from the tyranny of stratigraphy
“Sometimes I can see my face in the rock. It is very old. Over a thousand years. Over a million years. And so am I. I can see higher powers in the rock. I’ll bet you can’t.”
When he said this, he was not looking at her. And when he turned to face her, she saw a new look in his eyes – or perhaps it was a look which she had seen before but the look was now set in the new frame of his sudden muttering of nonsensical phrases. This made her very frightened. She clutched firmly at a stone in her right hand and thought of letting loose with it, of sending it as fast as she could to the flat and wide space between his eyes. The fright froze all of her fingers around the stone, and her arm in place at her hip.
“You have no power,” he said. ”No elevation.”
With this he turned back to the slab of rock and held both hands against it, with his fingers spread wide and above his shoulders. He chuckled in a bitter, quiet way.
“No elevation at all,” he said. ”None at all.”
“I think that I can probably find them now. I’ll just find them now, myself,” she said. As she said this, she began to walk quickly away from him, away from the trail and out into the openness of the desert. In front of her was the indifferent composite of the ancient, relict time-frozen dunes of the Navajo Sandstone and the modern dunes and pods of loose sand that filled the squat spaces between those of the Navajo. Everything below the horizon was a monotonous ochre; everything above, a monotonous blue. She had only taken three or four steps when she felt his hand firmly on the back upper part of her right arm.
“You’re crazy,” he said. “There is nothing that way. Nothing but sand and rock and cattle bones? You want to be cattle bones? You want to be cattle bones. You want to be a cattle bones?”
He then began, agitated and angry, humming a tune that he had just constructed to fit the phrase. She stopped and stood stiffly and examined him peripherally. He had light, long hair that was cut very crudely but was clean. His face was shaven but poorly shaven and the light hairs of his chin, neck and cheeks stood out in angular patches against the extreme darkness of his face. His eyes were bright pools of reflected sky. His clothes were worn, but not dirty. He was muscular, but not in a bulky way. There was something very animal about his form and the way he moved. It was as if he was constructed for the purpose of living wildly with no excess or frailty. His hands were extraordinarily large. The nails of his right hand were worn and chewed. The nails of his left were not. They were trimmed very tidily and painted red with small white symbols that looked like Chinese calligraphy, but were really, she’d later learn, rock art symbols that he’d found hidden on rock walls in his favorite canyons, where he hunted
with Pull and the wrens. He also wore many small gold rings: maybe twenty through his left ear, five through his left nostril, and another dozen on the fingers of his right hand.
The fingers of her right hand were numb now on the stone she was holding and the skin of her arm beneath his fingers began to hurt.
“We’ll find them. You came to me. Didn’t you? You came to me. I can’t leave you now.” His voice was angry now.
He called her “Little missus”.
“We’ll find your friends and get you out of here.” Now his voice was calm.
“Let go of me. Please, you’re making me uncomfortable.”
“Do you know what elevation is?” he said. “Elevation is the frame of reference. You look at something and you see it differently because of the emptiness. A feather on a city street is a feather on a city street. It’s one of a million things that overwhelm your mind and take away any separation. Here a feather is a uniqueness in all of this sand. There is nothing to see but the essence of the feather. So you understand it. The feather tickles. The soul of the feather tickles. You understand what it is and what it means. That is elevation. Little missus, have you ever found a feather that could tickle your soul?”
“Let go of me. I’ll go with you to find them.”
“I know your kind. I’ve seen you before. Like a shadow on the other side of a hill, I’ve been with you since the beginning. First you come with a nice talk and then you run. No elevation.”
“I’m not moving. If you don’t let me go, I’ll fight you. I will. I’ll fight you.” She looked down and behind her and then she saw that the back of his pants were torn nearly all the way from the back of the knee to the belt loops and that the tear was held together in places with safety pins. His legs and ass were as dark as his face and hands and covered with short light curly hair. Her fingers were numb on the stone. His grip was harder now.
They were on the edge of a canyon. The canyon was perhaps a hundred feet wide and three or four hundred feet deep where they were. They were twenty feet from the wall and she could see down into the canyon where it turned away from them. The walls were vertical with large undercut alcoves at places where the canyon turned slightly. She could see a small stream at the base of the canyon. It shown as a linear brightness for short segments and as a strip of green grass and thin streaky coyote willow for longer runs. She noticed that smaller cottonwood stood solitary away from the stream and against the walls in places where sometime-shadows might be. She had the edge of the canyon on one side and the wide open platform of the desert on the other and between them was a thin strip of trail that ran along the top of the canyon. She knew that if she could get loose and double back she could follow the trail or maybe find a way into the canyon for water and follow it and she would probably find them.
“That,” he said, “that is elevation.” She looked at his face and followed his eyes to his pointing hand. A raven, darkly crystalline and reflecting myriad sparks as would a mass of mica in the harsh light, flew along the top of the canyon. It was centered between the walls and hung at the interface that would have been the surface of the ground if the canyon were not present. She noticed that it didn’t flap its wings as it flew. It simply rested with wings spread wide on some sort of surface of air and floated as if buoyed and conveyed by the continuous aerial current of the canyon.
“Sister,” he said in the direction of the raven as it passed them. “Sister, I love you.”
When he said this he released her arm and turned entirely toward and with the passing of the bird. “I love you,” he said softly. And he turned back to her without grasping her and said, “that is elevation.”
She stood frozen like the dunes, staring at him, clutching the rock.
“Know what else?” he said. “Know what else elevation there is?”
He ran past her, only by ten feet, out into the middle of small patch of yellow sand. He knelt in the sand and lowered his head near a small pale pink flower. She hadn’t noticed it before because it was only perhaps a centimeter in diameter. He lowered his clean, strangely shaven face down to it and ran his cheek across it in an affectionate way. He sat smiling, contentment in his eyes.
“Smooth,” he said. “Sentient dignity.” He stood up and waved his arms out and open to the wide desert. “This little brother alone in all of this. Look at the dignity. Standing up to it. Just to live a little while in all of this. Not asking, just living, in this, beautiful friend in the great vacancy, all empty, not asking, little brother.”
She took a backwards step away from him and toward the edge of the canyon.
“Fine, just go,” he said smiling calmly, apparently having passed through some short disruptive period. “I’m only trying to help you. You won’t find them over that edge. You won’t find a thing over that edge. I been there.”
And then in a wild gathering rhythm he began another rant, speaking rapidly about the way the plates of the earth
moved and volcanoes and glaciers. “The way it was,” he said.
“The way it was so FANT-TAS-STIC.” He waved his arms above his head as he spun slowly on one foot with the other leg bent such that his lower leg was horizontal and his foot was at his
crotch. “You want me to destroy it, don’t you,” he said as he looked down at the flower. You want it to die because you’re afraid of the dignity. Or the power in grace, like my Sister. Sister is grace.”
She stepped further away from him, back toward the rim. Then she began to run forward onto the trail. Back the way she’d come. She ran, without looking behind her, to where she’d met him in a wide empty field of some dust-mottled little sage and stunted yellow-green rabbitbrush. There were two trails that met there and she followed the one that wound down away from the edge of the canyon into an open swale of the dry land with small ochre loafs of the sandstone hovering seemingly in the air. They had left their backpacks in a small shadow beside one of the large masses of stone. Then they’d separated to find the right trail. The boys, her husband and his brother, hadn’t returned. She’d found the strange man.
She thought there was probably water in her pack. As she walked, she then realized that running had taken her strength. She felt the earth rising and falling as would swells on the sea. She staggered against the push and fall of the earth. She fell twice to her knees and rose to her feet more slowly each time. She felt a dull sensation on one of her calves and saw that she’d fallen on a prickly pear and her calf was badly tom. She felt her hand loosen and she heard, overly and unnaturally loudly and clearly, the stone fall onto the sand of the trail beside her. She felt the earth tremble beneath her as the stone landed. She knelt and then lay down beside it.
The very first thing she noticed was the single ray of light which shown on the cattle skull. It was very dark and this one bundle of rays of light passed into the cave from beyond a comer where she couldn’t see. The light appeared very bright but this was relative because of the darkness of the cave. The light was thrice reflected afternoon light: first from the opposite wall of the canyon, second from the wall of an outer alcove, third from another wall of that alcove and finally it passed just above a boulder that blocked the small entrance to the cave from external view. The bundle of light was a cylinder tinged a reddish yellow; and it held a twinkling galaxy of suspended dust. The skull lay upright against a wall of the cave near the entrance. It was stained with the yellow of the light; and she noticed that two frail wisps of the flower Globemallow, terminating in two tiny orange and yellow blossoms, curved about one another elegantly and rose up through one of the eye-sockets of the skull. These too were set apart and held up to her in the single bundle of external light.
The second thing she noticed was that her shorts had been removed and she was laying on a wooden platform covered with ten or twenty sleeping bags of many colors that felt silky, clean and dry against her skin. Then she felt the coolness on the one leg and saw that where her skin was torn someone had applied a white soapy substance to it; and she saw the tin bowl that was piled high with a white lather on the platform beside her hip. She closed her eyes and opened them again and felt the stiffness in her legs and shoulders. She rose to one elbow with the sore leg extending out on the platform away from her body. Through a feature in the cave that was something like a chimney – it was a crack in the wall that opened into a cavity the shape of a large heart – she saw the man’s bare feet, first one and then the other, dangling from above into the heart cavity and then she heard the two feet drop and then she saw him slide with his head and then his shoulders through the crack and into the cave.
He walked near her but didn’t seem to be paying attention to her. He was naked, lean, dark-skinned, covered with fine curls of hair that seemed to concentrate light and slightly glow with a bright yellow, like filaments. She felt a cool breeze that followed him through the crack. The breeze smelt of water and she noticed that his hair was wet and he was rubbing his head and his body with a towel. She watched him walk through the bundle of light and past the corner and then the bundle of light was extinguished and she lay in darkness. She saw and heard the lighting of a match and then first a part of the wall behind the skull and then all of the cave was flooded with a bright light. He walked very quietly past the edge of the platform on which she was lying. He leaned far forward over her and hung a lantern from a wire which dangled from somewhere further above where she couldn’t see.
As he pulled on his pants, she noticed the tear that ran most of the length of leg. She saw the rest of the cave clearly now. It was a large circular cave perhaps thirty or fifty feet in diameter. She couldn’t see the top of it but it was much taller than the man. The floor was sand and three platforms were built of old dry wood like beds extending out from a wall. She saw him against the wall furthest from her. He patted his hair in the reflection of a large broken, unframed mirror leaning against a wall. The wall of one half of the cave was lined with vertical stacks of books. A ramshackle pile of books with broken spines lay on the sand against a portion of the opposite wall, adjacent to and in front of the wide crack and the heart shaped area behind it. A ring of stones enclosed a pile of ash and partially burned books beside it. On one of the platforms a solid bench that looked a little like a throne was constructed of the old wood with the wall of books behind it. She noticed a second lantern, not lit, that hung above the chair. On the other platform was a series of shelves made with the wood and slabs of red sandstone. There were stacked cans, jars and bottles of food and bags, perhaps a thousand small metallic bags, that she recognized as backpackers freeze-dried food.
As her eyes adjusted to the new light in the cave, she saw that above his head and somewhat hidden beyond the brightness of the lantern were a myriad of objects suspended by wires and strings. Flashlights, skulls of small mammals, skins of snakes, water bottles, fragments of maps and clothing, dollar bills, hundred dollar bills, bunches of dried flowers and sections of plants, clusters of feathers.
A strand of small desiccated lizards with the tails of each sewn to the shoulder of the next hung beside the platform she was on, nearest to her head; and she followed the line of them up into the shadows above her and couldn’t estimate the length of it.
She felt his hand close on her ankle. She pulled swiftly away from him, across the platform and up, further onto the pile of sleeping bags. She looked back to him and he knelt beside the platform with his hand still on her ankle and a slosh of the white foam in the other hand.
“Yucca, Aloe,” he said as he pulled her leg back toward him and she did not yield.
“What are you doing, where are my pants?”
“You’re hurt. I’m helping you.”
“My pants, where are my shorts?”
“They’re drying. They were bloody. They’re up drying above the tank. Want a bath? I had a bath. The tank’s up there,” he pointed above and behind him, “behind that crack. You just go through that crack and climb up a little bit and over a ledge and the tanks right there. Kind of a big rock bowl. Easy. It’s a big tank and the water flows through it and out to another cave so the water’s fresh all the time. Want some tea?”
“I want my shorts and I want to go.”
“They’re wet and you shouldn’t probably move. You cut yourself once and I dropped you. Little accident. Coming down here. We’ll get you better before you go. Let me put this on you,” and he pulled her leg toward him.
She felt herself suddenly unable to control her own movements and pliable to him. She felt her leg pulled away from her and she felt his hand and the cool foam pressed against her calf, thigh and hip.
“Monica is a pretty name,” she heard him say. She closed her eyes and let herself sink into the soft pile. She stopped hearing him and on the backs of her eyelids she saw the bright light of the desert and her husband and his brother walking away from her.
“We’ll be right back. You stay here Mon. Well find the road and we’ll come back for you. Twenty minutes, Maybe half-an-hour.”
When she woke again, the cave was very dark. The lantern was out and there was no light entering the cave from the outside. She sat up slightly and now felt the very hard pain in her leg and hip. She realized that she couldn’t move very far without some assistance. She probably couldn’t even stand without a crutch. Her eyes adjusted and she thought that she could barely see him. He was seated on the large chair with a book in his hands. The moment that she thought she saw him she heard the book clap shut and then she thought that she saw him open it again and then sit looking at it for a long time without turning pages and then she heard it clap shut again.
“Where’d you get all this stuff,” she said into the darkness.
“I stole it mainly. Well really I stole all of it.”
“You mean from backpackers.”
“Backpackers don’t have much. Always the same books. Good for burning. Little bites a food. Sometimes good bags. I like down. Propane. We always need propane. Boats are the best, boats that they leave alone for the day and cars left for being stuck or broken.”
“You mean boats on Lake Powell.”
“They stop and walk away. No-one could be here, they say. I come and take things. Boats are the best for food and books. Wine too. Once I found a car stuck in the sand with over a hundred books. All books about birds, every kind of book about birds. How about you?”
“I don’t understand what you mean. I like books about birds.”
“That is a little.”
“A little what.”
“Elevation, that’s a little elevation. It’s hard to find with the grid, but it’s here. You just look and you’ll find it. Its really everywhere.”
“Yes I know. You told me before. What is your name?”
“The grid is everywhere you know. It is all a part of us. It holds together the crystal palaces. San Francisco, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Denver. It is really very fragile but they do not know it yet. We see it, feel it and then it is a part of us. I got cell telephones, probably a hundred of ’em. A thousand of them. But they only work on top, over the rim, and only for about a week after I take ’em. I call people I don’t know and tell ’em to stop it. All part of the grid. You see a plane fly up high above. They go back and forth in criss-crosses. Like today a little plane, whirrrrly-bird, flying back and forth all day long. It takes away the elevation. It makes Sister stay away. Sister didn’t come today. The grid holds down the elevation. And all people, now I figured out, they’re part of the grid too. They come in and go out. In and out and back and forth.”
“They’re as much the grid as the airplanes. I s’pose I take from the grid when it expands into my place, penetrates, and then I push it back out. I call the airlines. 800, all of them on a list I got. And I tell ’em to stop it. To stay out.”
She sat up and leaned back against the bank of soft bags. She had trouble moving her leg, but did move it with both hands forming a semi-circle beneath her knee.
“What are you reading?”
“A story about the dark, a story about living underground. You know.”
“What is it called?”
“It isn’t got a name I’d call it. It isn’t got a natural name.”
“Do you like stories?”
“Yes I do, I like a lot of stories. I have one story that is the best. I read it all the time. Over and over again. I don’t understand the end of it, so I read it again and again. You can read it. You can read it and maybe you’ll know about the way it ends.”
“I’d like to. I think that the best stories have endings that are hard to understand. Do you read many things about this place?”
“I find a lot of those kinds of books. There are the books what tell you where to go. I already know. They are just more penetration from the grid. Fake elevation. They pretend to have the elevation when they are really nothing more than more penetration, penetration from behind because you can’t see them coming because they are fake. Those I burn. There are the books about animals and scientific things and those I keep and read.
There is a lot more to learn about the science, but I’m not going to tell them. They’ll have to find it out themselves. I read the books to see what they know. There are a lot of books that tell about how it feels to walk around. Those are silly books. More penetration from behind. Those talk about elevation and the grid, but those can’t ever find the right words and I don’t think that they are true. They don’t understand that the grid is the fragile thing, that it can’t hold down the elevation, that crystal palaces will fall in shards like rain, and it is elevation that has the grace, the dignity. They pretend to love the elevation but only when they are safe at night. So I break those books and I burn them in the winter. Those books and the books that tell you where to go.”
“When do you sleep?”
“All the time. I never know, I’ll just fall. I can feel myself falling into a bigger cave with sweet air. Sometimes I think you can see me when I’m asleep. I don’t look like I am asleep but you can see my dreams. You can see me in my dreams. I’ve been dreaming about you for a long time. I’m glad you finally came. You know.”
“I know,” she said. She was crying slightly but he couldn’t hear her. There was a gust of cool wind that blew unstopping through the crack in the wall behind him.
“Company today. Company, Little Missus,” she heard him say. Her leg was better but still terribly sore. It was much worse than could have been caused by the cactus. She suspected that he had dropped her from a high place when they entered the cave and it was broken in more than one place. She had slid from the platform and put weight on it but the pain was overwhelming. So she had stopped trying to stand or crawl. And had to be content with waiting.
She sat up into the darkness and made out his figure about ten feet away. He was naked. After that first day or night or whatever it might of been the lanterns had been removed and the light of so much as a candle had been suppressed. The cave had become her dark domain. He entered it to reach the tank, but he never slept there that she could discern. He must have been sleeping in another cave nearby. Or outside in the open air, perhaps. Also, she hadn’t seen him wearing clothes of any kind since that first day. Her eyes invariably wandered to his penis or his ass as soon as she saw him; and she had to fight to bring her concentration under control. It wasn’t as if she wanted him. She despised him.
As the time passed, she noticed that the absolute darkness had given way to a dull diffuse light, at first barely perceptible, during part of the day. And that this period of light had grown longer with the passage of each week.
It was a furtive involuntary act which left her despondent whenever she considered it. It was a loss of control even within the domain of her own mind. She had always been left naked also. She’d pleaded for her clothes every time he’d woken her for the first week. But as he fed her, and dressed her wound, twice daily in the white foam made of yucca, and carried her up to the tank and bathed her body and washed her hair with more of the foam, she’d gradually stopped asking.
He would run his finger down the length of her arm, gently, almost imperceptibly touching her skin. He was invariably silent when he did this, whenever he was near her. When he bathed her, it was always just after the sun had set when the cave was nearly black, he would gently carry her up to the tank. She wanted, every time, to assault him, to bite, to free herself. But a dreadful paralysis had set in. Whenever she was free and within reach of him, she couldn’t move her arms or legs. She would will an arm to move with all of her intensity and it simply wouldn’t. He insisted on washing her hair very slowly and ceremoniously, massaging her skull with his thick fingers. Then he would leave her with the bowl of foam, sitting alone in the tank. He would climb down and wait for her to call him to carry her back down to the platform.
“This is Pull,” she heard him say and looked past him to where he was indicating with his open hand. “Pull lives down around here too. Same way with me. He’s the hunter.”
The man she could see at the margin of the cave was also naked. It appeared, from the reflection of minimal light from the top of his head and the muscle of one of his breasts, that he was shaven entirely. When he spoke, and he really didn’t speak, he just opened his mouth and said something like “ahum”. She could see that his teeth were bright white and large and well formed.
“And these are Pull’s wrens,” she heard.
Then from somewhere along the walls of the cave above her she heard a strange murmur and the laughter of children’s voices. Two of them swooped down onto the floor of the cave beside her. They landed with incredible stealth and grace, reminding her of the way small birds landed on the narrow shelf. They walked slowly up to her and she pulled back away from them. They were naked and their bodies were either shaven or they were too young to have grown body hair. A boy and a girl. The girl giggled and the boy ran to a wall and adroitly climbed the stone into the darkness. Then the girl giggled again and around the top of the cave she heard perhaps ten of them giggle. A girl sat on the side of the platform and began caressing Monica’s foot. She smiled at her and, exactly like the other, ran up a wall.
“Pull catches them sometimes on hunts. He’s got many of the wrens, but they only stay good for so long.”
She was dazed from having just woken and she lost track of who was in the cave. When she looked around again, the men were gone. Though she heard the timid giggling and soft wordless voicing of the children above her. She fell asleep to that murmur and, when she woke again, it was gone and the cave was completely dark.
She woke, surprised, in the slightly less dim light of the tank in afternoon. She was rarely, actually on only one occasion had she been, allowed into the tank except just after the sun had set. The small amount of additional light was for her like food brought to the starving. The water was at her waist as she sat on a ledge along one side of the pool. She had been without light for so long that she’d forgotten how much she desired it. She looked at herself first. She held up her hands one at a time and moved them slowly before her face. The tank was a large oval pool. It was fed by a substantial flow of water from a large crack in the roof above it and it drained through a notch to a crack which left the room on the opposite side of the tank. There was a horizontal crack along one of the walls that was open to the outside. It was only a quarter of an inch wide perhaps and ten feet long, but it made for considerably greater brightness at the tank during the day. She could tell that it was either hazy or over-cast outside because the light possessed a more diffuse quality.
She looked at her hands carefully and then she lifted the leg which had been injured and turned it. She saw three long scars on the back of it. She realized that her skin had become almost translucent. Extremely white, it was very soft and the pale blue outlines of veins were apparent particularly in the tissue of her breasts. She excitedly sat up from the water and painfully slid both of her legs out from the tank and knelt on her one good knee and her elbows looking back down into the water as it became more quiescent. A continual flow from the seep in the crack at the roof disrupted the surface of the pool in front of her. So she, crawling on her hands and the good knee, moved as far away from it along the edge of the water as possible. She hung her head over the side and smiled on seeing her reflection. Once, about a month before, in a brief moment when she had pulled her self up to standing next to the platform, he’d caught her looking into the broken mirror fragments which were mounted on a wall in the cave. She could not see her face well. It was little more than an aggregate of shadows broken in angular bits by the fragmented mirror. He’d gently pushed her back on to the platform. He’d recently stopped speaking, except in rare gibberish or terse phrases of one and two syllable words, which she had, in the overwhelming silence, come to long to hear.
After that incident he hadn’t spoken for what she guessed was a week; and she’d woken one morning and noticed the mirror gone. She had assumed its disappearance had been because of his fear of her access to shards of glass. She hung her head over the edge of the pool and watched her face in the slight movement of the water. She brushed back the tangled wet hair which hung dominantly on the left side of her face and turned her face, examining her cheek and lips and chin with both her hand and a sidelong look into the water. Then she saw him above her. His reflected face was diffuse and smiling and she smiled back at it. She felt the loose knuckles of his hand slide across her back as he knelt beside her and slipped into the pool. She remained kneeling on the edge. She knew she was smiling. She didn’t want to be.
Her face was stinging when she woke. The incident was clear and focused in her mind, but her body wasn’t wet. She was in the exact position he’d arranged when he’d put her down the night before. She felt her hair and it wasn’t wet. She started to soundlessly cry. She’d woken this way. Not entirely certain, but fairly sure, from the same or a similar dream about every other morning for the past couple of weeks.
The dreams became her entire relationship with him. A strange cognitive darkness, in addition to that of her environment, had begun to pervade all of her real interactions with him. She recognized this slowly. She would see him enter the cave and begin to speak to her, she’d catch a phrase or perhaps two; and then she was alone in the darkness, oblivious to what might have lapsed in the intervening moments. Then whole episodes would pass without her notice. She’d suddenly realize that she was wet and had been washed. Over time, she did not know if it was weeks or months, she hadn’t noticed him at all in her wakeful existence. Because all she saw, or knew of him, or anyone, was in the nocturnal and apparently endless series of virtually identical encounters.
From the seed of the dreams came wakeful, more sinister, mirages. She lay alone in the darkness of the cave.
Alternating between loud sobs, indignant screams and purrs of ecstasy. He began to sit at the end of the platform and watch her. Occasionally through an entire day. He was careful not to speak or move or touch her. Because, if he did, she would stop and lay as if paralyzed for hours, frozen in the exact position she had held when he had interrupted her. This was an intriguing game to watch, but he could not bring himself to participate. He would often touch her, gently on the foot or leg, to stop her when her movements could have caused her injury. Occasionally she scratched herself badly enough to bleed. He would go away for the better part of a day and he began to leave her often because she was so obviously lost in another world.
When, one evening, he returned very late from hunting and found her gone, he found and lit the two lanterns and looked for her everywhere in the cave and the tank. As he set off to track her, he walked out into the moonless night naked and holding both lanterns. He took the old ancient pathway, a very steep one carved with steps into the sandstone. It ran up the canyon for about a half of a mile and then it curved back to above the cave. In one steep ascent it went straight up the rock to directly over the cave, and there it encountered the flat plateau of the desert. He left one of the lanterns there so that he could see where the path led down and he picked one of several sandy trails which cut through the prickly pear and black brush, following a woman’s small footprints, out into the chill of the night.
The story ran for a full three weeks, every day in the local papers and most days in the papers of the large regional cities. The run of the stories began with a short mention of the three lost hikers and then it was just the woman. There was a lot of coverage of the five-day search. Helicopters and men with dogs. There’d been a few stories about the woman’s relationship with her husband. Quotations from her coworkers. When, later, they’d found her, it was a much larger story. The picture which ran on the cover of most papers that day was a little off-center, because the face and the body of the man were excluded from it. The stories which ran three days after that were based on the County Sheriffs report and the autopsy. The man had been dead for at least fourteen hours when the dogs found her by the man’s scent. There had been over five hundred blows, only an estimate, with a rounded stone to the man’s face neck, chest and genitals. The stone, that had caused the body of the man so much damage, had been positively identified as one removed from the woman’s hand by the County Sheriffs Deputy. The report presented, in detail, the way her fingers clutched the stone like welded metal and the difficulty of the Deputy in removing it from her. Later stories dealt with pleas for understanding by the husband, and the ponderings of local officials on the location of the alleged cave.
Several young men who led backpacking, horse and river trips through the area and knew the country well and a few elderly cowboys signed affidavits confirming that it was impossible that such a cave could exist within even three days walking distance from where she had been lost and the location, not far away, where she was found. Later, the attorney hired by her family released press statements which were run almost entirely without modification. These dealt with the potential affects of such an experience on the young woman who was raised in a comfortable suburban environment and unfamiliar with the desert and provided several quotations from the reports of examining psychotherapists. One report consisted of over seventy pages of a detailed examination of the circumstance of the entire case. It laid out several psychological theories as to the woman’s eventual behavior, and concluded that her actions were for the most part a violent response to the psychological pressures of an unplanned, long duration encounter with environmental conditions for which she was thoroughly unprepared. Her present whereabouts were identified only as under the protective custody of a large medical institution specializing in the care of individuals affected by traumatic disorders. This phrase had been agreed upon by her attorneys and the office of the County Prosecutor. A trauma involving a fear of heights resulting in temporary clinical dementia was one corollary phrased by Richard Strauss, a Hartford Connecticut therapist, and used occasionally in the press accounts of the woman’s condition.
There has not been much coverage recently. Though it is certain to begin again, whenever the trial date is set.