House of Rain, by Craig Childs

House of Rain is an archaeological journey through the American Southwest, starting with Chaco Canyon and ending in the northern Sierra Madre in Mexico. Childs, not himself a credentialed archaeologist, is a man driven by curiosity and imagination who, rather than bowing to the accepted narrative of ancient peoples, looks for himself at the ruins, the pottery patterns, the feathers and burials and architecture, and reaches his own conclusions. He works with and discusses with many bona-fide archaeologists his ideas, his finds, and his questions. 

Some discount his theories, others offer bolstering evidence. By examining not only maps but the land itself, he makes connections, observing for example the ruler-straight meridians connecting Chaco Canyon with other population centers, and standing on heights where signal fire remains are visible, communicating across distances to other groups. His writing is detailed and lovely as he conveys the inhospitality of the landscape, chronicling visits in the depths of winter, the scorch of high summer, in pouring rain and parching drought. He spends a lot of time climbing in and out of precipitous canyons, and the safety-maven in me is often annoyed by his lack of top-ropes, communication devices, and other rudiments of preparedness for dangerous climbs. But the people he is learning about surely made these same climbs and descents, sometimes supported by holds carved into rock or wood ladders, but other times likely using methods similar to his, to reach their destinations. 

Childs’s overarching question is about the Anasazi (a misnomer which he uses as representative of a vanished culture without applying further definition to it) – why did they “disappear”? The archaeological record suggests that they abandoned Chaco Canyon and its outposts in the twelfth century AD. Looking at the layers of use in ruins, he concludes that they were migratory people, moving in response to conditions, especially drought and the absence of game to hunt. He sees that groups left a particular site in cycles of several centuries, their descendants returning as conditions improved, then after a few generations, moving on again. 

It was not abandonment but a shifting – they took their culture with them into territories of greater abundance – of water, of game. In some cases they strongly influenced the groups among whom they resided – occasionally dominating, possibly enslaving, the inhabitants; in other cases they built their structures in the very midst of the locals’, as if thumbing their noses at what they considered lesser cultures. 

He goes out on a limb, making the case that the Anasazi culture and its successors extended from Chaco Canyon into the Sierra Madre, citing trade in tropical birds from Mesoamerica, turquoise, and pottery designs to support his thesis. Some archaeologists agree with him, but the prevailing narrative separates events and groups in Mexico from those in what later became the US, as though the boundaries we maintain now have always existed. 

I am struck by the respect with which he treats these sites: often he finds burial areas, pottery shards, weavings, feathers and other artifacts. He handles them with care and respect, then returns them to where he found them. This conforms to modern field practice, but it is also a choice we feel he would make anyhow: these things should remain where their makers left them.

The Secret Knowledge of Water, by Craig Childs

The Secret Knowledge of Water is Craig Childs’ love letter to the desert, to its hidden pools, nocturnal streams, and floods. In a land of scarcity, water seems more abundant, more alive, more alluring, than in wet places. Childs journeys out into desert areas armed with detailed maps, but he is seeking to be surprised, to discover pools described by John Wesley Powell in 1870, to sojourn in the lands of the Tohono O'Odham, native people who live in and with the desert. 

The book is divided into three sections, each with its own aspect of water. We begin with Ephemeral Water, in which he seeks the water hiding out in water pockets, rock crevices, and underground until heat and parch evaporate its remnants. The next section is Water That Moves, which relates the stories of streams, creeks, narrow canyons where water can hide from the relentless sun. And finally, perhaps most beloved to him, is Fierce Water, about floods. 

The tagline of the book is “There are two easy ways to die in the desert: thirst and drowning.” He doesn’t seem much at risk of dying of thirst, despite wandering for weeks in places with no likely water sources. Even when he finds some tiny water pocket with a brackish gallon in it, he leaves it untouched though he is thirsty – it’s a religious kind of response. But floods fascinate him, and by the end of the book we concur in his assessment that floods are as much part of the desert as aridity. 

He writes, “[Water] is not a true element; its atomic structure can be easily broken into Hs and Os, a fact that startled many at the time of its discovery. It behaves so curiously, however, able to move unlike anything else we know of, that it is still unscientifically considered to be an element.” He describes the fish that survive inhospitable conditions, and notes the interference of humans – “There have been cases of native desert fishes being actively poisoned out of waterways to make way for non-native sport fish.” He commiserates with a biologist who has spent decades in a losing battle to preserve these unique species. 

From a café in Kanab, Utah, he watches a thunderstorm, its flash flood arriving to the nods of locals and consternation of tourists. “The water in the street suddenly turned from clear to deep red, the red of the Vermilion Cliffs that surround Kanab, flowing instantly with the viscosity of milk and not water. Objects began to show. Rocks. Uprooted plants... The narrow downstream box of Kanab Canyon was going to be a violent place in about two hours. Anyone hiking down there, or lounging on a boulder in blatant sunlight, was probably expecting the next noteworthy event to be nightfall.” 

Childs writes beautifully about everything he sees – the shapes water has left on rocks; the birds, fish, trees, insects; the sight of a far-off thunderstorm; the ragged forms of desert mountains – and about his own yen to experience water directly. Often he strips naked to explore some narrow side canyon or bask beside a huge pool in the middle of rocks, that shouldn’t even be there. As the American Southwest descends into long-term drought, it’s worth your while to learn more about water. This book is a great place to start.