by Craig Childs
Water hole shrimp eggs
The question then arises as to what actually defines life. The crustaceans in limbo are not dead. Yet a viable egg of a desert toad cannot be differentiated from a nonviable egg until water is added and the egg either hatches or does nothing. Death and life in this case are structurally identical. One scientist, especially preoccupied with this topic, slipped out the words “cosmic metabolism,” but quickly dismissed this as a notion with little meaning in the biological context of metabolism. In the case of these creatures waiting for the next desert rain, he commented, life is more a quality than it is a quantity. It cannot be defined or measured by our tools, but it is there, perhaps more philosophical than detectable. The basic constituents of life are not at all what we had scientifically imagined.
How long can these creatures actually last before the arrival of rain? Shrimp such as Triops last for decades, at the least. They have never been kept longer than thirty years, while evidence suggests that they may survive for centuries. Again, at the least. Because adaptations are similar, they can be compared to seeds awaiting germination. Although data are not firmly proven, a seed of an arctic lupine from the Yukon was viable after 10,000 years. A dormant seed from Danish soil was viable after a proven 850 years. An example that seems most fitting comes from a Canna compacta seed that was recovered from an archaeological site in Argentina. The specimen was found enclosed in a walnut shell, which was part of a rattle necklace excavated from a tomb. After lying dormant in this tomb for 600 years, the dry seed was removed and placed in soil. Unfazed by this long period of quiescence, the plant produced a healthy root system and within ten days presented its first leaves. Reaching a height of six and a half feet, it flowered, finally showing itself to be a particular species belonging to the ginger order, Zingiberales. It fertilized itself and produced seeds that fell from the flower in proper sequence. It came just like that, simple as waking in the morning.
Because the rigors of the dry, almost lifeless period are more taxing than the wet times, the actual shapes of creatures-in-waiting are more visually complex as anhydrobiotes than as productive adults. Animals thought to be of the same species were found to be completely different when the structures of their anhydrobiotic cysts were studied.
There is always an artful construction to these waiting organisms, revealing an interior genius within nature. Seen through an electron microscope, anhydrobiotic cysts are a gallery of architectural styles. The closer the view, the more complex they become, with passageways and pillars and sponge platforms enclosing arrays of spikes and welded orbs, each of these shapes designed for some unknown, peculiar function. In many ways, they are similar to pollen grains or snowflakes, their composition symmetrical, intricate, and enigmatically individual. Sealed against complete drought, a fairy shrimp, Chirocephalus salinus, surrounds itself with pastrylike structures, each raised from the surface and arranged into pentagons. A clam shrimp cyst bears the topography of a rib cage curved into itself to form a sphere. Tanymastix stagnalis is a flying saucer with a pouting equator, its surface as dimpled as that of a basketball. Complicated and unrepeated between species, the shapes are nothing but a response to incredible adversity. Since the anhydrobiotic animal has no moving parts to defend or transport itself, it must make parts that work even when the animal is basically dead.
Biologically these waterpockets are the edge of the earth. To say that periods of drought present the only antagonism to life out here would be untrue. The entire cycle of wetting and drying refuses calendars and predictions, working the inhabitants so hard with instability that adaptations must be honed to the intricacy of fine lace. Pools dry and fill at irregular intervals, relying on mercurial thunderstorms, topping off in the winter, carrying three days of water in the summer, staying full for five months, then dry for two years straight.
Pool water will easily go from 60 to 95 degrees Fahrenheit between sunrise and afternoon. Then, during dry times, the barren surface, with its anhydrobiotic life poised for the next rain, will reach a summer high of 158 degrees. Daytime oxygen levels in the water jump by 88 percent, plummeting at sunset while, in the coming dark, acid levels rise by nearly a third.
An aquatic kingdom that turns its chemistry inside out between day and night, and exists every now and then in a scalding desert, invites not resilience as much as it does ingenuity. One observer visited an Arizona stock tank for each of the nineteen days that it held water after a heavy summer rain. Nearly twenty species of invertebrates and amphibians appeared during this time, and he took note of each. Predaceous beetles, Eretes sticticus, arrived as eggs after adults flew in from unknown water sources to lay them. They hatched into thousands of beetle larvae. Their development seemed to follow in perfect stride the slow vanquishing of the pool. On the nineteenth day, at 10:30 in the morning, the pool came very near to drying. En masse, the beetles, which had only recently reached their adult phase, suddenly produced an intense, high-pitched buzzing. Then, while the man stood watching, the entire group of beetles lifted into flight at once. The swarm set off to the southwest, disappearing at the horizon. Within one hour the pond went dry.
This kind of prophetic knowledge is not uncommon among dwellers of ephemeral waters. The adaptation is called phenotypic plasticity, meaning the ability to alter the body's shape in step with its environment. Toads and fairy shrimp and beetles will shrink and stretch their growth rates in precise cadences with the pool's life span. Development rates in water holes depend not on the original size of the pool but on how fast it is drying. Thus small pools do not necessarily produce small organisms. Rather, pools that dry quickly produce small organisms because the animals must develop rapidly, resulting in dwarfed adults. It is not the actual volume of water that is perceived, but how fast the volume is decreasing.
No one yet knows how this is perceived. After numerous studies, mostly involving mosquitoes, researchers have been left guessing, suggesting that the organisms distinguish the time or effort necessary to move from the top to the bottom of a pool, or that they gain cues from increased crowding. It could even be that they discern a changing volume of air in their tracheal systems during descent to the bottom of the pool. Whatever it is, these organisms know exactly how long their habitat will last. In the case of Eretes sticticus, it was down to the hour.
And once the pool dries, then where to? Like E. sticticus, the predaceous backswimmer Notonecta is able to leave the water and fly with wings it keeps sealed in a protective casing. To find the next water, it seeks polarized ultraviolet light reflected from smooth bodies of water, the same method used by water striders and dragonflies. Ultraviolet sensors are situated in the lower portions of its compound eyes. The backswimmer flies with its body tilted 15 degrees to the horizon, placing these UV sensors at a level that will strike polarized light off a flat surface at an optimum angle, initiating a dive-and-plunge response. Only a certain crossing of angles between its body and a polarized light source will send the backswimmer into a dive. It makes a pinging sound when hitting the flat hood of a darkly painted car mistaken for water.
A researcher in Arizona found that the best way to catch flying aquatic insects was to lay black plastic garbage bags on the ground just as a storm moves in. The insects tend to be out flying around storms, seeking new water, and the bags, like car hoods, reflect polarized ultraviolet light from a flat surface. The insects would plummet straight at the bags, which he had coated with glue. Notonecta did this to me once in Utah. These backswimmers began bombing me at sunset (when reflections from water are their most striking) until five of them had bull's-eyed into a cup of water in my hands. The mouth of the cup was only four inches across.
With life being tied into such knots and going through so much time, my own life had to be measured by completely different standards. Tom and I were lithe, short-lived creatures who would never know how to sleep for an entire hundred years. I kept scooping Triops from the water in cupped hands, holding them upside down, watching their fan
s run so quickly that, like a car wheel reaching a certain speed, they appeared to move backward. I did not do this to watch them as much as I did it just to touch them. This was a different strand of life from my own.
From the highest waterpockets we found the fast way down, skiing in our boots along the face of a sand dune, sand splashing the air from our soles. This was steep, hundreds of feet to the floor of a wide canyon. My path wrote cursive letters in the face, a clumsy language that would be erased by wind by tomorrow. Our habit was to walk from first light until dark, and tonight we slowed near sunset, coming into a deep well of pockets in the evening. One in particular caught Tom's attention. It was almost a perfect square, like a picture frame with richly wrought edges where water had left small erosional marks. Behind it was a long view, probably fifteen miles of desert seen between symmetrical colonnades of sandstone. He observed this pocket from several different vantages: first from directly above, then from a straight shot across the vista, then from a narrow cleft where he could sit on a ledge, and finally from just beside it.
We were both exhausted from the day, and the coming darkness caused our muscles to go limp. Our skin was burned from the sun. I joined him on the opposite side of the water and we stared at it for fifteen minutes. I rolled onto my back after a time and, seeing the first couple of stars, asked Tom if he wanted to swim.
He looked up, surprised to hear my voice. He spoke as if slowly coming awake. “No,” he said. “No. I think I'm good right here.”
The next day, on a broad shelf midway down a seven-hundred-foot cliff face, we found a long, narrow balcony of pockets hanging just at the edge. One pocket extended along the shelf and Tom stood high on a ledge, performing a headfirst dive into it. His feet plunged under last and he was gone. It was at least eight feet deep. I watched the pale image of his body arc below the surface like a shark. The image stayed in my mind, even after he broke the surface again and inhaled with a loud gasp. We swam in a pool nearly two hundred feet long, our arms tiring as we reached the opposite side. Half a million gallons out here, I figured, enough to fill an Olympic-size swimming pool. It was all contained within about two square miles of deeply ribbed and finned country, where we had been walking for three days, dawn to dusk. And this was just the water we saw.
We walked out at sunset, stopping once to gather a panful of water from a final pocket, shuttling it back to the shade where we prepared a meal of egg noodles and curry. From there, walking took us away from the water, down a canyon and into a region of sand dunes and blackbrush. There was no racing against the dark to get back to the truck. The night simply moved over us. Headlamps were never brought out. We walked on starlight, becoming groggy tired, talking with animation for thirty minutes, slogging silently for an hour, then exchanging bad jokes. We talked about what we would eat when we got out, how we would drive until finding a town with an all-night store. In our minds we were already gone.
Hours later, at one in the morning, we reached my truck and within three minutes of driving had it foundered oil-pan-deep in loose sand. Tires spun helplessly. When I walked around in this sand I thought of Colorado's April snow, how it sits on the ground like goose down. We got the truck out of one hole with swatches of carpet stuffed under the tires, only to make it three feet farther along the road, burying ourselves again. Eight times this happened. The region had reached out and grabbed us. It had drilled us into the sand, informing us that indeed we were still here. We had left in our minds to some all-night store where we could buy microwave burritos, and the desert said, Do not leave this place quite yet. Remember. Take the sand and sweet memory of water with you. Become thirsty and pained again before you go.
“We should put on our packs and start hiking out now,” Tom offered. I knew he was delirious. He'd been the one pushing the truck from behind, while I wore on the four-wheel drive from the cab. “We should get to the road and find a bigger truck to get us out.”
“No,” I said. “That's crazy. Not tonight. We should sleep. We'll go out tomorrow.”
We did not argue about it. We were too weary, so we went ahead and rocked the truck out of that hole and into another one. Sand sailed into the air. Back tires dug themselves a grave. We stopped for a minute. The darkness made the world empty around us, the headlights vanishing into the sky from our hole in the sand. I shut off the engine and headlights, got out and sat on the ground, Tom standing beside me looking at the stars, praying perhaps. With its hind wheels laid deep, the truck tilted upward like a sinking rowboat in an ocean too big to get out of tonight.
Even as the scent of burning clutch dissipated, the air did not smell of water. The water was ephemeral in the greatest sense. Since we started walking tonight we encountered no sign of it, we did not find its scent. It got farther away, first by miles, then by distances that could not be mentally crossed. Now it was gone.
Part Two
WATER THAT MOVES
The people who climbed up on Superstition Mountain huddled together and watched the water coming up. With them there was a dog. One night the dog spoke in plain words: “The water has come.”
— Akimel O'odham story, Central Arizona
When I began hunting for water in small, isolated holes, I had wished for a tangible knowledge, a line of information I could personally own. Water holes come in their own packages, with their own distinct rules. I had taken notes carefully and made my own maps, quantifying whatever I could measure. On the top of the Navajo sandstone at the end of the summer rains. In steep, narrow canyons of granite, not in the arroyos below. To prove my knowledge, I wrote academic papers on the positioning of water holes, spatial distribution, ways of determining longevity, submitting these to scholarly reviewers for a master's degree program I had applied to. My measurements of water holes in Cabeza Prieta came out in stunning, colored charts. Weeks of fieldwork from the wildlife refuge appeared in fifteen pages of:
Pool #33 104 l (28 gallons)
Coordinates: N 32? 20‘ 15.1“W 113? 48‘ 36.4“
Elevation: 1,650 ft
Depth (h) = 0.18m
Average width (2r) = 1.5m
Protection: Protected
Local Catchment Area: Large
Sediment: Low
Turbid
Invertebrates: Mosquito larvae/pupae, chironomid larvae
Because of their simplicity, water holes are effortless to study. They need only be found. Regardless of the mystery they imply, of water hidden in impossibly dry places, they have discrete boundaries that take easily to a tape measure, a global positioning device, or a Brunton compass. Moving water is different. Where water holes are the ascetic monks, robed and silent in the desert, moving water is the jester. For all of the jester's elusive leaps and sudden appearances then disappearances, there is wisdom in the movements. In the desert there are places where canyons surgically incise underground aquifers, bringing ancient water into the sunlight. Entire rivers appear from the faces of cliffs. I could sit with water holes for the rest of my life, taking in their potent solitude, but there was more than this to learn from water. I traveled to find these other places.
As water began to move I again heard the voices. Water furrows itself into shapes as it runs, immediately telling stories out loud, decoding messages from stillness into momentum. An alphabetic string of symbols is left in sand and on rock faces after it passes. My papers and notes from ephemeral waters turned suddenly arcane and restrictive. The knowledge was no longer so simple to possess. It was not as innocent as where and how much. It was now asking questions of me.
I listened to the sounds, the liquid timbre in thin canyons, water running where there is no sound elsewhere, no water even if I walked for days. Vowels lifted from the purl. Whole words. Unintelligible garble, then words again. Water taught me that it was an organism itself, alive, not merely a landmark. At times I woke suddenly in the dark, sat straight up from my bag and reached to grab something—my knife, a headlamp, something. Even coming fully awake, I could not talk myse
lf down. The voices in water are real, for whatever they might mean.
Parched land wrinkles to the horizon and in one place, a rock outcrop, a seep emits a drop every minute, a light tap on the rocks below. The drop is sacred. Doled in such apothecary increments, this scarce water is almost deafening, surrounded by total silence, by hot sand fine as confectioners' sugar. It is a single word, a mantra.
In places it gathers speed, finding pathways, turning from seeps to springs to streams to rivers. To be near such moving water in the desert is like being in a vacant concert hall with a solo cellist, like standing on tundra with a grizzly bear. You must listen. You must make eye contact. The water cannot be resisted. Drops become elaborate cadence. The flow becomes song. It burbles from the ground, tumbling down hallways of isolated canyons. Life bends into preposterous shapes to fit inside, plying the narrow thread between drought and flood. Orders are given: you must live a certain way, and do it swiftly, elegantly, because this is a desert, this water is only here, and then a hundred miles of nothing.
In the Kama Sutra, erotic sounds are said to come in seven categories: the Himkara, a light, nasal sound; the Stanita, described as a “roll of thunder”; the hissing Kujita; the weeping Rudita; the Sutkrita, which is a gentle sigh; the painful cry of Dutkrita; and finally the Phutkrita, a violent burst of breath. I have heard all these in water, and then a hundred others, none of which have been offered titles besides plunk, plash, swish, or splash. I have heard the Phutkrita in the snapping of a tree limb during the sudden upwelling of a flood, and the S?tkrita sigh as that same water slowly spun itself into a downstream eddy. Horse trainers have so many names for horse breeds and colors, and Arctic dwellers have entire dialects for the nature of snow, yet few names have been given specifically to the sounds of water. It may be that water is too commonplace. Since it must pass your lips every day, and you wash your hands with it as a habit, it might seem too pedestrian for study. If this is true, if water is so prosaic, come to the desert and listen to moving water. I have been held for days in a single place not because I needed the water, but because I had to listen.
