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

by Craig Childs

  To my back I could see the scours of old floods against the wall, over my head. How old? A hundred years? A thousand years? It became difficult to carry a thought for more than a couple of seconds. My senses jerked back and forth as if I were being dragged.

  What was most remarkable in this flood was not the force or the sound, but the overwhelming smell. It was the smell of drowned pocket mice, sage, newborn canyon tree frogs and sun-heated rocks doused in ice water, the same smell as rain on a hot sidewalk. The bold, musty smell of sacred datura leaves and seep-willows. It was the smell of raw oxygen foamed into the finest silt this planet produces, and the methane of rotting cactus burped through the mud. The dissolving endosperm of acacia seeds. The damp underbelly of a red-spotted toad. Old, rank feathers of ravens, wings of cicadas, and bones of a black-tailed jackrabbit washed from the rim. It was the stench of everything living and dead.

  An entire oak tree paused at the margin of a falls, then tumbled, branches prying away as I watched. The main trunk, as thick as my chest, cantilevered over space, caught on a ledge, and shuttered down ladder rungs of exposed boulders. At the base, small rocks, most the size of kneecaps, jetted into the air. They took odd trajectories, pelting anything nearby, breaking into shrapnel. I could not count fast enough. Maybe ten rocks a second, six hundred rocks a minute, into the air. The tree was pulverized at the bottom.

  Any jag or protrusion was beaten down. If I were to stick my hand in there, my bones would splinter. The flood pummeled impurities out of this canyon, ridding the place of friction and awkward shapes, taking it down to an archetypal form—that of a smooth, carved canyon. Every physical element of a canyon network is mercurial, with no hard givens, no solid obstacles. These seemingly unflagging walls of the Supai Formation were simply another moving part. This is how canyons are formed, by the sway of the earth against floods, where the shape is defined by an alertness to even the most trivial tension. If a boulder falls in, everything adjusts. Channel cobbles shift as floodwater shunts to one side, beating a hollow into the wall, while the offending boulder rapidly erodes into a hydraulic shape like the nose of a speedboat. Any interruption alters the hydraulics. The flood might change its mind and a new canyon will be built to reach a new equilibrium. The equilibrium ends up looking like a house of cards, a succession of pits and shells and sudden turns.

  Flood researcher Luna Leopold called the flexible aspects of a flood degrees of freedom. Degrees of freedom measure the rates at which objects give way to pressure: the quick erosion of sand, the steady wearing back of stone walls, and the instant recoil of water hitting a boulder. From his technical descriptions of research sites, each item in a flood like this is a degree of freedom. Everything changes shape.

  Leopold, witnessing numerous floods in New Mexico, tromping the Arroyo Caliente, Arroyo de los Frijoles, and Arroyo San Cristobal in search of flash floods, had time in his life to decipher the motion of water through the desert, watching banks of mud caving in behind him while rocks battered his legs. In his scientific language, the relationship between a desert's geometry and its floods seems organic: “If the degrees of freedom of the [water] are reduced, the remaining factors [sand, canyon walls, cotton-wood trees, and so on] tend toward a mutual accommodation.” Meaning, the more durable and deeper the canyon, the more resistance is given to a flood. The more resistance that is given, the more the canyon wears into the shape of water, and water takes on the shape of the canyon.

  I stared into the melee below. The flood bounded over immovable boulders, churning into whirlpools. It had a texture like a rapid boil, sending debris up, sucking it down, each roil a barrel rising to the surface. Nothing stayed on top for more than a couple of seconds. The trunk of a cottonwood tree showed through. Smaller boulders, three feet across, stabbed and rolled against the larger ones.

  About forty-five minutes after the start, the flood began receding. The storm abandoned the canyon entirely, leaving the high sun to bake my head. A few more flood pulses arrived, latecomer tributaries finally sending water down, altering the flood by only a matter of inches. I climbed off the ledge and found a wide stretch in the channel where the water was not so deep. When I reached in to touch the edge of the bed, my arm quivered at the impact. There was no bed. Everything was moving. My skin stung with driven sand. A comparison of sediment loads of a desert canyon, dry all but a few hours of the year, and a year-round stream in Oregon shows that even with so much less flow time, the desert carries a million times more debris. Oregon creek beds are armored with cobblestones packed around each other, accustomed to a constant wash of water. Here, everything is angled for motion. A few of the seepwillows might stay. Half the cottonwoods in a grove may hold their ground. But everything else, the sand and boulders, is primed for momentum. You could close your eyes and run your hands across the stones in the floor of a canyon like this to tell which way the water last moved. It is called imbrication, the particular way water stacks objects in a downstream direction. Each rock leans against the next, placed in the position of least resistance, always the same position pointing the way down the canyon, so that if you turn and walk up-canyon, all the shapes are against you. Here and there are imbricate clusters of rocks and boulders; they look like stacked books, so uniform that you will swear someone has been emphatically arranging the local stones.

  When I handled a rock large enough that it might be stationary in the water, it rotated from my hand and was dragged downstream. Large rocks actually appeared above the surface, tossed up for a moment as if the water had run out of room. Downstream from here, where I would not even think of going, was even more of a keyhole of a passage. The flood down there would become catastrophically huge, soon to burst onto the Colorado River like a bomb.

  It would be simple enough to say that there is no grace to a flood, that it is nothing but uncooked power. That is what I saw today, the heedless battering against sandstone, against time, and against my most precious of sensibilities. But what was left behind—this entire canyon—is not graceless, not haphazard. I could see it in the camber of bedrock that the flood chose as a course. Each rock was left in a deliberate fashion. Passageways were left shaped like blown glass. The intentions of floods are expertly refined. The shape of the canyon is the shape of moving water, and the shape of water, like the canyon, will amend to the slightest bias. While resisting and accommodating each other, water and canyon both become patterns of the same intelligence. I found a place to sit, squatting in a patch of boulder shade where I could listen to the roar come down, watching the flood dwindle. The water finally stopped. It took two minutes to arrive, then two hours and seven minutes to leave. I expected hissing, some sound of decompression. At least the isolated clatter of cobbles settling into each other. But there was nothing. I did not know how to handle the silence. The simple aspects of the environment I had admired in past days—shadows beneath a western redbud tree, the intense blue of the sky, bighorn tracks across an upper level—now seemed inappreciable. I was standing weak-limbed, uncertain of what to do. There was no evidence that it had ever happened. I picked up a cobble, something that had sailed here from miles away, an integral part of motion and violence. It was now as inert as the rest of the desert. The flood had abandoned me. I walked back to my camp to put notes together, to prove to myself that it happened.

  12. FOLLOWING THE WATER DOWN

  Grand Canyon

  September

  MOVING WATER HAS A WAY OF HAUNTING ME AROUND corners, out of view below. I have spent time in canyons, perching at impassable falls with useless rope in my hand as water goes on without me. It goes around the next deep, subterranean bend, talking out loud into oblivion, while I crouch, tasting the acid of desire like blood in my mouth.

  When the flash flood came through this canyon yesterday, I had huddled on the ledge and stared down-canyon. I was looking at the penumbral dark ness of a canyon taking a sharp turn, where water lashed and roared out of range. That is where the wild things go. Down there, in tha
t hole.

  Among those living in the village of Supai in Havasu Canyon, east of here, the tradition is to avoid the interior depths of canyons. They will not even run the river that passes down the canyon from their village. Belief is that the dead reside in these lower gorges, a belief that is probably correct. These lower gorges are the most likely 1 areas to bring death during a flood. The belief is designed over time to prevent fatalities, beginning as a regulation (telling children never to go down there lest they be swept away) and eventually becoming a ritual. Their village has been repeatedly devastated by floods, yet few people have been killed because they do not mingle with these coarcted regions. Other tribes, with people who freely run the river and walk the narrows, live on the rims and in open country. It is the canyon dwellers who have superstitions about canyons. Floods have prompted taboos: Keep surplus food on the rim for when the village is destroyed, and never wander into the dark interior unless you are looking for death.

  I am not of the Havasupai tribe. My history is more like that of a mouse exploring crevices, or of the white man crusading to nowhere. I am burned by thirst. Perhaps I am looking for death.

  I tightened my full pack, tying off any extraneous straps, and placed seventy feet of climbing webbing within reach. All of my camp and my life fit neatly onto my back. I descended into the gorge where yesterday's flash flood had cast itself down. I wanted to see where it had gone.

  The place steadily closed. It sent me into long chambers where boulders the size of Clydesdales had been abandoned, dropped indiscriminately. I lurked among them. The flood had recharged all the surface springs that leaked from cracks, building a stream that babbled down the passage. Once I reached the hard limestone narrows, the flow of water became constant. Walls hunched together until nearly touching, and the stream sounded like a bathtub faucet left running in a concert hall. I could see only thirty feet ahead and thirty feet behind, the canyon stealing everything each time it barely turned. These were the limestone catacombs, their roofs slivered open where light became theatrical, the blue of the limestone not even reflecting the sky. The first place that straight sunlight actually touched rock was six hundred feet over my head, and from there down light graduated into shadow, then nearly into darkness. At the bottom of a thousand feet of cliffs, the floor went from alley width to just wider than the spread of my arms.

  Even with the comforting, silvery tones of running water, I could not help feeling that I was being stalked. Mauled pieces of cactus and the tangled appendages of agaves had been freshly jammed into cracks twenty feet up. The walls had the curved geometry of eggshells, too bald for the slightest handhold.

  The stream quiesced into a pool extending beyond the next curve. I slung my pack onto a dry rock, removed my clothes, and swam ahead, scouting along the causeway. My feet lost touch with the floor. I swam a slow breaststroke around a turn, out of sight of my pack, then around another, a modest wake gliding off my back. Each splash sounded like a cautious rummage through a closet, which made it clear that I was the only living thing inside of here. A couple of brief, steep canyons entered from the sides, and I drifted into each of these shrines where films of water slid down their faces from an unseen source.

  The pool went on—fourth turn, fifth turn. I stopped and held myself in place with hands against the wall. My heartbeat trembled the surface. This was yesterday's floodwater, still weighted with the opaque fawn color of sediments. I recounted the events of that day, the suddenness of the storm, the volume of the half-liquid mass that tore through here. I had checked the sky before entering, waiting until it was completely clear, which would maybe give me four hours of safe travel. Where floods had come the hardest, the walls were swept clean of every scratch, smooth as obsidian.

  After the flood

  On down the channel, as far as I could see, the walls had carved out like stacked porcelain dishes and wine glasses. This is the inside of a flood, where the only elements are water and rock honed into each other, trapped so there is no contamination by any laws of physics other than these. As if walking through the inside of a sealed nuclear accelerator, studying the scratch marks of atoms, I swam along, brushing walls with my shoulders. Each mark on the wall was a grace note where the energy of moving water had paused, dug in, and dispersed: the same principle as dimples on a golf ball, where pock-marks encourage patterns of turbulence, reducing drag, allowing the ball to travel farther. In the case of the rock face, turbulence in the water encourages the patterns of pockmarks, which then reduce the drag on a flood. A canyon is not blind stone. These cogs and wheels made of limestone are parts of a mechanism expertly designed to govern floods.

  Working with the most subtle aspects of these shapes, a sedimentology researcher named John Allen studied scallops and flutes left by moving water. He produced numerous papers, and abstract drawings of flow patterns, and inventive, official titles for the shapes he witnessed in water-scoured rock: spindle-shaped, corkscrewed, comet-shaped, conjugate, twisted, wavelike, parabolic. Names were given to the anatomy of simple scour marks: leading point, dividing plane, cusped rim, principal furrow, local furrow, medial ridge, lateral ridge, rounded rim, flank. He studied their evolution by sluicing water across partially dried beds of plaster of Paris, measuring the changing dimensions that blossomed beneath turbulent water, sometimes defacing the plaster with a trowel or the bottom of a soup can to see how the water would treat these aberrations. He watched his plaster deform into sculptures.

  Shapes took on strategic development. The faster and wilder the water, the more complex the designs. Wherever a flow broke from steady to turbulent, he saw the creation of fluting marks, which is the same process that leaves steps and plunges along the length of a canyon floor, only on a much smaller scale. The stream builds force until the energy must blow out and dig a hole for itself in the rock, making a divot. The divot robs the current of its excess, turbulent energy, allowing the water to continue in an orderly fashion—until too much force is once more gained and another hole is dug. Allen saw in his experiments that the bursts are not randomly shaped. They have intrinsic forms.

  By spilling dye into water that moved over his erosion marks, Allen was able to see the skeletons of ghosts. He could actually watch the structure of turbulent water as it spun into holes and wrapped around itself. The shapes revealed by the dye were the same as the shapes left in the plaster, and his drawings of the dye patterns are art. Couching the work in scientific terms, he sketched a gallery of whorled spirals, hairpin vortexes, rollers, and swirling black holes. He gave to moving water what is not visible to the eye: motifs that define the shape of a flood-worn rock. He created a dictionary for this language of water.

  Straight, smooth flows and turbulent flows split from each other and reattach in orderly fashion, and the difference between the two types can be read in the rock. Smooth flows behave like diamond-bit drills moving in one direction against bedrock, while turbulent flows erode surfaces like a madman with a hatchet, betraying any impurity in the rock's structure. It can be felt with a hand. The separation from smooth to turbulent forms a palpable line on the rock face, a crest that is one of the most common, prominent shapes in a canyon: one side smooth, the other roughened.

  This madman with a hatchet has a method to its blows. Researchers have been able to place tiny probes in moving water to observe the actual topography of the turbulent/smooth-water interface, a boundary so well defined that they saw calm flows—the tranquil eyes of the storm—entrained and carried away in the center of turbulent patches. In these probe tests, turbulence proved to be distinctly three-dimensional, with most turbulent zones not isolated, but connected by thin, swirling threads to other zones of turbulence. These shapes are the embryonic scallops that become embedded in canyon walls.

  The best example of this order I have seen was a single western redbud tree growing toward the end of the pool in which I swam. It grew from a mound of cobbles just out of the water, and as I swam up to it, I could see that it was healthy
, that its leaves had not been torn away, its yam-skin bark had not been terrorized by boulders. The trunk was only four or five inches in diameter, but firm enough that it would probably have snapped if pushed all the way to the ground. Yesterday it had been submerged in twenty feet of rampageous floodwater, deep enough to break in half cotton-woods three times its size. But even the fragile leaves remained unmolested on this tree. I had seen an oak tree yesterday, probably a stronger body than this redbud, and watched it burst into splinters in the flood. This redbud was the only plant growing down here beside a few ravaged twining snapdragons, and desert rock nettles hanging from cracks above the flood zone. It would be as likely for this tree to be found growing on freeway asphalt.

  This redbud grew between the lanes of traffic. It had sprouted in one of the vortexes spun from the wall, the only place something could live in here. It came up in the center, in the detached piece of calm water that must always appear in this spot, while every object on all sides had been either destroyed or carried miles downstream. I crawled up on the cobbles and touched the tree's soft, lily-pad leaves. Soaked grasses hung high on the branches like tinsel, but otherwise the flood left no evidence of itself. No evidence other than the fact that the tree remained. Turbulence has order. It can be seen in the shapes of the walls. It can be seen in the existence of one healthy tree in a canyon that cannot even keep its fifty-ton boulders in place.

  I swam farther down the corridor. As the pool descended into a flume wallpapered in carved rock, dry ledges appeared on the sides. I swam back to retrieve my backpack and ushered it down on my head to this next clearing, stopping once to rest at the red-bud tree.