The Canyon the Moon Cannot Find

West Fork of Oak Creek... THE CANYON THE MOON CANNOT FIND

Nothing is random, so they say. Not even the manner in which the smallest snowflake falls. The same, I am told, holds true in human affairs; that every event in each of our lives is inexorably tied to all of the events that ever preceded, all that will ever follow. I tend to accept that proposition and, from time to time, recognize the evidence that supports it. Take, for example, the evening of March 28, 1986. Rummaging, late at night, in an old footlocker at the back of a walk-in closet. A ritual performed every few years according to no particular schedule. Initiated, I suppose, by some compelling urge to visit my distant yesterdays. Memorabilia tucked away. Things old; things saved. To be buried with me, perhaps, as treasures were buried with the pharaohs of antiquity? Not likely. I save them to help me remember.A gold football letter, salvaged decades ago from a blue sweater that finally raveled away. I can feel the frosty bite of November air...hear the chant of the quarterback's count...feel the opposing lineman's elbow as it makes hard contact with my cheekbone. The crowd sings the Prescott High School fight song, and, in the back of that closet, the last game of my senior year runs through my mind like an old movie. A small black-and-white photograph with a ragged edge where I long ago tore myself out of the picture, leaving only the dark-haired girl with smiling eyes. High school sweetheart. An evening in early spring comes back. We stand on the dark-

ened porch of her house at the top of Mount Vernon Avenue. Embracing in the spirit of a tender love that would last forever. But, of course, it didn't. Report cards from grade school. The

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names of my teachers are on them. Miss Gibson, Miss Murchison, Miss Johnson, Mr. Madison. Others. They are gone. Only what they taught remains. Under a small stack of high school yearbooks, I come across a manila folder. I slide out a typewritten ten-page manuscript. It has a title: "The Canyon the Moon Cannot Find." The sheets are brittle, yellowing with age...held in that manila folder for nearly forty years. My fingers slide across the pages, feel the texture of the paper, and, like a man reading Braille, I know what it contains. An account of a long-ago trek into an enchanted canyon in northern Arizona. A zigzag canyon so confined by its soaring sandstone cliffs that it had never been penetrated by a road or its course traced by a trail. A forested wilderness area, remote, little known, seldom visited. A place where native trout swam in profusion through the spring-fed waters. A place where eagles nested. No one had ever lived in the canyon, except a few Sinagua people, diminutive brown primitives, who disappeared long centuries ago, leaving their debris on the floors of silent, mysterious caves.

When I explored the canyon for the first time, I went with my best fishing pal, Donnie McCleve. We were fifteen, and just out of our sophomore year. Our parents had given us permission to camp for a week in Oak Creek Canyon. On our own. They had not extended permission to journey by foot into a neighboring area, the rugged and almost hidden canyon of the West Fork. Fearing their answer, we had not asked for that permission, and, in the absence of a firm "no," we went. Sloshing against the current of the crystalline stream, bearing packs and fly rods, ankle deep, knee deep, often hip deep. Sometimes edging along the rust-colored cliffs to avoid the deeper pools. We stayed with the stream because, beyond its banks, there was only the shimmering green of tangled underbrush or vertical rock walls that sometimes soared for a thousand feet or more. We were surrounded by bird sounds and the incessant talk of the tumbling stream. And the trout were there, suspended lazily in pools as clear as fresh bathwater. The farther we went, the more of them we saw, until we finally encountered deep, slow-moving places that contained dozens, maybe a hundred.To my boyish senses, the West Fork conveyed an atmosphere primeval. I moved through the canyon wrapped in a Lewis and Clark fantasy and came away from it awed. Once back home, I sat down at an old manual typewriter and wrote an article for Arizona Highways magazine. When I finished, I mailed it to Raymond Carlson, the publication's almost legen-dary editor, the man who guided the mag-azine for more than three decades.

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Some weeks later, I accompanied my parents on an auto trip to Phoenix. I took a city bus from the downtown area to the magazine's offices to see Mr. Carlson and inquire about my article. Although I arrived without appointment, he received me courteously, said he had read the piece, and extracted it from a drawer. It was not exactly what he was looking for at that time, he told me. But he was encour-aging, even complimentary. We talked for a few minutes; then I took my manuscript and left. I noted later that he had taken the time to pencil his comments on the pages. On page three, he had written "good!" next to a certain paragraph. That one word made the article worth saving.

Now, in the quiet of my walk-in closet, old manuscript in hand, I make a mathematical computation. The summer of 1986 would mark exactly forty years since Donnie and I took that trip into the West Fork. Birth of an idea.

I send a letter of query to Arizona Highways, the original article enclosed, the idea explained. A return trip to the West Fork forty years later. The magic canyon revisited. A few days later I receive a call from Editor Merrill Windsor at my office in Dallas. We will do the article. My youngest son, Bart, just out of his sopho-more year in high school, will accompany me into the canyon.

August 2, Oak Creek Canyon. We shoulder our packs and hike north along the highway, then leave the asphalt and angle down toward the site of Mayhew's Lodge. The lodge isn't there anymore. "Burned down some years back," a lady at a grocery store had told me earlier.

On the west side of the Mayhew property, we encounter a trail aiming toward the opening in the sandstone cliffs where the stream from West Fork Canyon joins Oak Creek. The trail concerns me. Forty years ago, Donnie and I encountered no trails. From the time we entered West Fork Canyon until we came out, we saw no one. On two subsequent trips in the early '50s, I saw no people in the canyon. Now, a trail. Trails mean people.

Up ahead I see a flash of moving color, then another. We hear children's voices. We see a family frolicking in a small pine enclosed clearing. Farther on, we pass two women in hiking shorts, then another family. Children wading in the creek. I begin to wonder. Has my magic canyon been tamed?

The trail continues, and we follow it. It's the path of least resistance, but I wish it weren't there. Then, beside the path, I see a man-made object planted in the ground. A marker that reads, "1 mile."

By the time we reach the 2-mile marker, Bart and I have said "good morning" to four more hikers.

But beyond that point-my hopes pick up-we see no one. No more markers. Soon the trail disappears, and the great sandstone walls close in around us and above us, blocking most of the direct sunlight, creating a canyon of shadows and soft breezes. We take to the stream. It is the only avenue into the West Fork.

By midmorning we are deep into an environment of solitude, and I sense that the canyon has not been tamed after all. The boy's words, written forty years ago, still hold: "Back behind those giant red walls there is a land that has never blended itself with the tame world. Civilization has never made its mark on the can-yon, for on the West Fork only slow time makes the changes."

Nothing has changed, except what Na-ture has decreed, and thus the canyon becomes a duplication of my earlier ex-perience. It is my memory in three di-mensions, with the sights and sounds and smells that have lingered there for four decades, awaiting my return.

While the canyon itself is the total memory, I am looking for certain specific landmarks. After about four miles, I come upon one of them: a gigantic chunk of

WEST shadowed pool nearly fifteen feet deep. There is no path around it. To get beyond this point, one must edge along the face of the cliff. No horse has ever followed the stream past this deep pool."

Again, nothing has changed. I watch Again, nothing has changed. I watch Bart inch tentatively along the narrow ledge, one arm out of its pack-strap, just in case he slips. A thirty-pound pack would take a hiker to the bottom of the pool fast. As he moves, Bart touches the same stone that Donnie and I touched decades before. It is the only path, unless the hiker chooses to swim. Upstream from the place where a horse cannot pass, the trout appear in greater numbers. I wade a long pool, thigh deep. Off to my left, no more than four feet away, two of them swim leisurely at my side, like a pair of following puppies. They stay with me nearly to the head of the pool, then, for no apparent reason, dart away. I know from my boyhood days that the native trout of the West Fork are easy to catch. Naive and unsuspecting. But attitudes change. I will take none on this trip. The canyon is theirs, not mine.

At a little past 5:00 P.M., we reach the gravel bar where I twice camped in the early '50s. This is one of the few places on the upper West Fork with enough open ground to lay out bedrolls and cook a meal. There is even a fireplace. As Bart and I change into dry clothing, I contem-plate the possibility that the fireplace I am looking at is the same one I built in 1951. Logic tells me that the possibility is a strong one. If I built a good fireplace (as I did), and left it intact (as I did), why would later campers dismantle it and build another when the first was perfectly suitable? I try my hypothesis on Bart. He considers it for a moment, then shrugs his shoulders. I guess he's right. We'll never know for sure.

Dark. A few embers still glow in the fireplace. Bart, filled with a meal of freeze-dried beef teriyaki, is fast asleep in his bedroll. Not his dad. I'm stirring the coals with a stick while old feelings stir me. When I was a kid, the canyon alwaysspooked me at night. Too dark. Too confining. Too cut-off from the rest of the world. Off in the distance, a night-calling bird makes strange sounds, and I feel the way the boy did when he wrote of the canyon darkness forty years ago: "The night is as black as any I've ever seen. The cliffs on either side seem to lean in toward each other like an arch nearly complete, except for a narrow opening at the top. This is a canyon the moon cannot find. Light from the fire is overpowered only a few feet from the source, and I feel silence, the same silence that has settled on this wild place for every A few feet from the source, and I feel silence, the same silence that has settled on this wild place for every salmon-colored sandstone resting on open ground beside the stream. Nearly as big as a house, it is surrounded by other huge fragments, parts of the main rock broken off on impact.

I look upward and, 400 feet above, find the ragged concavity, the immense vacancy from which it dropped. And I ask the same question I asked myself forty years ago. When did it fall? A century ago...five hundred years ago? Ten thou-sand? A million? All I truly know is that it broke loose from the wall, fell a few seconds in silence, then struck the canyon floor, forever changing the geography of the world. A little bit. Not unlike our lives which, lived in kindness or in cruelty, change the course of human history. A little bit.

Mid-afternoon. We reach the place where a horse cannot pass. To me this is where the true wilderness of the West Fork begins. From the canyon entrance to this point, it would be possible, although difficult, for a horse and rider to execute the route. But they could go no farther. Let the boy's words from the old manu-script describe it: "There is a point where the great walls close in on the canyon. The red cliffs are scarcely more than ten feet apart and rise vertically. Here, the half-choked stream forms a long,

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evening of a million years. At night on the West Fork, I feel a certain anxiety for daylight."

My late-night canyon feelings remain the same. I know that before dawn I will awaken more than once. To stir the coals and toss wood on the fire. And look into the darkness for the green eyes that are never there. Later. I'm lying on my back in the bedroll, looking up from the narrow black well of the canyon, dazzled by the breathtaking clarity of the stars.

August 3, afternoon. Clouds rolled in over the canyon in early morning, and we took cover for an hour under an overhang of rock, staying away from the rain and hail. But now, as we approach the pool that has been speared by a plunging pine tree, the sky is purest blue. Here, the cliffs on one side of the stream are tiered. Above us pine and oak grow wherever the ground is level enough to give them a hold. This big pool is another of my remembered landmarks. The trunk of the old pine remains, angled into the deep fissure of sandstone that holds the water. Although the stream is clear, the pool seems dark because of the leaf debris on its bottom. Out of this pool, as a boy, I took my largest West Fork trout.

Over there, on the left side of the stream, I had climbed up the rock face to a narrow six-inch ledge about seven feet above the pool. Bracing myself against the wall, I flicked the salmon egg so it arched perfectly, hitting the water just inches from the old pine. I watched the salmon egg sinking. The dark streak of motion passed it quickly, turned, came back as a fast-moving shadow. Hit it! In my excitement, I lost my footing, slipped, and fell into the pool. Somehow I managed to keep my hold on the fly rod and my head above water. I flailed my way to dry ground, exhausted the trout, and scooped it from the water. It was a beauty nearly sixteen inches long.

Now it is time to relive the event. But, on this occasion, I will not fish for trout, only feed them. I position myself cautiously on the narrow outcropping, take the small jar of salmon eggs from my shirt pocket, pick one out, and flick it into the pool. When it is two feet beneath the surface, a darting form takes it. I flick another. The same. Except that this time there are several quick shadows competing for the salmon egg. I toss in a handful. In rapid sequence, they are gobbled up. I am satisfied. The magic canyon has not been tamed. As long as the trout swim in such numbers, the West Fork can be called wilderness.

We turn back at the pool that has been speared by the pine. Beyond it, the stream is only a narrow rivulet of cold spring water that issues from an underground source farther up the canyon. Time to head back downstream to the gravel bar and another freeze-dried evening meal. Tomorrow we will walk out.

August 4, afternoon. We exit the mouth of West Fork Canyon, slosh across Oak Creek, and start up the brushy incline to the highway. I pause to take a breather, and Bart comes up behind. We are tired, reasonably dirty, and ready for a hot shower and motel bed.

The experience is over, the cycle complete. And I know why I wrote that article forty years ago. I wrote it so I could return to the West Fork in the summer of 1986. It is as simple as that. Nothing is random.

"Well, how was it?" I ask Bart.

"It was okay," he says. "Maybe we ought to come back in another forty years."

"Why not?" I reply as I turn and start the last few yards to the road. Why not, indeed.

Selected Reading

Oak Creek Canyon and the Red Rock Country of Arizona: A Natural History and Trail Guide, by Stewart W. Aitchison. Stillwater Canyon Press, Flagstaff, 1978.

A Sampler of 108 Sedona Westerner Trail Walks, arranged and edited by Lorraine Jaquith and Dixon Fagerberg. The Pronto Press, Sedona, Arizona, 1979.

Hiking the Southwest: Arizona, New Mexico, and West Texas, by Dave Ganci. Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, 1983.