Читать книгу Virga & Bone - Craig Childs - Страница 11

VIRGA

If I could see the wind, it would look orchestral: strands and swirls nested into each other, braiding and springing apart. When it stills and coolness settles, the air would lie as smooth as water on a lake.

Flying over the Four Corners in August, we couldn’t see the wind, but we could feel it. We were riding inside an aluminum box with wings, the heat-pan of the desert boiling below. It was good flying until about one in the afternoon, which was now, as a big up carried us through the hoop of a thermal and down the other side.

Time to be on the ground, said the pilot, turning us west toward the blue snakes of Lake Powell. He had a few years of experience with planes, a good and trusted friend from the backcountry, a novice growing less novice with every trip. It was only the two of us, crammed more tightly than astronauts in a space capsule. We knew the drill, talking about landforms through our headsets, memorizing canyons and redrock swales, making maps in our heads. We had gear to go on foot from wherever we landed, checking dirt strips around the Nokai Dome, not far into Utah from the Arizona desert. Clouds were scattered and some bloomed into cumulus risers, a pattern of the day, heat lifting from blush-colored earth, entering higher, cooler air, condensing to moisture that sometimes, when everything is right and the prayers have been said and a feather from the wing of a hawk sails up on a thermal, dew drops gathering on its edges at twenty thousand feet, condensing as moisture that falls as rain.

No rain today. Clouds had a whiteness that said don’t even think about it.

Hall’s Crossing, he said. See it out there? He handed me the map and his finger scooted down to the electronic screen on his knee, checking distances. We both preferred dirt, but this landing strip was paved and it was close and safe. That’s a reason I fly with him. He’s cautious. He caught a whiff of something the other day, passing at sunrise in front of the Bears Ears buttes in southern Utah, and he turned the plane around without hesitation, didn’t say anything until we’d pulled a complete, gentle U-turn. As he scanned the terrain ahead, calculating a possible landing at Monticello, Blanding, or Bluff, envisioning his approach in case of power loss or disabled flaps, he asked, Do you smell something? I detected nothing but the slightly musty smell of a machine and old upholstery, a mix of body shop and furniture repair. He asked again. A burning smell or chemical? I said no. We flew on until he was convinced it was nothing and turned us back on our route. He didn’t have to explain why he’d been concerned. Up here, small mistakes add up quickly.

The pilot and I fly together whenever we can. A couple years back we explored not far north of here, bringing backpacks and hopping one rutted old mining strip to the next in the Utah desert. That had been in October in mostly gentle air, cool days and crisp nights, perfect for flying. August is different. Days are planned around temperature, airborne at the first crack of light, the coolest part of the day, and back on the ground by one, two at the latest, before the sky turns into an inferno of upward winds. The plane needs lift, something to fly on. Hot air is thinner, fewer molecules to push against, not a solid hold. An old cloth-wing like this, a 1946 vintage, needs good lift to stay airborne and resist the punishing updrafts and downdrats of a shimmering desert afternoon.

Hall’s Crossing was the closest landing between slim canyons written in cursive, the airstrip sitting alone on a plain of rock and sand that goes on for miles, for days, forever. We landed, hiked around the area, cooked dinner, and settled in. Just after sunset, I walked the blacktop back and forth, talking on the phone with my kids. The pilot was at his tent, sitting outside with a screen in his face, studying the weather maps, his plane tied down and blocked. Love and giggles on the phone, and a voice deepening, asking what I was doing. A few days out by plane, I said, having a look at the desert, leaving at the start of light to see where the day pushes us.

Hard conversations sometimes, questions from home, a girl, a school grade, a thing said or done. I lay on my back on the hot runway. Air temperature tonight would barely dip below ninety degrees. Nothing was cool, definitely not the runway. Knees crooked upward, my spine settled on an oven-top, back of my skull on asphalt, I talked through whatever hard thing it was, searching for words, giving sketchy advice at best, letting the runway cook me from below. We exchanged goodnights and I love yous. Phone off, the evening sky returned, stars not out yet. I sat up from the runway and looked across a horizon of distant scarps, redrock turned black. Some of the clouds in the west, backlit by an indigo dusk, were letting out spiderwebs of virga, rain falling in long and gossamer veils, but not touching ground.

You wait in heat like this, scanning the horizon for a cloud, sometimes through a haze of wildfire smoke that turns the world orange, when a drop of rain would be a miracle. You stop in the middle of the day and hold up your hand to the sky, the mountains on the horizon electrified. If the air had more water, if it were East Coast on a sharp summer day, the sky would be washed out and white, hard to tell distances until a plane flies through. In dry like this, you can see into the blue lens of space, eye set to infinity.

When you hear the word drought in the desert, it means magnification. These dry, rocky places are made of drought, created by absence, the sky holding back on purpose. When a drought is in drought, a knob with very fine settings is being turned, every hundredth of a degree boiling harder. I saw a creek by my house, which I’d always seen running, dry up and not start again for a year, beaver having trundled off to who knows where, or died in their dens waiting for moisture from the sky.

Deserts are mummifiers, bone-makers. Some years, the rain won’t come, clouds promising and promising, but did you say the right prayers, did you pray to the right god? Global measurements of desert precipitation had to be recalibrated recently when it was discovered that satellite signals were bouncing off of virga and not actual rain. Fifty percent of estimated rainfall never reached the ground.

By morning, virga was gone, horizons played out and cloudless. Loaded before dawn in the earliest light, headlamps in the cockpit, the pilot showed me his screen and the day’s coming weather. I asked about the green blob down by the town of Kayenta, the tail end of Comb Ridge, northern Arizona. A little thunderstorm, he said. It was left over from yesterday, not much to it. I asked if we could aim for that, at least get a look at the only thing happening in a hundred miles. He agreed.

Takeoff was slow, the ascent lagging on, night temps not low enough to cool the surface. We would have picked another week, but you take the one you planned, the hottest August on record, air thin and rising.

No pilot likes spending too much time near the ground. You don’t have space to improvise a few hundred feet up, where the ground could rise up in seconds. We both leaned into the climb, our shoulders forward, as if giving the engine that much more weight. Ater five miles we leveled off at two thousand feet, air propping us up better, high enough to relax. Once you’re up, the world is yours, seventy to eighty knots, like driving through the sky with a tractor.

Around nine we landed at Goulding’s Trading Post on the Monument Valley end of the Navajo Nation. We tied down and crossed a paved road for milkshakes at the gas station, weaving between RVs and tour trucks with open-air beds, the morning crowd already rolling, an hour and a half away from a hundred degrees. We took on extra fuel and chatted with a retired German couple who’d landed in a silver-tipped single prop with chrome exhaust ports. They were out to see the sights of the Southwest from the air. Their plane cruised five thousand feet above our altitude at a couple hundred knots. They raved, as much as a retired German couple raves, about flying in the West. They said Europe is like a traffic jam, radios crackling nonstop with flights in every direction, landings and turns, every decision announced, airspace chopped up over cities and towns. Out here, they said, you could do anything, be anywhere. You’d go half an hour without hearing a stranger’s voice through your headset.

The benefit of our plane was that it flies low and slow, more often under the clouds than over. Going through his checklist, the pilot tapped his screen where the green blob from dawn had moved north over Monument Valley. This is our last up today, he said. When we land, that’s where we’re staying. Where do you want to go?

I pointed to the blob of weather. Usually we flew in accordance to landscape, aiming for buttes, pivoting around mountains. We’d check on airstrips or scan for routes we could later take on foot, seeing if water holes had any water. The air has equal terrain, invisible canyons and vast, open bays to fly through and around.

Since he’d gotten his license a few years earlier, I’d watched the pilot test himself between the topography of earth and sky. He’s not a bumbling risk-taker, but he pushes his boundaries. It’s the only way to keep flying. If you don’t learn, he said, you aren’t going anywhere. If the first landing didn’t work, bouncing across a trough plowed by a tractor in the 1950s on the cap of a southern Utah mesa, repaired only a few times since then, he’d swing back for a second attempt, and a third, until he figured out how his plane works, how it responds to ruts, bouncing and throwing gravel, struts creaking, and he’d stick it on the fourth try.

The green on his screen had no yellow or red, no alarming colors. It was a smear of low pressure, a memory of a storm from the night before. If he thought it was dangerous, he would have kept us away. Approaching from the north at four thousand feet, about seventy knots, we saw an unremarkable cloud, a vestige of a cumulonim bus, a thunderhead on its last breath. Beneath it fell a single drape of virga. The cloud was letting go of itself, disgorging strands of spider’s silk that tumbled toward the towers of Monument Valley, stone Yeibichai dancing into a desert basin. At an altitude of about a thousand feet, the heat of the desert was too much, the dew point too low to let the rain make it all the way. On the ground beneath it, I’d be standing on peach-red sand, boulders shimmering all around, my hands open to the sky, and I’d be looking straight up asking for nothing.

The Navajo word for water is tó, pronounced twuh, the word shortened at the end, the sound of a drop of water landing. Virga is a Navajo koan, the sound of one drop not landing, waterless for those down below. My word for water sounds like want, sounds like desire, which might not be so different from the Navajo. Can we fly through it? I asked. The pilot looked over at the sheen of drizzle, a single curtain. He judged distances and potential turbulence in air that had been stable since we left the trading post half an hour earlier. He said we should find out and tipped the plane, her wings shading us from the sun as we arced toward this floating steamship and its diaphanous trailer.

Entering the virga was not as rough as we thought it would be. Expecting rattles and jolts, we instead sank into a well, our stomachs rising as we dropped. He increased power and lifted us back up. We could see raindrops: lone, silver-gray beads streaking by. They hit the wings and passed my window where I watched them fall, trailing several hundred feet before hissing back into air.

One drop hit the rounded windscreen, then another, a fifth, an eleventh. They were soft as cooked peas, as ripe berries. Each became a small, staggering comet heading around the plexiglass, looking for a way off, a way down, wanting nothing more than to meet the ground.

The plane fell again as we crossed the virga’s middle, then fell once more, riding down a staircase, the veneered cloth wings catching us as the pilot throttled back up. Cooler air descended inside the falls, carried down by water droplets, causing the air to sink. Only a few more drops fell against the windscreen as we tilted out the other side. It was five seconds across, a tenth of a mile thick.

Virga, I can now say, is as velveteen as it looks. This was no downpour, technically a drizzle. I could have stood inside its rain and barely gotten wet.

Out from under the cloud’s shadow, we became a shadow on the ground ourselves, a dot passing over sand dunes and open-mouthed arroyos. Our shadow was a storyteller crossing buttes and billows of rocks the size of small towns. In a canyon full of shadows, our plane winked out the daylight, a flash across a damp clutch of maidenhair ferns and a small pillow of moss where water seeps through a seam in the rock, a tiny spring releasing ancient rainwater.