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

by Craig Childs

  The water comes from below. Low, exposed country uncovers subterranean streams, allowing them to surface, most often in the form of barely a trace of moisture at some inconsistency in the rock, sometimes as measurable water gathering in the shade, even more rarely as a newborn stream.

  I once, for no memorable reason, hurled a single-bitted ax into my father's backyard in Phoenix. It cartwheeled through the air and squarely struck the ground, embedding itself blade-down. Clean water suddenly bulged from the earth. The first half-second was glorious. Water sprung to either side of the blade, the way the sea splits around a driving bow. Clean, pure water. I had tapped the interior of the planet. I had opened the desert. When water flows onto a dry place, something astounding is at work. Where, other than at the turn of a faucet handle, have you witnessed water actually begin? Where have you seen the leading edge? Even to chase car-wash water along a street curb, watching its soapy finger probe the concrete, has a peculiar enchantment. But seeing it burst from the planet was far above such common magic.

  In the next half-second I realized I had severed my father's water line. A look of betrayal crossed my face, as if this was the least possible of the two options. I heard my father's what the hellja do that for voice from somewhere behind. Nonetheless, it was the original moment that captured me, not the hose clamps, new fittings, and wrenches that came after.

  When I was younger, before the ax incident, my father took me to an Arizona canyon called Valentine. There he showed me a place just up from the floor where a rock about the size of a hand protected a small underground waterway. The rock itself was cushioned in green spongy moss, like a brick seated into velvet. He lifted it gingerly. Beneath was a tunnel of fine, red roots clutching a stream no wider than my wrist. It flowed straight through the ground as if we had cracked open a pipe to look inside. Its delicate sound of motion beneath the surface told of another world. The way a person learns to see pipes and storm drains running invisibly beneath streets, I began seeing threads of water moving beneath rocks.

  My father used to talk about wild things a lot. He led me to believe that everything worthy out here was a secret, that other people were not to know, not to be present, all of it beyond humans (even for both of us, who were privately sneaking in for a peek). So this water, like the half-second of water I would eventually access with an ax, was perfect. It was true. To open a hole and let my eyes fall into the water the same instant as its first sunlight was the ultimate act. My father did not smile as he looked in with me. He was serious, as serious as I was. Even if he was only trying to convey a sense of importance, relaying to a curious child the meaning of reverence, even if he knew in his heart that a person could hardly be sustained on such secrets in this world of humans, I absolutely believed him. After this hidden spring, the only way I was going to be able to survive was by crawling on my belly looking for secrets.

  We returned to the spring many times, lifting the rock as carefully as opening a music box, being sure to place it back just the right way upon leaving. We both kneeled, one after the next, to drink from the underground stream. As the water, slurped off the surface with a circle of mud and bits of moss pasted to my face, entered my throat, I did not fully realize what I had learned. In fact, I had not learned anything. I simply knew, however wrong I may still be, that everything must be perfect, like this secret, like the euphonious voice of moving water. Then we put the rock back and walked out of the canyon, my future decided.

  3. SEEP

  75-Mile Canyon, Grand Canyon

  October

  ON A SUMMER DAY I SPOKE WITH AN ARCHAEOLOGIST who had once worked in the Grand Canyon. We stood outside her home in the moun tains near Flagstaff, both of us with our hands in our pock ets, looking across a large meadow of grasses surrounded by stands of ponderosa pine. The sky was a clear blue dome with out clouds, a kind of sharp blue that comes to the dry skies of the Southwest.

  When I told her of my interest in water, she offered this story. Not many years earlier she had escorted a number of Native Americans down the 270- mile stretch of river that lies in the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Many of these people were tribal elders from a wide range of cultural backgrounds, each of them having some affiliation with the area. The tribes of Zuni, Hopi, Hualapai, and two Paiute groups were represented, stuffed into life vests, clinging to tie-down straps through the rapids. She brought them in order to reveal a number of archaeological sites that might have pertinence to their traditions, these often being sites she had found herself.

  On the river they stopped at numerous side canyons, where they tied off the rafts and hiked up. While she pointed out various facets of what she had found, say, the shape of a granary's doorway or a type of painted pottery, the people distractedly glanced up-canyon as if wanting to keep walking. This continued from site to site until she found herself insulted by their rudeness. When she finally confronted them, the answer was clear. These sites, these haphazard, everyday remains of a lost culture, were dead. What they wanted to see were the springs.

  They had been looking up-canyon because water sources were nestled up in the cliffs and caves at the far points of these canyons. Certain springs were well known, but only through stories or family names or by ceremonial kachinas, and they had never actually seen them. One person told her that the springs were entities. Such a descriptive word as spirits was not used. Nothing of great contextual merit was offered. The springs were simply alive. They were points where creation came to the surface and spilled out, where a hand could actually reach forward to feel the emergence. The importance of anything out here paled in comparison to the springs because this was the Grand Canyon, the place of springs, its desert interior riddled with running water.

  There was an innocence in the woman's wish to show archaeological sites, to her belief that what was important was only the datable, stratified record of human events that could be questioned and classified, and that the more mysterious aspects were too sentimental for report. The woman understood her own innocence. They walked to the springs instead.

  When I drove away from her home I did not turn on the radio to search for stations. Instead I recalled the springs of the Grand Canyon. I went through each that I could remember after having spent, at one time or another, over two hundred days walking in the canyon. I had listened to water dripping down there. Where small springs gathered beneath ceilings of sandstone, the orchestration of water beads had halted my thoughts. My chest settled. My fingers spread against the ground. This water comes from cracks in the rocks, weaknesses between bedding planes, and in small seeps that fill a water bottle only after it has been propped below for an entire day. The original collecting place of this water is rain and snow on the surface—the high rims, days, years, or millennia ago, where it filtered down and became trapped in underground catacombs and paper-thin spaces before again emerging.

  As I drove from the archaeologist's home, I remembered a Grand Canyon backpack trip the previous autumn where I stopped one morning to study a garden of seeps from beneath a rock shelf. A seep is differentiated from a spring because a spring will produce a liter of water in less than a minute, and a seep will take longer, sometimes days longer.

  I slung my pack into a deep alcove and sat there for a time, listening to the gracious sounds of water tapping rhythms against the canyon floor. There seemed to be a pattern to the drips from each seep, a pattern I had heard before, wondering each time if there might be a sort of specific timing. I remained for a morning, pulling out a stopwatch, placing a notebook on my knee.

  An assortment of young seepwillow with a garnish of twining snapdragons grew below, half of them uprooted and combed downstream by floods. I sat in a nest of these plants, listening to the drip drop drop drip drop. The sounds were predisposed, unaware of anything more important than their own syncopation. They ran down breasts of moss, coming to single points before releasing, then landing in well-worn thimbles in the moss below. When I studied the spacing in time, I found that the se
eps ran like clocks in a shop, each ticking and chiming at its own interval.

  The quantity of water exposed here could not be compared to that in the holes of Thousand Wells on the Arizona-Utah border. Thousands of years would be required to capture this seep water and even come close to matching those waterpockets. But this water was of a different nature. It was alive and intricate, revealing that it is not the volume that finally matters, but how it is presented. The seep was in motion like glass trade beads passed between hands, able to convey, relay, and arrive in a new place, still moving on from there, into the moss, into the ground, below the floor of the canyon, reentering other springs to be released again elsewhere. Water holes stay put. Here I was witnessing a mission, seeing a snapshot of the seep's life. A few times I disregarded the stopwatch and moved in to examine the forming droplet, to study its pregnant bulge, how it swelled before falling and how within the swell I could see a mirrored globe reflecting everything around. I saw my own face, upside-down. I caught some drops on my fingertips, bringing them to my mouth, like placing rubies on my tongue.

  Two hundred years ago water was considered to be a pure element, like gold, oxygen, or iron. But it is not a true element; its atomic structure can be easily broken into Hs and Os, a fact that startled many at the time of its discovery. It behaves so curiously, however, able to move unlike anything else we know of, that it is still unscientifically considered to be an element. It announces its presence everywhere that it shows, hardly able to blend invisibly into the incumbent granites and sandstones. It has a different set of laws, obeying them by threading between our fingers like liquid mercury and by flowing down our throats into our bodies, directly into our blood and our flesh, making us look quite different than granites and sandstones. I've often thought that a planet without water would be a dull, sad place. Most, if not all, water on this planet came from countless small comets thumping against the atmosphere (which continues at about ten thousand comets or pieces of comets per day, enough to add a twenty-five-foot depth of water across the entire globe every half a million years). That it comes from space suggests why it is so peculiar and fascinating here on earth. It is a substance from far beyond our reach.

  Ferns on a cliff wall seep

  Oxygen and hydrogen atoms, H2O, arrange themselves tetrahedrally in water the same way silicon and oxygen atoms form lattices in quartz crystals. When you throw water molecules at the ground, they land locked together, but hinged off one another so that they change shape to match whatever they touch. The molecules respond to the air the same way they respond to oil—by shunning it and adhering to only themselves. Because water's positive and negative electrical poles are unable to bond with nonpolar air or oil molecules, water fortifies itself, fronting a wall of oxygen atoms while hydrogen atoms cling to nearby water molecules within. With hydrogen atoms pointing inward, bonding to the next oxygen atoms below, water basically turns its back on the world, showing a tight hind-side of oxygen, which accounts for water's tremendous surface tension and its ability to exist as a single body: a drop, a stream, or an ocean. Then, when separate pieces of water meet, they immediately bond into each other like painless surgery. Anything else—dirt, glass, or bone—breaks apart and stays that way.

  The entire hydrologic cycle from atmosphere to ocean and back is a marathon line of nearly unabridged hydrogen bonds, a continual flow of awareness. To touch water, especially water out of a spring or seep, is to return to each origin, meeting the rains and the snowmelts and the cold interior of the planet, meeting, in fact, the comets machine-gunning against our atmosphere. I am surprised that when a hair dryer falls into a bathtub we are not all electrocuted.

  Each drop I witnessed at this Grand Canyon seep relied on a mathematical arrangement, a balance between gravity and the attraction of atoms breaching when the drop fills to an exact point. I continued through the morning and into the day with the stopwatch, ticking numbers into my notebook beneath the rapping of water. I monitored one seep for half an hour. It dripped every four and a half seconds, and the space between drips never varied by more than a tenth of a second. Even when I came back in the afternoon, it was still every four and a half seconds.

  Another seep released a bead of water every four minutes, showing startling precision as each drip lingered for maybe an extra second, or fell three seconds early, but most often came exactly at four-minute intervals, not missing a second. I wondered if even the minor variations I recorded had something to do with me, that my breathing or the opening and closing of my eyes added just enough atmospheric weight to offset the timing. If there was an offset by one drip, it was answered at the next drip by an offset in the opposite direction. Then it returned to its pattern as if it had recalibrated itself.

  I measured others; they each behaved the same. I wrote this in my notebook, charting rows and pages of numbers that grew so numerous they looked like a musical score. This is what math is for: when something beautiful, something magic, or the Big Whatever passes by, the only thing that can be accurately held when it is gone is numbers. These hours' worth of pen marks were to be taken out of the backcountry and turned into statistical units, diagrammed so that I could find each variation and pattern. Nothing especially scientific showed from my record, and the information did not imply any audacious order to the universe. It was only that I was mesmerized by the metronomic grace of this escaping water.

  Driving from the archaeologist's home, I imagined that the indigenous people who first studied these Grand Canyon water sites had no need for stopwatches. They saw the seeps and springs and immediately knew they were alive in a way that could not be defined by simple languages. They understood what I first knew, before I prepared charts and broke numbers into statistical arrays. My intuition was simply that I would find order. The order implies process, some hand of god or breath of life or ratio of fissures and pressures within the rock. The process suggests that a spring is a route to a more fundamental mathematical or mystical rule. Whenever I find something so orderly, so hypnotically abstruse, I hunt around its backside for the thread connecting it to everything else. As water freezes, it grows into complex, symmetrical crystals, the same as its arrival in tides that can be calculated to the minute from one century to the next, the same as its seeping from the rock with the exactness of a clock. Time on this planet is counted out by water, the small second hands ticking away in the back of some desert canyon.

  I drove from the dirt road onto the paved road, remembering the seep and its gentle, metered rain, and still did not turn on the radio.

  4. THE SOURCE

  Interior Grand Canyon

  February

  AS SOON AS THE WATER TOUCHED AIR, IT ROARED LIKE a violent god. An underground river struck sunlight, thundering from the face of a cliff. I could hear it a mile away, the sound lifting from an envelope of canyons, shuddering against boulders and eventually, from far enough away, turning to a distant, static hiss. The water came from somewhere inside the planet—no one knows the actual source. Experiments have been performed on these explosive springs at the north walls of the Grand Canyon, traceable radioactive isotopes scattered in the water of the country far above to see where they might emerge in the desert five thousand feet below. The isotopes have only van ished, drawn into puzzling underground passageways, taken to some remote spring and spilled onto the ground unrecorded.

  I came to the floor of the Grand Canyon, following canyons and the side canyons of side canyons for three weeks. On this day I hiked toward the source of unusually clear water cascading like an alpine creek in the desert: water born from a distant, bolting spring. I reached its origin, which was a waterfall pouring straight from the rock, and stood just beyond where it struck the earth with such force I could feel an erratic heartbeat in the ground. The vision was incongruous: desert cliffs rising thousands of feet, bare and dry as chalkboards, and out of one, the emergence of water. It plunged hundreds of feet from the high face, pounding against several ledges, then rumbled into boulder
s with the strength of a river. What was more incongruous than the sight was the sound. This was a spring by definition, a tap into an underground water source, not bubbling and singing like the larger springs I had seen, but bellowing furiously at the air.

  For fifteen minutes I climbed a series of narrow ledges until hugging the final wall, fingers crimped to the rock as this waterfall sprung three feet to my right. The falls dropped about forty stories beneath my feet. Just at the point of discharge, where water appeared from rock as if from the touch of Moses' staff, I could see an opening in the wall where dollops of flying water met their first bluish light.

  There was madness to this. The water seemed desperate to get out, to be born, wanting. Mad with ignorance, too, it knew nothing of the outside world, completely pure at this very second. Just at the entrance came a deep, hollow sound, like a bow dragged across a string bass. It sounded frightening, as if I were too close to something I should be watching from a distance. To get inside of this spring and its cave I would have to enter through the waterfall, through the sound, wedge into that hole, and work against the push of water. My first thought was that I would instantly be blown out, sent sailing down with the falls. My second was that I would not be able to turn and exit the cave without losing my grip. I was already testing my body by hanging on this edge. Mist skated against me. The trembling of stone and water worked into my bones, into my face pressed to the wall. I clutched the rock for several minutes, ducking my head into my shoulders, wincing at the force. Wind leaked out of the hole, from around the edges. A wet, steady wind.