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

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by Craig Childs


  A tinaja is so specific in its shape that any alteration changes even the condition of the water. Nearly each time I have seen human improvement attempted at a tinaja, the water has been bankrupted. The bowl of a tinaja is steep at the upstream side and shallow at the downstream, which pouts outward like the lip of a pitcher. This gently sloped exit, a happenstance of hydrology and erosion, ensures that organic debris is flushed out with heavy rains. Cement dams have been constructed to increase the holding capacity of some tinajas, with the intention of supplying more water to bighorn sheep. What happens instead is that organic material on the floor swirls around during a flood, unable to top the impoundment. The tinaja rots. The water becomes the color of decayed fruit. Under a microscope it is little more than a jungle of single-celled algae, no sign of the glasslike baubles.

  In some cement dams, not only is the flow of organic material cut off, but also flood-driven rocks and boulders are stalled. I found a dam built in February 1948, spanning a 32-foot-wide section of canyon that once proved excellent at garnering water into holes. After fifty years it had long since filled to its nine-foot-tall rim with rock debris, impounding twenty-three hundred cubic feet of rock instead of water. A former refuge manager for Cabeza Prieta told me that at one improved tank he had to go out with a shovel after each heavy rain, digging sand out of the hole.

  Of the water-hole maps I have seen, the one that most intrigues me is one left on the ground, out in the open, completely different in style from what Father Kino produced in 1705. Rather than something recorded on paper, by hands, with filigree handwriting, this was set by feet below the mountains in a style more fitting to the era of rock art than of Jesuits. It consists of subtle trails, too wide and intentional to have been left by wildlife. Sunlight was too bright, washing them from view, so I looked for them at night. Vaguely milky in moonlight, the trails showed as faint as breath on a cold day.

  Kino never mentioned these lines in the desert, but I'm sure he saw them, or at least involuntarily followed them. They take the easiest routes, curving where they hug high points on the bajada, aiming toward particular canyons or mountains. I've come down one of these trails at night and stopped where another entered from a different angle, leading away into darkness to some other starting point tens of miles farther like a country road striking off.

  The trails were formed by the passing of countless feet, which sorted each small stone to its flattest profile. These prehistoric routes are not consciously constructed. They are instead recordings left out of habit, out of slow repetition, obviously of some antiquity because many pass through three-hundred-year-old saguaros with-out flinching. Other markings tell of use within the past hundred years: I found a series of small stones spelling out the word WATER, with an arrow pointing toward a canyon where there was indeed a large tinaja. The trail beside this message was older than the word. It was probably older than the English language.

  I talked with Gayle Hartmann, one of the archaeologists who did work at the Tinajas Altas camp west of Cabeza Prieta. Her impression of the people who had left these trails was that they were in constant motion, a demand put on them by the land. “You can't park yourself at any tinaja and expect to survive very long,” she said. “You're going to quickly eat up everything around you. These people were in small groups and moved around through broad areas with a really intimate understanding of what was available at what times of the year.” She described great journeys these people had taken. It was documented even up to three hundred years ago that people regularly walked hundreds of miles from near Tucson to the ocean. Shortly after the time of these great walks, Anglos and Mexicans were dying in droves just trying to cross modest portions of the same route. The moral is that if you know the land and its maps, you might live.

  Closer to large tinajas the trails converge like strands of a spiderweb coming to the center, and within a few miles of water, broken pieces of pottery tend to appear alongside. Mostly the pieces are plain: thick-rimmed, ochre ceramics called Colorado River buff ware. Clay vessels would have been hauled back and forth until finally a carrier stumbled. The stumbles added up in places so that over hundreds upon hundreds of years pottery became evenly scattered, in some places pieces on top of pieces. Along with the pottery a small number of shells might be found, brought from far oceans probably for adornment, wealth, or ceremony. Along one of these trails I picked up part of a shallow-water cockleshell, its delicate hinges still intact after being carried hundreds of miles from the Sea of Cortés.

  I started calling these trails waterlines. Waterlines are the opposite of canals, moving people to water rather than water to people. This bestows a formidable significance on the origin itself, the tinaja, because that is where you must go. Must. It comes and goes over the year, or over the days, while the location always remains the same. You can put your finger down and say here. Of all this land, all this dryness, all of these mountains heaped upon mountains, here.

  With full water bags tamped into my pack, I walked away from this largest tinaja. The field of surrounding boulders was a litter of black basalt, shiny the way coal becomes when rubbed with a cloth. In the sun all day, certain angles of these rocks burn flesh at the slightest touch. They hold their heat well into the night. They also hold drawings. Walking through, I could see the drawings around me as if heaps of strange artwork had been toppled out of a dump truck. These were lines and inset curves, each carved by hand, the hands of the same people who left the water-lines. On some boulders every possible facet had been marked, like the tattooed face of a Maori fisherman. Some petroglyphs swayed to the underside of a boulder, coming out on the opposite face, leaving half of the art down where scorpions wait out their days.

  That there were no familiar symbols, no animals, dated these to a style common three or four thousand years ago. But the age of rock art here is unknown. One archaeologist suggested to me that it might be no older than four hundred years, or as old as four thousand, explaining that because of the rigors of survival in Cabeza Prieta, people maintained whatever rituals had kept their culture alive for thousands of years—ways of gathering food, finding water, or leaving signs on rock. Mostly these signs were carved webs and rays and intersecting lines. It was a sort of geometry that made the place look like a chalkboard left unclean after a math class. These people rarely addressed the larger or more prominent boulders, choosing instead the more numerous commonplace boulders, as if in a gesture of humility.

  Directly between the etched boulders and the string of tinajas was an alcove. The back wall of this alcove showed a faint handprint made with dots of ashen paint, probably hundreds if not thousands of years old. It was the last piece of artwork after the boulder field of rock art, where waterlines approached from all directions and met the tinaja. It was the X on the map. It said, Here, you have arrived. Drink.

  In the morning I crossed a place called Cabeza Prieta Pass and turned north. At each of the passes and notches I found pottery, enough in some cases that I could bend over and piece together a portion of a jar. I followed corridors of peaks and valleys, stepping down into washes, crushing the leaves of desert lavender between my fingers so that I could set the smell loose. I wiped the scent across the base of my throat and over the skin between my wrist and palm.

  Walking into one of the interior ranges, held within a larger range, I found a place where the walls muscled apart, revealing a nucleus basin suspended within one of the mountains. Inside of this I followed the rounds of boulders and the trunks of fallen nolinas. In a small parabola of rock sat a little more than a tenth of a gallon of water. I came to my knees and placed hands on both sides. Even being so small—less than a foot across and one and a half inches deep—it housed a community of mosquito larvae, midge larvae known as chironomids, and gelatinous flat-worms. I smelled it instead of tasting it. Not enough water for even a sip. It carried the scent of life, the smell of something green. How this had endured the past weeks of sun was not clear. It had never been much larger than
this, so slight that if I dropped a nickel into the dish, the change in volume would be visible. Easily it could be dismissed, stepped over without notice. The rest of the world has water: lakes and streams and faucets and drinking fountains and swimming pools. The rest of the world is insatiable. Here, a tenth of a gallon is as striking as acid, yet I could inhale that amount through my lips and in two seconds it would be gone.

  I once spent twenty days north of here in the Kofa Mountains. There I would come to a tinaja and strip off my clothes, sinking into it and letting the shock of cold in the desert rise through my spine, into the sky. Every chance I got I doused myself in these waters. This happened every few days. Now, in Cabeza Prieta, I felt like a parched ascetic. Salt ringed my eyes. Brittle trails of blood decorated my calf muscles. The prosperity of the Kofas had been replaced by rarity in Cabeza Prieta.

  I dabbed the surface of this tiny pool with a finger as I had done to each one, not out of conscious choice but involuntarily to keep from weeping, to do anything so that I could touch this water. I touched only with my fingers because I remembered the Tohono O'odham people who live east of here, and how it is their customary belief that water is not to be taken boastfully. It is important to listen to people who have been in the desert for some time. To ask for too much water is to invite disaster. Only in a place like this would you bow your head and humbly request just the water you need and no more. Only here would you walk away from water when thirsty, but not thirsty enough.

  Forty feet up the canyon from the tenth of a gallon I found two gallons, then another gallon. I left them in place, taking no water on the chance I would find something farther. Which I did: four tinajas of thirty-four gallons to the north.

  With so many people dying from dehydration and exposure in this region, in 1917 the United States Congress appropriated $10,000 to send surveyors into southeast California and southwest Arizona to map watering sites. Breaking into teams of two, each with camping supplies, a plane table for mapping, and a Ford automobile, the U.S. Geological Survey crew scattered through sixty thousand square miles of desert looking for water. Kirk Bryan, head of the field program, kept notes on their finds.

  Beyond the center of the Cabeza Prieta Range by ten miles, he described a place called Coyote Water, where water can be obtained by digging about four feet into the sand of a particular arroyo. South of Coyote Water, Bryan reached Tinajas Altas, one of the more reliable sources. He arrived in October 1917, taking note of nearly seventy nearby graves as he passed. His notes on Tinajas Altas are indicative of how he approached each water hole, taking down as many details as might be needed for those coming behind him:

  Water will be found in a series of tanks in a very steep stream channel or dry falls 500 feet west of sign [which was placed by the team]. The lowest tank is commonly full of sand, and water will be found by digging in sand. The second and third tanks are best reached by turning left (south), where a steel cable will be found, up which it is easy to climb the smooth rock face. The upper tanks are difficult to reach, and it can perhaps best be done by taking trail to right and climbing to “window” and then going down to canyon above falls. The water lasts all year, but the lower tanks are sometimes exhausted by travelers. If so, climb to upper tanks and pour water down channel to fill lower ones. The water is palatable but there are usually dead bees in it. Occasionally mountain sheep slip and fall into the tanks and contaminate the water.

  The teams erected 305 water signs, each one anchored into the ground with two redwood blocks. They were made of 18-gauge steel, white background with dark blue letters offering names, distances, and directions to watering places. Standing alone on a trail or a rarely used road, these signs were classic, with arrows pointing off to seemingly nowhere, which in certain cases could only enhance a sense of despair.

  GARLIC SPRINGS 24M

  As a warning, Bryan said that the traveler here “must drink what is available, and the permanent inhabitant is so hardened to water contaminated with mineral salts or organic matter that he accepts without question water which elsewhere would be considered unfit for human consumption.”

  A series of maps emerged from the fieldwork. The one I took interest in was titled “Relief Map of the Western Part of the Papago Country, Arizona, Showing Desert Watering Places.” When I came across this document, it was stiff with the feel of a starched collar, neatly creased from having been folded, unseen for seventy years. Mountains were shaded in a grainy brown, as if from a clear evening light from the northwest. Small red triangles marked the tinajas.

  My own record of water holes was preposterously focused compared with Bryan's. By the end of my time here, I would have found fifty-two individual water holes, but most were too small to capture the attention of those at the refuge headquarters, and they would not last long enough to maintain bighorn sheep populations. In all I had found about fifty-five hundred gallons of water. This mountain range, parched as table salt, has water. Contrary to every impression you gather from looking across this country, there is a way to survive.

  Each evening in the field I would regard my own map. The water holes I had marked with a black pen corresponded to a notebook where I recorded the longitude and latitude, the aspect, gradient, and dimensions of each hole, a rough inventory of invertebrates, the size of the watershed, the type of rock and its texture; then there were sundry notes on, for instance, the taste of the water or whether bighorn sheep had been there recently or not. These notes were my map of water holes.

  I once left Cabeza Prieta in the middle of my research to travel to an archive in Tempe, Arizona. There I asked to see a book of maps published in the late 1800s. I was presented with an object that stood about three feet tall, its cover tied closed with three strings sutured into the book itself. Too heavy and cumbersome to carry with one hand, it had to be hauled to a reading table with both of my arms supporting it from below, as I would carry a tray of fragile dishes. The maps in this book had been drawn during a survey by the United States and Mexico International Boundary Commission. A party from the commission, four men traveling from Sonoyta, Mexico, to their post in Yuma, Arizona, had once reported their encounters with emigrants who were struggling from a lack of water. Writing in his personal journal, one of the crew left this passage:

  Some men had died from thirst, and others were nearly exhausted. Among those we passed between the Colorado [River] and the “Tinajas Altas,” was a party composed of one woman and three men, on foot, a pack-horse in wretched condition carrying their all. The men had given up from pure exhaustion and laid down to die; but the woman, animated by love and sympathy, had plodded on over the long road until she reached water, then clambering up the side of the mountain to the highest tinaja, she filled her bota [a sort of leather flask], and scarcely stopping to take rest, started back to resuscitate her dying companions. When we met them she was striding along in advance of the men, animating them by her example.

  I untied each of the binding strings, and the Boundary Commission book, published in 1882, opened like a vault. There were no explanations inside. No tales of travel or intriguing encounters. Any language used was official, in both Spanish and English. The book was meant to convey only topography and a bold line marking the border between two countries. I ran my finger along this border, turning broad, heavy pages from New Mexico into Arizona, looking for the edge of Cabeza Prieta.

  There, on the correct page, I recognized the shape of topographic lines, how they made impressions of mountains I had walked across. Within these lines were black dots and, beside each dot, the word tinaja. There were no other words nearby, no descriptive terms or names of landmarks. I studied these sites for several minutes. I recognized the water holes, could see them in my mind: where they sat in a canyon, what their water looked like tucked into the shade of smooth rock, the ripe taste they carried after months of no rain.

  I closed the book, placed my hands on the solid cover, and realized then that I had been wrong. The story of water that I had
been trying to repair had not been lost. It had never even been interrupted. When I began this mapping project I believed that I was personally bridging a gap my culture had clumsily left open. We had not kept the story of water and its maps going. Now I saw that it was no accident or coincidence that these record keepers came into the desert and mapped its water so diligently. Every era produced its own map, sent its own people into the deeper desert to come back telling stories. The story is still intact, ritually retold in the maps, papers, leather-bound books, and the carvings on rock. Each generation is linked by the knowledge of this water. I kept my hand on the book, feeling partly ashamed for underestimating the people of this land, yet filled with a sense of completeness. The finding of water turns out to be intrinsic, stored in our desires that push us out looking even in the most hostile of places. We never forgot to move the story ahead.

  In a month's time Father Kino would have crossed hundreds of miles, and Kirk Bryan's crew would have erected signs around numerous mountain ranges. In the same period I wound tighter and tighter circles into this single mountain range. The circles, growing smaller and more detailed, felt almost obsessive and I took careful notes to remind myself of what I had seen, that there was more than just these stones beneath my feet.

  Several hours before sunset I climbed high, using a canyon that cut straight up the center of a mountain chain. When the canyon ended, I scrambled up the edge, then topped out at a thin razorback of granite. The inside of the backside of nowhere. I spread my arms for balance and looked across the world. Usually I would remain in the canyons hunting water, where I would sleep, but I wanted to come up and see. I wanted to breathe. The washes, marked by bands of greenery, made fine loomwork, their strands descending from the knots of mountains, spreading across the curve of the earth. I stood two thousand feet straight over the desert floor, my hands open to the sky.

 

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