out. So we stared at this low passage that would seal off if the water came up six inches. Keith squinted as we both trained our lights on the same spot, as far in as we could see. Mist rolled from his mouth into the beam of his light. “Looks like the way,” he said.
He took a handhold on the ceiling and pulled himself in. The choice was made. I followed, studying every turn ahead with my light, taking holds in the limestone over my head, hauling myself along. My head slid underneath as I gripped my way through, my feet touching rock now and then. The passage did not widen, but after fifteen feet of travel became much taller, maybe forty feet. It was in this last passage that I passed ahead and wedged into a tight hole, with Keith shouting behind me that the cave ended here.
I kept trying ahead, but found the water only coming from the ceiling, from holes too tight to even take my hand. I turned back and looked at Keith. This was already more than I had anticipated. I had thought we would maybe venture a hundred feet into the spring, but it seemed as if we had now worked a quarter-mile back.
I pushed out my right hand like a stop sign. “This is it. No more.”
Keith pointed toward dry boulders and mantles above us. “What about up?”
Our headlamps brushed the ceiling, showing a few passages. We went up. Each of us tried a different dry route, climbing through dust and pieces of rubble. I ascended a chimney, emerging into a room the size of an aircraft hangar. Perhaps seventy feet tall and over a hundred feet long, its ceiling was a lifted dome, its floor a garden of waterfalls and pools. Darkness ate my beam of light toward the back. A quarter-mile into a desert cliff, beneath two thousand feet of solid rock, inside the belly of the mother, was this: a buried grotto with the broken plumbing of a spring sending water everywhere. As I walked, my light took on altering values, passing through swift water, still water, deep water, sheeting water, plumes of mist, and shiny, wet stones. The river ran the width of a street.
When Keith arrived, we stood together, our headlamps casting about the space. Nothing was said. The water was still loud, but had more definition in here. We could hear individual waterfalls instead of the galling roar of the corridors below.
At the far end sat a broad, deep well, its surface motionless beneath a tapering ten-foot ceiling. Our lights drifted into the lagoon-blue water and to the cerulean boulders sunken beneath. Green ribs of reflected light traced the ceiling into farther chambers.
“You want to go on?” I asked.
“I'm getting really cold.”
“Yeah, I'm feeling that too. You want to go on?”
He waited, studying the length of the swim, the shape of the ceiling. “Yes,” he said.
We slipped into the well and swam across. In the center of my stomach I felt the drawing weight of the space below. I looked down to see if my feet might brush anything. There was no bottom within reach of my light. I did not look down again.
Now, when it touched the flesh of my throat, the water cut my blood. Sharp on the jugular, the cold moved directly into my body, pumped without reservation into my heart. Our gasping, percussive breaths came in rhythm with our strokes, as if we were trying to throw the cold from our mouths. We rounded one bend, swimming side by side as the ceiling came down to a smooth cupola five feet over our heads. We swam into one of the inside hallways.
“I can't,” Keith blurted between breaths. “Too cold. I've got to go back.”
We treaded for a moment, facing each other. The cold was now all the way in. “I'm keeping on,” I said. “Just around this next corner.”
“All right, but I'm going back.”
“I'll be right behind you, in a few minutes.”
“Go,” he said, as he turned to swim out the way we had entered.
Cold followed the path of veins beneath my skin, into my organs. I swam ahead another several strokes before drifting into a back room, a slight wake pushing ahead of me. By now the sounds of rushing water had faded. I climbed to a shelf and stood knee-deep, flexing the muscles in my arms and legs for warmth. My mind was already faltering toward hypothermia, my thoughts becoming rudimentary, drifting away as if I were falling asleep. My face felt weak. I could not hold an expression. I would have to speak out loud to remember any of the details.
This room, I whispered. Remember this room.
It seemed to be the end of the cave. Water welled slowly from below. The surface quieted from my swimming until my light sank straight down, no ripples in the way. About every forty seconds a bead of water fell from the ceiling, dotting a circle into the pool. Each drip was so widely spaced that the silence between had weight. Then the weight broke with the next startling drip.
The drip seemed to be something to remember too, something that would fall every day, every year in consummate, unstirred darkness. The ripples would spread unnoticed like those of a star pulsing at the far edge of a galaxy. I whispered so that I would remember it.
I watched radiating circles disappear before the next drip fell. Then I heard my breath. I held it for a second. This was not silence like a windless field at night. It was silence like a space buried deep within the earth.
The silence, I whispered. Remember this silence.
I thought of the Hopi emergence story, and that before everyone was able to climb out of the sipapu, the ceremonial song ended. It could be sung only four times. The hole closed on those who had not yet reached the surface.
Those people, I thought. I looked into the pool, as far down as I could see. Were they in here? But there was nothing in here. The impossible pain of the world above, the mystery and beauty and fear, there was none of this in the far back of the cave. None of the sky and purple asters and hot winds. No emotion or desire. I reached to my headlamp and turned it off. Total darkness moved in. It was true, there was nothing. This was the beginning, so utterly still that I could not breathe. Then I heard the drop of water. It plucked the surface of the pool with a low, ripe tone. The first act of creation. I inhaled.
I swam and climbed back along our only route, aiming for the exit with fumbling, hypothermic moves. At the first sign of bluish light near the cave's mouth, I felt the soapy slickness of algae on the rock. Then moss as I waded farther with the current. Then tufts of maidenhair fern and monkeyflower with crimson blooms above the water, and a spider's web catching mist. The mouth of the cave became a green tunnel of life. I grabbed the emergency line and pulled myself from the water, out to the brightly lit spine of rock. Mayflies mobbed the air.
Keith stood on the ledge just beside me. Sunlight needled into my skin, rapidly drawing blood toward the surface. I did not know how long we had been in there. Twenty minutes at least. Half an hour maybe. Keith checked his watch. Nearly an hour and a half. The interior of the cave began washing from me like a dream. I looked down fifty feet to the ledge where we had left our gear.
“I need to get to my notebook,” I said. But then I had to breathe. Each time I took a breath I forgot. By the time I climbed to my notes, the air and sunlight had turned my memory into incorporeal sensations, rendering it in an older, more arcane language. It was the same as it is with dreams. Reason was lost as I clutched at my memory. I opened the notebook and wrote what I could. Remember this silence.