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

by Craig Childs

  5. THE ACTS OF DESERT STREAMS

  Southern Arizona, Northern Mexico

  January, February, July

  In the Pajarito Wilderness

  THE NIGHT I SLEPT ABOVE THE CANYON, NO MORE THAN ten miles from Mexico, I heard coyotes. Echoes came out like floods and orgasms and things I cannot even name. I figured it was not that there were so many coyotes; rather it was that so many side canyons took the howling and twisted it into a thousand parts. This is the low end of the Pajarito Mountains in southeast Arizona, at about the point where saguaro cacti begin to flourish as the canyon drops to Mexico, then opens across a broad fan of the Sonoran Desert. Morning came when the coyotes stopped. Frost dusted the top of my sleeping bag. It was the beginning of January. This is one of those rare places where water sings its way through the hottest of deserts. Unlike the spring-laden country within the Grand Canyon, the lower regions of Arizona often present hundreds of miles of land with hardly any surface water at all. Here, a stream emerges from springs in the Atascosa Mountains, the Pajaritos, and some other nameless battlements off to the west, meager in flow but enough to send waterfalls between boulders and to leave pools as clear and as slightly off-color as cut diamonds. Very few creeks run openly through the desert year-round, most being short-lived leftovers from heavy rains. Others, the ones that run with greater regularity, tend to get drawn through the sand to some brooding aquifer five thousand feet into the ground. The ones that stay on the surface all year, that bear the light of day, are those you can count on your fingers.

  I began walking where the creek bed was dry and carpeted with oak leaves. Mustard-colored cliffs grew from the mountainside, marking where the stream, in more violent days, had cut down, peeling back the rebar and foundation pieces of the earth. Oak trees hugged the middle, crowding me to a single point where shadows dizzied the ground. At the very center, where water might be expected to run, fallen leaves were now slightly damp. My hand, pushed underneath, came up with rich, black loam. Small, stagnant pools appeared downstream. Eventually these motionless pools came together, their floors dimpled with the shadows of water striders.

  When the pools converged, they began to move, giving arrhythmic but purposeful noises, like a conversation heard from another room. These were the sweet, adorned sounds of water weaving between rocks, and of small air bubbles murmuring wherever they became caught. With its ornamental and quixotic sounds, the creek washed around hopscotch boulders until arriving at the first waterfall. This was a simple waterfall, a narrow stream tipping over the edge of a moss pillow, dashing ten feet into a fat, green pool. The pool was then inset into a large room constructed between fallen boulders and a concavity of bedrock. To get inside this room, I had to place feet on one side, hands on the other, flipping back and forth as the walls changed shape over my head. I could swim, but even in the desert, winter had sunk itself too deeply into this pool. Using small fingerholds, I crept into the back of the room, pinning my boots to the curved rock just above the pool's surface. The chamber that encircled me had the architecture of crescent moons. Waterfalls of different volumes, sent at different times, had engraved deep arcs. These were not the types of marks to come from wind or simple exfoliation. This was a place of water.

  Farther into the canyon there waited cauldrons, each topping off into the next. The canyon tightened, as if trying to pen the stream in. The water kept running, pouring over edges, filling everything it could as shapes became exposed from the bedrock: lone walls and graceful statues. Climbing among these obstacles became slow, picking work. I passed my pack down ledge to ledge. I searched for footholds, dropping my feet blindly for a crack, kicking away the small, ball-bearing rocks. My body stretched as I breathed into my reaching arm, looking down for the next place to plant my foot. Shapes became more refined as the water gained force, growing into tall and narrow protrusions so that the entire canyon became a gallery of Venus de Milos.

  Alligator junipers grew along the slopes, and on their branches hung stars of ball moss. This is what is especially odd about the place, the ball moss, something commonly found in areas such as Florida and Costa Rica. The species, Tillandsia recurvata, is an epiphyte, meaning it lives on host plants but does not steal from them as would a parasite. It merely uses them for support. Related to Spanish moss, and more distantly to the pineapple, it is a tropical plant, a creature of short, grassy limbs. Some of the trees were actually buried in ball moss. Other than the ball moss in a small number of nearby canyons, and in the Chisos Mountains five hundred miles to the southeast, the next population lies several hundred miles south in Mexico.

  This canyon is a museum of ecological oddities. The ball moss is simply a messenger, making it visibly obvious that this is not common territory. Once you start looking deeper than the ball moss, everything is out of place. Often within sight of one another are species belonging in low deserts, pine forests, and the tropics. A saguaro cactus stands thirty feet from an Arizona dewberry, Rubus arizonicus, which is closely related to raspberries and blackberries. A tropical passionflower, Passiflora bryonioides, sought after as an ornamental with its white petals striking against a purple corona, grows near a Virginia creeper, which is just beyond a dusty-dry mesquite tree with tiny milagro leaves. A single colony of so-called whisk ferns, Psilotum nudum, is found in only one place in the canyon, with the nearest other population being three hundred miles into Mexico.

  These are here because of the highly prized creek, and the topographic complexities of the canyon, and the canyon's placement along the boundaries of ecological provinces. The canyon looks as if it were decorated by a mad botanist. Its drainage starts at a high oak woodland, where both water and cool air begin. Flowing with the water, cold air drops between steep walls down to the thornscrub of Mexico, brushing by certain plant species that are accustomed to cooler, wetter climates. Temperatures in these areas can come down to 9 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter. With different exposures to the sun, other sections easily reach 106 in the summer. Between these two extremes, the canyon walls twist to each cardinal direction with eighty-foot-tall spires casting shadows inside, creating a full spectrum of microclimates. With its location between the United States and Mexico, and then between Sierra Madrean mountains to the south, Sky Island mountains to the north, and desert all around, it has become a corridor of species travel from the tropics into Arizona. What is most unconventional, though, is the running water. It flows into the canyon like an invitation. The aberrant species follow.

  I once came to this canyon in the spring. I arrived with a friend, an esteemed naturalist named Walt Anderson. His knowledge of birds was astoundingly complex and as bird calls drifted from the underbrush and sycamore canopies, he wrote names into his notebook in small handwriting. Bewick's wren. Bell's vireo. He pointed out the question mark at the end of a Mexican jay's call. He heard cactus wrens just behind the spotted towhees (formerly known as rufous-sided towhees) who scratched insects from beneath fallen leaves. Few of the birds were actually visible. We could hear the shuffle of towhees in the underbrush.

  He told me that elegant trogons have been seen here, Trogon elegans, with dramatic, tropical colors in their plumage. He said he would be pleased to witness a trogon, a close cousin to the famous quetzals from the tropical forests of Guatemala. At the end of that day, as we walked up-canyon, I saw a bird flash across the west wall. A large bird, a sound of wings, and a ruby breast like a spatter of blood in the trees. “Red,” I said quickly. “Look there, up. It's a trogon.”

  Walt moved quickly to see around a sycamore trunk. “Yes, a trogon. Yes.” He scrambled out his binoculars. Then he laughed out loud and reiterated that it was, indeed, a trogon.

  Red was the correct word. The breast was brilliant, a color seen in the desert only on the glossy fruits of fishhook cactus. Above the breast was a thin white band, then a nearly iridescent green body. This was a male, customarily more colorful than females. It swiveled through branches of a border piñon and landed, its tail popping
once for balance. The two outermost tail feathers, hanging ornamentally below the body, angled away at their tips with slight turns like cursive serifs. Above the black stripe at the bottom of the tail feathers was a metallic sheen of polished copper, catching light in different ways.

  The trogon dove away. We followed it through a labyrinth of rock, water, and sycamore trees. It paused, then flew ahead, and we kept behind it, turning corners to find it just in front of us. It stopped to return our stares from a sycamore branch, its red eye ring standing out from thirty feet away as if it had been painted on. Walt finally lowered his binoculars. Without looking away, he said that this was something, to see the passage of a trogon through here. He called the bird regal. It dropped from the sycamore and flew around the next turn, following this map of running water farther into the desert.

  On this solitary winter walk I dropped into the vestibule of a waterfall. The pool beyond led to a broad, rounded lip that sheeted water to the next level. Columbine flowers, not yet bloomed, crowded around the edges, their cilantro-looking leaves taut over the water. These were Aquilegia triternanta, flowers that can be found at an elevation of ten thousand feet in the White Mountains of Arizona. The elevation of the creek was about thirty-six hundred. Around these grew border piñon pines, their needles delicate as hairs, and around them a full accompaniment of oakvtrees of numerous species including an Arizona white oak with convex leaves and several Toumey oaks, compact and formed like bonsai trees.

  Two canyons met and the waterfalls thinned into a smooth stream flowing beneath sycamores and ashes. Exposed by floods, roots of a sycamore tree wrapped around a boulder like a starfish working open a clam. The stones along the creek bottom sat smooth and round, nicely rolled into shape by the water. Along the shaded walls grew coral bells, blood-red flowers with heads as bowed as a bishop's crosier. Among the coral bells grew wild cucumber, saxifrage, and a small, hairy-leafed Henrya brevifolia. The entire genus of Henrya is represented in the United States by this one species alone, and only in this canyon. Eleven other species make this canyon their sole home in the United States: a blue lobelia flower; a flat-bladed grass of the genus Paspalum; a small, tropical Dichondra with white petals; a couple of wild beans; an undershrub with the common name of sensitive joint-vetch; a Lotus; a shrubby member of the pea family called Desmanthus bicornutus; a strong-scented spurge; the white, hairy herb Sida rhombifolia; and of course the dramatic passionflower. What these all have in common is that they do not belong in the desert. Water allowed them to come.

  As well as being the northernmost boundary for so many Mexican species, this creek is the southern terminus for others from the United States. The waterfall's columbine goes no farther south than here. The Utah serviceberry, Virginia creeper, and mock orange (its flowers smelling of pineapple) end here. This is also the lowest elevation for numerous species of pine, oak, and a twenty-foot-tall New Mexican locust tree that generally grows in conifer forests.

  This watercourse could hardly be compared to the Grand Canyon cave with its waterfall bursting from a hole just big enough to duck through, but it indeed carried its own convoluted mysteries. Again, it is not the quantifiable aspects that matter with water. It is how it is delivered. The more I studied, the more involved water's outcome became. A water hole in bare stone, a cliff face giving birth to a waterfall, and now a desert creek responsible for a ludicrous volume and diversity of plants.

  This January the sycamores, barren of leaves, showed themselves so white and heavy with hundreds of branches that they looked like ivory carvings. The stream under them was delicious with the smell of seepwillow and of honey, the source of which I could not find. I waded through narrow sections and climbed the backs of fallen trees.

  In the main part of the canyon, especially beneath overhangs sheltered from rain, were signs of another wayfaring species: a meager camp with a crumpled package of Boots Light brand cigarillos, an empty, circus-colored bag of animalitos cookies, and a wrapper from a package of Tostados de Maíz that looked as if it had been bought off a rack in a gas station. I found a boulder rounded in just the right way, and as I sat, my back conforming to the cool rock, I noticed a spent cigarette near where my right hand rested on the ground. Another person, right-handed, had done the same, finding refuge at this one boulder out of the hundreds heaped along the canyon floor. The cigarette was Boots Light again, from Mexico.

  I began hunting footprints, studying the size and style of the boots and tennis shoes and flat-soled business shoes that had come through. Like the ball moss and Henrya and passionflowers that have traced this thin path to the north, immigrants from Mexico cross here. These people cross without papers, walking illegally into this country as unassuming as the passing of a seed or the movement of green vine snakes following prey along the stream. Often they come from distant parts of Mexico, from as far as the rain-forest border of Guatemala and Chiapas, and often from the southern countries of Central America. Once they get this far, the canyon offers ample cover and rough terrain in which they can easily evade capture, and it shoots a direct line up from Mexico, entering the United States in one of the more remote regions below Tucson. There is water here, and relative coolness while the surrounding desert burns the back of anyone walking through.

  At the low end of this canyon the walls stepped back. Saguaro cacti and mesquite reached the stream, dipping toes of their roots to the water. Floods had ripped away the barbed wire fence delineating Mexico from the United States, sending the border downstream into wrapped heaps of branches, stones, and rusted wires. Three sycamores to either side of the creek showed numerous repairs to the fence where barbed wire had been coiled around and around the trunks, each strand of a different age as if we keep returning to mark an invisible and ecologically meaningless boundary.

  Those animals and plants that come through this open border become isolated as the desert closes the path behind them. These illegal immigrants also are severed from their families and communities as they cross. The desert boundary is the line that disconnects them from their homelands, severing the tropics from the rest of North America.

  I slept beside the creek that night, only a mile from the border. This was a gruff little camp, set in dry grasses and winter-bare vines near the water. It was perhaps just past midnight, as the near-half moon tilted into view, when I heard steady footsteps in the loose creek gravel. Tilting my head slightly, I tried not to make a sound. They walked without flashlights, without pausing to negotiate the water, coming within seven feet of my camp. The percussion of small rocks underfoot made the sound of walnut shells being cracked open.

  As the people passed, I could see their dark forms against the stars, and behind them a skyline of saguaros and tips of rock. They walked well-spaced in the chalky light, too far apart to talk, marching like a procession of intent ghosts. I could not see their faces, but I believed that they were all men, nine of them. Ahead they would wade through narrows full of clear, night-darkened water and climb hand over hand. They each carried duffels or a number of mesh and burlap bags tied into single lumps on their backs. These were broad, heavy objects, causing the men to lean slightly forward. I tried to see how their loads were hitched, ropes taut over their shoulders, some crossing at the chest. With their heads down, their eyes did not even catch moonlight. Every man carried a gallon milk jug filled with water. The jugs made sloshing sounds, and the fifth man uncapped his to drink, not slowing as he tipped his head back, then quickly replaced the cap. The pace was swift, outrunning sunrise.

  I listened to their steady breathing. They did not fill the air with expectant worry—that emotion may have come during the first days of this journey, or was maybe reserved for when they would reach the first paved road and scatter into the rest of North America. All that was given to the air around them was a sense of direction and momentum. Arguments over economics or national legalities seemed feeble against the intensity of their footsteps.

  The migration of plants and animals along pathway
s is like water pouring through a canyon. Paths are chosen and worn down. In this canyon alone are at least 624 species, 349 genera, and 96 families of vascular plants, along with 60 species of lichens and mosses. Wild geranium. Scarlet sage. Silverleaf oak. Wild cotton. The small fish Gila ditaenia, commonly called Sonoran chub, comes into the United States only along this creek. The Mexican hooknosed snake, the vine snake, the barking frog, and the Tarahumara frog have entered the country through here. Along with every other organism, the species Homo sapiens has appeared, obeying the laws of the land, the legislature of flow. The last man passed. He walked to the side of a large, pale boulder, as each had done before him. A milk jug, half full, hung from his right fist. When his sound was gone, the night hollowed the way it does behind a train just passed. The only thing left was the sound of moving water.

  Remudadero

  A truck jacked up on the side of the road. Five men standing around a flat tire, the way men stand around flat tires: arms folded or hands in pockets, comments made in low voices, the slow nodding of heads. Dust. Heat. The land around looked like alligators crammed too close together. Ridges and blocks of rock and sharp skylines, the road nothing more than a drag of a knife blade across the midway point of a canyon. Sharp, angular rocks stuck up through the roadbed because the road was somewhat new and had yet to be beaten down. None of the roads in this part of northern Mexico are old, each one caving in with a landslide while someone cuts a new one somewhere else. This road could not be found on a map.

  We retreated into the shade of a cliff behind the truck, letting the flat tire fend for itself, its sunbaked rubber quickly becoming too hot to touch. This morning we had driven out of Nacozari, a copper-mining town of tiered houses overlooking one another. This was in the state of Sonora, where five of us had come and turned onto this back road to head toward the base of a mountain called El Tigre. One person came with the intent of biological inventory research in the high canyons radiating from El Tigre. We would never make it that far. The rest of us came to traverse the country between here and there. An ecologist from the Mexican government had driven over from Hermosillo to join us in Nacozari on this Sunday morning. When he met us, residents had been out in fresh clothes and the town had beamed with the cordial, bright energy that permeates Mexican towns on Sunday mornings. This ecologist squeezed into the truck with us, riding with his knees crimped as we all shared sweat off our shoulders.