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

by Craig Childs

  Here the rock was basalt, a lava flow from about a million years ago. Treated with the same regard as any sandstone or limestone out here, the black basalt had been cut into a wormhole of a channel, smooth and polished. I skittered down its chutes, entering the pit of a canyon tall and narrow like a snake path through high grass. This is when I had to think, when I slowed to check every twenty feet for an escape route, some crack or ledge above the high-water mark. The old high-water mark rose as the canyon tightened—ten feet, sixteen, nineteen, twenty-five feet. From the narrow floor of the canyon I was looking for a good place to bundle up and wait out the storm, a platform as far in as possible, where I could safely sit and watch if a flood should happen through.

  Built of constant steep plunges where waterfalls formed during floods, the canyon complicated navigation. One of the descents down the middle was too difficult. A small piece of Kaibab limestone had wedged into a crack over a plunge, making a chockstone, something that sat sturdy enough to use as a handhold. Twenty feet below was a plunge pool full of water, its surface jumping like popcorn from the rain. I paced a few times, looking down-canyon, up-canyon. Should have brought the webbing, I thought. I grabbed the chockstone, shook it around to see if it was stable. Good enough. So I got down there, swung my body over the stone, and held on for dear life. I wanted to see if there was a way down. I figured if there was one more hold below the chockstone, I could climb inside just that much farther.

  There was not another hold. This was not going to get me anywhere. From my suspended vantage I could see plunge pools lining the canyon from here on down. I pulled myself up to climb out. But I could not get my boots on anything. The angle of the rock was wrong. All I had was this wedged stone to hang from, enough to hold me there but not enough to get me up. I grunted, cursed, squirmed around, and could not get back up. I turned quiet for a second, listening. If the flood came now, it would hit me at just about eye level. I made a trapped-animal sound and tried another position. My right arm weakened. The muscles in my chest drew tight. Then I started to kick. The waist pack wedged me in. I forced myself until something popped in my shoulder. Pain shot up my neck. It was a small strap of muscle pulled too far. I could feel my face involuntarily losing composure.

  With my free left hand, I reached down and unclipped my pack. I pulled, so I could toss it up, out of my way. As I pulled, the strap wormed from my fingers. The pack fell. I saw it sail for an instant, the straps swinging out. It landed in the pool below like a sack of laundry.

  My notes.

  That is all I thought, my notes.

  For two seconds I tried to find an alternative. There was nothing to hold here. I knew this already. I let go. The only thing to do to get my notes back.

  Slot canyon flash flood

  Falling took longer than I thought. My legs started kicking unintentionally in the air. Then I hit the pool, chest-deep. I pawed at the gravel, sputtering juniper scales and small, wet twigs from my mouth. I pulled myself out, the pack in my right hand. The canyon echoed with my splashes.

  For a moment I stood with my draining pack, listening so hard it hurt. The sound of thunder. Water running from my clothes. My heartbeat.

  The world changes colors when you think you might die very soon. Everything stood brilliant. The purple shade of the storm had a thirsty lushness. The rock was smooth as pearl. Even as I stood panicked, listening to water pour through my pants, out of my boots, it was unmistakable that everything I believed was down here. Each part of my faith: the scalloped walls; how each sound was sharply distinguished; the smell of water on stone; the fine patterns left in sand from the last flood. Every last piece of magic and belief. I had spent my life clutched to these canyons. I had always sought this. I could feel lumps of juniper berries down my shirt.

  Even if it looked feasible, I could not go downstream from here. That is definitely how people die. From desperation. Bad decisions. If a flood never came, I would be trapped in there like someone stuck down a well peering hopelessly up at a little circle of sunlight. So I turned to the place where I had fallen. I scrambled at the left side, got halfway up and scraped back down into the pool. Skin stripped from my palm like an offering. I sucked on the cut, mumbling obscenities. My flesh for an escape.

  Then the right side. A couple of cracks lacing the basalt, part of the jointing that occurs in cooling lava, were exaggerated by erosion. With the pack slung over a shoulder and out of the way, I managed to reach the halfway point, just below where I had jumped. I lay back against the last handhold and rose finger by finger. I used all of my energy, a day's worth just for my fingertips. Then, just for my palms when I ran out of cracks. I used my chin, my right cheekbone, my hip. Anything I could get. It was bad rock. Too slick. My body began to shake, muscles jackhammering.

  Rain plucked at my eyes. Skin started to slip, sending my heart jumping. I held to the rock with the side of my face, with my palms flat as palms can lie, the last knuckles in my fingers crimping at the rock. Water started over the edge of the canyon floor above me. It started into a waterfall. Clear water. A small, ornamental flood. Okay, I thought, clear water, just clear water. The clear water increased, spreading toward me as it ran into the plunge pool with a sluicing sound. Oh Jesus, not now. I could not move. If I did I would fall. I let the weight of my body settle on my flesh and the rock. I breathed. The voice of the water grew louder.

  I could go down. If I could not get up, I would have to go down. I thought about the circle of sunlight, and the sad, helpless look that would be on my face. I banished the thought and went ahead with my left hand. My body would be sore tonight. Every part of it. I relished the thought. Tonight. Out of here. Then the right leg. My left hand drifted over, touched the bottom of the limestone chockstone at a full reach. Fingers crept up its side. I got a hold, my face still flush to the wall. I wrapped fingers around the stone. My entire weight shifted. Water ran down my arm, using my body now as a waterfall. I inched up, boots against one side, hands against the chockstone. When I got high enough, without thinking, I pushed off like a frog, thighs tight, launching my body away and landing with my torso in the gravel and water of the next higher level. My fingers dug in, keeping the dangling half of my body from yanking me off. Gravel let loose and flowed over my shoulders. As fast as I could, I scrambled away from the edge.

  I bolted off to one of the walls, climbed up to the rim. Scared enough to have this crisp, anxious stare on my face, I sat in the rain watching the streamflow, which never got bigger, never muddied. It stayed ornamental. Most of the storm had hit lower in the canyon, where I would not have expected it. Big floods down there. The rain stopped. I peeled off my clothes and wrung them out so that murky water spattered the rock, then scooped water in my hands to clean the small debris from my skin and rub clean the abrasions on my palm. Scanning through binoculars (a bit foggy now), I could see water running off the Esplanade sandstone miles below.

  I sat there naked for a while, thinking I would get up, dress, and walk away soon. But I did not get up. I sat. I watched. The canyon had given me back. There are certain gambles out here. A commodity of value comes into risk. I figure this is why people spend hours in casinos, tossing money down for a sense of immediacy that is often removed from civilization, a sense of wildness perhaps, where loss or gain will be simple, quick, and definitive. That would be my sense of loss at my own death—simple, quick, and definitive. I shook my head, made promises to myself. But I was here to find floods, regardless. I walked around the basalt rim, finding my way into the lower canyon.

  Miles inside, the canyon floor burrowed into a corkscrew passage. Eighty-foot boulders lounged along the dry bottom, some wedged between the walls, others perched on top of each other. Walls took directly to the sky, leaving shadows to feast all over each other at the floor. This is what it must have been like, I thought, to be the first to stand beneath the Empire State Building or beside the docked Titanic. The canyon was enormous.

  By late morning a second storm bro
ke the canyon rim. The sky turned the color of a bruised plum. Ten minutes ago there had been no sign of clouds, straight sunlight, and now the bulk of a thunderstorm shouldered into the canyon. From a small ledge over the dry canyon floor I watched each movement in the sky, my body shifting to whip-cracks in the wind.

  This second storm came erratic and elastic, leaning any direction. It was driven from the inside, from descending swells of rain that severed rising heat cells. By now it was certain; the storm had committed itself. It would land here.

  I hit the stopwatch when the rain arrived like the dropping of a cement block. No pause, no first raindrops, just suddenly here. A cloudburst. These storms had been liberating forty-ton boulders lately, and I had been arriving days too late, finding only downstream carnage, falling clumsily into a pit of old floodwater, panicking even as no flood came. Storms had been swerving drunkenly across the landscape, suddenly expelling into one canyon and not the next.

  Now it was here. I jumped from the ledge when a curtain of waterfalls came over me. I landed in the drainage and ran. Rain took the land. Waterfalls stirred down every cliff face. Rain beat at my head.

  The flood was here, two minutes after the rain began. It filled the channel with no warning. When you hear tales of desert floods you hear about sudden waves, walls of water. These impulsive walls are deep inside the canyon, down in the menacing constrictions, or out the other side. There came no wave here at the very beginning. This was the place where the wave was constructed, the fingerprint where the storm had landed. A stream assembled, midcalf in some places, deeper behind boulders and in the plunges. And rising. Foam of released air and silt collected in eddies. I could not even track this water's origination. It was simply here, fed from every side, fed from things that were not even canyons, were not even places where water should flow.

  Canyons are basically nets that catch water. Branches and fingers and tributaries scour the land above, sending everything down, so that when a storm passes, all of its rainwater is driven toward a single point. Water can run from tens of miles down hundreds of feeder canyons, spilling into deeper and deeper, fewer and fewer canyons until the volume of the flood has jumped exponentially into one final chasm where everything converges. I was in this single point. I slapped through its gathering water, running downstream to glimpse the behavior of each local tributary. Water from one side canyon choked and growled, arcing down and bursting into the main channel. A couple of tributaries added enough to triple the flood's volume, one emerging from a slim crack, ushering the curve of a waterfall. Not water, though. It was something else: half rock, half water. It ran red with Supai and Hermit shale, red like a soup of cayenne and fresh, squashed tomatoes thickened with sand and stones. It threw rocks into the air, plunking them into the flood around my legs.

  There is a specific geometry to a canyon floor built by this kind of water. There will be long segments of gentle gradients interrupted by sudden drops and pools, followed by more narrow runways leading to more drops. These narrow flood canyons are built like stairways where, at critical points, the energy of increasing stream-force becomes too much. Turbulence drives water and debris until it fists a hole into the canyon. The cauldron that has now been cut into the floor is called a hydraulic jump. It is a method of dissipating the flood's energy into a plunge pool, some ten to twenty feet deep, before the water can resume its downstream travel. Floods spill out of these hydraulic jumps, move downstream, build force, and again reach peak turbulence, carving another bowl. This is followed by the slope, then the waterfall, then the next bowl, on and on down the canyon. The pattern is a way for the flood to shed energy, like pumping the car brakes to keep from going out of control.

  Within moving water are an array of genetic instructions, which are driven into stone and passed from one flood to the next. If the water is funneled through a thick forest, say in the Olympic Mountains of Washington, it will make the same matrix of steps and pools, only out of fallen trees and woody debris, not out of bedrock. If the medium is boulders and sand, the final shape will be the same, as if sorted by hand—steps and pools in perfect order. You will see it down a steep street gutter where cigarette butts and pieces of loose asphalt have been arranged to form runs and puddles. Water is not concerned with the setting. It consistently uses this language.

  This canyon sank into the Supai Formation and strangled itself with meanders and waterfalls. I found ways around, jumping between backs of boulders to keep pace with the rising water. The flood became dangerous in the constriction, boiling with mud and rocks and smaller parts of trees. Large rocks began surging up from their settings, lumbering half out of the water, then thudding downstream. I dragged my left hand on the wall, scooting far over, remembering how the desert fishes get through these floods by squeezing to the side, by keeping straight. The flood began pushing at my legs, telling me faster, faster! Water swelled behind my thighs, rising, causing my feet to fumble, almost knocking me over.

  Maybe I had made a mistake. Maybe I shouldn't be here. It was time to get out. The first exit to higher ground within the canyon, with ledges just barely beyond reach, did not work. I ducked through a culvert of fallen boulders. Rainwater latticed my face. Where the floodwater smacked into obstacles, mud burst into the air and onto me. The rain then washed the mud from my forearms, off my neck. I turned every eight or ten seconds, wiping my face, to glance behind for the infamous wave. With the storm on top of me, I figured I was in the wave. The wave was building around me. At this point I could not turn around and run back up against the flow. I had to follow or I would be tumbled backward.

  There are things one cannot know about canyons and floods. One Arizona flood in August 1971 came from a fairly insignificant drainage and yielded what is clearly the largest known flood for a canyon of its size. In a brief event, Bronco Creek belted out about a thousand tons of water every second. The creek, which drains nineteen square miles, was suddenly as large as the Colorado River, a river born from seven states, draining thirteen hundred times the land of Bronco Creek. You never know what you will get—where the storm will hit, how much rain will fall, or how the canyon will play it.

  In general, storms travel over the Grand Canyon from southwest to northeast. For canyons like this that open into the common local path of storms, floods tend to be more numerous and more pronounced. Canyons cutting perpendicular to the path are shielded from the bulk of a thunderhead, which crosses briefly from one side to the next. The volume and frequency of storms can be read in the terraces of flood debris left at the mouths. Canyons facing into the storms have shoveled layer after layer of flood debris out, while those facing other directions have produced more scant debris. Storms happen to track along the pattern of geologic faulting in the Grand Canyon, so that many canyons, which use faults as blueprints, are open like mouths swallowing the weather. The entire Grand Canyon is thus a machine designed to capture and drive flash floods. Every last wrinkle and crack lends itself to this mechanism, showing water the quickest, most efficient way down.

  A catwalk of a ledge protruded from one wall and I took it, narrow but elevated enough to be out of reach from the flood. On hands and knees I made the first moves. The canyon floor dropped around me through fallen two-story boulders. Where I had last walked, an acacia tree rattled, then bent as mud slopped through its branches. The water below grew from knee-deep to shoulder-deep. Then shoulder-deep to eye-deep. Then the references were gone.

  The ledge became wide enough for me to stand as it hugged the curving east wall. At the junction of several major tributaries, the ledge entered a four-hundred-foot-deep sanctum where floods jumped from each side, spanning well away from their cliffs. Two particular tributaries flowed with unnerving throbs, dropping from canyons that hung a hundred feet above the floor. Shapes were visible in their muddy veils, shadows of large, sailing objects. A newborn waterfall burst off one edge, throwing rocks into the air in its lead. It was as if the scaffolding of the planet was coming down, the bolts and
metal sleeves of time and physical structures snapping apart, planks caving in. Wind sheeted up from the canyon floor, propelling mud and mist straight up the wall and against my face, through my soaked clothes.

  You could not shout over this sound. It was like gritting teeth and clenching fists. It was the sound angels make as their wings are torn off. Occasionally a single sound stood out: the smack of a boulder, or the sucking of a thousand gallons of water finding a new path. Most individual sounds were felt only through my feet or up the bones of my arms. Breaking boulders made sharp clacks. The low-pitched sounds were those of larger rocks, and when I heard these I backed against the wall in case the earth should split open here. It is simply not possible to stand limp before something like this. The muscles in my neck stood out.

  I have often thought that trapped on a shelf in a flood, a person could go insane, waiting for the flood to lift and take the ledge. I remembered a story from Havasu Canyon, when a twenty-foot wall of water came down on the village of Supai in 1910. Charles Coe, the Indian Service superintendent, was found around noon the next day with his wife and their Havasupai cook, huddled on the roof of their house. Theirs was one of only two structures left standing. The three people clung to each other, wearing nightclothes and a few blankets they had salvaged, while the flood growled around them, carrying off horses and cotton-wood trees. From the roof, they had witnessed other buildings collapsing into the flood while somehow, theirs stood. But the fear. The endless fear. During the night they had listened to the world crumble around them, to lumber splitting as roofs buckled. I imagined the fear of waiting for their house to topple beneath them. As soon as Coe was rescued and got out of the canyon, he never checked on his responsibilities to the Havasupai people he had been serving. He left Arizona and did not return.