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

by Craig Childs

  About half a mile up from the decimated palm grove we found a single, large animal print in wet sand. I spread my hand beside it. Just larger than my palm, it was the track of a jaguar. Hard to tell, maybe two days old. Perhaps one day. The man with me measured the pad and the toes. At the end of this month he would be traveling just east of here with jaguar researchers. This was data. Of course, as soon as the creek rose, the track would be washed out. Or if the creek dried to nothing, as it would do toward the middle of summer, the track would blow away in the wind.

  Nothing can be expected to remain in a place like this. Granted, many of these large trees had been here for over a century. But the reason for their presence was that floods had wetted the ground for their seeds. These are the same floods that will someday come through and level every last tree, working the creek into a new shape, erasing jaguar prints, gouging waterfalls into place, and opening new ground for the next generation of forests, which will look nothing like this.

  The next day Mario and I took the hitchhiking shift. We skulked in the shade of an acacia tree. The day started hot around sunrise and we didn't feel like talking. Our two flat tires used each other as props, dusty and baking in the sun, announcing our predicament to no one. I had the map unfolded on my lap the way people spread newspapers, hands gripping either side, my head draped forward.

  Unlike those I have seen in my own country, this map showed few places named for people or their deeds. This was a map of more useful terms. They were suggestions of a plant or animal, something marking the place as being different. The map showed one thousand square kilometers, and on it were nine creeks, canyons, or buttes named after the cottonwood, el alamo. Water is probably no more than ten feet below the surface at each of these alamos.

  There were other names. La Angostura is the name of a canyon, meaning The Narrows. The creek of El León suggests the presence of mountain lions. El Güerigal is a grove of cotton-woods of a species other than what is usually seen, and Las Palmitas is a place of small palms. Los Alamos means cotton-woods, Los Nogales walnut trees, Los Alisos sycamores. Places like Los Aguajes (Watering Places) and La Ranita (The Little Frog) imply rich water. The mountain of El Tigre has jaguars.

  The name that struck me was at the low end of Los Alisos, a place called Remudadero. This roughly translates to an act of alteration, something like a snake shedding its skin, or, literally, a spare tire replacing a flat one. The basis of the word is change. At Remudadero the map was missing topographic lines, as if someone had become tired of drawing them. From what I could tell, the canyon was narrow and extremely steep. That is where I would go as soon as the hitchhiking business was done.

  I looked up from the map. The metal rattle of stock racks and the grumble of an eight-cylinder engine came down the road. Mario stood. A big Ford pickup with bent stock racks and no stock halted in front of our tires, dust surging forward, then settling in still air. Mario did the talking. We got a ride, and three rides later, including the back of a truck full of copper-mine workers and the back of a car filled with dogs, children, and our two tires, we reached town. One more ride got us back, returning us late at night with a sack full of beer and ice and two patched, inflated tires.

  In the morning I walked alone to Remudadero. The creek burrowed into high-standing walls. As the water took a hard turn to the west, it entered and exited a cavern it had burrowed from under the cliff. Inside, water babbled over creek stones and I listened for a while, the place having the acoustics of a small performance chamber. I placed my hand in the water to make the sound change. I pulled it out to listen to it change again. In the creek outside, yellow-spotted water beetles with carapaces colored like checkerboards of cadmium yellow paint darted around my legs.

  The creek changed its nature through this section. Upstream it had been a smooth run, usually the same depth all along, no major falls. Here it became much more rugged, closing down to waterfalls, pools, and rolled boulders with palm trees tucked against one another. Above stood sharp layers of cliffs interspersed with chaparral and thornscrub. The view clamped as the canyon narrowed. Armies of organ pipe cacti came to the precipices in full sunlight, while down here the creek bed darkened. Maroon-colored rock sculpted nearly into a tunnel. As the canyon deepened and narrowed, there was no more room for cottonwoods or willows, and in some places no more room for organisms that could not swim.

  I had imagined it would be something like this. The creek had shed its skin, as the name Remudadero suggested. Everything changed. Tree tobacco grew with leaves larger than a jaguar print, larger than my spread hand. Where the canyon tilted open once more, palms crowded the floor. Cacti stood above them. The desert of Tierra Caliente stretched for a hundred miles beyond that.

  Champagne waterfalls flushed the pools around my legs with oxygen. The canyon closed again, turning dark beneath stone walls. The only reason for all this change was that the creek had found a harder rock formation in which to flow. The rock resisted. The water insisted. The ground was edged open and a new breed of running water formed, while upstream, where the canyon floor was gentle, the rocks had not contested the flow. I pushed through a pool waist-deep, holding my pack over my head so it would not drag. In the dim, ambient light I followed the creek. Round, odd-shaped stones at the bottom tended my feet from one side to the other. For all the floods and all the trees that had once been uprooted and thrown through this passageway, there was peace for a moment. For all of the open desert, there was a place burrowed into shadows and water. Remudadero. The world changes.

  Creeks of Galiuro

  I stopped. Swallowed. Looked around my feet, my eyes burning with sweat and light. A hundred and nineteen degrees Fahrenheit, at least. This was the hottest July on record for Arizona. It was in fact the hottest single month recorded in all of North America. If I prayed for rain, the sky would laugh at me. Last time I listened to a radio I heard that forty people had died while trying to cross the border. They had all run out of water.

  The creek bed on which I stood, stretching across the boundary of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts in southeast Arizona, was dry. The air carried no sound. I reached down and, among scorched white stones, picked up the shell of a turtle.

  This Sonoran mud turtle had died long ago. The shell's edges flared like a conquistador's helmet. About an inch and a half long, it rested in my palm like a small creek stone, one with hardly any weight to it, as if made of balsa. Inside I could see the ribs, curved and fused to the underside the same way ribbing is built into wooden ships. I returned it to the ground and walked forward.

  I am never any good in this kind of heat. I lose track directions, not minding if thorns stab my legs, the same thorns I would have avoided at dawn. I crawled into the narrow shade of a cliff, watching a single cloud, waiting for it to become huge and pendulous, scratching its belly with lightning, splitting open with rain. Instead it huffed into nothing, as if exiting a boiling kettle.

  I left from there and walked into the shade of cottonwoods, where I nearly stepped on a rattlesnake. It was a western diamondback stretched inconspicuously across dry leaves, not even rattling from two feet away. I made a sound—something like whoaholycrap—and swerved my boot the other way. The snake did not move, did not twitch, did not flick its tongue. I had seen six rattlesnakes in two days—all Arizona blacks and diamondbacks—and as always, they reacted with the firm politeness of a brief, irritated rattle, or they did not react at all. As a rule, I have been treated kindly by rattlesnakes.

  Saguaro cacti stood all around the low slopes of the canyon, coming down to the edges of these deep groves of trees. I walked into the brothy darkness beneath alder trees, ducking under some of the larger, more boldly strung spider webs. Inside the shade I found a place to wait, arranging leaves behind my back and leaning against them. I waited for night, six hours away. When shadows went long at about five o'clock, I returned to a place in the bed where earlier I had detected a trace of dampness. I organized a stopwatch, a tape measure, and my
notebook on the stream cobbles and watched the spot, which was still moist. At about 5:30 water came out of the ground. It did not spew up, but slowly escaped into the surrounding sand and small rocks. The wet circle grew until water became visible. Then it bubbled out like a small fountain and the creek began.

  Many of the desert streams that flow through the summer emerge in this way. They come out at night, as if fearful of the sun, rising through small gravel-filled corridors that connect the stream on top to the subsurface stream flowing far beneath. By midnight, this entire creek bed would be the site of a clean, swift stream. Walking across during the day, you would find this absurd to imagine.

  As soon as light strikes leaf surfaces at sunrise, the riparian forest sets its higher metabolism into motion, photosynthesizing and pumping phenomenal amounts of water up to the canopy. The thickly arranged plants along the creek are known as phreatophytes, meaning they have no control mechanism for water. They are not true plants of the desert. They take as much water as they can get (a day's worth for a single tree being enough for a few lifetimes of a large cactus), sending it out the leaves, into the heat, making the understory as humid as a New Orleans summer. Instead of flowing across the ground, the creek is hoisted a hundred feet into the air into the leaves of sycamores, willows, cottonwoods, alders, and Arizona walnuts. What is not taken shrinks into the ground and returns to the water table. The surface creek is sucked dry.

  As light faded from the trees, the creek saturated the surrounding ground before actually taking depth. I drank it there, at its source, my lips against the rocks. Within an hour it was moving. Here and there a new channel broke forward with swift fingers, liberating the wing of a moth, the doily veins of a decomposed cottonwood leaf, a dead beetle. Then it slowed, testing the route, finding places into which it spilled. Dusk came. The creek gained speed, making sounds, pushing pieces of gravel around, sucking air from the soil. As soon as the creek had about eighty feet of ground, longfin dace, supple little fish about an inch or two long, began darting about. There must have been a hundred of them. They had spent the day in sponges of soaked algae protected under leaf piles, or in rotted pieces of wood where water had collected, surviving in a half-alive torpor as the rocks baked around them. Water beetles, who had hidden in the same fashion, spun into action.

  Crouched at the water, squinting to write measurements in the coming dark, I glanced to the darker tunnel of overhanging trees upstream. Fireflies had appeared. They besieged the tall grass. Their lights were not constant or sharp but rather were ephemeral, green lanterns fading in and out, describing brief paths through the air. Eerie flickers revealed corners and closets within the canopy, and when a firefly neared the ground, a pale green circle of light cast over the twigs and leaves. They were accounted for in my notes, along with the rates of flow from the creek:

  1st firefly at 7:45

  many more by 7:49

  dazzling by 7:54

  Finally, in the dark, the gurgling sound of the creek became loud enough that the bottom of the canyon had transformed. Through a parade of fireflies and the dance of fish and diving beetles, the water had come. Tomorrow, in the sunlight, all of this would again be gone.

  I should not give the impression that all the creeks here appear and disappear completely. Like the creek of the fireflies, many have surface water for twenty yards or ten feet or half a mile, with dry stretches between. At night these grow and sometimes connect, and during the day they recede, but not all of them entirely. Small waterfalls can still be found in the deepest shade during the day, and some of the creeks keep miles of water on top day and night.

  I had come walking the creeks below the Galiuro Mountains, one of the more remote ranges in Arizona, northeast of Tucson and northwest of Willcox. Depending on what you count, there are well over ten good, running streams here. In the winter they run full steam, bank to bank all the way to the San Pedro River, a river that flows north out of Mexico into the Gila River, which runs south of Phoenix, curving across the state to meet the Colorado River before returning to Mexico. In the summer these small creeks are piecemeal, consisting of wet and dry sections scattered haphazardly through the canyons.

  Although the Galiuros reach as high as 7,663 feet, they do not account in size for the amount of water produced in the springs and creeks below. These desert creeks, all around a 4,000-foot elevation, are too numerous. Even larger mountain ranges that feed the surrounding deserts cannot produce this volume of water. For the number of cattle historically grazing this area, about twenty-five windmills would be expected. There are only six. Much of the water is actually a remnant of Ice Age water. Stored and doled out in the increments of small streams, this Pleistocene water slowly drains from aquifers buried in the mountains, joining banks of much more recent runoff water. Radiocarbon dating on the groundwater here places it back ten thousand years, while the oldest water goes back to over fifteen thousand years. Hydrologists call it fossil water.

  The Nature Conservancy in 1982 purchased forty-nine thousand acres of private land and government land leases below the Galiuros. Even as a neighboring rancher sued the Conservancy for not grazing cattle on this leased land, the conservation outfit talked the Bureau of Land Management into a five-year riparian and grassland restoration plan for the area. The plan mostly involved doing nothing, letting the place get back about its business. The boldest moves were the removal of cattle that had been grazing the area heavily since the late 1800s, and an experimental controlled burn program. The canyons at the northern boundaries of the Conservancy property are within two federal wilderness areas, which, when combined with the Conservancy's Muleshoe Ranch land, encompass the entire watershed of these desert streams.

  For the most part, surrounding ranchers are complimentary of work that has been done at Muleshoe Ranch. Most of these ranches have voluntarily kept their stock below maximum numbers. Because of the ensuing quality of their ranges, after the last three years of hard drought, these ranchers were some of the few to survive without major economic losses.

  The ranch manager at Muleshoe, Bob Rogers, is a congenial man in his thirties who no longer deals in livestock. He does not boom his voice, and he scratches the dirt with his work boot in the middle of a conversation. He is far less at ease in political situations than he is repairing fences, a task that had to be done on one fence sixteen times in a single summer after a barrage of floods. Other pieces of land belonging to the Nature Conservancy are of higher profile and have provoked disputes: quarreling with local government or citizens over water rights or grazing or public access or hunting. Muleshoe, on the other hand, is thirty miles down a dirt road that is sometimes washed out. Scientists doing work out here usually vanish into the backcountry for the length of their research. Public visitation is minor. Rogers is pleased with all of this.

  He found the only known pair of endangered Mexican spotted owls in the range. Government biologists were skeptical about his claim, saying that sycamore forests with understories of oak and juniper are no good for spotted owls, so Rogers took them there, showed them the birds. He has a good grasp of the land, how to get around. His grandmother was born beside Aravaipa Creek, which crosses the northern point of the Galiuros. Most of his family background is in the ranching business, which he considers himself to still be in. It is only that he is tending to creeks instead of cattle.

  “In a canyon like Double R,” he said, “cattle will get into the shade and water on a day like this and they won't move. Not for days. Not for weeks. That is why you either have old, massive trees—from before cattle grazing—or only new trees that have grown since we got the cows out.” I have noticed this: one sycamore probably over a hundred years old with acres of shade below, then beneath it young, weedy sycamores shooting up everywhere. The trees of in-between age are absent, represented by the time cattle were present.

  I spent some time talking with him about the creeks, getting an idea of what the different seasons are like, sorting through his records of fl
ow measurements. We spread maps on the floor at the headquarters, got on our hands and knees. “Now this is some lost country,” he said, scribbling his finger over a series of canyons to the north. “I don't know where this water comes from. Just doesn't make any sense to me, but it certainly is there. Right there,” he stabbed his finger down. The creeks of Galiuro befuddle him. So much water in a place where there should be so little.

  After spending a week walking the southern canyons, I traveled north, to the place Rogers had called lost country. I started in the morning in one of the canyons, taking note of whatever I saw first: a coiled Arizona black rattlesnake (coming through again later in the day, I found the bare clearing where the snake had shoved pebbles away, leaving its coiled shape on the ground) and a yellow-breasted chat scolding me through the stained-glass light of cottonwood leaves. The creek here ran steadily. It stopped in only a few places, draining into a downwelling zone to reappear elsewhere along the floor, around the next turn. These forests were the thickest I had seen. Dangling throngs of grapevines snared my ankles and I pushed through hedgelike walls of vegetation that blocked the view of the creek. A couple of times I found myself off the ground, suspended on cribs of grapevines, then stumbling out to the desert, into the light, hoping to find a shortcut. The land beyond the thin bands of forest was nude with rock. Saguaros stood here and there, along with numerous leafless ocotillos barren as fence posts. The sky was everywhere, sharp, hot, blue. A soaked bandanna stiffened in three minutes. I fell back into the forest, looking for the creek again.