House of Rain

If you don't know who Craig Childs is, it's time to find out. I first became exposed to Childs at the Xeriscape Conference in 2006. I remember waking up from a previous talk (my usual struggle to stay awake in conference rooms) when Childs began speaking. I vaguely remember him beginning by saying something that sounded like the beginning of Lord of the Rings, something like, "The world is changing." I doodled, preparing for another session of struggling against the sandman, thinking, "Oh, here comes some psycho." I let my mind half listen to his words, which soon had insinuated themselves around me, twisting, hypnotizing, lifting and transporting me into his experience of the dunes, sand, heat as he trekked across the barren desert in search of an understanding water. It was a dreamland, but not of my own mind, of his words. I realized that his "talk" wasn't a talk at all, but a performance.

Craig Childs is a master storyteller, even though this isn't how he's booked. His books "The Secret Knowledge of Water," "Soul of Nowhere," "The Way Out," and his articles in High Country News are mesmerizing rhythms of words, images unfolding in the mind's eye. But his speaking/storytelling that day makes me embarrased to compare to the beginning of Lord of the Rings. Somehow I was with him, buried in sand up to my eyes, looking out at the drifting sands for hours waiting for the heat of the day to pass. I was trecking for days across dune after dune, feeling my soul rise out of my body. And it was more as the cadence of his words, the rapid phrases of excitement interspersed with quiet passages recalled the arrival of a thunderstorm, and the quiet after the storm. The quiet phases seemed to be drawn out of his very soul, each slow word reverberating with the unsaid, an almost inadequate distillation of his remembered experience and each word seeming to be a struggle to remain in the here, the now.

Last night, Craig Childs spoke at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. The best $2 I've ever spent. Although slightly more of a talk than the performance I remembered, Childs had that wide-eyed look of someone who sees the world anew every day of his life, and the look of someone still re-aquainting himself with "civilization." I had the sense that when he referred to the house lights as "those things" it wasn't because he was being dramatic, or that he forgot what they were called, but because he wasn't quite used to them being around. It was worth paying $10 more for the book compared to Amazon, to have him sign one of the last books of the first printing of his new book "House of Rain."

At the book signing, I begged him to do an audio recording of a performance, shameless in wide-eyed star-struck awe, just like a fan at a rock concert (or me at the last talk given by Lauren Springer Ogden). Read the books. But even better, listen to a performance. Please, Craig, do a recording.

(image from: http://www.nmnaturalhistory.org/edu_lectures.html)