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

by Craig Childs

  To the south, in the low, early evening light, I could see the ellipse shadows of sand dunes in Mexico, how they curved like cusps of crescent moons. Rows of mountains encrypted themselves into each other, one behind the next, too many to count. There were mountains I had not even known existed, occupying the earth to every edge. Winds came up from both sides, pressing my body. They carried smells. Desert lavender. Creosote.

  Below somewhere were El Camino del Diablo and Aguaje de la Luna. So many curious names and mysterious deaths out here. These are stories, and they say something about the place, the same way water tells of the shape of an object as it passes. But the stories are not the place. All of the names and the deaths and the bones piled up to keep the wind from leaving the country are our replies to this landscape. These are the comments we've made as we have been confronted with the mountains and the long stretches below. Long before we made any of these remarks, there was water. There was this single definition to the land, which eventually formed the words on our lips as we traveled here, which told us which way to go to get across. My stories about this water are only my telling of the shape as I pass by.

  Like following a circus tightrope, I walked this long, slender ridge. It swayed in front of me, sometimes too sharpened for walking, forcing me down on one side with my fingertips jammed into the cracks, then back to the top where I walked with one foot directly in front of the last. The sun went low. Shadows tilted to the east, marking every tower of rock. The desert turned to fire, hot cadmium reflecting off even the blackest of rock. Then it turned quiet. Shadows had everything. The wind stopped.

  In the last light I found a clearing about the width of my shoulders along the axis of the ridge. It had been scraped flat by the hooves of a bighorn sheep, cleared of sharper stones so an animal could fold its legs and lie here with its belly against the ground. A rough bed at the top of Cabeza Prieta. Clusters of hard, dry sheep droppings had been pushed to the edges, shoved out of the way so I could see the outline of the sheep's resting body. I tossed a few rocks down, listened to them clatter until I could no longer hear them. I unloaded my gear onto this slim clearing, then sat with my knees drawn to my chest. A handful of peanuts and raisins. A long drink of water. My back damp and cool with sweat. I watched the desert disappear into the night. Then the stars took everything.

  2. WATER THAT WAITS

  Thousand Wells, Arizona-Utah

  September

  AN ACCOUNT OF WATER WAS ONCE BROUGHT BACK FROM a region of sand dunes in the Gobi Desert. In the first decade of the twentieth century a woman had gone in search of an extensive lake, called the Lake of the Crescent Moon, rumored to be deep within the dunes. Working as a missionary, she spent time traveling the region, inquiring into the lake as she went about. She was told that it was in the Desert of Lob, beyond many crests of dunes. The directions became more specific as she came closer, until she left the town of Tunhwang and walked four miles into the dunes to find this exiled body of water. She described her feet slipping in the sand and how, exhausted, she scaled the last dune to peer over the top to see water below.

  Swales and crests of sand loomed five hundred feet above the lake, casting shadows across its untroubled water. She had no explanation for this anomaly. It was perhaps thousands of years of rainwater gathered on a buried hardpan of rock. Or it was the one spring where dunes fed their sparsely gathered precipitation. She wrote, “Small, crescent-shaped and sapphire blue, it lay in the narrow space dividing us from the next range like a jewel in folds of warm-tinted sand.” The image haunted me; I have always thought it to be true—an enigmatic, ultimate source of water. There are such places.

  The ulterior store of water—not just a place to drink, but a jewel like the lake in the sand dunes—was an elusive image, formed in my mind but extremely difficult to locate. Some people had suggested to me that if such a lake was out there, it was already known, cordoned off, confined to a national monument or a state park. But I had been out searching for water for so many years in places unknown, finding bits and pieces, that I came to believe it would be there. I tried not to be a clown about my belief in some great, unaccounted water source. I traveled efficiently, keeping tidy camps, walking at night when necessary, and looking for water only because I had to. Always in hopes.

  In this place, west of the Four Corners and Navajo Mountain, along the Arizona-Utah border where the Great Basin Desert comes south, I had found no water at all. The heels of my boots dug into the peach-colored sand of Navajo sandstone. I sat with my back pressed against a rock wall, my body seeking shade, scooting another inch tighter as the sun moved in. Every once in a while I stuck my hand forward to feel sunlight playing down like a clean, odorless poison. The September sky was as curved and blue as a robin's egg, a color and shape that implied scant moisture in the air and a far walk to the horizon. My partner, a broad-shouldered man named Tom Vimont, breathed heavily in the shade ten feet away. His eyes were closed, his jaw slack against the sand. Morning. We had already walked as far as we could in the last cool between darkness and 10 A.M. Now the day had begun. Heat was everywhere. When the sun crawled onto my boots I could feel it through the leather. In my toes. I stood and hoisted my backpack. Tom opened one of his eyes.

  “I'm going,” I said.

  “Okay.”

  “I'll be at the next ridge. The white one with those boulders fallen on the west side.” I pointed out there. He did not look. I told him I would wait for him in that next shade.

  “Whatever,” he said. “You go get lost in the heat. I'll find your bones when it cools off.” He closed the one eye.

  When not alone, I usually travel with one other person and we share few words during the day. I carefully choose the people I join for these walks, making certain they are not too abrasive or loud, or they carefully choose me. Tom is of a different quality, vocal and prankish. I travel with him because he rousts me from my quietness. He dances naked on rocks shouting obscenities to the sky, not caring if God hates him. He was once a mountaineering instructor. He sang in a punk rock band, was hired as an exotic dancer. When he was fifteen, as he so often enjoys saying, he got his girlfriend pregnant and stole a car, drove off with her to get married on the other side of the continent. I travel with him because when I say I'm heading into a piece of desert I know nothing about on the off chance of finding water, he grins and asks When do we leave?

  Leaving Tom half asleep in the shade, I walked into the heat. From a distance, this is an inconspicuous land. It is a tilt rising gently to a high ridge at the roof of the formation called Navajo sandstone. It looks barren, uneventful. I had seen it a number of times from twenty or thirty miles away and never considered walking in this direction, always having been bound for more spectacular country. But on the voluptuous stone of the Colorado Plateau nothing is ever as it appears. There is constant potential. The desert is not dried up and empty as if it might blow away like the seeds of brittle grass. It is the bones of the earth brought to daylight, half stuck out of the ground so that winds and flash floods constantly reveal more. Just as it is beneath our own flesh, the bones are the sturdiest, most lasting parts. With their hollowed sockets and deliberate lines, they set a foundation upon which the flesh of forests, mountains, and oceans might accumulate. Only here, the flesh is gone, the last of it turned to dune sand.

  Waterpocket at sunset

  The convolutions grew as I walked. Forms of carved rock rose above me. Colors shifted between the red of salmon and a cream white, highlighting changes in the shapes of rocks. Navajo sandstone in particular wears into the most sensuous of shapes. It erodes into moons and the backs of whales across which I walked. I had studied a master's thesis by a man who did his field research somewhere in this area, a man who had spent time searching the rounded top of the Navajo. I was told he was ambitious with his travels in the desert, and that his skin had hardened against the sun. He had been studying habits of the crustacean species Triops, a creature an inch or so long, looking like a cross
between a horseshoe crab, a trilobite, and a catfish. It is the oldest living animal on the planet, perfectly matching fossils from 180 million years ago, each part of its anatomy unchanged since then. It is an aquatic species, unable to survive on dry ground or even mildly damp ground. It must have some deep pocket of gathered rainwater that lasts weeks or months. I figured that there had to be a fair number of these pockets to support enough Triops for a master's thesis. Between the woman who found the clear lake in the sand dunes and this man who had found Triops on blistering sandstone, the place with water must exist.

  Tom and I were both carrying whatever amount of water seemed prudent. I don't like to haul more than a couple of quarts at a time. A gallon is enough for one day of drinking, but that is too much weight, eight and a third pounds. Water would need to be found by nightfall. I flooded the air ahead of me with faith that radiated away, then disappeared in the dryness like a hot afternoon breeze that cannot stir a leaf.

  Water created life the way it creates creeks or springs. It did this, I think, so it could get into places it could not otherwise reach, so that I would act as a vehicle carrying it into the desert. As living beings, we consider ourselves to be independent with our fingers, arms, and voices. Unlike alpine creeks, we are not all tied together, so we imagine that we each behave with free will. We can tie our own shoelaces and write poetry. But especially as I drink the last of my water, I believe that we are subjects of the planet's hydro-logic process, too proud to write ourselves into textbooks along with clouds, rivers, and morning dew. When I walk cross-country, I am nothing but the beast carrying water to its next stop.

  Sit in a car on a cold night and you will fog the windows with the water you carry. Touch your tongue or the surface of your eye and you will find water. Stop drinking liquids and see how difficult it is to maintain a coherent thought, and then, days later, how difficult it is to remain among the living. Specialized equipment has been designed to find a person behind a cement wall by bouncing 900-megahertz waves through the wall and off the liquid in the human body, as if we were all water-filled balloons unable to hide our cargo.

  We are not as ephemeral as clouds. We cannot dissipate at the first downtrend in humidity, then expect to re-form elsewhere, so we have developed legs to walk us to the shade and hands with which we can construct faucets and swimming pools. Like any stage of the hydrologic process, we have our own peculiarities, our organs making us nothing more than water pools or springs of bizarre shape, filled with pulsing tubes and chambers.

  Within my body I escorted well over a hundred pounds of water into the sand and rock on this day. Another four pounds were in my pack, for drinking. I carried this water across the supple shapes of small dunes and along the better footing of stone slabs. Whenever I scraped against a rock too hard, out leaked blood, nothing but glorified water. Tipped saucers of rock leaned upward and I dropped off their backsides, walking around clusters of shoulder-height juniper trees screwing out of cracks in the rock. Two ravens crossed. Their wings sounded like cardboard whooshed through the air.

  I removed my pack and turned up through the boulders at the far ridge. At the top I pulled out binoculars and could see Tom, who had begun to move, groping through his gear a mile away. I watched his candid gestures, how he threw his head back to drink. Ahead I saw farther ridges, and beyond them a massive dune of sand rising five hundred feet to where it slept against a higher ridge.

  About a hundred yards east of where I had just walked, freckles of water-filled pockets extended over a sandstone plain. I squinted, then started counting. They looked like fallen pieces of sky, so delicious that dry seeds would split open just to know of their presence. Each sat in the open as if lounging, unaware of the aridity surrounding it, mocking the sun. They had been beached here by thunderstorms, slowly hissing into nothing beneath the sky. I counted twenty. Maybe twenty-five when I included glints of reflected light from behind rock swells. These were sizable rainwater depressions, some of them the largest pockets I had ever seen in sandstone, thirty feet across.

  In the Sonoran Desert they are called tinajas. Here on the Colorado Plateau they are waterpockets, generally different in structure than a tinaja, usually pocked across open plains of sandstone instead of in the line of a drainage. As it sits for different seasons over thousands of years, gathered water carves its own hole in the easily eroded sandstone. The longer the hole has been there, the deeper it becomes, the more water it holds. Hydrogen bonds in the rainwater pry sand grains from the rock, deepening the hole.

  I jumped down from the ridge, grabbed my pack, and stumbled along the slope to intercept Tom. I shouted once, shouted the word water, and pointed east. My voice came back from every direction.

  Tom motioned to his ears. Couldn't understand.

  We met at a ravine and he waited in the shade of a piñon for me to catch my breath. I told him that there were at least twenty-five of them. We would have walked right past them. I'll show you, follow me. Down into the white sandstone, where it mingled slightly with red, we followed sand, then exposed rock. This opened to a rolling dance floor. On the floor was water. It had gathered from rain, but was substantial and would stay for some time. At a quick guess, I figured about fourteen thousand gallons rested in the rock before us. If water had created life in order to reach odd places, it created waterpockets in order to stay there.

  I walked among the pools forgetting Tom was with me, letting me stride ahead. I did not watch each pool. I let them pass, feeling the prosperity of not having to bow and drink at each one. Some were thin and snakelike, others shaped like a woman sleeping on her side. There were crescents and deep envelopes, none of them feeding plants. They were all in bare rock, each one supporting Triops shrimp as well as a flood of clam shrimp and fairy shrimp. I swallowed my saliva, my throat dry. I stopped at one of the deeper pools. It sat twenty-five feet wide.

  Tom stepped beside me. He did not wait. He stripped off his clothes quickly. Naked at the edge of the water, he posed theatrically with his hands praying to the sky. He is a big man, looks like he could crush rocks with his fingers. He glanced at me, grinned, and entered the water.

  I stripped and followed. There could have been discussion about us damaging the ecology of the hole. There was not. Even though filter-feeding organisms might profit from our flailing and stirring of sediment, I would never profess our presence to be a benefit. But it was hot outside, and there was water.

  When I entered, I did not jump. I slipped in at one end until only my face remained above the surface, my body seizing for a moment and then relaxing. It was not the coldness of the water that brought the quick seizure, but the absoluteness of the transition between desert and here. The shift was not slow or buffered. The only boundary was this perfect lens of blue, matching the cloudless sky for every value of color. The water turned smooth after a minute. My arms and legs hovered half-cocked, the way they do for sleeping astronauts. My face floated on this liquid mirror, surrounded on all sides by hot plates of sandstone tilted at the sky. I lifted a toe to penetrate the surface, watching rings drift outward, their movement opening a passageway from an inconceivable world.

  Tom crawled onto the rock, his body doused, draining water back to the pocket. Water ran the depression of his spine, off his face, from between his fingers and toes. He rolled onto his back and the heat worked into his skin from both the rock below and the sun above. He closed his eyes. His mouth opened. In a groan, he said Yes.

  Leaving Tom half-asleep on the rocks, his body surrounded by a thin, evaporating sheet of water, I took a notebook and skirted the pools barefoot, counting them, figuring which had what combination of crustaceans. Each seethed with life. The shrimp grazed on smaller organisms from the floors or from the open water, undulating their appendages so that every liter was guaranteed a good going-over. The deepest pocket, its floor hidden from daylight, belched Triops from the darkness below. Some had only fairy shrimp, which patrolled the water like schools of squid, trailing their tee
ming shadows over the round floors. These were slender and transparent of body, showing rhythmic sways of feathered appendages, which both propelled them and gathered oxygen. Other pools specialized in clam shrimp, with bodies similar to those of fairy shrimp, but seated in a bivalve shell thin as onion skin.

  The Triops were by far the largest and most aggressive compared to the milquetoast fairy and clam shrimp. Their undersides, decorated with appendages of a slightly blue tint, gave them the appearance of crafted Japanese fans. They quarreled like cats whenever encountering one another, sometimes killing and consuming neighbors, hauling their bodies away. They scraped the floor with urgency, tracing the shapes of question marks as they arced through the water.

  The species looks ominous with its shield for a carapace and two poppy-seed eyes seated next to each other, a fleshy, pronged tail ringed like that of a rat, and wired sensory organs splayed off the front. In my palm they slung their bodies with electrified twitches, trying to return to the water. Once returned, they got back about their business without pause, showing a distinct lack of memory. Still, I was hesitant to touch them, fearing whatever mechanism they had developed to defend themselves against seafaring dinosaurs. Creatures like sharks or scorpions or dragonflies are often considered to be some of the oldest on the planet, but they represent only an old style, an old type of organism. Their bodies have changed in the hundreds of millions of years while Triops has not. It is the same now as when it left fossils of itself.

  Theoretically, the one thing that placed Triops into these holes was the evolution of predatory, suction-feeding fish about 300 million years ago. The only defense these crustaceans had was to move out of the oceans and into these loose affiliations of water holes, surviving by following the rise and fall of various climates, moving from one temporary water hole to the next across the planet, waiting out dry times in the form of eggs parched as dust.