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

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The Secret Knowledge of Water: There Are Two Easy Ways to Die in the Desert: Thirst and Drowning Page 14

by Craig Childs


  The air inside was a potent marinade of humidity and heat causing my upper lip to taste like the sea. Any exposed skin became a repository for field specimens, my flesh a sticky net drawn through the brush, my forearms collecting insect wings, spiderwebs, curled bits of leaves and bark, patches of soil, and live ants. Flying insects struggled with their wings pasted to the back of my hands and to my forehead. From in here, the creek sounded like dishes being put away, a purposeful clatter in the distance. I followed the sound and ducked through to a broad pool where a small waterfall entered at the top. Fish, some of them a foot long, flashed and scattered. A rusty-orange dragonfly dodged up and down the stream corridor, its vellum wings making the rasping sound of dry garlic skins.

  A spring came in from the opposite side, draining from cracks in a sheer stone wall. Shrouds of maidenhair fern and already-bloomed monkeyflower hung below the spring, dripping ten-thousand-year-old water into a natural trough, which then ran into the pool where the fish had calmed after my intrusion. I held myself up by the trunks of two young willows as I leaned toward the pool. The fish settled mostly in one place, the Sonoran suckers resting heads on each other's tails the way horses lean on one another. The smaller, more stout Gila chub kept their distance, hovering higher in the water than the suckers. The streamlined dace, both speckled and longfin species, hung everywhere, high and low, here and there.

  I crouched slowly between my two willow trunks. It never seems to me that fish swim. Swimming seems like a mechanical process with articulated parts performing a variety of operations: the breaststroke, the butterfly, the dog paddle. There are no rigid strokes to a fish in motion. It is more like sailing. If fish had words, they would use swim for all of us terrestrial animals struggling through their medium, and something else for themselves.

  Fish in the desert, though. It sounds like a play on words, a trick phrase. A woman without a man is like a fish without a desert. But these fish are not random, not accidental slips that spilled out of the mountains. They are desert fish, found nowhere else. A number of fish biologists contend that they are, along with the water they live in, holdovers from the Ice Age. There are other contentions that they even precede the last ice age. Streams are threads through time, remaining through numerous climate changes as ice ages and deserts rise and fall. The fish cannot stand up and walk to more suitable habitat, so for the hundreds of thousands of years that the desert lasts, they seek refuge in these final springs and streams, adapting to the particular rigors. I once talked with a biologist named W. L. Minckley, who had found speckled dace in a spring along the higher benches of the Grand Canyon. The only physical link between the spring and any streamflow would be during floods, and that connection consists of impassable waterfalls thousands of feet down toward the Colorado River. This, he told me, led him to believe that the fish were there before the canyons were cut. The fish would have lived in that one piece of water for uninterrupted millions of years.

  Obviously humans have changed the course for desert fish by interfering with their insular habitats. Extinct in the desert are the likes of the First June sucker, three species of Mexican dace, the Monkey Spring pupfish, Phantom shiner, Las Vegas dace, thick-tail chub, and numerous others. In some cases, especially with the native fishes of the less-studied Mexican streams, the extirpation occurs so rapidly that there has been no time to even document extinctions, ironically similar to what is occurring in rain forests. In Arizona, 81 percent of native fish fauna is presently classified or proposed for classification as threatened or endangered.

  There have been cases of native desert fishes being actively poisoned out of waterways to make way for non-native sport fish. Referred to as trash fish, most natives are not fleshy or large enough for eating or do not put up the right kind of fight against a fishing line. I once discussed poisoning with a man who had worked on one of these eradication projects, a man who went on to become the superintendent of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area on the Arizona-Utah border. In his early years he had operated a drip station, one of fifty-five stations that introduced 81,350 liters of the poison rotenone into the Green River and its tributaries in the fall of 1962. The plan was to regionally dispose of the native humpback chub, a now-endangered fish, to make way for bass for sportfishing. “That is how we saw things then,” he explained with a regretful but helpless tone, as if telling of war crimes. “We didn't understand.”

  Minckley, one of the foremost biologists working with desert fishes, said he could not see the remaining few natives of Arizona deserts surviving the next fifty years. Minckley's words were short, gruff. I talked with him in his office at Arizona State University in Tempe, where he is a professor and researcher. His desk was a mess of books and papers. A poster of native fish species hung on the wall. “Western fishes are completely unique,” he explained. “There are only a few examples left in the desert anymore. The value of a species is just…just…so hard to hold onto. These species, these fishes, are sentinels for the system. They go, and you know that the place—the larger habitat—is being decimated. One of the things that pisses me off is that it is not necessary. You don't have to introduce bass into remote streams. The biggest factor for these fishes is the competition with non-natives. Dams are not that much of a consequence. Destruction of riparian habitat is not nearly as big a factor. It's those damned non-natives.”

  Minckley let out a hard breath and wrenched his left hand over his forehead, having told this story before. “All a native desert fish really needs is a place where nothing preys on its young. I am really getting too old to pussyfoot around with all of this. You've got to be insane to be in this business. We are continually losing.”

  He lamented the lack of support for desert fishes. People fail to get excited about something so remote and unfamiliar as a fish, even if that failure draws to an end not only a large number of species but an entire form of life. Non-natives are brought into these creeks for sport, and I have been unable to argue my way through a steadfast fisherman on the topic. I started bemoaning this to Minckley, telling him that it is difficult to express the value of a fish, something called a trash fish no less. He closed his eyes, retreating to someplace far away. “I know,” he said, grumbled, whispered. “I know I know I know I know.”

  Consider the sum of all life, the heaped arrays of adaptations flung one after the next into the abundance of forms, each possessing codes pertaining only to its ancestors and its immediate predecessors, teeming organisms hefting around history in their cells, a library of each quirk and evolutionary indecision of the past 3.5 billion years, but only a record in each species of its single divergence from the source, with no register of errors or chance events gone awry because those were discarded to extinction, leaving a peculiar animal honed to a perfect set of symbols and codices, down to the Sonoran topminnow Poeciliopsis occidentalis, perhaps soon to be vanquished from the planet. Protecting species is the same intrinsic gesture as preserving the original documents and constitutions of an entire civilization, or the love letters of grandparents.

  Especially among biologists there is a respect for life and its uniqueness that goes almost unspoken, a reverence for the incomprehensible diversity of organisms that has woven itself into patterns across the earth. We, biologists or not, look at these creatures, including ourselves, the same way we observe stars of the night sky—with unspoken questions hanging from our mouths. To be privy to the eradication of a species and to know damn well what is going on is a shame beyond repair.

  A recent government meeting was organized to discuss the preservation of certain desert fishes. One of the top policy makers announced that before anything was done that might hinder non-native sport fish in favor of natives, they would have to assess which of the two should take priority. To keep from bursting into a rage, Minckley stood up and walked out.

  Roberts at Muleshoe Ranch told me that while walking up one of the creeks he saw a bass shoot by. It was the first non-native he had seen in that creek. Up higher
is a stock tank that a family insists on keeping filled with bass for fishing. In floods the stock tank overflows and the bass tumble into the stream. Roberts swallowed and looked at the ground. It is like being told you have cancer.

  To avoid the embarrassment of destroying another species, there have been mad scrambles and last-minute panics. The recovery of the Sonoran topminnow came so late that its habitat was already heavily fragmented and the species had been driven to genetic isolation. The fish that were chosen and reintroduced along numerous creeks turned out to be inbred, carrying no detectable genetic diversity at all. One of the populations in Mexico, one that was not used for reintroduction, was found to have strong genetic diversity, higher fecundity, and higher growth and survival rates. The reintroduced population from Arizona, basically engineered by humans who drove them into detached habitats, was already a dud ready for extinction.

  There have also been subtle, illegal maneuvers to preserve these fish. In 1967 Minckley hauled two species out of a spring in an ice chest and transplanted them into a creek. For such a simple act, it was more consequential than many budgeted, staffed, and researched restoration attempts made since. At the spring he had found several species of native fish: the Yaqui chub, the Sonoran topminnow, and the Yaqui sucker. The Yaqui chub, Gila purpurea, was at the time uncomfortably near to extinction. He said, “I filled up a cooler with water, grabbed a hundred chub and female topminnows, then hauled ass up to Leslie Creek and let them loose. Somehow they took hold.”

  At the time there were no specific laws about transporting native fishes, but Minckley's move was somehow regarded as illegal, and a decade later government land and wildlife managers openly frowned on his actions. Ironically, his act prevented the extinction of the Yaqui chub. Shortly after he had transplanted these fish, the spring, which had become the final refuge for the species, completely dried. The fish he had transported in his ice chest became the only remaining population and are now the genetic stock of the Yaqui chub that have been reintroduced across southern Arizona.

  I traveled fifteen miles north until reaching a creek directly below the crest of the Galiuro Mountains. A canyon burrowed into the desert, carrying a length of dark, fat pools and short waterfalls. The forest was no haiku, no simple arrangement. It was a mess. Flood debris and alders. Alders grew so thick that I had to place my two hands before my face, or walk backward, my backpack parting the way until the way became too tangled, and parted me. I had left the last canyon and traveled fifteen miles farther north, walking into a majesty of cliffs. Smooth walls and buttresses jetted seven hundred feet to either side, where chambers rounded into places to sit and great curves of rock. The alders thickened. Their leaves are more numerous and darker-colored than those on any other riparian tree, their branches starting near the ground and crowding each other to the oblivion of the canopy. I stopped trying to walk the edges and came down to the water, pushing my way through the stream, fish slapping my shins, water to my crotch. I pushed away vines and branches, breaking with my thighs the trapeze webs of orb weaver spiders.

  The alders were so abundant due to a large flood that came through a decade earlier, spitting the remains of cottonwoods, sycamores, and willows into the San Pedro River. The alders were the first to come back. They returned with a vengeance.

  Floods get rid of things, cleaning the creeks. Along with tearing out the forests, floods dispose of non-native fish. One thing natives have over these non-natives is that they can survive incredible hardship. Floods come down like rolling loads of cement. In Aravaipa Creek north of here, which carries one of the largest assortment of native fish, half of the creek's entire water output is discharged over twenty-two days of the year. A quarter of the year's water appears within three and a half days. An autumn flood on Aravaipa sent the creek fifty feet above its normal waterline, and more than half of the riparian forest was destroyed. Most aquatic insects were wiped out. Researchers returned to find that the fish had hardly even moved, that the populations kept roughly the same proportions, as if the flood had been nothing to them but a shrug.

  The razorback sucker has a peculiar hump of muscle on its back, shaped like a top keel, located close to the heart to deliver immediate bursts of swimming power against overwhelming currents. As one fish biologist told me, floods mean nothing against this one muscle. While other native species—aquatic plants, invertebrates, and amphibians—must often repopulate a previously flooded stream in the form of seeds, eggs, or airborne adults, fish are often still there.

  Consider the proportions. A two-inch dace and a fifty-foot wall of water, boulders, shattered cottonwood trees, and mud. The flood subsides. The dace has not moved. A researcher named Gary Meffe, working at Arizona State University, planted Sonoran topminnows and non-native mosquitofish in a Plexiglas flume. The mosquitofish has wiped out topminnows throughout most of Arizona, largely by preying on juveniles, but tends to disappear after heavy flooding in narrow canyons, while topminnows remain. This piqued Meffe's curiosity. When he sent a pulse of high water down his flume, the native topminnows quickly faced into the current, taking nearly motionless positions along the sides or near the bottom of the flume, wherever frictional drag gave the water a slight pause. Mosquitofish panicked and darted anywhere. If they oriented into the pulse it was with hesitation. They would not hold their places, flashing from side to side or turning completely around, their bodies catching different currents, their tails tucking into eddies and pulling them off course. They were flushed out of the flume. Even newborn topminnows snapped to the correct position and stayed there when a pulse came down. The mosquitofish had no genetic memory of water behaving like this, while native fish hovered in the eddies and shear zones, hunkering down, refusing to move or even twitch their fins in the wrong direction.

  Few environments in the world are in such a constant state of violent expansion and contraction as this. If these streams were forests, they would vanish suddenly, understory and all, leaving nothing but hard ground, then reappear from nowhere. Devastating fires would charge through, sometimes several times in one year. The common assemblage of rabbits, elk, and bears would never do in a forest like this. An entirely new means of life would have to be invented.

  On the other end of the spectrum from floods are the retreat and disappearance of the streams, sometimes daily, sometimes once a year. Rather than avoiding retreating sections of stream, some beetles and water bugs seek out these habitats in search of prey. Predator densities rise quickly. Raccoons and coatis scoop beleaguered fish out of the last pools, and black-hawks drop from the canopy to find whatever else has been stranded. The stresses and cycles of desert streams are uncountable. If not floods, then drought. At one desert stream in the last stages of drying, researchers saw eight predacious water bugs fly into two pools and consume twenty fish within a matter of a few hours.

  Fish scattered ahead of me as I slid through the water. They schooled around each other, darting beneath tree roots. These were all natives. This canyon has yet to see a non-native. Dragon-flies flitted and poised on the ends of twigs and snatched prey from the air. A researcher had walked into one of the nearby canyons last summer studying these insects, finding a tropical damselfly, Palaemnema domina, that had never been seen in the United States. In canyons west of here he captured three species of damselfly that had never been recorded anywhere in the world. Down in the rich forests along one of these Galiuro creeks he cataloged twenty-five species of damselflies and dragonflies, some with zebra-striped abdomens, others with colors scripted into their wings. With these creatures hovering in and out, the place verged on primeval.

  I worked around root-strapped boulders, pushing through the water. Every few minutes I caught glimpses of the desert outside where saguaros perched across the walls. Towers of rock had pulled away, leaning out as if about to fall and bridge the canyon. These were censored views, framed by so much greenery that it seemed unlikely that there was any world beyond here at all. The sun could not get directly inside th
e forest, so the place became a steaming greenhouse, the air strong as horse breath.

  A wind shoved through at 2:30, launching a fresh and unmistakable smell. Rain. Cold rain and hot rocks, the smell of a summer storm. There was not much of the sky to see, but there were certainly no clouds. I kept moving, trying not to wish too hard for rain, not to disappoint myself. Every summer the storms come as each desert inhabitant waits down here. We all watch the growing clouds after months of sheer heat until we are leaning toward them. Then one day they break open. The desert is deluged, flooded, reborn. The storms are insanely powerful with wind and rain. For months we wait for this.

  After half an hour a thunderstorm moved over the canyon rim, lumbering in like a floating city. Thunder came through with low, gravely echoes off the walls. I looked up. My god, I thought, I prayed, pummel us down here. Ravage us. Please. This had been, in fact, the hottest July recorded across the entire Northern Hemisphere. We needed rain down here.

  I found a fifty-foot boulder in the stream and climbed its back to where I had a clear view of the canyon and the heavens above. It was like standing on a glowing woodstove. The boulder sent heat straight through my body, up my raised arms to the sky. The clouds were dark with water, bulging down as if about to rip open. A few drops of rain fell. Fat drops. I closed my eyes, turned my head upward. One hit my cheek. My first rain since sometime in the late winter or the spring. But that had been a different kind of rain. So much desire in the summer desert. So much goddamned, furious desire. I was begging out loud, holding my hands up.

  It did not come. The drops ended. Thunder lost its sharpness to distance. The boulder was still hot, having evaporated each drop, not letting them stain the surface for more than two seconds. I crawled off the boulder feeling self-conscious. I had made a fool of myself begging at the sky.

 

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