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We ease down the river for another hour
or so working our way along the large meander around the Turk's
Head and then tie our rafts to a crack in the roof of an alcove
in the flesh-toned Cedar Mesa Sandstone. It's a cool and shady
spot for a floating lunch and yet another swim. Weisheit whips
up tunafish wraps, apple cobbler, and, amazingly, watermelon
that is ice-cold and delicious.
There's a small hanging garden
lurking on the cliff-face above us. Glen Canyon was famous for
them, but they are much rarer here in Stillwater and Cataract.
Hanging gardens are usually found under alcoves of porous rock,
such as sandstone, where water seeps through the face of the
cliff to create a lush microhabitat for maidenhair ferns, alcove
columbine and desert orchids.
Here sprouting out of a nest
of ferns is a close relative of poison ivy (to which I am pathologically
allergic and more frightened of than rattlesnakes) called the
lemonade bush. But far from being toxic, this leafy shrub offers
up pink flowers and sour berries that can stimulate saliva production
for the parched desert nomad. I pop of a couple of tart berries
in my mouth, swill them around until my mouth begins to erupt
with foam. Hmm. Might make for nicely perverse treats for Halloween.
After lunch, Lorenzo dives
into the deep pool. He breaks the surface of the reddish water,
yelping. "Hey, something bit me!"
"Nothing to worry about,"
I say. "Probably just a minnow."
Yeah, a minnow all right. The
Colorado Pikeminnow: once the most voracious predator in the
Colorado River system. The Pikeminnow is far from a tiny fish.
When Powell descended the canyons, his men caught Pikeminnows
that were bigger than barracudas. One was six feet long and weighed
around 100 pounds. When they gutted the mighty minnow, it's large
heart continued beating on the ground at twenty beats a minute
for four minutes.
Then again that little nibble
probably wasn't a kiss from a Pikeminnow, since those cruisers
of the Green and Colorado have nearly been wiped out, along with
all of the other native fish in these salty, silty, hot and turbulent
desert rivers.
What the dams didn't kill,
the rotenone did. Fish managers considered the native minnows
and suckers "trash fish" to be eradicated and replaced
with catfish, striped bass, and cold water fish like rainbow
trout, which now thrive in the clear and frigid waters in the
reaches downstream from the spillways of Flaming Gorge and Glen
Canyon dams.
As a result of the dams, eradication
regimes and competition with exotic fish, four of the eight species
of native fish are on the endangered species list: the Colorado
Pikeminnow, razorback sucker, humpback chub and bonytail chub.
The other four species are also in freefall, with no help in
sight.
* *
*
In the sizzling glare of the
late afternoon sun, the water of the Green River appears flat,
mellow. But once you're in it up to your neck the pull of the
current is strong and decisive. A weak swimmer could easily be
swept downstream, tire, slip under, surrender to the river's
covert power. It happens. Whiskey helps make it so. Most of the
deaths in Cataract Canyon involve the consumption of spirits,
of one kind or another.
One by one, we wade out to
the channel and plunge in, breaststroking across the silent surge
of tepid water to get a closer look at a Fremont granary clinging
to the canyon wall. Here the river is perhaps two hundred yards across and yet
it sweeps us a hundred yards downstream before we reach the far
bank and once again fight our way through an unyielding hedge
of tamarisk. If the only the French had planted the Maginot Line
with a thicket of tamarisk, they might have been able to repel
the onslaught of the Nazi Wehrmacht.
We contour around the base
of the cliff, casually looking for the pot sherds Weisheit found
here a few years ago. But site has been picked clean by looters.
A decade or so ago, the looters
were mainly Mormon ranchers busting across the desert on ATVs.
They would dig up Anasazi and Fremont sites for pots, metates,
sandals, jewelry and skeletons and sell them to eastern collectors
and museums. Now the threat largely comes from New Agers seeking
a personal communion with Anasazi mysticism, a potsherd to serve
as a talisman to transport them to the spirit world. They are
spiritual trespassers and there are legions of them now, criss-crossing
the plateau, festooned in coral and turquoise jewelry bought
in the haute boutiques of Santa Fe and Sedona, spewing misty
platitudes about the interconnectedness of the universe.
And they're not only after
human antiquities. Several of the anthills we've come across
have been looted as well, dug up in search of shark's teeth from
the Triassic Epoch. Give them the slightest pretext and humans
will mine almost anything. During World War II, there was an
all-out blitz on rabbitbrush, a desert scrub that used to be
a ubiquitous plant in the canyonlands that could thrive for 150
to 200 years, when the Pentagon offered contracts for uprooted
plants for use in the manufacture of tires for jeeps and airplanes.
The maroon granary looms thirty
feet above us, blending in with the dark reds of the Organ Rock
formation. The rectangular structure is about 12 feet tall and
eight feet wide with a small window framed in wood near the top.
It is affixed to the sheer wall of the cliff like a tick with
no visible means of access. Once the structure was reached by
a rickety ladder, tied together with strips of yucca and deer
sinew. But there is no sign of that now. These are the kinds
of seemingly inaccessible, floating buildings that led the Navajo
to conclude that the Anasazi and Fremont practiced black magic,
that somehow they had learned to fly.
The granary is a corn bin fortified
as if it were a missile silo. The beautifully austere building
must have been incredibly dangerous to build. At least a ton
of sandstone rock would have been hauled up to the small alcove,
where it would have been drystacked on the perilous cliff, probably
with some kind of scaffolding, though there are no apparent holes
in the rockface as signs of such an edifice. Then cottonwood
branches would be used to frame the window and as vegas and latillas
for the roof. The whole structure was then coated in adobe.
In the fall, women, most likely,
would carry woven baskets and pots stuffed with corncobs and
beans up a series of ladders and ropes to the granary and dump
the seeds through the tiny window. Then in the spring the grain
would be retrieved for the planting season. Both ventures were
very risky propositions. Surely many fell to their deaths on
the sharp rocks below.
Of course, the Fremont and
Anasazi were desert farmers, planting their corn, beans and melons
in these sun-scorched bottomlands, dependent on the summer monsoons
and snow-melt floods. The picked spots were the water table was
near the surface, so that their crops could be moistened from
below. On the Hopi mesas, women still cart down water in clay
pots to irrigate the crops during the driest weeks. Certainly
the Fremont did the same.
Hording was a necessity of
this tenuous existence once the Fremont culture gave up the life
of nomadic hunter and gatherers to raise crops in the sandy bottoms
of canyons of inscrutable stone. But it seems unlikely that these
kinds of extreme precautions were taken merely to secure the
grain from the elements or from ravens. Something much darker
was haunting the Fremont culture; their art and architecture
display all the signs of a highly developed society slipping
into a self-consuming paranoia.
This granary, I called it the
Maroon House, was probably constructed around 1100 AD and perhaps
used for less than a decade. There are at least a dozen similar
structures within a few square miles. The capital and human investment
in the construction and maintenance of these buildings must have
been a huge drain on the resources of the community. By 1300,
the Fremont, as known through their rock art, pottery, architecture
and burial figurines, vanished as a culture across the Great
Basin, where they had arrived so mysteriously a thousand years
earlier.
If the anthropologists are
right, and that's a very frail "if," the religious
beliefs and customs of the Fremont and Anasazi still resonate
in the rituals of the Hopi and other pueblo tribes living on
the sun-blasted mesas of northern Arizona and New Mexico. That
means the Fremont were end-timers, believers in the approach
of a great, cleansing apocalypse that would sweep away the tormenters
and redeem the believers. From Mount Sinai to the Trinity Site,
most desert religions cleave to this chilling faith in a final
cataclysm.
I imagine the Maroon House
as the cell of a visionary, an entombed Wovoka, the Paiute shaman,
eyes starring through that tiny window at the searing arc of
the sun, day after day, year after year, until the final vision
of how it would all come to an end burned into his soul, giving
rise to the Ghost Dance movement that swept across Native America,
promising that soon, very soon, the skin of the earth itself
would rise up and consume the white invaders.
And, yes, we still have to
get past Rockfall Canyon.
I look across the river. Brian
is doing a little dance as he tries to drain a big boiling pot
of pasta without the use of a strainer, which seems to have mysteriously
vanished from the cargo hold. Raven, again? It's time for dinner:
Chicken Alfredo. The intoxicating smell of Susette's herbs being
put to efficient use lures us back.
* *
*
Night falls suddenly in what
Powell called "these solemn depths." Weisheit passes
around a plate of brownies. No one asks if he has perhaps slipped
a little hashish into the mix. No one needs any embellishment
for what is unfolding above us. The virgin sky pulsates with
stars, unbleached by even the faintest strains of light pollution.
We begin to notice yellow streaks blazing down toward the earth,
then burning out in a fast orange fizz. One after another. A
meteor shower, perhaps, though it's a month too early for the
glorious annual migration of the Perseids.
"Probably not meteors,"
Weisheit advises. "Might be space junk. There's a hole in
the sky up there, a window in the ionosphere, where the space
shuttle and other debris from deep space slips through into the
Earth's atmosphere. That's one reason Moab attracts a lot of
sky watchers, alien hunters."
So here we sit, munching brownies,
smack on the landing pad of God's trash chute. Perhaps that explains
how Upheaval Dome came to be.
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