WHEN WATER DOESN T RUN

The Hidden West

Rob Schultheis

Lyons & Burford, Publisher

31 West 21 Street

NY, NY 10010

Paper, 176 pages, $14.95

ISBN 1-55821-434-8

Previously published in Bloomsbury Review

This winter in the California Sierras, the Wasatch of Utah, and the Colorado Rockies, the snow fell again as hoped for. This spring brought more snow to the mountains, rain on the high plains, and snowmelt running into the Colorado River as if the drought of the past few years has given way to a new wet cycle. The water we cannot live without is once more bringing a green springtime to part of the West, though we need only look to Idaho and Montana to know this year s moisture remains last year s drought for them. Aridity, drought, and insufficient water for all is the past and future here. We can dam up the Colorado River, but sooner or later we ll see the bottom of Lake Powell and Lake Mead; and the fountains of Las Vegas will filter back to sand, while Denver will dry up and blow away.

In The Hidden West, first published in 1972, Rob Schultheis explored not only the few pockets of wildness that then remained, but also the one constant that makes life possible water. He says: To understand Los Angeles, you have to start at a place like Pueblo Bonito. Pueblo Bonito? Yes. The abandoned stone pueblo in Chaco Canyon built so perfectly without mortar by the Anasazi that some windows beam sunlight to mark the solstices on inner walls. Between 1000 and 1300 CE, the Anasazi built about a dozen little city-pueblos like a string of pearls along the bottom of the canyon, until a 70-year drought killed the culture.

Think of that a 70-year drought. How long will the Colorado River and its tributaries sustain Denver, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson, the Imperial Valley, and Los Angeles in a drought that long?

This history and future is what Schultheis writes about. In the present he manages to catch a small piece of each, though what he discovers is nearly always difficult to find. Often he initially locates something fundamental in stories and myths, and he quotes the poet-philospher Salustius that Myths are things that never were, but always are. Says Schultheis:

My journeys across the hidden west have been like that. Drive the back roads till they end; follow the trails till they run out . . . and then you keep going. The deeper you go into the back country, the further back in time you go. The things you find have the power of things that have endured a long, long time: pueblo, canyon, sacred mountain, splinter of an Ice Age sea; an eagle s nest built out of 6,000-year-old sticks the color of old rubbed silver. The door to that ancient, magic America is guarded by a blind Indian flute player; the maps were in the Mayan codices the Spanish burned. But if you walk long enough and hard enough, you ll find your way there in the end.

What Schultheis suggests is something Neolithic still lives in a few rare places, a few rare souls. He tells the story of a Catholic priest in the 17^th Century who attempted to convert the Zunis, descendants of the Anasazi. The priest challenged the Zuni magician to a contest. If the Catholic god proved greater, the Zunis would become Christians. If not, the Spanish would leave the Zunis alone. The priest proceeded to point a musket at a tree and shot off a branch: Our god can do that, the priest said. The Zuni magician uttered an incantation over a chunk of rock called Thunder flint and pointed it at the tree.

The tree exploded into pieces, leaving nothing but a cloud of smoke and a few shreds of bark. So much for Catholicism at Zuni.

The Anasazi may have been dried out of Chaco Canyon in a two-generation drought, but their descendants still live at Zuni pueblo. And us? We slaughtered 50 million bison at the end of the 19^th Century to starve the plains Indians. In a hundred-years of irrigation we have largely drained the Ogallala Aquifer. And the ColoradoRiver? In Mexico, it no longer reaches the sea. The delta that once was is now a salt-encrusted waste land where dried up Mexican farms crumble and bake in the sun and Mexicans spit at Americans for stealing their water, the land colored like a dry snakeskin.

To find something of the past, something of the Neolithic that might remain, the wilderness of untamed rivers, Schultheis journeyed south to Barranca del Cobre, the Copper Canyon. There, 40,000 Tarahumara Indians still live in the high Sierra Madre. There is nothing romantic about their existence:

they live in the steepest, poorest, hardest corner of the landscape. They work corn fields the size of a Persian carpet cut into the side of a mountain. They run down deer on foot till the deer fall over dead from exhaustion. They are the greatest runners on earth: they call themselves Raramuri, the Runners, and they run cross-country footraces, kicking little carved hardwood balls twenty or fifty or two hundred miles across the mountains. They are almost constantly inebriated on a native corn brew called teshuino, which they spike with jimsonweed or peyotl juice.

Here the mountains are largely unmapped, the rivers free and undammed, the canyons so big You could lose a dozen Grand Canyons in those stone convolutions.

In the canyon, Schultheis comes across an old Tarahumara carrying a loaded rucksack held by a tumpline across his forehead, a big bundle of sugar cane over his shoulder, and leading three little pack mules with heavy burlap bundles. Also barefoot and jogging. He had covered 100 miles of mountainous terrain in less than two days. As Schultheis knows: You and I would not last long in the Sierra Tarahumara.

It would be a mistake to romanticize the Tarahumaras. Their lives are hard, harder than we can imagine. Their heartland is crumpled and corrugated till there is hardly enough flat space to lie down in: villages and farms hang by the fingernails over thin air. Their shanties are full of smoke, their dwarf corn is shot full of worms, and their teshuino gives them dysentery; when they are sober they are gloomy; when they are drunk, which is most of the time, they argue, fight and seduce each other s wives. Their god is Onoruame, a sinister deity who causes floods, sickness, disease, death. Hard lives, hard deaths. I would not want to be a Tarahumara.

If we would not live long in the mountains of the Tarahumara, we would no sooner survive in the Great Basin. But the Piutes did, based on a delicate, preternatural understanding of the seasonal tides of seed, nut, root, bug and rodent in the microenvironments that make up the basin. They did not need to dam the Colorado or mine the Ogallala to quench thirst, although we dam the river and drain the aquiver to come back thirstier than before. As Schultheis concludes, Civilization is a luxury, really, a thin skin of gilt on human existence. Strip away the delicate surplus of energy and material that pays for it and life becomes a matter of bare-bones survival.

Precisely what Schultheis seeks in the backcountry of the West is never too easy to find; no easier than discovering it within the human soul. What he says contains a timeless quality and essence. Drought drove off the Anasazi, and it ll drive us out, too: it all leads back, ultimately, to that intermittent thread of water that sometimes, sometimes, doesn t trickle down out of the mountains.