“How much do you know about the geological history of this land?” Rio asked quietly.
“Not much more than the name ‘Basin and Range,’ and that’s self-explanatory,” she said, gesturing toward the view. “Basin followed by mountain range followed by basin, world without end.”
His clear eyes narrowed slightly as he focused on the distant horizon. World without end.
“You live in a rare place, Hope. It’s almost unique on earth. Its closest cousins are the Baikal region of Siberia and the African Rift Valley. Those are places where the crust of the earth is being stretched by the force of molten basalt pressing up from below, literally tearing the continent apart. The crust thins and breaks apart under the pressure in a process called rifting.”
Hope turned toward Rio, drawn by the near-reverence in his deep voice.
“In Africa the process has gone so far that parts of the rift are below sea level, just waiting for the south end of the rift to split the edge of the African continent and let in the ocean. Then a new sea will be born. Like the Red Sea, where the Arabian peninsula slowly split away from Africa and salt water bled into the gap, concealing the rift.”
He watched the horizon for a moment longer, but his eyes saw only the compelling, massive, surpassingly slow movements of continental plates over spans of time so immense that they could only be named, not understood. Geological time. Deep time.
“A similar kind of crustal spreading is happening all the way down the center of the Atlantic Ocean,” he added.
Just listening to Rio made Hope ache with all that couldn’t be. His words were alive with a subtle excitement, the voice of a man who saw things few other people could, a man who was intellectually, spiritually, and sensually alive to the world around him.
“I’ll show you maps of it tonight,” he said. “The Atlantic rift is really something, all the frozen ridges of basalt and the flat intermediary basins being pushed east and west from a great central seam at the bottom of the ocean.”
“I’d like to see that.”
Slowly Rio’s focus returned to the rugged land in front of him instead of the images in his mind. “The Basin and Range country is pulling itself apart, just like the Atlantic. Basalt wells up deep below the surface, fracturing the crust in thousands of fault zones. Some of the land rises along the faults, some drops, and then huge blocks of land tilt up and back like a dog pushing up on its haunches after sleeping in the sun.”
Hope smiled at the image of blocks of land changing positions like a pack of great, shaggy dogs.
“That’s what makes our mountain ranges,” he said. “The tilting. Look over there. See it?”
She followed his glance from the Perdidas to the distant basin shimmering with heat.
“Tilting is why the west side of the mountains isn’t as steep as the east side,” he explained. “The uplift is sharper on the east face of the blocks. If you look with your mind as well as your eyes, you can see the blocks of land shearing apart, rocking back, rising, mountains growing up into the sky. And the higher the mountains go, the more clouds are combed out of the sky, and the less rain falls on the eastern side. The dry side.”
“Valley of the Sun.”
“Yes. And a lot of other valleys. That’s where part of your water problem comes from. The Basin and Range country is in the rain shadow of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Young mountains, tall and growing taller. They block the clouds coming off the Pacific Ocean, milk them, and very little rain escapes to the other side. It’s as though the mountains cast a shadow where it rarely rains.”
He shifted slightly in the saddle, putting his palm flat on the saddle horn, and studied the land he sensed in his soul as much as saw with his eyes.
“Okay, living in a rain shadow is part of my problem,” Hope said. “What’s the rest?”
“There just isn’t as much water in the atmosphere as there used to be,” he said simply. “We’re in a dry cycle. And I don’t mean only the last few decades or generations. A hundred thousand years ago, if we looked over the Basin and Range country, we would have seen water, not sagebrush.”
At first she thought Rio was joking. A look at his face told her that he wasn’t. He was watching the land with eyes that saw through the surface of reality to the shifting forces beneath—shaman’s eyes, darker than twilight, as hypnotic as his voice sinking into her, wrapping her in visions of an earth she had never dreamed.
“A lot of little lakes and two big ones covered this land,” he said. “One of the lakes was nearly nine thousand square miles of water. The other was twenty thousand square miles.” As though he was remembering, his eyes looked inward. “They were deep lakes. Hundreds of feet deep. They filled the rift in the land where the crust was being pulled apart.”
“How? Was there really that much more rain back then?”
“Partly it was more rain. Mostly it was runoff and meltwater from the Sierras. The mountains got a lot more rain and snow then. Rivers that only run part of the time now were a year-round torrent racing down to fill the crustal rift.”
“What about evaporation? Why didn’t the runoff lakes dry up then the way they do now?”
“It wasn’t as hot, which meant less evaporation. The water that came to the Great Basin stayed and created lakes. Men lived along the lakes, fished there, explored island mountain peaks covered with pines and glaciers, hunted animals that are now extinct, and saw vast fields of wildflowers bloom.”
Hope listened without moving, enthralled by the words and the man who spoke them. While Rio talked she saw her land change before her eyes—and she saw him change, too. His country drawl was overlaid with words and phrases and concepts that should have been utterly alien to a drifting cowhand.
“But the last ice age ended, the weather warmed, and rivers stopped running year-round,” he said. “Less moisture to evaporate. Less moisture to gentle the climate. More evaporation and then more, until the rains couldn’t keep up.” His voice was low, intense, seeing today’s drought foreshadowed in the climatic shifts of fifteen thousand years ago. “The vast lakes began to evaporate. They shrank and shrank and shrank until nothing is left today but what we call Great Salt Lake and Pyramid Lake on the California-Nevada border.”
He closed his eyes for a moment, seeing it happen, vast lakes becoming a desert. “All that immensity of water. Gone.”
Hope saw, too, and mourned.
When Rio’s eyes opened, he looked out on today’s land, a dry land layered with fossil life forms from long-dead lakes.
“Today almost no water flows out of the Basin and Range country to any sea,” he said simply. “Think of it, Hope. Thousands upon thousands of square miles of land drained by rivers that run into the desert and vanish. Mountain runoff goes down to the playas, the sinks, the basins between the ranges. And there the water stays. There are no networks of ponds and lakes, no rills and creeks and rivers running down to a waiting sea. There is only a blazing sun and an empty sky. And the wind, always the wind, blowing over the changing face of the land, touching all of its secrets.”
Hope heard both Rio’s words and the hissing whisper of a dry wind blowing over the Valley of the Sun. She had a thousand questions to ask him, a lifetime of questions aching for answers. Yet she didn’t speak because she wanted him to keep talking, wanted to see the world as he saw it, an endless process of change and renewal, seas and mountains rising and falling, continents shifting.
And through it all there were rivers and clouds pregnant with rain, the recurring miracle of water.
As though Rio sensed her silent plea, he began talking again. “In the rare cases where there’s still enough runoff to keep a low spot covered with water year-round, the lakes evaporate at a fantastic rate, up to one hundred fifty inches a year.”
Hope winced. “God. It barely rains a tenth of that most years.”
“That’s how fresh becomes salt, over time. All water, even so-called fresh water, contains tiny amounts of dissolved salts. When the
water evaporates, what goes into the air is truly fresh, no salts allowed. The salts stay behind. Each year the fresh water goes and the salts remain.”
Her saddle creaked as she moved slightly, as though she would hold back the flight of water from the dry land.
“Without enough new, fresh water, evaporation slowly turns a freshwater lake into a saltwater lake, useless to animals or plants,” Rio said simply. “The Great Salt Lake is what’s left of one of the huge Pleistocene lakes. Mono Lake is the remainder of another. Salt and little water.” He shrugged. “That’s how it went from the Sierra Nevada to western Utah and even beyond. All that land. All that water stolen by the sun and the thirsty sky.”
Hope waited, watching him with an intensity that made her eyes almost dark. “Then the hydrologist was right? There’s no hope for my ranch?”
Rio shifted in the saddle, wanting to promise and knowing he couldn’t. All he could do was offer a fighting chance.
And that was all she had asked for. A fighting chance.
“Not all of the water evaporates,” he said. “Some of it slides down into the land itself. It gathers between fist-sized rocks and pebbles no bigger than my thumb. It hides between grains of sand and oozes between particles of silt so fine you have to use a microscope to see them. It sinks down into some of the rock layers of the mountains themselves, limestone and sandstone and shale.”
Suddenly Rio turned and pinned Hope with a vivid, midnight-blue glance. “And the water stays there. There’s water all through this country. Some of it is old water, fossil water, rains that fell when men hunted mammoths by the shores of ancient lakes.”
Wind like a long exhalation from the past moved over Hope’s skin, stirring her in a primal response. She looked at her ranch with new eyes, seeing beyond the drought of today to the water of a million yesterdays. When she turned back to Rio, her eyes were radiant with the vision he had shared.
He saw the beauty of her eyes, green and gold and brown, a mixture of colors that changed with each shift of light. He saw his own vision of time and the country reflected in her eyes and in the primal shiver of awareness that rippled through her.
And then he knew that she had understood his words as few people would have, or could. She had listened with her soul as well as her mind. She had seen time and the great land as he saw them, sharing his vision in an intimacy that he had never known with anyone.
At that moment he wanted nothing more than to lift Hope from the saddle and let her flow over his skin and he over hers like a rain-sweetened wind, touching all the secret places, bringing a passionate storm, sharing his flesh with her as deeply as he had shared his mind.
Silently cursing his unruly body, Rio reined Storm Walker around the landslide. After a moment he heard the long-legged gray mare follow. A shod hoof made a distinctive sound as steel rang on a stone buried just beneath the surface of the landslide.
When Aces moved alongside the stallion, Rio didn’t look at Hope. He couldn’t. He was afraid that she would read the hunger in his eyes, afraid that her eyes would be hungry, too. Then he would reach for her, lift her into his arms, know her as deeply as he knew the land.
And in time the wind would blow and he would leave her as surely as water had left the land.
Rio rode on, wondering if the Great Basin’s long-vanished rains hated themselves for leaving a hungry, hurting land behind.
Thirteen
HOPE AND RIO rode in silence until he could look at the bleak mountains without seeing a far more gentle flesh, could focus his thoughts on the slabs of differing rock strata broken and canted up to the sky instead of on the hunger that clawed through both his body and his mind.
He could deal with the passionate needs of his body. But the passionate hunger of his mind for Hope was new to him, as deeply disturbing to him as the upwelling of molten basalt was to the thick crust of the earth. He knew that their shared silence, like the shared vision before it, held an intimacy that he could neither describe nor deny.
Rio didn’t speak until he was in control of himself again. It took a long time. Much too long.
“Most of the boundaries marked on my map of the ranch go something like ‘one hundred and twenty paces on a Montana horse’ or ‘twelve degrees northwest of Black Rock Wash,’ ” Rio said. His voice was practical, empty of visions, offering no more than the dictionary meaning of his words.
“Homesteaders’ measurements,” Hope said. “Dad called them horseback estimates.”
“They’re not a hell of a lot of use when you’re trying to figure out how to avoid drilling a well on someone else’s land. When was the most recent survey of your ranch done?”
“Oh, about 1865, shortly after Nevada became a state. That was when one of Mom’s great-greats decided to file on land that we’d been squatting on for twenty years,” Hope added with a small curve of a smile.
Rio sighed and tugged his hat into place. “That explains it,” he drawled. “Some rawhide ancestor of yours took a notion and filed on about thirty square miles of sagebrush and foothills. Damn shame he didn’t take a cut of the high-country watershed while he was at it.”
“Oh, he tried, but we could only show improvements in the foothills—spreader dams we’d built to slow the flow of the runoff streams, water holes deepened and cleaned out, wells dug, that sort of thing. Because we didn’t need anything like that for stock in the high country, where there is water year-round, we didn’t make any improvements.”
“So the government kept the high country and you kept as much of the foothills as you could,” Rio summarized. It was an old, familiar story around the Basin and Range.
“Plus all the government land we could sneak cows onto,” she added wryly. “We’ve never been real big on fences here in Nevada.”
He smiled. That, too, was an old, familiar story. “How deep were the wells in those days?”
“It’s hard to say. You know how it is. The ‘good old days’ were always better. The truth is they had droughts then, too.” She hesitated, fighting to keep her voice neutral. “It’s also true that the water table is dropping gradually, and has been for years. Some of the drop comes from too much pumping for local irrigation. Some of it comes from pumping water out and selling it to cities like Las Vegas. And some of it,” she said bleakly, “comes from the simple fact that less rain is falling. This is a dry land and it seems to be getting drier every year.”
Rio heard the hollowness in Hope’s voice that she couldn’t hide. He didn’t ask any more questions.
Side by side they rode in silence until the dirt track dwindled to a trail winding up toward a ridgeline covered with piñon and juniper. Higher up, far beyond the point where foothills blended into the mountains themselves, stands of aspens touched by frost blazed like golden embers burning against a green and gray backdrop of pine and sage.
Saddles creaked and the horses began to breathe deeply as they leaned into the steep climb that led to Piñon Camp. Finally the trail took them to a gently sloping piece of land where piñon and pine grew thickly. A sun-cured meadow made a tawny contrast with the black rocks of the mountainside and the dense green of the piñon.
To one side of the trail there was a fire-blackened ring of stones, a rack for hanging game, and faint old footpaths leading from the camp to the meadow. Overhead a hawk soared in transparent circles, watching for movement below. Ravens and scrub jays called from nearby perches, warning other animals of the intruders that had appeared from the dry lands below.
Rio took in everything with the quick, comprehensive glance of a man who has spent most of his life in wild country. Then he looked again, seeing beyond the superficial clothing of plants and animals to the geological history beneath.
The meadow and the camp were part of a bench, a small block of land that a minor fault zone had caused to break away from the larger mountain block. The mountain had continued to rise on the far side of the local fault, while on this side the bench had continued to rise, too, but more slowly. T
he result was a sloping land surface that was higher than the surrounding foothills but lower than the mountain it had sheared away from.
Rio reined Storm Walker across the open land. Ahead of him the mountain rose suddenly, its side bare of all but the most determined sagebrush. The various steeply tilted layers of rock that made up part of the mountain showed in the changing colors and textures of the cliff, looking like thick stone ribbons that had been pushed and pulled by unimaginable forces.
Though worn by time and weather, twisted and broken by the movements of the earth, the stone layers had a story to tell to anyone who could read them. Some ribbons of stone were relatively young sedimentary rocks. But the majority of the stone layers were old, dense, so darkened and changed by time and the movements of the earth that they were all but impervious to the elements now. Storm, wind, water, sun, nothing changed them. They were the spent, blackened bones of a younger time, a different world.
Somewhere, tilted at a steep angle and buried from sight, Rio believed there would be at least one thick layer of limestone, legacy of the great sea that had covered the land long, long before man arrived forty million years ago, when the Basin and Range country lay beneath a wealth of water that could hardly be imagined now. Since then, continental plates had oozed over the earth’s surface, their passage lubricated by molten rock. The movement of the plates changed everything, making mountains rise and dragging other lands down beneath the surface of the earth until it became so hot that rock melted and ran like water.
“What are you looking for?” Hope asked.
“Potential aquifers.” Rio’s eyes were intent on the mountainside as he visually traced various twists and turns of stone. “An aquifer is a layer of rock that can absorb water.”
Beautiful Dreamer with Bonus Material Page 13
