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

  Copyright © 2000 by Craig Childs

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Originally published in hardcover by Sasquatch Books, March 2000

  Hachette Book Group, 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  The Sasquatch Books name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  First eBook Edition: May 2001

  ISBN: 978-0-316-05530-7

  Book design by Kate Basart

  Contents

  ALSO BY CRAIG CHILDS

  DEDICATION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  PART ONE: EPHEMERAL WATER

  1. MAPS OF WATER HOLES

  2. WATER THAT WAITS

  PART TWO: WATER THAT MOVES

  3. SEEP

  4. THE SOURCE

  5. THE ACTS OF DESERT STREAMS

  PART THREE: FIERCE WATER

  6. THE SACRIFICE OF CHILDREN

  7. CARRYING AWAY THE LAND

  8. CHUBASCO

  9. HAUNTED CANYON

  10. FLOOD AT KANAB

  11. FEAR OF GOD

  12. FOLLOWING THE WATER DOWN

  EPILOGUE

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Craig Childs

  contributes regularly to National Public Radio's Morning Edition. He camps in the wilds of the American West several months of the year, usually living in the back of his truck, out of a river vessel, or from his backpack. His other books include Crossing Paths: Uncommon Encounters with Animals in the Wild.

  The Secret Knowledge of Water

  A Top Ten Book Sense Pick

  Selected by the Los Angeles Times as one of the best nonfiction books of the year

  Selected as a Southwest Book of the Year

  “The scenes Childs takes us to and the facts he recounts are utterly memorable and fantastic…. This is a direct book in which the author is on fire with his subject and grabs whatever lies at hand that might help him testify…. It's an approach that is without affectation, and that puts the reader right there with him dropping down that waterfall into what turned out to be a waist-deep pool. The net result is that one comes out of the book feeling that the experiences recounted in it are one's own. Certainly no reader will ever see the desert in the same way again.”

  —Suzannah Lessard, Washington Post

  “An astute observer of nature and a concise writer with a knack for storytelling, Childs meticulously records each significant occurrence in an attempt to understand how the absence or presence of something most of us take for granted dictates life and death in the harsh environment. Highlights include terrifying accounts of flash floods and a fascinating cave exploration, complete with wet suits, deep in the Grand Canyon.”

  —Tim J. Markus, Library Journal

  “The Secret Knowledge of Water exhibits an almost spiritual feel for the desert and its inhabitants…. Childs's knack for storytelling, his broad knowledge of the desert environment, and his conversations with a diverse group of geologists, ecologists, conservationists, and archaeologists bring added insight to his narrative.”

  —Cait Goldberg, Science News

  “Sometimes a book comes along that is pure oxygen…. Be forewarned: Like all truly oxygenated items, The Secret Knowledge of Water is an extremely erotic book. Childs rubs desert lavender between his hands. He hears voices in his ears; he clutches sandstone and the walls of caves; best of all, he describes 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 purl. Whole words.'”

  —Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “Sprinkled throughout the book are fifteen line drawings by Regan Choi that are usually delightful, like shining gems in the desolate sand…. Also sprinkled throughout the book are wonderful uses of the English language. The Secret Knowledge of Water certainly deserves to be considered in the same company as Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire and Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert.”

  —Martin Napersteck, Salt Lake Tribune

  ALSO BY CRAIG CHILDS

  Stone Desert: A Naturalist's Exploration of Canyonlands National Park

  Crossing Paths: Uncommon Encounters with Animals in the Wild

  Grand Canyon: Time Below the Rim photographs by Gary Ladd

  Grand Canyon Stories: Then and Now with Leo W. Banks

  Colorado

  photographs by Art Wolfe, with Gavriel Jecan

  In memory of Josh Ruder,

  who was taken by the water

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Without the inspiration, hard work, and friendship of Walt Anderson, few of these words would have come to paper. I have been humbled by his knowledge and propelled by his enthusiasm.

  I am also indebted to my editor, Gary Luke, for asking gentle, necessary questions, drawing this story into the light. There have been many other people who have made this work possible, countless researchers who have added to the body of knowledge from which I have drawn. Among them, I especially thank Ellen Wohl, Bob Webb, Dennis Kubly, Father Charles Polzer, W. L. Minckley, Gale Monson, and Gayle Hartmann. I also thank the Nature Conservancy's Muleshoe Ranch and Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge for allowing me to perform research on their lands. Finally, thank you to my father, who was born in the desert and, during the floods and storms recorded in this book, died in the desert. Thank you for making certain that my eyes were always wide open.

  Introduction

  First Waters

  MY MOTHER WAS BORN BESIDE A SPRING IN THE HIGH desert, just north of where West Texas and Mexico meet along the Rio Grande. Born three months premature, she was kept alive in an incubator heated with household lightbulbs. An eyedropper was used for feeding. The water from the spring bathed and filled her body, tightening each of her cells. It filled the hollow of her bones. Years later, as the water passed from mother to child like fine hair or blue eyes, I grew up thinking that water and the desert were the same.

  Beyond the spring grew piñon and juniper trees, their wood grossly twisted from years of drought, while here, where my mother was born, cress and moss grew from the spring. A weeping willow, imported from an unfamiliar place, dusted the surface with seeds. I traveled there once, walking up and pushing away the downy willow seeds with the edge of my hand. I dipped two film canisters below the surface. I capped these, walked back to my truck, and drove away before a Introduction stranger could appear from the nearby house to run me off the property.

  I figured that the water might come in handy someday. If my mother ever grew ill and her death was near, I would bring this water to her. The spring had kept many people alive before her. It was an essential stopover for Spanish explorers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and for whomever traveled the desert for the previous millennia. I would slip its water between her lips, tilting her head up with my palm. Her body might recognize it, the way salmon make sudden turns to follow obscure creeks, the way dragonflies work back to the one water hole held between desert mesas.

  An early memory of the low Sonoran Desert where I was born is of my mother walking me out on a trail. I remember three things, each a snapshot without motion or sound. The first is lush, green cottonwood tre
es billowing like clouds against the stark backdrop of cliffs and boulders. The second is tadpoles worrying the mud in a water hole just about dry. Each tadpole, like the eye of a raven, waited black and moist against the sun. The third is water streaming over carved rock into a pool clear as window glass. These three images are what defined the desert for me. At an early age it was obvious to me that water was the element of consequence, the root of everything out here. Even to say the word Sonoran required my lips to form as if I were about to take a drink, and the tone of the word hovered in the air the same as agua or water.

  The desert surface is carved into canyons, arroyos, cañoncitos, ravines, narrows, washes, and chasms. The anatomy of this place has no other profession but the moving of water. When you walk out here, you walk the places where water has gone—the canyons, the low places, and the pour-offs—because travel is too difficult against the grain of gullies or up in the rough rock outcrops.

  At the time that I gathered my mother's spring water, I was out of work, beginning a series of monthlong foot treks through each of the North American deserts, starting here in the Chihuahuan, a desert that in winter sounds like fields of rattlesnakes with dried seedpods of yucca ticking in the wind. In the coming months I pressed myself into the desert, the land of my familiarity. When I pressed hard enough, water came out.

  As I traveled from this west Texas spring, I saw water issuing from each piece of desert, and every turn I made pushed me into water. In the desert below the Chisos Mountains near the Mexican border, and just south of my mother's spring, I found small creeks flowing during the night, then drying and disappearing come daylight. When night fell again, the creeks flowed once more with small fish appearing like driven spirits out of what had been nothing but dry stones. Diving water beetles suddenly flashed alive in the new water. I witnessed these events like miracles.

  It was a season of unusual water. March rains had gone heavy, flooding the desert. I was in my early twenties and had been in the desert enough, but hadn't seen this. I had not seen water leaking from fissures in rocks, ferns uncoiling in the shade of cacti, or rivers plunging along canyons I always knew to be dry. In the desert, water in any amount is a tincture, so holy that it will burn through your heart when you see it. To see it erupting from the ground was impossible.

  On this cross-country journey I slept beside a flash flood at the mouth of a slot canyon in Utah. The next morning I climbed into the canyon where the last of the flood's earnest, red water coursed along the floor. I dipped my hand to gather the floodwater, then brought my hand back up. I put the thick water to my lips and it stung with the sour taste of dead animals and fresh mud.

  There are two easy ways to die in the desert: thirst or drowning. This place is stained with such ironies, a tension set between the need to find water and the need to get away from it. The floods that come with the least warning arrive at the hottest time of the year, when the last thing on a person's mind is too much water. It is everything here. It shimmers and rises and consumes and offers and drops completely away, changing everything. I watch it move and can't help but want to walk straight into it. To be taken. To be purified by its oblivion. To never come back.

  This Utah canyon's interior had been swept into sensuous, conical chambers. Down the walls the light of day bent until the place became as dark as an avocado bruise, me below wading through leftover floodwater. The entire passage was a flood path. Water had moved through here fifty feet deep the night before. The image of a flood in such a narrow canyon is terrifying, where a human body is twisted so hard that bones pop apart. Boots are ripped off, found downstream still tightly laced. Fingers snap off like twigs. I walked through with this memory, the canyon still and quiet around me.

  I stopped. I heard people talking. I turned my head and waited to make sure of this. For at least a week I had seen no one else. This sounded like a group. As I reached the next turn, I could ear a fair number of people, maybe as many as ten; an overburdened backpacking group or worse, a hiking club. Speech against such slender walls tends to echo like spilled coins, but the enclosure was still too loud with running water for me to distinguish xact words. I could hear inflections well enough. Questions, then answers. I could nearly tell the age of people by the tone. I heard a woman in her forties.

  It annoyed me that they spoke so loudly and freely in here. I thought I would startle them as I rounded their corner. I hoped so. They would fall silent upon seeing me, a man from out of the desert, fingers bandaged from cuts, eyes deliberately wild. When I waded around their corner I stopped. Water funneled down the canyon's cleavage. I stood knee-deep in the pool, sunlight landing in small daggers. There was no one.

  I became aware of my breathing. The weight of my hands. The voices continued. Right here, in front of me, around me. Now they were so clear I could see the point where they began. The canyon crimped into a sliver ten feet up from the pool. Out of that sliver, water fell from darkened hallways. Within rooms I ould not see, the stream plunged, poured, filled, and overflowed, addressing the canyon with innumerable tones, which then folded into echoes sounding so much like human voices that I had no category for them. I walked forward, approaching the slim waterfall. I reached my hand out and slipped it inside. Red water came down my fingers and laced my forearm like blood.

  This book was written nearly a decade after I heard the voices. I focused a solid two years on the search for desert water, and my journey is written here. My pursuit was not of the edges of water, but the center of it. Not to be traveling through, but to be arriving. In the time this book came together my life was shoved back and forth between dramatic forms of water until I considered myself blessed, then overly blessed, then terrified.

  In a part of the world inundated in water politics, I chose to look elsewhere than the dams and compromised rivers and skeletal canals leading to Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas. It was desert water I was looking for, the water that is actually out there, that has been out there for thousands of years. The water holes, springs, rare creeks, and floods. I searched among stones in the wilderness, relying on disparate pieces of information: obscure research papers, my own recollections, stories told to me by old men, a 300-year-old desert map prepared by a Jesuit missionary.

  Years before I wrote this book, in the bottom of the dark canyon, I stood in a shroud of voices. They spun up the canyon walls, radiating through the dusky interior, and I realized that part of my life was here, something I would have to seek with full attention, dictated by the water from my mother's spring sent from her body into mine. The voices were part of a complex language, a language that formed audible words as water tumbled over rocks, and one that carved sentences and stories into the stone walls that it passed. I would grow older with this language, tracing its meanings like working back through genealogy. I would study its parts, how different types of canyons varied their conversations. When there was no fluid, as was most often the case, with my hands on the water-carved walls I would read the language like some sort of seer. If you want to study water, you do not go to the Amazon or to Seattle. You come here, to the driest land. Nowhere else is it drawn to such a point. In the desert, water is unedited, perfect.

  Part One

  EPHEMERAL

  WATER

  Water, stories, the body,

  all the things we do, are mediums

  that hide and show what's hidden.

  Study them,

  and enjoy this being washed

  with a secret we sometimes know,

  and then not.

  — Rumi, thirteenth century

  The desert looks hideous. Burned-out cores of volcanoes, hundred-mile basins with floors mirrored in mirage, and terse, studded mountains. You would be a fool to believe water is here. But I have seen water holes. Back there, among boulders too hot to touch in the sun, thousands of gallons, blue eyes on the land. Or just enough in a hole for one swallow and then gone. They cannot be located by verdant islands of greenery visible from miles away, o
r traced as clouds pass over to spill rain. They are random, hidden, and ironic.

  During open-desert cattle drives, livestock sometimes suddenly turn and, with nostrils flared big as oranges, march in some random direction, undaunted by slaps and shouts from horseback riders. Hours or maybe a day later, far off course from the cattle drive, they reach water, pawing into its banks and inhaling it. Coyotes have been reported to trot over twenty miles straight to a water hole, deviating only to sleep or hunt rabbits. Omens and rumors are constant in the desert. It is all a matter of learning how to read them, and when to commit to walking straight across desolation to reach the right place.

  Merely from traveling out here, needing to drink, I have earned some degree of knowledge. I've inserted this into my bag of instincts, able now to crouch on a piece of barren rimrock looking five miles out and say there, on the far point, on that open plain of sandstone, there will be water holes. It is a party trick, impressing companion travelers. A knowledge of geography, geology, shapes. But I've still been left puzzled. A hundred holes dry and one full to the edge. No water for three days, then a galaxy of water holes.

  Common knowledge of water means nothing in these regions—the lowest reaches of Arizona, California, or Mexico, or the baked stone rims of the Four Corners. That it flows downhill, that it is cool to the lips, that you can splash it across your face and still have plenty to drink, must all be forgotten. Sometimes I catch the smell at night, a greenish scent without a return address. It wanders by. Some lost plug of rain in an old hole wetting the air just enough to perk my nose. Then gone.

  Imagine thirty miles of rock and coarse sand, and a steady, clean light from the sun. You are walking east perhaps, driven by a rumor that water is out there, but you are not certain exactly where. It is one hole maybe four feet wide in a desert that is fractally endless. Abrupt mountains stand in your way and you must choose whether to search the mountains, sharp with rock and nearly absent of vegetation, or the dizzying trails of sand-filled washes below. Inadvertently you bite your tongue, seeking moisture. Say you find the water hole. It is surrounded by artwork of cultures here long before: complex, undecipherable etchings on boulders. You drink, mouth to the surface, and it tastes like the foamy sweat of the earth. It enters your blood, preventing your organs from shriveling like the raisins that they are in the leather pouch of your body.