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

by Craig Childs

  When the boulders impacted the earth, the entire forest of pines catapulted, hurtling end over end. Mike hit the ground, held onto something. He was afraid he might asphyxiate in the blizzard of wind and granite dust that followed. He breathed through his clothes. When motion stopped, he crawled out of the dust. He and his partner were the first to arrive at the victims. One person was killed without question. Two young women were pinned beneath trees, partially crushed. He stayed with one woman, cleaning the blood, helping her with slow, calm words.

  Then his story was over. He said he did not like times like this. He said that later this would make sense, in the telling of the story. But now, the earth was coming down around him. The basic footing of the planet was coming loose.

  We talked our way through the storm, bolstering each other. We talked about fear and about how these things strengthen us. As we listened to rocks come down we talked about how we wished it would end, how the sun would rise and we would find ourselves alive. Eventually, amidst our talking and our silences, the wind slowed. The rain stopped abruptly, as it does when these storms suddenly change course or pass on. We both tentatively lifted our corners of the tarp and stepped into the night. Water could be heard washing down the cliffs.

  We disassembled the shelter, shaking things out. Clouds left the sky as we reset our camp on the ledge. We were now gifted with a startlingly clear and calm night. I spread my bag on the flat ledge of limestone and crawled in. The night's element of consequence had been darkness. Now it was quietness. Water stopped running.

  I waited with my eyes open, but there was nothing to wait for. How could I sleep? A clack of a single falling rock came from the north. I imagined it was no bigger than a drinking cup. But it was the only sound. I listened to it all the way down, each scrape and clip standing out as if speaking to me directly. It did not seem to fade as it fell hundreds of feet into the canyon.

  Then silence.

  Well into the 1930s it was believed that most erosion in the desert had little to do with water. Geologists cited extreme day and night temperature ranges and constant dryness, reporting that rocks must explode during the night from the pressures. They believed that it was the absence of water that caused desert erosion. In laboratory experiments, researchers tried to force rocks into cracking and exploding, assaulting them with temperatures and dryness far beyond what a desert could produce. The rocks did not budge. So they said that it was wind that had left deserts so chopped up with canyons and clefts. But when they hammered open these desert stones, ones gathered from the Mojave Desert in particular, they found hidden inside traces of moisture. Eventually they examined the shape of the land with increasing scrutiny. They walked the canyons. They witnessed floods and watched boulders roll away in the seething froth. Then they understood.

  Desert floods come from rain. Most rain falling anywhere but in the desert comes slow enough that it is swallowed by the soil without comment. Desert rains, sporadic and powerful, tend to hit the ground, gather into floods, and disappear before the water can sink five inches into the ground. I have devised a simple experiment to explain this process. Find a curled, dried sponge under the sink and set it on the floor. Fill a glass with water and toss it, all at once, at the sponge. What you will get is water all over the kitchen floor. Now find another dry sponge. Fill the same glass with water and this time pour it slowly. The result will be obvious. The sponge is soaked, your floor relatively dry. Because of the intense nature of its storms, a desert receives rain most often as if from a tossed glass. The rain from the other night was not subtle and did not soak in. Water splashed off the desert and ran all over the surface, looking for the quickest way down. It was too swift for the ground to absorb. When water flows like this, it will not be clean tap water. It will be a gravy of debris, snatching everything it finds.

  Walking alone along the canyon rim the next day, I picked through the results of these gravy flows from the night before. Agaves had been half-buried, muffled by six inches of smooth sand, while their blades poked up like birthday candles. Prickly pear cactus pads had the appearance of catcher's mitts, fielding the movement of rocks and sloughs of organic debris, straining oak leaves through their spines. Some were buried by small, square pieces of rock, remnants of Hermit shale and supai formation from above.

  I gingerly lifted one of these remnant stones from a cactus pad. The rock stood white against all of the local red and maroon formations. It was Coconino sandstone, carried from several miles away. The cliffs up there are falling over each other, adding more and more material to these slopes, more sand to the river. Under certain rock formations you will sleep to the constant plucking of small rocks, pieces that whistle down and crack near your camp. The Coconino sandstone is particularly good at letting fly fractured arcs of rock, large enough to disturb you from your camp and send you elsewhere for the night.

  Nearby I found in the sediment a single grayish black arrowhead. To its left, six feet away, was a small piece of broken pottery. I wheeled the potsherd between my fingers. It was not curved enough for a bowl or an actual pot. Maybe a dish, tan and glazed, seven hundred years old or so. I began counting pieces of pottery as I came to ten and then thirty of them.

  A slight drainage another twenty feet away had dislodged—along with its usual fare of seeds, rock, and sand—numerous Anasazi potsherds. They gathered with debris of like size, caught in the feathered, sandy eddies, buried to their tips, or pushed sideways against a narrowleaf yucca. These were bluish corrugated pieces, the lips of jars, painted redware, bowl concavities, sherds with angular black-on-white paintings, smooth beige pieces, gray sherds with hand-drawn burnish marks, and the handle of a mug or of a water carrier.

  In this exhibition of potsherds I found some that had been broken by mule deer hooves only days ago. The trail of water-driven pottery led to the remains of a round building, eighteen feet across. Pieces of pottery had fled from the structure in every downstream direction. It was an exodus. The potsherds were steadily on their way to the interior canyons, pushed by runoff.

  I crouched and set one of these painted black-on-white pieces on my left knee. Typical of this culture's attention to detail, the lines of paint were as fine as shadows of grass blades. It occurred to me that a measure of a civilization should not be how well it stands, but how well it falls. In some places the water had stacked pieces on top of each other. They could have easily been mistaken for coin-size stones, gracefully blending with every other natural object being carried away.

  I held the piece up so that it cut a shape against the sky. Behind it could be seen layers upon layers of cliffs leading into canyons, dropping then to innermost chasms, eventually to the river. The thread between these landforms was water, the downhill flow, the shape that scientists could not originally understand because, they asked themselves, how could a place defined by the absence of water be defined by the presence of it? Each object here at the rim was fodder. We were all being fed to the passage of water.

  8. CHUBASCO

  The Arizona Strip

  August

  THIS YEAR I HAD SOMANY DREAMS ABOUT FLOODS. IN one I took a nap on a sandstone ledge and woke with my body covered in frothy, rust-colored foam, the kind that floods leave on the backs of boulders and up against cottonwood trunks. In the dream I jumped off the ledge and chased the flood. But I could not catch it. It glimmered as it entered numerous arroyos and spread beyond my reach.

  There was a dream of a storm that ripped canyon walls apart, prying the cliffs until they crumbled like statues during siege. The leathery storm unraveled to the ground, and I watched it take one canyon, then the next. I was hoping not to fall under the gaze of this huge, roving creature, hoping it would not find me. But it did and it lumbered at me. I hid behind a boulder as the water surged down and exploded above my head. A protective envelope of air formed between the boulder and the fan of a waterfall, where I crouched and shivered as the flood thundered around me.

  A couple of years ago I sat
in a window seat of a passenger airliner. We were attempting to land among summer thunderstorms in Phoenix, banking around the city eight times as I looked down on arteries of lightning. Each time we passed the edge of a storm, the rattling of the fuselage made a sound like a box of pencils being violently shaken. Running low on fuel, we turned south for Tucson and within ten minutes of landing, a thunderstorm hit the Tucson airport, pinning us there for an hour, still in the airplane. During bursts of wind-driven rain, all conversations halted as people looked around, expecting the fuselage to buckle. After we finally took off, halfway to Phoenix I looked out the oval window from ten thousand feet and scanned the sunset earth below. Then my hands went flat against the window as I lifted from my seat, my forehead pasted against the plastic. It looked like molten gold had been loosed across the desert. Arroyos were flooding, catching sunset light, their brilliant threads working the desert, each of them advancing at the same pace, which seemed incrementally slow from up here. Tom Mix Wash, Bogard Wash, Coronado Wash, Big Wash, Rainbows End Wash, Suffering Wash, Cadillac Wash. Everything was running down there.

  I turned quickly from the window. I must have looked raving because the man one seat over, a businessman from El Paso, was already tilted away from me. I blurted, Flooding down there. He regarded me with a kind, protective smile. Really? I stared at him for another three seconds. I wanted off the plane.

  It was pilots coming back from Southeast Asia in the '50s and '60s who added the term monsoon to the Arizona lexicon. They were stationed near Tucson, and commonly referred to these summer storms as monsoons because they came on schedule each year like those of Vietnam and Korea. Monsoons are broad and slow rainstorms, liquefying the ground into mud, sweeping over entire continents like an arm brushing crumbs from a table. Arizona's “monsoons” come immediately after the harshest droughts of the year, which run right up to July. Almost half of the desert's yearly precipitation then arrives in August as if a door is flung open. Water stands against drought like light and dark.

  What we have in the Southwest is more a season of chubascos than monsoons. If a monsoon is a big front of weather, then chubascos are needles poking through the weather map. A chubasco is a kind of storm that eats holes into the sky and the earth. It is a convective thunderstorm, the one item of weather that brings the quickest rainfall, the heaviest winds, and erodes the most land. Corrugated aluminum roofs are ripped off with horrible screeches, then sail like cotton sheets into the atmosphere. People die in chubascos when twenty minutes earlier they didn't even think there would be weather. Most of a year's precipitation can easily be unloaded in six minutes, while one mile away the ground might not even be dampened. This kind of storm is not slow, not broad, not long-lived. Often they come in groups, like packs of feral dogs bickering the winds apart in their teeth. They appear from nowhere and hurl at the ground, then evaporate as if they didn't mean anything by it.

  A chubasco is an alchemy of conflict. It is superheated air forced through cold, wet air, heralding the desert's rainy season at the hottest time of the year. A low-pressure system, ripe with moisture, pushes from the Sea of Cortés and the Gulf of Mexico, colliding with the heat of an Arizona summer. Hot air rises off the sunbaked ground, shooting upward at about fifty feet a second, with low pressure leaving the sky open for heat to continue upward as long as it can. The heat pierces higher, colder layers so that rivers of air scroll backward, toward the ground. The sky becomes a sea of writhing puncture wounds. As cumulus clouds move upward, becoming cumulonimbus clouds along these rising domes of heat, enough turbulence builds to rip the wings and rudders from airplanes. Moisture caves in, driven at the earth by frantic winds. Ice churns from the sky, landing on ground that may be 150 degrees.

  For over a century scientists have been trying to isolate variables out of these chubascos, tying them down to numbers for prediction. Because they bring the greatest annual rainfall to the desert, offering both water needed for crops and drinking, and disastrous floods, they have been studied down to their individual shapes, trajectories, electrical fields, and the theoretical mathematics of their frequencies. A seventeen-line equation was once composed to anticipate summer thunderstorms from a single gulch in southern Arizona. It was based on eleven years of data from forty-seven rain gauges, leading to a prediction of where and when rain is most likely to fall. After all of that, the prediction was that the rain could fall just about anywhere, and would probably do it during the summer. After seventeen lines of calculations, the mathematicians could conclude nothing more.

  From canyon rims I can sit out all day just for the frank pleasure of watching these storms uncoil into the sky, their shapes as peculiar and ornate as wood carvings. Twenty thunderstorms may rise and fall, while not a single shadow crosses me all day. There are those that build into massive columns, then spread and vanish, and those that do not even catch my eye until out of nowhere they burst and steal half the sky, shrouding the ground with rain. In the evening their lighting becomes cinematic. Different storms play on each other, stealing red sunset light, giving it back orange, stretching up so that they stand on tiptoes in the last sunlight, casting shadows through the atmosphere. Then night arrives and I see their muffled lightning a hundred miles off.

  This summer I sat on a rock, watching a chubasco over by the Grand Canyon. This was the Arizona Strip, a desperate piece of land stuck between the Grand Canyon, Nevada, and Utah. Hungry Valley, Poverty Mountain, Last Chance Canyon. I had started watching the storm an hour earlier when it was a cloud not much bigger than a pea from where I sat. Now it raked the planet with thunder, erasing entire landscapes inside of its rain. It looked as if someone had taken a knife and gutted the sky and, like a gift of magic, out fell a flood of purple spiderwebs. The low ceilings of clouds caught light off the richly colored sedimentary rocks below. This effect will be seen only over the naked stone of the Colorado Plateau: low, ominous clouds turned a velvet lavender by the ground beneath.

  This August morning I had shaved my head until it was as bare as I could get it. The heat, like that of a truck engine, left me guzzling water, sleeping out the afternoons in juniper shade, cutting my hair off, whatever was necessary. I scattered the leftover hair into a garden of narrowleaf yuccas, and the tufts looked like the remains of a killed rabbit. So while I watched this storm, I kept running my hand over my scalp, feeling unduly naked. The storm roamed to the south once, then pivoted back to the north, and was now coming northwest, toward me. Distant thunder made the sound of something important happening somewhere else. I probed my hand over the top of my head and waited.

  The edges of thunder grew curt on my eardrums. The thunder no longer sounded like someone else's. It was becoming mine. Looking into this storm was like looking into the deep colors and shapes of a huge orchid. It was dark in there. And being torn apart. Winds visibly shoved through the clouds, shredding the edges as if angrily ripping fabric apart, hurling some up and some down. Strands of the storm broke away and rapidly swirled into tight spirals, winding until they sprang apart. When the storm arrived, it made a vertigo wall, taking a sudden shift to the north, then west so that it swept behind me and arrived at my back. Before anything, I heard the zealous sound of rain, the ground blurring and jumping as it arrived.

  I had not moved for an hour. I had been sitting on the rock feeling my skull, watching the storm come around me. At the first slap of a raindrop I jumped. I ran west, to the top of a sandstone knoll where I could get a look at the topography and quickly study the lay of drainages leading into lower canyons. Another drop hit, this one on my shoulder. The next two were on my cheek and my arm. Quarter-size prints smacked the red rock. Then the drops were everywhere, leaping all over each other. Something had opened. With the opening came an instant wind shouldering me to the side to get by. I could see it rushing through juniper trees, pushing everything out of its way. Parts of piñon cones hurled into the air. Rain came down like heavy fabric, folds of rain. It came so hard that the ground turned to smoke. Lig
htning struck. Three seconds later the sky split open. Fear. Sudden, instinctual fear. I ducked at the sound, threw an arm across my head.

  Pockets in the sandstone immediately filled and poured one to the next. Larger pockets took several seconds, then filled and overflowed. I ran from the knoll, down its smooth dome into the start of a canyon below. Wind sprinted through, blocking me, knocking me sideways as I made quick choices, finding routes along steep rock benches, checking to see where the rain had gathered, how much of it was flowing to the floor. I was looking for a flood. Small waterfalls pirated each other, building into torrents that fumbled through fallen branches and rocks. The thunder was now sharp as billiard cracks. Rainwater ran down my legs, filling my boots. A lightning bolt struck inside the canyon ahead of me. It touched ground beside a juniper tree, so close and so bright that I involuntarily leapt in the other direction like a jackrabbit hit with headlights. No pause came between lightning and thunder. The air shrieked hysterically. Rain fell harder, signaled by the lightning.

  In the past month, nineteen people had died in this state, caught in the path of water as chubascos sent floods through the desert. Bodies were still being exhumed from the mud. I figured I was safer because they had not been looking for floods, while I was. I would have just those extra seconds of lead time. I had made choices at the knoll, calculations on where water would flow, how much, how quickly. I had forgotten the seventeen lines of hard mathematics that had proven not a thing about desert rain.