by Craig Childs
Weeks earlier, I had recorded a hole several miles away, and in my notes it was marked as Dry 001, meaning that it was the first of a series of dry holes. Because of what I remembered of its shape, a certain moistness to the sand in its floor, curtains of dry algae, and its position along the bottom of a constricted canyon, I thought it might someday hold water. There had been signs of a coyote digging in its sand. Light rain had come once since I had last seen it. Perhaps light rain twenty miles away meant heavy rain over the hole.
I rose through canyons where nolinas grew fifteen feet tall, each with slender, exotic trunks like those of palm trees and a crown of grasslike leaves. Canyon walls worked into odd shapes like nests of bones—finely curved ribs, sockets, and skulls. I climbed through these, coming over a pass and dropping down the other side into a wash. I bit lightly on my tongue, finding it dry.
When the wash tightened into bedrock I found Dry 001. It held about sixteen gallons of clear water. I stood for a moment in front of it, trying not to act desperate or crazily excited. I simply stared at the water, letting my hands list to my sides. I drank, taking water from just beneath the surface, then made notes and measurements, spanning a tape measure across the surface and then to the bottom. The hole was the shape of a cone, so I calculated the volume based on the volume of a cone. Not too accurate, but good enough. The name for a water hole like this is tinaja, Spanish for “earthen jar,” a description I have always liked. A person who constructs or sells water jars is a tinajero. The English word often used as a parallel is tank, not nearly as rich or descriptive a term.
I gathered a couple of gallons from the tinaja. A gift. I tried to take this with my head down, and I worried that my disinterested taking of measurements might not be the proper response to something giving me life. I paused there thinking of how I should act, what words I should use. Nothing came. The desert is full of simple acts with indescribable significance. I merely rose and left, a thief of water.
Just after nightfall I dropped gear at a place where the contrast of dark basalt boulders on the pale quartz surface looked like raisins drying on linen. An ocotillo reaching its arms all over the sky made me think of a black octopus gathering stars. I sat beneath it, staring.
Being here alone had a sharpened edge to it. The edge came at night, whenever I stopped and sat among rocks. I had no stove, only nuts, raisins, and chocolate, so I did not have the ritual of preparing a meal. I reached out and spread my hand to measure spaces between stars. The magnifying glass of the atmosphere pried constellations apart at the horizon and then made them smaller as they rose. For a sense of comfort and familiarity, I arranged each of my belongings, placing my knife on a rock beside my headlamp, the water on my right, notebook on my left. I again spread my hand into the air to see how the stars had changed.
An ecologist working in this desert once looked straight at me and with a quiet voice told me to be careful. “I don't know what it is about the place,” she said, “but there are hoodoos out there.” She then started telling me stories I did not want to hear. One researcher had her vehicle burn to the ground, with a total loss of equipment and records. It burned for no reason. Hoodoos is an odd word for a uniformed federal scientist to be using, as if warning me of ghosts. But the word stayed with me.
So far the only odd event had been that my truck was broken into near a fifty-mile-long sand road. The break-in was a sign of desperation from people who kicked out a window and went past all my valuables to the food, clothes, and water. Anything else would have weighed them down, lessening their chances of getting out of here. Nearby, I came upon their vehicle—a beat-up Camaro from Mexico—with one tire shredded and the rest bogged so far down in sand, up past the doors, that the occupants had had to crawl out through the windows. Empty plastic milk jugs lay in the back.
At the same time as this break-in, a body of a backpacker was found southeast of here. The man had been missing for nearly half a year. With the proper permits and equipment, he had arrived to hike into the Agua Dulce Range. I surmised that he got out of his car and was seduced by the vacuous bajadas, kept walking until he collapsed from thirst. For the people working at the refuge headquarters, the time that the body went undiscovered was like a door left open, making it hard to concentrate. The body was found, the door closed. But other doors are still open all over, banging in the wind.
Out here I hesitated to tell myself stories about such things as hoodoos or found bodies. I preferred to study the stars rather than wonder why I would wake suddenly at night. An aerial bombing range surrounds the refuge, and daily I found unexploded missiles stabbed into the ground. Occasionally jet fighters came barreling in and out, chasing each other's tail, raking behind them a wall of noise. I have been told of pilots mowing down endangered Sonoran pronghorn with machine guns. From the cockpit of a jet fighter you might imagine that nothing down here could get you. One pilot was dropped into the refuge for rescue training. Sitting alone on the bajada in his flight suit, he said he felt fine. Night came. Then, he said, his world was not so easy. He could not sleep as he sat alone on a hump of granite. Maybe, with how quiet it gets at night, he could hear all the banging doors.
In this small pack, the one to be taken beyond the first and second supply caches, was room for just enough gear: small tools of measurement, something to sleep in, dry food, notebook, a pen and pencil, first-aid supplies, and a headlamp. A set of folded papers fit neatly down the side. These papers were not important items that might save my life or keep me comfortable at night, but under the midday shade of ironwood or paloverde trees, I unfolded them in the sand and read. They consisted of copied memoirs from a Jesuit missionary who had been sent here from Spain in 1683. Among the memoirs was a reproduction of the missionary's map, which is what first interested me in Father Eusebio Kino, a man I remembered from Arizona History classes in high school. He was the first person to record on paper the location of water holes in the Sonoran Desert.
Handmade Jesuit maps of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were of a meticulous, artful quality, detailing places previously unknown to European cartographers and explorers. Kino's work was one of these puzzle pieces, and it was in fact one of the best maps of the New World at the time. He recorded latitudes by astrolabe, holding the instrument against stars and the horizon. As I studied, I was taken by his accuracy. His map is a square, centered on the delta of the Colorado River, incorporating parts of the Sonoran coast and of Baja, where Kino had explored in 1683 under the title of royal cosmographer. It is the first map to show California not as an island but as a continuous segment of North America, a supposition borne out by Kino's overland travels. At the time, the survey of larger landmasses was commonly done from ships along coastlines. Kino chose to do his work on foot and by horseback. He had to cross Cabeza Prieta in order to do this.
On his map this vast interior country, unmarked by missions or any sort of township or ranchería, bore only the names La Tinaja, Agua Escondida, and Aguaje de la Luna. Three watering sites. Just above 32 degrees latitude sat Aguaje de la Luna (Watering Place of the Moon) and Agua Escondida (Hidden Water). Below 321?2 degrees was La Tinaja (The Jar). He called the holes at La Tinaja pilas, meaning baptismal fonts.
On February 22, 1702, Kino and his party were held back by heavy rains that overtopped local tinajas, causing them to cascade from one to the next. Even knowing that they were not constructed by human hands, he described these as “very sightly rocks which appeared to be very fine tanks made by hand and with very great art.”
Kino's gentle language reflects the tone of his explorations. His was not the bloodbath journey common to his contemporaries in the New World. He did not sever feet from the youth of villages or pluck eyeballs from old men who refused to beg for their lives. His concern for gold seemed no greater than his concern for granite. Slavery would have only befuddled his interests, and he petitioned the Spanish government to allow him to convert Native Americans without requiring that these new converts commit the fo
llowing twenty years to labor on estates or at mines, as was the law. He led cattle into the desert so that if he came upon any encampment of people, he would have something to offer.
Even the military personnel who joined him were not brought for reasons of war. Kino wanted secular witnesses who could return to explain that these people of the desert were not monstrous savages who, as the Spanish believed, ate their own children, but were human beings of a composed nature. The Spanish, for the most part, did not understand the desert, did not understand that people could survive without going mad.
During his twenty-four-year residence in the desert, Kino made more than fifty journeys, what he called entradas, each varying between one hundred and one thousand miles. Although he was a markedly skilled cartographer, technology was not yet available for the field recording of longitudes. So his maps do not pinpoint his route exactly, and there is debate as to where certain tinajas lie. His travels through Cabeza Prieta were done east to west and then west to east, setting a line roughly corresponding to what is now called El Camino del Diablo, the Road of the Devil. The line follows the water holes.
Of personal items along this route, Kino carried in leather saddle bags only essentials: gear for survival; an astrolabe for mapping; a black cassock, typical of the Jesuit faith, which extended from his shoulders to his feet; field notes; a small telescope; metal knife blades or trinkets—glass beads, ceramic pieces, or rosaries—which could be offered as gifts if he should encounter anyone; and, finally, devotional necessities (while crossing the desert, mass was performed for twenty minutes each morning, which would have required a gourd for wine, a host chalice, water, and bread). For reasons of faith or obligation he constantly wore a vow cross made of brass, inlaid with a wooden crucified figure.
Of all the people who have died here, none were under Kino's watch. None of his people wandered off lost in search of water, never to return—a record that was due partly to the knowledge of Native Americans who joined his travels and partly to Kino's refined sense of landscape. There were apparently times when neither Kino nor his companions knew where the next water would lie, and they relied on each other to find it. Kino watched closely. He recorded each detail.
I imagine those who now die here are intent on getting across rather than intent on finding water. The only way to get across is to have the sole intention of finding water. This was made apparent by Kino's constant mention of water in his notes.
The dead are most often found on the rolling bajadas and even lower, where the desert spreads itself flat, as if they thought that somehow they would find salvation at the lowest points, where gravity always carries water and leaves it. They would crawl under the spade-shaped shadows of brittlebush and the speckled shadows of creosote, or cooler paloverde, and there would suffer slow, delusional ends. The mountains must have looked too forbidding, too far away, too much like struggle and fear waiting on the horizon. They are also the only places that carry reliable water here. Kino always routed his entradas through these mountains when the easier way would have been to go around.
Once rainwater pours into the calligraphy of low, sandy washes, it is gone. Water is all up there, in the crags and chasms of the mountain ranges where containers have been carved from the rock like secret vases and ollas. The ranges along El Camino del Diablo are particularly poor at holding water, their granite too coarse to form neat bowls and the canyons too steep to allow the water to pause in a hole as it races down. Of deserts I had walked through, this was the most covert with its water. Still, Kino found and named some of the most remarkable sources. His small telescope was often employed in the scanning of distant mountains. He could not see water, but he could see the angle of rock, the abundance or absence of shadows. Steep, dark canyons speak of water, and they can be studied sometimes from thirty miles away. Whether they actually hold water or not is a different question. He had to go there to find out.
His first arrival at Aguaje de la Luna, in 1702, came under concern that water would not be found at all. It was just past midnight when the party entered a deep gorge and, with an accompaniment of a full moon, scrambled upward. Stock animals, unable to maneuver through the steep boulders, were left behind. These peregrine travelers entered a mountain range that stretched like a parched spine, a place now called Sierra Pinta. The moonlight must have made the granite look even more like bone, softening its edges, removing aberrant colors. Among the sharpened processes of this spine, they chose this particular route, perhaps because of its deeper shadows. Nearly halfway up a gorge, drenched in moonlight, they came upon a tinaja containing nearly two thousand gallons of water. It is one of only two tinajas in the range. Kino named it for the moonlight. On his third arrival at Aguaje de la Luna, when he was in his late fifties, Kino cleared a trail for his animals out of these boulders, beating apart rocks by hand to reach the water.
My original, childhood vision of what Kino looked like, a squat Friar Tuck kind of man with a jovial, plump-faced grin, was replaced by the image of a lean, muscular man who set his body against work that needed to be done. He would rarely wear his black cassock on these entradas—reserving it for formal encounters—and so wore ordinary clothes of the period. He wore far less regalia than his military escorts. Under the sun of the desert, on these great expanses between ranges, he looked like an ordinary man bearing no weapons, no helmet, and no robe of faith. Only a small vow cross hung against his chest. And each morning he dropped to his knees in the sand, performing his humbling ritual, his holy water gathered from a tinaja.
Tinajas
Walking for so long in a place few others travel, I have come across my own footprints, a bit formless in the grainy sand and gravel after days or weeks of wind. I have followed myself, investigating my own rituals. Up an arroyo, out to a creosote bush where I peed, along a gauntlet of sprawling ocotillo looking for dried flowers. I found the marks of my shoulder blades where I had slept, and a fallen, rotten saguaro that I had severed open with a knife to see what was inside, its black, spilled innards now dried like syrup on a table. With my finger I have studied the depth of my tracks, finding where I had given or taken weight, where I had barely paused to turn my head. If there had been much of a pause, I looked up to scan the horizon I would have viewed, looking for what I had looked for, imagining who I was when the prints had been left. I found where coyotes had crossed my path and sniffed at my heels.
When I came to the canyon that holds the largest tinaja, set deeply back into the range, I intersected my own tracks four times. A busy location for me. Each set of tracks marked a return for water at a place I could rely upon for months. I stopped in today to fill up, walking along stacks of boulders, past a rib cage of a bighorn sheep toppled to the side in sand, the same rib cage I had seen unmoved each time before. The canyon narrowed into a resistant rock, a hardened volcanic slurry that turned soft in its eroded shapes. The narrows burrowed down so that the walls became curved rather than sharp, squeezing until they revealed a disk of water fifteen feet across.
Two thousand fifty-three gallons of rainwater. This was the one that could last through a summer when everything else, even the water in the surrounding mountains, had gone out. The pool sank into a greenish chest of shadows, showing the way through hollows in the rock floor. It was almost blinding to see so much water. Look across this mountain range—in fact, look over the whole of Cabeza Prieta and the surrounding ranges: the Kofas, the Trigos, the Gilas, the Cargo Muchachos, the Ajos, Growlers, Craters, Childs, Granites, Mohawks, Pintas—and the thought of water will sting the back of your neck. It is out there, but to actually find it, to find this tinaja, is overpowering, like coming across blood on snow. I spread my fingers so that my palm floated on the surface. Shadows of my fingers cast through the fine mist of microscopic organisms. Waiting in the canyon above was an archipelago of tinajas, adding up to forty-five hundred gallons. Each tinaja hung gently over dry plunges from one to the next.
This was not an oasis in the classic sense. There
were no palms, no broad leaves big as a hand, no lush grasses. It was raw and exposed, rock and water, making it appear not extravagant but completely implausible. I filled my bags, then crawled down on my stomach to drink straight from the hole. The back of my calves baked in the sun. A couple of red spotted toads glued themselves to the dampness surrounding the tinaja. Toads, out here. Seventy miles from the nearest reasonable, permanent water source, which is Quitobaquito Springs in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument to the east.
Water fleas of the genus Daphnia dangled just beneath the surface, hardly visible to the naked eye. Under a hand lens Daphnia is as fine and crystalline as an ornament of blown glass, its body almost invisible except for the faint shadows of internal organs. When I've taken a powerful microscope to this water, it has appeared as if full of broken slivers of glass, countless fragile organisms. With the sun on the backs of my legs, I cupped these organisms in my hand, staring with the lens. Shapes like these should not be here, not in the desert, not something so delicate. Only at a tinaja could there be such a display of incongruity.
Rock contoured around the water's surface as if hands had rubbed the clay of this earthen jar, just as Kino had described. No sharp angles existed in the rock. Curves were as smooth as where the neck meets the shoulder, as where the arch of the foot sways off the heel. Everything else in Cabeza Prieta bears the cross lines of busted granite, the landscape looking like a heart ripped from the body, something out of violence, made in a fist. The mountains are heaved upward, pinnacles thrown to the sky so that boulders topple over themselves. Down at this very point, where the fingers of mountains have drawn together, the shape turns ceramic. Within the shape, as if invited to come, is water.
I once came up a canyon a few miles southwest of here, scaling shadows and the sculpted brows of granite. The word water, agua, rested on the lips of these rocks, waiting to be spoken. Finally it was said in a curved, shaded bowl beneath a dry waterfall—a broad, clear pool cupped against the rock. The sand and small rocks below glowed with colors like animals in a tidal pool. I had known that I would find water there. The shape of polished stone told me so.
