The Secret Knowledge of Water: There Are Two Easy Ways to Die in the Desert: Thirst and Drowning

by Craig Childs

  Now say that the hole is dry, or you do not find it, and you have walked thirty miles only to place into your mouth a pinch of sand damp from the night before. The sand is a desperate act, and you die a few hours farther with grit on your swollen tongue. You leave your bones there, in the place where your last fragile thoughts drifted away.

  There are great, natural cisterns out in the desert, marvelous contraptions of rock, but each is buried within miles of difficult land. They are revealed gradually, through patient inquiry, through stories told over hundreds of years. Yes, they may be worth dying for, because anytime I find the water holes, they stand out like emeralds in the sand.

  1. MAPS OF WATER HOLES

  Cabeza Prieta, Arizona

  February-March

  THE DESERT BREATHED AND THEN WENT SILENT AT THE first mention of nightfall, a kind of quiet that comes only at the edge of the earth. The last small winds broke apart, rolling down unrelated washes like pearls off a snapped necklace. Then came stars. And a crescent moon. And a desert strung in every direction, iridescent indigo in the west where the sun had just set, black in the east.

  I walked west, toward an escarp ment on the horizon barely into Arizona from the Mexican border. In evening silhouettes, these sere, isolated mountains had the look of tall ships strewn about the desert. Between were gulfs of open land furrowed with slight washes. Within the washes were the dimpled tracks of black-tailed jackrabbits and kangaroo rats, and within them the curled parchment of bursage leaves left by a wind gone somewhere else.

  Across the flats I heard only the hushing sound of my boots through sand, then the sharper sound of my boots through the broken granite above the washes. The hum of one of the stray breezes through thousands of saguaro cactus needles. The sound of creosote leaves scratching the brim of my hat. At night it is best to walk through the desert with a hat held in the hand, pushed forward to block the thorns and sharp spines of occasional unseen plants. Almost everything alive out here is armored with some barb, spike, or poison quill. From the years that I did not carry my hat, the back of my right hand is scarred as if it had been offered to a furious cat.

  Tonight the moon, a waxing crescent thin as an eyelash, would not give enough light for shadows. I used it as a reference, walking directly toward it, carrying on my back all of the gear needed to resupply a base camp fifteen miles out, and the gear to supply the lesser camps beyond that. I had come to map water holes, working on a project for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The agency wanted to know what kind of water hid among these mountains, in some of the driest land in the Western Hemisphere. There are years when rain never falls, and sometimes the water holes contain nothing but rainwater that is twelve or sixteen months old, if they hold anything at all.

  To find the water, I took thirty-seven days to traverse a single mountain range, hunting in its cracks and canyons. I carried simple measuring tools along with a device that communicates with satellites to record latitude and longitude of whatever water I found, perhaps a quart of evaporating rainwater in a rock depression. With my coordinates recorded, I placed small red marks on the map, showing one water hole, then the next.

  This survey area was chosen not for any special characteristics, or a promise of water, but because it looked as arid and embattled as any of the mountains out here. Now and then I would return to my truck, which was parked beside a wash, off a long-winded road made of sand. There I would refill my supplies and cache them in the desert beyond. As I found water from the outlying natural cisterns, I was able to drink and extend deeper into the range, until I had recorded lifelines of water holes leading from my base camp into nowhere.

  The final product of this work would go to the files of Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge is managed primarily for desert bighorn sheep that supposedly thrive on these quarts. There are those people who worry for the sheep, who believe water should be shipped into the desert during early-summer droughts so that the sheep can maintain an “optimum” population, so that they can fill their range. There are also those who believe that after ten thousand years of seeking water, sheep do not require our aid.

  While out walking through these canyons, below summits sharp as ice picks, I have heard sheep clattering among rocks but have rarely been able to get close enough to see their eyes. I have lifted their discarded bones and horns, turned them in my hand, and studied their tracks near water holes. One morning I watched a group of four rams carefully pick through steep talus. I waited above, crouched shirtless in shade, observing their choices, how their hooves negotiated each small rock. I tried to decipher their boldness and indecision, learning how an animal must behave in this landscape. The fourth ram, the youngest, waited until the others were out of sight before making its own mistakes, then backtracking. This made me smile, made me rest easier.

  My personal reasons for mapping water holes here had little to do with bighorn sheep. I came to put a story back together and recover parts that had been lost. The story, when it was complete, would have told of secret water in a desperately ragged place, would have shown the route to safely cross from one end of Cabeza Prieta to the other. I wanted to understand water in a land this dry. Within the 860,000 acres of this refuge, only one spring exists. It is a bare, dripping spring, yet is enough to have bestowed the entire mountain range in which it sits with the name Agua Dulce. Sweet Water.

  The desert cities have their cement aqueducts to siphon distant rivers, and holes are drilled into ten-thousand-year-old banks of groundwater. Familiarity with scattered water holes has become obsolete, left only for the bighorn sheep. Words are now missing from the story of ephemeral waters, severing critical pieces of information. Many people have died while crossing this desert, regardless of their reasons for being here. They died because the story was forgotten.

  This country is not idle. The mountains are bitterly seared. Rising a couple thousand feet off the floor, they are offset by swaths of bulged, rolling desert, called bajadas, that take days to cross. As I walked on this night of the crescent moon, the bajada unfurled to the horizons to the north and south. Here and there it was intercepted by farther mountains, each an island, or a chain, or a misshapen monstrosity bursting straight from the ground.

  On long night walks like this, brushing through plants and walking up and down against the grain of dry, north-flowing washes, I told myself stories, recounting whatever I remembered about the place. Stories gave the land definition at night, as the mountains vanished around me. Sometimes I would speak the stories out loud to break the loneliness. A particular one came from a site about eight miles straight ahead of me. An archaeologist making a sweep of the area found among assemblages of prehistoric potsherds two .45-caliber Colt cartridges, manufactured by the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. They had probably been discharged onto the ground in the early 1900s. The two cartridges had been rammed together, making a small, enclosed capsule. Inside this capsule was a note that read, “Was it worth it?”

  So I invented scenarios, tried to imagine what the message meant. Death or desperation or gold that was never found or somebody like myself pushing the edges of the desert only to be confronted with this question in the end.

  Just south of these two cartridges, in six hundred square miles of lava flows, cinder cones, and dune seas, ten forty-pound boulders were found butted against one another to form a perfect southeast-to-northwest line. It is not possible to tell if it was constructed hundreds or thousands of years ago, but it was done, for whatever reason, by strenuous human labor. I told myself stories about this. Perhaps they levered the boulders with wooden saguaro ribs tied together, rolling them from miles away. For what? To appease certain gods? To reinvent the mountains? To invite the rain with a signal that could be seen from the clouds?

  Cabeza Prieta

  In another place each small rock on the ground had been cleared, revealing the pale belly of earth in a line six feet wide and seven hundred feet long without deviation. There are other, more orna
te sites: geometric designs hundreds of feet in length, with mazes and inner circles that can be seen as a whole only from an airplane. I have seen in one of these stone clearings the life-size and accurate image of a horse, probably a sixteenth-century Spanish horse as seen by an indigenous artist, while around it ran a web of exposed lines radiating into the landscape.

  In the mountain range ahead of me, a Spanish missionary of the Franciscan order came through in the 1700s, querying local inhabitants about the mounds of horns and bones from bighorn sheep he found erected near the water holes. He was talking to the people called the Hia C'ed O'odham, known as the Sand People by the Spanish. Without offering further explanation, the people gave him a simple answer. The horns and bones had been placed to keep the wind from leaving the country.

  Stories everywhere. This is the place where people came to hold on to the wind. It is where they brought expectations that were rammed into rifle shells. In the coming dark, the desert grew richer with stories. And I became more alone. I knew of a small group of archaeologists with a work site about a four- or five-day walk southwest of here. Probably a few illegal immigrants were coming up from the border, but not through here, where people die from exposure and thirst. So I figured I was the only person for thirty to eighty miles in any direction. This left a kind of openness and remoteness that made merely breathing feel obscene. A friend once traveled with me here and as we walked the perimeter of one of these ranges, he said the vastness reminded him of the Arctic, up by the Brooks Range where great basins of tundra lie between distant and imposing mountains, where there is no human artifact. I nodded at the time, realizing a sensation I had not yet been able to place.

  Humans are absent here because they die. One document records the death of four hundred people here by 1900, many of whom were traveling from Mexico to the California goldfields. More have died since. Within view of several distant mountains, a family had been memorialized by black pieces of basalt arranged to form the numeral 8, telling how many family members perished. Sixty-five graves surround one of the better-known watering sites, presumably from the times that the holes went dry. Most victims died of dehydration and exposure, but occasional reports concerned those who drowned, too weak from thirst to climb out of the deep stone water holes into which they had plunged.

  There are more recent deaths, those of illegal immigrants from Mexico, who come seeking jobs picking watermelons or cleaning houses. These people walk out in small groups, some of them from the tropics, never having seen the desert. They hire a person, a coyote, who deposits them across the border and points the way to Interstate 8. Each carries a gallon plastic milk jug filled with water, which in the summer lasts a few hours. The walk takes many days and they live maybe until the afternoon of the second or third day, their tracks of discarded belongings and empty milk jugs signaling insanity. Some of their milk jugs are, in fact, found half-full beside their bodies, skin taut to bursting. This story repeats itself every year.

  As in stories I have heard from Mount Everest, where bodies of climbers are dispersed among glaciers, bodies here are turned to bones and spread across the sand and gravel and in the rocks. The bones are uncounted and unburied, scattered like offerings. It is perhaps these bones, rather than those of bighorns, that now prevent the wind from leaving the country.

  Coming close to the horizon, the moon appeared to move quickly. As it fell into the mountains of Cabeza Prieta, it described ridges as splintered as dry wood broken over a knee. For a moment, all that remained in the sky was the watermark stain of the moon's dark side. Then it set, leaving this hysterical swarm of stars. I chose certain constellations and followed them, my hat still extended in my hand.

  There were good places to sleep. There were open flats where the ground curved slightly, barren of most plants. I could lie on one of these flats with my eyes open, the earth presenting me to the sky as if I were a newborn or a sacrifice. I chose instead a narrow wash, one barely depressed so that the wind had to bend down to find me. I protected myself beneath a creosote bush on ripples of wash sand. This is where I slept, in a country littered with arcane rock symbols, and death, and rumors of water.

  First I followed bees. This was three weeks ago, when I arrived at a six-hundred-foot block of white granite floating on the desert like an iceberg. I slumped into its shade and craned my head up, hearing a drone of bees above. The sound told of an unusual congregation, so I scrambled up the smooth shield of rock. The bees led into a crack where they busied themselves in and out. I had already taken my shirt off in the heat, so as they commuted from the hole the bees thudded into my bare back and chest.

  For seven days now I had found no water. Everything I had was carried on my back or left cached in caves. I had begun to doubt my choice of research sites, spending days where nothing was to be found but rock and ocotillo and bighorn scat. In this bee hole I could see a reflection within a rectangular crevice: a smooth, shaded mirror vibrating slightly against the wing beats of several hundred bees. The color quieted me. It was like a purple dusk sky suddenly masking the hot white I had been walking through all morning. I bunched my shoulders and squeezed in as far as I could, reaching my hand back until my fingers touched water. Circles spread over the barely lit surface. The circles fell back on themselves.

  This was not the kind of water that could make war on the desert. It was a secret, a softly spoken word that the surrounding desert could not hear. If the sun ever found it, it would be gone in days. This was an artifact of the last rain, which had sheeted over the face of this isolated mountain and just happened to catch in this dark place where a block of stone had fallen, leaving a hole like the pulling of a tooth. Bees had come because it was the only water in their range. They distended their abdomens with water and carried it back to cool and moisten their hive.

  I unraveled a tape measure and slowly passed it through the bees, then reached down to scratch numbers on a notepad. Bees landed on my forearm. They explored my fingers, with their legs catching in my hairs. This hole, I calculated, contained twenty-two and a half gallons of rainwater; it was about three feet long, a foot wide, and a tapering foot deep. Crustaceans called ostracods, each small as a dill seed, cruised the floor, their presence suggesting a longer life to this pool than I might have thought. Weeks rather than days. Bees started bottlenecking against my body, troubled by my movements, making me nervous, so I pulled my head backward into the light.

  This particular island of granite, so heavy and white with quartz that it was hard to look at in the middle of the day, became a regular stop, a landmark to let me know how far it was to the mountains to the west. Halfway points are more important than the destination with these kinds of distances. On the morning after the crescent moon I paused to take measurements and drink a cup of water from the bee hole. It had only a slight, earthy taste of rock. As I drank I could feel the water fill the inside of my body as if I were an empty jar. There was no water on my back. Everything had been stored at my base camp, where I would arrive before sunset. I felt as if I were treading in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, no land in sight. I would stop now and then just to test the feeling, to say out loud that I had no water with me and see how that felt. It was a peculiar combination of arrogance and vulnerability. With this drink, I climbed down and walked farther.

  Distances are meaningless here. Walking toward this western mountain range seemed, for most of the day, to be a futile task. But by afternoon the range, which had kept still since morning, began to shift. What was a single ridge unfolded into a backdrop of different mountains. The hazy blue of far objects became a variety of colors. Smaller mountains came and went, rags of granite that took no note of my passage. A mountain range that had looked like crumpled paper on the horizon now occupied most of the view, then opened into canyons, coming around me as I walked inside. Chasms spread up from the desert floor. The smooth bajada behind me was put away, and the world became a ring of quartz cathedrals, steeples playing all over the sky.

 
; The somewhat barren land of the bajada was replaced at the foot of the range with groves of ironwood and paloverde trees, vines of devil's claw skulking among fallen mesquite branches, saguaros clumped together like old men waiting for a bus, and massive, spidery ocotillos with arms sprawling at the air. The desert here became arboreal with what little moisture drains from the mountains during a storm.

  I reached my cache, a small cave sealed with dried elephant tree limbs and a tarp. Everything in this cave had been deposited over a period of several weeks during my passes-by in search of water holes, as I dropped off extra supplies and water for when I would later need them. I withdrew objects slowly, watching for scorpions. I grabbed the canvas water bag and it collapsed between my fingers, empty. Rodents had gotten in. Chewed a hole in the bottom, letting the water spill into the hole, soaking sand, then drying. They had not disturbed the food or the notes in plastic bags. They took my water.

  Thirst, I remembered, is mostly a psychological pain, at first. It can drive you insane so that you die of something other than dehydration. Falling or getting trapped on a cliff or walking in the wrong direction. I remembered this and steadied my mind. I methodically unloaded new food supplies into the cache, took five days' worth of what I needed, and sealed the thing up, walking south now without water. I was still treading in the ocean. Still couldn't see land.