An Officer and an Oracle

Image Gallery image by Craig Childs / www.houseofrain.com

A mosaic of rocks covers the ground where a middle-aged, lightly graying man crouches over his heels. Around his shoulder is a coil of climbing rope. He leans forward and runs a hand across red dust and sharply broken debris. It looks like he is reading an invisible sign—an oracle paused in the desert.

“Come on,” he mutters to the ground. “Give me something.”

I am looking too, crouched near him, hoping for a sign, a clue about how to get through this landscape. Around us, pale, bare cliffs tower one above the next. Canyons plunge into inescapable, winter-cold depths. Dirk and I have been walking for several days through this land, an untrailed, remote quarter of the Navajo Reservation in northern Arizona. This mode of travel has been our mutual pastime, wandering for weeks or months on end into the wilderness, seeing what might become of us.

We’re balanced on a platform of rock, geologic scaffolding, not a single living thing visible around us, no shrub or sprig of grass. The land looks elemental, the very bones of the earth.

Dirk pushes his fingertips into parched blowsand and unearths a bighorn sheep dropping. The small, oval scat is exactly what he was looking for. It means there is a passage, a way through.

“Somebody’s been here,” Dirk says. Bighorn sheep navigate this territory, traveling finger-width ledges, leaping chasms. Their habitat, known as escape terrain, is convoluted country where predators cannot reach. The only hitch is you have to learn to move like an acrobat, every sense elevated at every step.

Dirk crushes the dropping and it falls apart like sawdust.

I would be lost without Dirk and his uncanny skill for finding routes. He can find his way through the impossible.

Dirk used to work as a street cop. His history is a menagerie of car accidents and gunfire. It might be why he is such a good route finder, 15 years spent negotiating the underworld of an American city, trying to find his way out alive.

When I first met Dirk, he had just left the Denver police force. He moved to the desert, appearing in the wilderness like a shipwreck victim. That is where I found him, or he found me. I was living out of the back of my truck and spending months at a time in the wilderness. We began walking together.

He told me he got out because he thought he was going to get a bullet through his head at any moment. More important, he was afraid he would go mad if he stayed in the city. He left and took a job as a river outfitter in Moab, Utah.

I was attracted to his uncanny alertness and ease of control. It was like traveling with a mountain lion by my side. As we journeyed through canyons, he told me that being out here was not so different from being a cop. Subtle observations are required if you want to survive. Nothing is taken for granted, no dry wash, no water hole.