The Last Empty Places (40 page)

The tension escalated when one of the Spaniards apparently sexually assaulted an Indian woman. The Spaniards did not bring forth the culprit, so the Indians responded by driving off the Spaniards’ horses, which they feared ate people. The Spaniards retaliated by besieging the village where the assault occurred. Both sides eventually agreed to a peace and the Indians surrendered on the understanding they wouldn’t be harmed, but Coronado had sent instructions to make an example of the rebel village and not to take prisoners. His commanding officer at the scene, Don García, interpreted that to mean he should roast his two hundred Indian captives
²⁷
at the stake, which he proceeded to do.

All trust vanished. Fighting broke out. The Indians retreated to two villages where the Spaniards besieged them—for fifty days in one case. The Indians suffered from lack of water. In one village they dug a well, but the well collapsed, killing a number of them. The Spaniards offered asylum to the women and children but the Indians didn’t trust them or their promises. Finally, one night, the Indians tried to escape the siege. They were run down by the cavalry, died while swimming across the icy Rio Grande, or captured and made into slaves of the Spaniards. This ended the siege, noted Castañeda, on March 31, 1541. Several weeks later, in early May, with the Pueblo country “pacified,” Coronado’s army started marching northeastward toward the Plains in search of the Turk’s golden land of Quivira.

I
N OUR CAMP NEAR THE HOT SPRINGS
we could have used some buffalo robes, too. The temperature plunged with the falling of darkness. Wearing our pile jackets, our hats, our long underwear, we sat on
the forest floor around the fire and spooned up our bowls of beans and rice mixed with chunks of canned chicken, then nibbled on chocolate. Molly curled up in the warmth of Amy’s lap, and Skyler in mine, staying off the cold ground, their backs warmed against our bodies, their fronts warmed by the jumping flames. It was a sweet moment, these fast-growing children on our laps around the fire, a moment that I wanted to remember when they were grown and I was old.

“I’m getting cold,” Molly said.

They’d climbed wet out of the hot springs in the cold air and had been chilled since then.

“Why don’t you go to your tent and crawl into your sleeping bags and I’ll come in and read to you aloud,” Amy proposed.

Headlamps flashed and nylon rustled as they disappeared in their yellow tent, lit from within by flashlights as if it were a large, soft Japanese lantern. I rinsed out the bowls, put away the pots, hung the food in a backpack on a tree branch out of the reach of animals. Then I snapped off my headlamp and stood by myself in the blackness next to the dying orange coals of the fire, sipping a bit of dark rum from my camp cup, savoring the peaceful moment.

I listened. Several different layers of sound lulled through the black night of the canyon bottom.

Amy’s quiet murmuring, reading in the glowing tent.

The soft susurration of the Middle Fork of the Gila, a hundred feet away through the dark grove of trees.

The chirp of crickets and buzz of insects, oddly vibrant in the cold desert night in late October. How could it be? I then realized the insect sounds emanated from a hot springs seep on the hillside above camp, where tall, wide-bladed grasses grew with a jungly lushness. Here, powered by the interior heat of the earth, lay a little patch of the tropics amid the arid, cold mountains.

A coal popped in the fire, sending up a spark.

I looked up to the night sky.

The stars looked so hard, and bright, and sharp, little diamond chips spangled through the treetops, so many, many stars—the milky bands of stars, the swirls of stars, the clusters, the constellations.

It occurred to me, standing there, that I gazed up at the inverse image of my “blank spots” satellite photo. From one of the earth’s dark
patches, I peered up to where the lights of the heavens shone brightest. There were no human-made lights for miles around. The desert air was dry. The altitude was high. I was at the bottom of a deep canyon.

I’d found my perfect blank spot…a kind of black hole.

I let my mind roam over the surface of the earth. I could see scores of sprawling cities and their beaded strings of lights. But so much of the earth, I saw, remained lightless. So much actually remained or became a blank spot. I thought of all the oceans, and the deserts, and the high mountain ranges, and the deep forests, and the icy poles. They all remained lightless in the satellite image in my mind. They all remained places where the stars shone as intensely on the earth’s surface as they did right here.

But so rarely did we venture to these places. They were difficult to reach. They lay far beyond the convenience of our airports and our cars, beyond that web of wires and buildings and roads that bind the accessible parts of the earth. It was easy to become convinced they didn’t exist anymore. We think blanks spots are gone because we, as individuals and as a species, almost always follow the crowds.

But the stars are out there, with effort, for us to see.

A
LDO
L
EOPOLD KNEW THIS
. As a young man, he developed a crude formulation for what constituted a true “wilderness,” distance from “civilization” being of primary importance. A wilderness was, he wrote, a wild area “big enough to absorb a two-weeks’ pack trip.”
²⁸

When he first arrived here in the Southwest in July 1909, as a twenty-two-year-old U.S. forester, his crew hated him. Overeducated and stiff in their eyes, a graduate of Yale and its new Forestry School, Leopold quickly demonstrated he was incompetent, too.

He’d grown up in a big house on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River in Burlington, Iowa, in a family with a passion for the outdoors. His businessman grandfather, German-born and educated, loved to spend his leisure time landscaping gardens and parks. His father, owner of a Burlington desk-manufacturing company, loved to hunt ducks—a passion that young Aldo quickly adopted. His mother provided a literary and artistic influence. A lover of poetry who had an Eastern boarding-school education, she nudged Aldo to boarding school—Lawrenceville, in New Jersey—in order to prepare him for undergraduate
work at Yale, which he followed with a master’s at the Forestry School.

Dandified up in his newly purchased cowboy outfit
²⁹
(including the pistols), and riding his stallion Jiminy Hicks, young Forest Assistant Leopold, with the East Coast ivy still clinging to his ears, brought to his job “the fervor of a sawdust evangelist”
³⁰
—as his boss later phrased it—mated with a greenhorn’s lack of experience.

His first big assignment came a few weeks after his arrival when his boss put him in charge of a crew mapping the Apache Forest’s remote eastern edge—not far from where we hiked in the adjoining Gila Forest—and appraising its timber value. Never strong in math, Leopold couldn’t make the maps he drew match up one to the next. He refused help from more experienced mapmakers. He repeatedly left off the mapping job to track poachers and predators of deer and elk. The crew fell so far behind schedule that the survey dragged far into the autumn and early mountain snows became a threat. At one point, he abandoned his crew of five—two lumberjacks and three foresters—to go looking for a promising location to place a game refuge.

The camp ran short of food. Leopold returned to find his crew in a state of rebellion. He’d never been in charge of anything before, and, at least in this situation, sympathy wasn’t his strong suit.

“Why damn their whining souls,”
³¹
Leopold wrote to his sister that October 4, “wait ’til it begins to snow. That will take the conceit out of them.…It looks like it [will] take all the tact and patience I can raise to hold the party together until I finish the job.”

Tact and patience is what he didn’t have, not then. There would be a Forest Service investigation afterward into why the mission had gone so badly.

“In my opinion,” one crew member would testify, “Mr. Leopold considered the Apache reconnaissance a picnic party instead of a serious matter.”

But the ultimate significance of the Apache reconnaissance didn’t lie in Leopold’s beginner’s incompetence (the investigation concluded he was simply inexperienced and would be given another chance) nor in the mapping work it did. Rather, it lay in one seemingly inconsequential incident on one afternoon in a river canyon not unlike the one where we had camped.

Aldo Leopold and another crew member or two were eating lunch
on a rimrock overlooking a whitewater river, and, down below, spotted what they thought was a deer swimming across the river toward them. As the creature climbed onto the shore and shook its tail, they realized it was a wolf. Her pups joyfully jumped out of the willow bushes to greet their mother, tails wagging, jumping over one another playfully, on a bit of open ground along the shore. Years later, in one of his most famous essays, “Thinking Like a Mountain,” Leopold described what happened next with the frolicking wolf pack that autumn afternoon:

M
OLLY WOKE UP
at four a.m. in our hot springs camp as she had the night before. But this time it wasn’t the cold.

“I’m having really bad growing pains in my legs,” she called out to us from the neighboring tent.

“It’s not growing pains,” I murmured to Amy. “It’s all the hiking she did with a heavy pack.”

“I’ll come massage them, sweetie,” Amy called back.

She switched on a headlamp. The inside of our the tent was coated with frost, but it was not quite as cold as the previous night.

Grateful for Amy’s offer, I hunkered deeper into my warm sleeping bag. Sleeping seldom felt so delicious. A small tent stuffed with fluffy bags made me feel like a hibernating animal curled up in a dry, grass-lined burrow. During storms, I’d found it remarkable how long one could sleep in a tent. Once, during a storm on an island off Greenland, Amy and I slept for most of two straight days until wakened by our Inuit guide, who told us the sea ice was breaking up in the storm and
we’d better get our asses on his dogsled and back to the mainland before it did.

That was before children. We now scaled our adventures to what we hoped they could handle. Oddly, it was still no less adventurous. Children threw into the mix another set of uncertainties entirely, which at times could be just as adventurous—challenging, hair-raising, satisfying to overcome—as whether, for instance, the sea ice was about to go out from your island.

We woke again at eight, lingering another half hour before dragging ourselves out of the warm bags into the shady cold of the canyon bottom. The sun was striking the cliffs high above, illuminating them gold against the canyon rim higher up still—dark green, pine-draped—and that seamless, deep blue sky. It felt like standing in the bottom of a deep, beautifully painted pottery bowl.

We started a fire for warmth and slurped up big, steaming bowls of ramen noodles and camp cups of hot chocolate and tea for breakfast. By the time we finished, the sunbeams had tilted down far enough to illuminate the cottonwoods along the river, and a few minutes later filtered through our leafy grove into camp.

Molly helped pack the tents while Skyler scrambled up a huge, slanting Arizona sycamore. With their smooth, thick trunks and heavy limbs, their flaky bark and star-shaped leaves, these look very much like the big plane trees you see lining the streets in Paris. They also make great climbing trees. He sat up there like a monkey, throwing down bits of debris and surveying the canyon, entirely content.

Amy and I used this moment to hike up to the hot springs, strip down, and slip in. The water felt evenly smooth on my skin, like a perfectly tempered bath. I felt the clean pebbles of the bottom massaging the sore soles of my feet. We wallowed, up to our necks. The pool rippled as we moved, spilling over the waterfall, the pool’s water blue-tinted from the stones of the bottom. Tendrils of steam rose from the surface and curled up into the morning sun. The bower of branches arched over the pool and the gusher of warm water poured in from the cavern under the tree roots.

It was one of those moments in marriage—in life—of perfect poise. The distractions of our daily scramble back home now lay so far away they didn’t even enter our consciousness. We’d finally reached that geopsychic region where there is only the present.

“This feels delicious,” said Amy.

That zone seemed harder and harder to reach. It made me wonder about the cell-phone-Texting generation, Molly’s generation, and whether they’ll ever be able to reach it. There was no cell-phone reception out here. But sometime in the not-too-distant future cell phones will link into satellite reception and it will be perfectly possible to sit in this hot springs pool in the midst of the wilderness and text with your friends back home.

C
ORONADO HAD NO SUCH
close connection with his base, which lay more than a thousand miles away back in Mexico City. Warmer weather arriving and the ice gone from the Rio Grande, the plumed and gilded Coronado marched eastward in spring of 1541 from the Pueblo villages where he’d wintered. Out there, somewhere, lay the Seven Cities of Gold. He was convinced of it. He knew well the old Spanish stories of the seven bishops who, carrying the Christian riches, escaped the Moorish conquest and fled to the west. He’d heard the reports of Cabeza de Vaca, and of Fray Marcos, who, while discredited and sent back to Mexico City in shame for his false reportings of Cíbola, surely had encountered
something
to bolster the suspicion of the golden cities. The Indians would have very good reason to hide the true location of the golden cities. They sensed the fierceness of the Spaniards’ hunger for gold. Yes, this was why they were so difficult to find. It was because the Indians were not forthcoming.