by Craig Childs
Desert water holes produce the oddest of non sequiturs. In Cabeza Prieta, at the Mexican border, the eight-inch-long Colorado River toad, Bufo alvarius, has been found in a number of tinajas. Some of these toads, so large that their skin is folded, robelike, were found in tinajas 140 miles from the Colorado River. Along that straight line happens to be the driest land of North America.
How does the toad or a Triops make the trek to some small pool of water? A list was once compiled recording items known to have been unexpectedly delivered by the sky, mentioning spores, pollen grains, algae, diatoms, various microscopic single- and multiple-celled organisms, rotifers, living mites, pieces of dried algal mat, mussels weighing up to two ounces, fish, salamanders, frogs, turtles, and rats. If it seems unlikely that aquatic animals can be regularly transported to their water holes by wind, keep in mind that among these falling turtles and rats, there have been nearly a hundred accounts of fish raining from the skies.
Just before eight o'clock on the morning of October 23, 1947, fish numbering in the hundreds fell upon the streets, houses, and walking commuters of Marksville, Louisiana. Several people were struck directly by falling fish, most of which were either frozen or at least very cold. Their temperature suggested a recent ride through high clouds, meaning they were probably sucked out of a lake by an atmospheric disturbance, something that in the desert is commonly called a dust devil.
A biological investigator from the Department of Wildlife happened to be eating breakfast in a Marksville restaurant when the waitress told him about the thudding sounds outside. He immediately moved to the streets, where he collected samples of largemouth bass (one of them being nine and a quarter inches long) and various species of sunfish, pronouncing them to be “absolutely fresh, and…fit for human consumption.”
More than likely, however, organisms deposited in waterpockets by wind would be smaller than fish or Triops. They would be algae and microscopic diatoms the size of ground glass. Desert rains are particularly rich with minuscule aquatic organisms, richer than mountain rains even, pulling down a dusty atmosphere of creatures, then directing them to waterpockets as they flow over the ground.
Still, wind and rain are not particularly efficient at relocating animals. The fish of Marksville did not benefit from the random rolling of atmospheric dice. They were, instead, ready for eating.
Hitching a ride with an animal heading to water offers far better chances. In 1930 a researcher sent a letter to an associate, mentioning, “When examining the contents of a frog's rectum yesterday in the course of our lab work I noticed several living ostracods.” An ostracod, commonly called a seed shrimp, is a water-hole crustacean much smaller than Triops. The creatures either had been living permanently in the frog's rectum or, more likely, were passing through.
Although a Triops or a Colorado River toad the size of a soft-ball cannot be comfortably passed by most rectums, their eggs can. When domestic mallards were fed dust from a desert playa bed that had been dry for several months, the ducks defecated the eggs of fourteen crustacean species including Triops. Some of these were brought to hatching within twelve hours.
As a more seemly way of travel, these same species also gather on the outsides of animals. A single dragonfly was once meticulously cleaned and found to be carrying twelve viable samples of unicellular algae, eight samples of filamentous blue-green algae, a rotifer (a microscopic aquatic organism), and fourteen other small aquatic creatures. One wasp produced nineteen species of animals and plants from around its wings and legs.
None of these dispersal methods are especially quick or predictable. The result is that species in water holes, the ones that can't get up and fly away, do not move around very often. They become genetically isolated over thousands, and then millions, of years. In 1992, after nearly all of the temporary vernal pools of California were destroyed by human development, researchers went out to catalog those still intact. Of the sixty-seven species of crustaceans found in the remaining pools, thirty had never been documented anywhere on the planet. People had to suddenly set about inventing names. A quarter of these newly found species were each found in its own pool among the fifty-eight pools studied, meaning there is not much motion between one pool and the next. What was lost in the hundreds of destroyed pools is unknown. Extinctions from ephemeral pools have probably been occurring at massive levels, banishing numerous species that have never been seen or even imagined by humans.
A study of such magnitude has not been performed on these Navajo waterpockets, so diversity between each pool is contained in the genes of these creatures and not in our papers and studies. Already I had noticed a number of different species among both fairy and clam shrimp. Walking barefoot, I had recorded twenty-eight waterpockets in the white sandstone. Some had floors of clean rock, some mud. There were floors dotted with swollen cacti that had blown in, floors of juniper berries, and floors of sand. Some of the water had the faint red-wine color of tannic acid from nearby junipers, while some were olive green and others absolutely clear.
These pockets led me farther east, where the dance floor ended, rising into a series of tall, narrow fins. Once I reached the fins, the skin of my feet growing sore against the heat and the kernels of rock, everything changed. I stepped up one of the backbones and looked down into a sea of waterpockets. I stood for a second. Then I crouched. There were over a hundred waterpockets below me.
This I had never seen. Nothing like this. The rock formations themselves were remarkable, having the configuration of egg crates with round water holes seated in the pits. I walked across the connected high points, looking down thirty or forty feet into smooth white craters on all sides where water had gathered. Each depression was entirely sealed from those around. I had to go back and get my boots. From there I kept counting, but I soon had trouble remembering where I had gone and where I had not. The fins and their cauldrons were beyond measurement. I put away my notebook at 138 waterpockets.
The only thing that could have adequately prepared me for this was to have walked in Cabeza Prieta. Following bighorn sheep off the Mexican border, my first discovery had been a bee-infested crack with twenty-two and a half gallons of water, my fingers trembling just to touch it, which allowed me to now see the garishness of this fortune on the roof of Navajo sandstone. Within a few hours today I had seen over seventy thousand gallons in water holes. This would have been unthinkable in Cabeza Prieta.
Tom joined me at the cauldrons before sunset. We left our clothes at a lip near one of the deeper holes. There we climbed in and sank our bodies. The sky became a confined circle. We spread our palms on the smooth stone as Triops bumped into our backs and burrowed beneath our feet.
We climbed out and, naked in the copper light, walked the narrow bridges, casting shadows of our bodies on the next fins over. The land, with all of its turns and holes and cryptic back rooms, rose up and swallowed us.
We returned at night and I lingered at the dance-floor pockets, near our small camp. Stars of a moonless sky reflected from the water so that the sky looked as if it had shattered and fallen messy across the earth. I was able to map the Milky Way by walking a circle around one of the pockets. A few hours before sunrise, a thunderstorm took the sky, rumbling and churning to the south. I woke and moved to the water, where I sat with knees against my chest. The pockets threw back the electric-white flare of lightning, the desert thumping with thunder. I waited for rain, to watch water run into the holes. Instead the storm broke in two, swerving to the east and west, offering only drizzle here. As the storm moved north I watched lightning crack the water's surface.
Eventually I returned to my own camp, which consisted of a sheet and a ground pad. Crickets got back to their Morse code after the passing storm. I lay on top of the sheet and fell asleep, my body peppered with light rain.
In the morning we packed and left, walking east. I had originally wanted to stay for days at these waterpockets, but the territory was vast. We had food for only four days and neither of us kn
ew anything about the territory. First we crossed the cauldrons, stopping to stare into the pits. Then we descended a narrow canyon, pushing through crowded junipers and the prodding limbs of rabbitbrush into a broad wash that separated the last region from a taller cluster of fins ahead. In the wash were sand dunes fortified with bunches of Indian ricegrass that kept the valley bottom from blowing down to bedrock. Our footprints sank and caved in on themselves as we plodded to the next escarpment of sandstone, the canyon shaping around us as if we were being swirled up into a dust devil.
This took us several hundred feet above the floor of the wash, leading to the tallest of fins. From there we looked down into numerous vaults of water. Our packs hit the ground. We scattered, walking lines of stone that laced over these new pockets, even deeper than those before. There were more at this location, many inset by fifty and sixty feet, leading into tiered holes stacked one above the next. Some were so deeply inset that rims heaped up like excess clay on a potter's wheel. In the few pockets that held no water, sand had collected. On the sand grew juniper, ricegrass, foxtail, purple asters, yellow spiny daisies, scrub oak, broom snakeweed, and prickly pear, each garden its own particular arrangement. The rest had water. Cones and bowls and tubs of water.
I kept shouting over to Tom that this was beyond the realm of reason. He shouted back words of disbelief, then disappeared into one of the holes, his voice coming out as if from a barrel.
One of the early government surveyors of the canyon Southwest, Major John Wesley Powell, told of water like this. Giving vague directions, he wrote that one day in September 1870, he was traveling along the foot of the Vermilion Cliffs, having found little water other than briny springs. The next day he climbed a cliff to a “billowy sea of sand-dunes” where he found canyons wrestling into a tilted mesa top. “On the slope of this ridge,” he wrote, “facing the mesa, there is a massive homogeneous sandstone, and the waters, gathering on the brink of the ridge and rolling down this slope, have carried innumerable channels; and, as they tumble down precipitously in many places, they dig out deep pot-holes, many of them holding a hundred or a thousand barrels of water. Among these holes we camped, finding a little bunch grass among the sand-dunes for our animals. We called this spot Thousand Wells.”
An etching by Thomas Moran and W. J. Linton accompanied Powell's description. The etching showed two Indians, one on hands and knees to drink from the largest of a series of oval pools.
This spot Tom and I had reached was Powell's Thousand Wells. It could be no other place. Even with the vagueness of Powell's directions, it matched. We decided to stay on task. We turned to the southeast, which took us from the waterpockets and sent us to lifting tables of sandstone. Quickly, I entered the mode of desert walking as my breathing became metered, my thoughts simplifying into bare bones. A straight-faced walk. Hot. Still air. I picked up small rocks or the bones of animals, then set them back without having formulated a thought more profound than bone or rock. I could hear the crunch of Tom's boots on the ground a quarter mile behind. I saw the way he moved, how he had accepted the desert, how his thoughts had centered as he sought routes over bulges and boulders.
As soon as I felt at ease, taking on the rhythm of walking in heat, I came to water again. This was in slanted, loose shelves of red sandstone where I would never look for water. Deep red sandstone is not as pure or as tightly packed as white sandstone, and never seems to hold water as well. The position of the rock, the angle of the bedding planes, was all wrong. I could not even find a drainage that would have filled it. The only way to get in was from the sky. My comments of impossibility became instantly hysterical as I waved my hands in the air before this pool, forty feet across, the largest we had seen. This whole region was absurd.
We removed clothing in a fashion that was becoming routine, leaving our own brand of piles: socks stuffed in boots, my notebook out of reach of wet hands, his clothes in more of a pile and mine more in a line. We sank into water the depth of our shoulders. Instantly we became playful, embarrassingly so as we made the water slosh back and forth unnecessarily until it tipped out one end. Then we walked, drenched, on the surrounding rocks. The sound of slapping water, the deep swallows made only by large masses of liquid, was almost too much to bear. I stood at the edge of the waterpocket, where much of the desert dropped off below, showing pockets of even greater size, and lifted my arms straight into the sky. Beads came down my body. This was abundance.
We walked to higher country, spending hours working toward a stretched dome of red sandstone. The tables steepened in the last mile to this highest point where the uplift broke its back, falling twelve hundred feet to a chasm below. The cliff was as smooth as lake ice. A rock could be dropped and it would not once touch the wall. Just beside the edge, as if lifted onto a pedestal, was a waterpocket. I told Tom that what we were witnessing here made everything I had ever seen inadequate. Tom laughed at me, said that I always say that. We go to places for particular reasons, he said. We came here for opulence.
I had not been counting religiously, but we had now passed between four and five hundred waterpockets. Maybe 300,000 gallons of rainwater. My careful counting of waterpockets the day before felt like a prank on myself.
As we slipped into the hole, our arms draping across its rims as if over the back of a couch, I said to Tom, “This has been years. I knew it would be here. If I looked long enough I would find it. I've been trying for years. Years.”
Skirting a pool that measured about one hundred feet in length, we could see a prickly pear cactus lurking in the depths. It was surrounded by Triops and a cloud of fairy shrimp. The cactus had not fallen in. It had grown there prior to the water, indicating that years of drought must have preceded this water. When this pool is dust, it must retain the seeds of aquatic life for however long it takes a cactus to grow.
To survive, these aquatic-desert organisms have taken an evolutionary course that rejects mechanisms of survival used by most everything else. Bypassing all accepted notions of life, they cope with extremely long periods of drought that would kill every jackrabbit and human out here. They shrivel up until they are dry as cotton balls, releasing all of their water, entering a state known as anhydrobiosis. Life without water. Basically, they die, but with the loophole of being able to come back to life.
Anhydrobiosis is dehydrated life—life shrunk down to its most primary aspects. No energy is spent on what would normally be considered to be living. The participants become sealed containers against the world, cells turning from living structures into reinforcement material. Sensitive organs are tucked away into specialized membranes, like wine glasses wrapped in newspaper for a move. Molecules, mostly a disaccharide called trehalose, are produced to shore up the shriveling internal structures. The organism's insides become crystalline, a material very similar to the liquid crystal in digital watches. A dehydrating roundworm converts a quarter of its body weight into this trehalose material before going completely dry, coiling into a compact circle and reducing its surface area to a hardened bulb about 7 percent of the original size.
If an anhydrobiotic organism regularly lasts for three weeks from egg to death, it does not matter if one hundred years of drought are placed in the middle of the life cycle. It will still live for three weeks, the extra hundred years being nothing but a pause on the biological clock.
Abandoned in dry water holes, these barren animals can be exposed to heavy doses of X-rays, gamma rays, neutrons, proton beams, high-energy electrons, and ultraviolet radiation with no ill effects. Embryonic cysts of an ephemeral pool crustacean were actually dangled outside of the space shuttle, exposed directly to the cold and radiation of outer space, and were later brought back to earth and added to water, where they came to life within minutes. The universe could be accidentally colonized by such creatures. In a sadistic array of experiments, adult tardigrades, known also as water bears, were once kept for eight days in a vacuum, transferred into helium gas at room temperature for three days, and then e
xposed for several hours to nearly -450 degrees Fahrenheit. Placed in water at room temperature, they returned to life, no questions asked.
Perhaps the most telling experiment is that anhydrobiotic cysts of crustaceans are packaged and sold to children. Often they are sold as “sea monkeys,” presented on packages with the females wearing pink bows in their sensory organs, and families of smiling crustaceans reclining in underwater living rooms (the wife wearing an apron, the husband smoking a pipe). At a toy store I once bought an envelope of Triops eggs (Desert Dan brand); the print on the back informed me that they would live twenty to seventy days, “unless, of course, they are eaten alive by their cannibal siblings.” The packaging read:
TRIOPS
From The Age Of
DINOSAURS
Watch
Their
AMAZING
AQUA-BATICS
They're
ALIVE!
Just Add Water
They Hatch In
24 HOURS
EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO GROW INSTANT PETS
I put them in a cup, and within twenty-four hours small objects could be seen scuttling across the bottom. No false advertising. I instantly had pets. And they were, indeed, from the age of the dinosaurs, as Desert Dan had professed. The aquabatics would come later as they began eating one another.
What truly separates these dehydrated organisms from every other living thing is that they have no metabolism. Even scientists who contend that all life requires a metabolism admit that anhydrobiotes must exist at the minutest fraction of the speed of normally metabolizing specimens. If this were a human, the heart would beat three times every year. But there does not appear to be even a slow heartbeat in anhydrobiotes. Using radiochemical assay, researchers have not been able to detect enzyme activity in any “live” organisms below 8 percent water content by body weight. There appear to be no working parts in these organisms: they are as dead as rocks. If a Mars lander were to be given a scoop of dust from a dry water hole and allowed to run all of the spores and shrimp eggs and desiccated adults of various species through its battery of life-finding tests, it would conclude that no life was ever present.
