Written in wilderness

CRAIG Childs finds it strange to be in a place “where people actually go.” Eight months of each year he spends walking the Southwest, mostly the Colorado Plateau. If he’s lucky, the way he sees it, he gets lost. Traveling in an area that has a few footprints here and there, a place to park the truck before you walk into the canyon, well, he finds this funny, the way some of us chuckle if we happen to find ourselves in McDonald’s.

What is he looking for? Back when he was writing “The Secret Knowledge of Water” in 2000, he was prowling around the desert looking for water holes and explaining the dynamics of desert floods in his sense-surround style. He wasn’t thinking about his career as an author, but then his second book came out earlier this fall, “The Soul of Nowhere” (Sasquatch Books), about wandering with friends from the Sierra Madre in Mexico to the canyons of Utah to the Sea of Cortez, noticing the shards and scrawls of earlier civilizations.

It was the end of anonymity for Childs, who now, at 36, finds himself a regular correspondent for National Public Radio, writes for everything from Outside magazine to High Desert News and is working on a new book about the Anasazi Indians.

As a naturalist, Childs falls somewhere between the conservative conservation of John Muir and the anarchistic leanings of Edward Abbey. He is fierce about leaving things alone but gentle when it comes to man’s place in the universe. He is often put in the uncomfortable position of disagreeing with environmentalists who express an urgency that he feels is sometimes unwarranted. If anything, his travels have shown him how temporary we are, how tiny our mark, how insignificant.

As a writer, Childs is most interested in telling the story of a landscape and conveying what it feels like to be there. It is a writing style not unlike Rachel Carson’s (particularly in “A Sense of Wonder”) and Aldo Leopold’s in “A Sand County Almanac,” writers who both expressed the fear that if people had no sense of the wild, it would be that much harder for them to care about protecting it.

Childs, however, engages in as few environmental debates as possible. He has developed a set of skills that he believes can be used in every environment, even the dark canyons of Manhattan. They involve paying attention, being aware of yourself as part of the place, tracking and having a good time with friends, not necessarily in that order.

Childs invites a guest to join him and some friends on a two-day hike in southern Utah on the condition the exact location not be revealed. The group includes Dirk Vaughan, a 46-year-old ex-Denver cop who now lives in Moab, Utah; Colin Wann, who, at 24, is nicknamed “The Boy” and lives pretty much out of his truck; and Childs’ wife, Regan Choi, who is five months pregnant with their first child and is a serious hiker in her own right.

Along the hike, the group spots granaries, kivas, dozens of arrow flints and pieces of pottery, and what Childs believes was an unopened grave site, surely a treasure trove of baskets and beads and pots and clues. But he lets the mystery lie and leaves the grave untouched.

The day before, Childs and Vaughan had found a large black-and-red painted Anasazi pot, partially buried in sand. They did not move it. They sat with it for many hours. On the open market, Vaughan says, that pot would sell for $500,000.

Childs does not look vertically. He does not dig. He looks horizontally at a site, trying to piece together the patterns of life and travel and survival that have been etched in the landscape, visible only to the still, trained eye. In some ways, this method harks back to the time of the gentleman naturalist, the explorer who walked and wrote stories about his field work, long before computers allowed for the kinds of data analysis and extrapolation based on case studies.

When not exploring, he and Choi live in Colorado. This winter, they are having indoor plumbing installed, which doesn’t seem to rouse the level of excitement one might expect. No, they are more excited about the quantities of cherries and peaches they get in the spring and summer from neighbors. The two met while working for an outdoors outfitter.

Embalmed artifacts

In the early 20th century, of course, there was a great deal of plundering of artifacts, of dragging them back to museums to be embalmed in glass cases. Childs and company do not want to see this happening on their account. “The object is to become lost,” Vaugan says. “Look forward as much as backward. Never go down a path you couldn’t go back on.”

There has been much debate about whether the Anasazis were in fact a violent people and whether they engaged in cannibalism, a theory supported by various evidence, from skulls with spoon marks on the inside, to DNA found in cooking fires to mass bone fields.

The northernmost Anasazi, on the other hand, were primarily hunters and gatherers, and both Childs and Vaughan feel that they were more peaceful and more creative than their grain-gathering agricultural cousins, who spent much of their lives hoarding grain and fighting over food supplies.

“I don’t read much,” says Childs as he walks, carrying packs to a plateau where the group will camp for two nights. “I’m trying to develop my senses and some other, extra sense.” He puts his hand on a partially dead 300-year-old juniper, notices the drainage ditch at its roots, how it fell and how it twists.

“Every object has a trail leading to it and away from it, a kind of perpetual motion in which there is no loss and no gain, only movement.”

Childs is hampered in walking by his compulsion to write. He carries a small leather notebook in which he makes inscrutably tiny notes that fill every speck of whiteness on the page.

In less than 20 minutes, the group is crouching under an overhang by a 700-year-old Anasazi granary, looking across the canyon to an arch formation through which the setting sun sends a perfect beam straight out.

In the morning, the friends discuss routes. The four can see possibilities under ledges that it seems no human without wings could get to. Along the route, there are several granaries in good shape, one of which shows handprints and corncobs inside.

Childs and Vaughan speculate about dates and building methods and routes in and out of the site. At the end of the day, heading back to camp, Childs hangs back and whistles down the canyon. He’s found something. Vaughan, who is tired, groans.

“He always does this. It’ll be the end of the day and he’ll point and say, ‘What about going over there?’ We have a word for it. We call it Lelandia. His middle name is Leland. The last thing you want to do at the end of a day is go to Lelandia. But it’s always where the treasures are.”

Sure enough, the three crouch around an unopened burial site on a north-facing ridge. “It’s important to leave things intact so that other people can feel this sense of discovery,” explains Childs. The landscape weaves a spell on them. They start howling and jumping like monkeys, playing around.

“Craig gets as close as any writer I know to that interface between writing and doing,” Vaughan says, and the comment rings true. Childs’ writing engages more of the senses at once than that of most any naturalist: “This place was hungry,” he wrote in “The Soul of Nowhere.” “Pulling in everything it could, filling itself with the tumult of the earth. I could smell it all around, the feral, seductive scent of decay and sprouting seeds. And this solitary ray of sunlight. It was a stranger down here, a thing of logic and propriety fallen into the filthy underworld. I was tempted to at least reach my hand into it, but decided not to. I had only come to look at it out of curiosity. I left it alone. I turned and worked my way deeper into the chasm’s throat.”

The group breaks camp the next morning and walks back, careful not to crumple too much crypto-soil, a delicate, living layer of topsoil. “When you walk up to a precarious boulder and push on it and it tilts and cracks, some of your relationship is defined. Maybe the clumsiness of your action will spin around and bite you,” Childs says.

Back at the truck, a fine red dust covers everyone. “What I want to know,” says Childs, who will continue on with Wann for another four weeks, “is why am I so hungry for this?”