The Last Empty Places (39 page)

“Let’s keep going to the hot springs,” they repeated.

“Okay, if you’re sure you’re up for it. We can have a quick lunch and then everyone put on their water shoes.”

Amy pulled the lunch items from Skyler’s backpack. As she sliced with her Swiss Army knife, the four of us devoured most of a block of
sheep’s-milk cheese she’d found in Silver City that came from Ronda, which we’d once visited in Spain, and we knocked off a dried salami, as we’d eaten nothing since our breakfast of mush but a few handfuls of trail mix.

“Dad!” Skyler said, eating his salami thoughtfully while sitting on a driftwood log in the sunlight. “Remember how mad you got when the sausage rolled off the cooler into the river on our canoe trip in Maine?”

“Yeah, Dad, remember that?” Amy teased.

“Yeah, Dad,” Molly said. “You were so
mad
!”

“No!” I responded. “I’d like to correct that statement! The salami didn’t just ‘roll off the cooler into the river’ by itself. It rolled off because Skyler was jumping from one canoe to another, pretending he was boarding a pirate ship while I was getting out lunch, and he rocked the canoe and the salami rolled off the cooler and sank.
That’s
why I was mad. I’d been looking forward to that salami for days! I really,
really
wanted that salami and it ended up somewhere on the bottom of the river!”

They laughed. In the psychological arc of wilderness trips, morsels of food assume increasing symbolic significance as days pass and supplies dwindle. So do words, and gestures, and repeated annoying patterns of behavior. In an urban setting these things would be diluted or absorbed by thousands of other words, gestures, acts, bits of food. But here in wilderness it’s just you—or the four of you—and whatever you carry on your back and in your heads. Whatever distraction you find derives solely from memory or from nature. In dozens of different ways, over the course of his lifetime, Aldo Leopold, who would eventually found the Gila Wilderness, would make this point, expand it, constantly reach for wilderness’s importance. His concept started simply:

“We’ve got to keep moving or we’re not going to make it to the hot springs by dark,” I said.

We packed away the lunch things—Skyler’s backpack now lighter by two pounds—and pulled off our hiking boots. We tied them by
their shoestrings to the backs of our packs, and put on our water shoes. In their white shoes and backpacks, Molly and Amy looked hilariously incongruent—prim nurses from the waist down, pack animals from the waist up.

“Okay, ready?” I said.

I took the first step into the Middle Fork of the Gila River. Cold water splashed up to my calves, then above my knees, as I shuffled across the slippery, rounded rocks of the bottom, arms outspread for balance. I looked back. The other three were shuffling after me, Skyler pulling up his shorts because the water went well up his thighs.

“It’s not bad,” I called back. “Just a little deep in the middle.”

I reached the far shore where the trail notched into the bank, and splashed out, my big shoes trailing streams of water like a wet dog’s legs, while the others splashed out behind me.

“That’s one down,” Skyler called out. “Only fourteen more to go.”

According to the hiking guidebook to the Gila Wilderness, there were fifteen river crossings along this trail to reach the hot springs. We’d torn out the pages and stuffed them in the top pocket of my pack.

The canyon walls twisted, shoving the river from side to side. A chilly shade enveloped the bottom. The sun had vanished until morning. Our shoes squished. The trail cut through dim patches of forest—gambel oak, ponderosa pine—that filled the elbows of the river bends. We emerged from a copse onto the riverbank again. Down we scrambled, splashed in, and waded across, clambered out dripping from the cold water to the shady forest. That was two out of fifteen. This, I started to think, could be a cold, grim haul. We needed something to keep our minds off it. I remembered Skyler’s beer-bottle song. I amended it, starting to sing, “Fifteen river crossings…”

Molly immediately picked it up, then Skyler, then Amy. As a family, we hashed out the lyrics as we hiked along.

An hour later, we were on the eighth crossing. I began to doubt that we’d make it to the hot springs this night. It was getting really dim. Everyone was chilled, bare legs against cold water. Amy and I had some tense words about whether we’d make it, which then made Skyler upset. We all got past it.

“Seven river crossings in the canyon…seven crossings to go, wade through nine, pull yourself out, six crossings to go.”

It took concentration to do the math, sing, and balance across the river at the same time. Down to five…four…three…It was now almost dark. We came to a small opening in the forest. I told everyone to remember the spot, as we might have to come back and camp here if we couldn’t find the hot springs.

At the fourteenth crossing, I smelled a whiff of sulfur in the air. Climbing up the bank from the fifteenth crossing, we entered a dark grove of trees. A small rivulet ran across the trail. I put my hand in it.

“Feel this,” I said to Molly.

She dipped her hand.

“It’s warm!” she exclaimed.

Nearby lay a clearing under the trees and a circle of stones someone had shaped into a fire ring. We threw down our packs. We had a race to put up the tents—Amy and I versus Molly and Skyler—before it was too dark to see at all.

“Now that we’ve helped with the tents,” Molly asked, “can we go swimming while you make dinner?”

They scrambled up a short trail leading up the hillside above camp, slanting up toward the canyon walls. By headlamp, I collected dead wood and made a fire, got a pot of river water simmering on our little campstove, while Amy laid out sleeping bags and pads in the tents.

It was dark by the time I climbed up the hillside to check on the children. There was a large boulder overhanging the pool. They’d strewn their clothes and hiking shoes atop it, and dropped their headlamps on the boulder, too, so they shone down into the pool. The beams illuminated the rock basin of slightly steaming water, with its bluish gravelly bottom. Molly’s and Skyler’s white shapes glided contentedly
about in the clear water, like goldfish. An arched bower of leaves overhung the pool and from a cavern under massive tree roots a torrent of warm water gushed forth, replenishing the rock pool. On the pool’s far end, it spilled out over a small waterfall into a series of smaller, lower pools, and then streamed down the hillside toward the river below.

They were the most beautiful natural hot springs I’d ever seen.

I
T WAS ABOUT
125
MILES
north of these hot springs that Coronado had attacked and taken the Zuñi Indian village where he was almost killed by flung stones. The Zuñi knew the place as Hawikku, one of a group of seven close-knit villages. This was the origin of the “seven cities” of Cíbola
²¹
(Cíbola was a southern tribe’s name for the group of seven Zuñi cities) that Fray Marcos had reported to the authorities in Mexico City after his first visit and rumors of which Cabeza de Vaca may have heard.

Angry and disappointed, Coronado and his army had still not found anything remotely resembling the Seven Cities of Gold, but they didn’t entirely abandon hope in this arid, goldless landscape. That summer of 1540, based at the village he’d conquered and renamed—dreams of grandiosity still alive—Granada, Coronado sent messengers back to Mexico City to report the bad news to Viceroy Mendoza. He also sent Fray Marcos back to Mexico with the courier party in order to put the friar out of reach of the angry soldiers in Coronado’s army.

“Fray Marcos has not told the truth
²²
in a single thing that he said,” Coronado wrote to the viceroy, “except the name of the cities and the large stone houses…God knows that I wish I had better news to write your Lordship…Be assured that if all the riches and treasures of the world had been here, I could not have done more than I have done.”

He added a note, clearly intended to generate some sympathy for his hardships and deprivations, that the expedition no longer had any raisins to eat, nor sugar, nor oil, nor wine, “except barely half a quart.”

Coronado also dispatched three smaller exploring parties in three different directions. One bore southwest toward the coast to find the support ships that had sailed up from Mexico. But the ships had left only a packet of messages buried under a tree, pointed out by the Indians, which contained the explanation that they’d waited a long time for
the army to appear and now were heading home because worms were eating the wooden hulls. A second exploring party tracked northwest from Cíbola, and, in today’s northeastern Arizona, encountered the first Hopi villages. After a brief skirmish, the Spanish subdued these “very intelligent people”—as Castañeda described them—and began friendly trading for turquoises and for the cotton cloth woven by the Hopi.

The Hopi told the Spanish about a large river that lay beyond a desert country. With Hopi guides, the party traveled twenty days across the wilderness and reached a canyon rim. Seen from the rim, the river below appeared only about six feet wide and the canyon not deep, although the Indians reported that the river was actually far wider than it seemed. The skeptical Spanish sent their three lightest, most agile men scrambling down, and, after an entire day, they reemerged on the rim saying the canyon was far steeper and deeper than it looked. They hadn’t made it even one third of the way down. The rocks in the canyon that looked from the rim only as tall as a man were, in fact, taller than the Giralda bell tower of the great Cathedral of Seville
²³
—which was 275 feet high—and the river was indeed very wide.

These humbled Spaniards were the first Europeans to see, and hike into, what’s now called the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River. Still a third exploring party went east from Cíbola. They’d been invited in that direction by a tall, strong young Indian they nicknamed “Bigote”—“Whiskers” in Spanish, because he wore a long mustache—who came from the east. Bigote had brought the Spaniards gifts—strange woolly hides that looked like very heavy cowhides but weren’t, and sturdy leather shields and helmets crafted from the same material. Bigote said his country was full of these large animals.

Coronado sent one of his captains, Hernando de Alvarado, and twenty men guided by Bigote to check out the country of the strange cows. Heading east from Cíbola, in a few days’ travel they reached the “Sky City”—Acoma—sitting atop an inaccessible, 357-foot-high rock mesa…“so high,” wrote Castañeda, “that it was a very good musket that could throw a ball as high.”
²⁴
The village could be approached only via a dizzying series of handholds. The Spaniards, not having much recourse to conquer it, made peace with Acoma. Today it is still a thriving adobe village atop its prominent rock—the oldest continuously
inhabited settlement in the United States—about sixty miles west of Albuquerque.

Still farther east, they came to a very strong village, Cicuye, of four-story buildings where they met a slave of the Indians whose original home lay still farther east, toward Florida. They nicknamed the slave “The Turk,” because, writes Castañeda, “he looked like one.”

“[The Turk] told them so many and such great things
²⁵
about the wealth of gold and silver in his country that they did not care about looking for cows, but returned after they had seen some few, to report the rich news to the general.”

Among other things, the Turk reported a river six miles across (likely the Mississippi) where giant canoes were paddled by forty Indians each, the prow adorned with an eagle made of gold. The chief took his naps under a large tree hung with gold bells that tinkled melodically in the wind. The people of this land used golden jugs and bowls, the Turk told the Spaniards.

The Coronado expedition had been largely peaceful to this point. They were under both orders from Viceroy Mendoza and edicts from the king and queen of Spain to treat the natives humanely. But that suddenly changed. Gold was at stake. The frustration mounted among the Spanish as they wandered around the pueblo villages of the Southwest, month after month, squeezing the native inhabitants ever more tightly with the question, “Where’s the gold??!!”

The fighting started over a few bracelets that probably never existed. The Turk claimed to have owned several gold bracelets that were taken from him by the people of Cicuye when he was captured as a slave. Captain Alvarado went to Cicuye—a pueblo village just east of today’s Santa Fe, now called Pecos—and demanded the gold bracelets from Cicuye’s leaders. They said they knew nothing about gold bracelets, that this slave, the Turk, was lying. Captain Alvarado didn’t believe them. He threw both Cicuye’s chieftain and Bigote, who was also a leader of Cicuye, into chains. He transported them to the Indian village of Tiguex, where Coronado had set up his winter camp among a cluster of pueblo villages on the Rio Grande. Here Captain General Coronado kept the twosome captive. It was from this point forward that the Indians didn’t trust Coronado and his army, according to Castañeda.

“This began the want of confidence in the word of the Spaniards,”
²⁶
he wrote.

It was now snowing and cold in the high desert and the Rio Grande was frozen solid. The Spaniards took over all the pueblo houses in the village of Tiguex, forcing its inhabitants to move in with relatives in neighboring villages. Coronado also demanded from Tiguex’s chieftain three hundred pieces of clothing for his freezing men, these warm-blooded Spaniards from Mexico. When the chieftain replied that the request had to be sent to each village separately, Coronado’s men simply went into the other villages and took the robes off people’s backs.