by Craig Childs
The sun returned, baking the roof of the forest. As I walked, spiders danced frantically in my hair and down my forehead. Grapevines unfolded around me, slinging off their host trees or their boulders. Pools turned emerald with depth and I bent over to plunge my head in, flipping my hair back so that water ran down my spine. Primrose flowers grew in the gravel, some of them a foot taller than myself.
When dusk came I unloaded gear onto rugs of fallen leaves where I would make my camp. The forest had become disturbingly dark. I glanced up, my ground pad in hand. I did not move as I looked through the offhanded crossing of branches, leaves, and vines. Dark, closed places like this make me uneasy. It is not the wild beasts or the idea of a lunatic with an ax. It is not facing my dreaded interior self. It is the informality, the thoughtlessness, the brooding wisdom, the endlessness, the closure of darkness. More than that, it is the thing in darkness I cannot name. I was once called in by an adventure travel magazine where a number of writers at a table were asked to do a piece on their fears in the wilderness. Someone said she would take spiders, and everyone laughed sympathetically. Another person said heights, and another being lost, both of which elicited noble nods and mmm sounds. I said dark, and not one of these outdoor folk said anything. They all looked at me to see if I was kidding. “Dark,” I said. “You know. The Dark.” They all kept looking at me.
I stayed in the forest for a few minutes, reasoning with myself. Then I packed and climbed out. I went up only two hundred feet, scrambling in the loose rock around prickly pear cactus, before dropping my gear again. It was easier to breathe up here. Hard, definite edges and blocks replaced the boiling, fleshy shapes of the forests. It was not dusk, as I had thought. Orange sunlight embedded the cliff tops. The nest of solid green below sounded like an aviary. No matter how loud the birds became, they still seemed secretive, hidden in the trees around the water. I kicked away the larger rocks and lifted off the balls of cholla cactus. There I could sit and look down into the stirring, breathing forest. I finally stretched back, pulled off my clothes, and covered my body with a sheet.
Sometime in the night a brilliant white light branded my eyelids. I woke. There were no stars, only a black sky. The air smelled wet. The breeze, liquid. My hands were clutched over my chest and I did not move them. In fact, I tightened them, bracing for what would come next. It sounded like a block of marble cleaved open with a sledgehammer. The sky broke in two with thunder. Echoes pounded back, thrumming against my spine.
Lightning shot to the southeast. The air exploded again. Lightning then fell all around, snagging on the higher terrain. Scraps of lightning showed from behind rock towers. I counted the canyons by how many echoes of thunder were returned. Four pulses of thunder: four canyons. Then I heard the tapping. Rain began to fall. Another bolt of lightning. The rain increased, dabbing my face, making the sound of bean-filled rattles. I could hear it up on the cliffs, rain sheeting against rock. Rain dimpled my sheet, then sopped the fabric against my skin. I kept my hands folded on my chest. Water ran like tears out of my eyes, into my hair, through the rocks and into the forest. The creek grew by just that much.
My prayers. I remembered my prayers.
Part Three
FIERCE WATER
It's here! Now! Get out!
—Survivor of a flash flood in Havasu Canyon
Now come the floods. They charge down atavistic canyons drinking furiously out of thunderstorms, coming one after the next with vomited boulders and trees pounding from one side of a canyon to the other, sometimes no more than hours apart. Sometimes a hundred years apart. Sometimes a thousand. The floods always come.
As I searched for water, the floods arrived and the hunting became no longer mine. It was no longer my own longing or my own body, not some piece of knowledge I could possess. Water now had the knowledge. It dispensed with sweet sounds and the dispassionate isolation of water holes. It hammered against the earth. Floods that came around me erased all possible humanity, even in some cases the very bones of other people, turning them under where search teams could not find them, even as for months they dug as relentlessly and religiously as paleontologists.
Water becomes filthy with desire as it gains speed into flood. It cannot move in a straight line. Even in artificial flumes of cement, steel, or sandbags, it scratches its way out like a prisoner working a hole into a cell wall, steadily digging with any tool it can get. There is too much craving and energy when water moves. It wants out.
When I was younger, less experienced with floods, I brought a girlfriend into a slot canyon in Utah. We were halfway through, our bodies pressed beneath full backpacks, when a cloudburst hit the canyon. We both knew a flood would come. The ground was saturated from storms and floods over the previous week. We had been testing the canyons, pushing as hard as we could, exploring places where floods had hit hours earlier, and on this day went in even as cumulus clouds lumbered around the sky like giants. Now it was my error. I was the one who should have known better. She was slightly less able than me with climbing over jammed boulders, wading across pools full of days-old floodwater, so I charged ahead looking for exits, then ran back to shout, Keep moving, we need to get the hell out of here! She never looked up, never made eye contact. She navigated each obstacle as quickly as possible, knowing as well as I that if a flood hit there would be no way out.
I had betrayed her. Out of breath, I paused and watched her, saw her determination. Her moves across the boulders were innocent. Rain poured through her flowered baseball cap, forming rivulets across her cheeks. She had no right to die here. I had no right to get her killed. Quietly, like a prayer, I said, I would die without question to get you out of here. She was too focused and far away to hear me.
Within fifteen minutes we succeeded to the canyon rim. The flood punched in behind us, took the canyon. She was able to smile in relief and exhilaration then, crouching under a ledge for protection from the rain. We watched the soup of red water swirl into the head of the canyon below, but I was uneasy. I had said the words. I would die without question.
When you place your hand in moving water, you will feel the curves of power looping your bones, addressing your skin with logarithmic sways. Magnify that ten or twenty thousand times and you will be killed by the force. Then your body will know. The designs of the flood will be told in nail marks left in your flesh, the rearrangement of your bones, and where your body is finally abandoned. There is something disconcerting even in seeing from a distance water that wants out this badly, that it would grapple your body if it could just touch you. It is a type of current that flips you end over end, tears away your sense of direction, your sense of control. Your arms are pulled, your frame shoved, as if a shark is punching up from below, your head jerking back. But pay attention in that moment and you will feel the intelligence of water upon you. It will tell stories of itself against your body in boils and surges and vacancies.
If you do not want to be killed looking for this secret, then the ground will tell you. Viewing the desert from a satellite, from a plane, or even from hands and knees shows the desert to be a dry, waiting map of floods. The desire of water is scribed across the desert like graffiti, until all that is left of the desert is water. Sandstone humps of the Colorado Plateau are streaked with chasms, the plateau being nothing but a dendritic fan of hundreds of thousands of miles of canyons across four states. The rolling bajadas of the Sonoran Desert consist of arroyos to the horizon. Stared at closely, each part begins to look like a math problem, decipherable into some detail about water's appetite. Rocks are eaten by sudden water, but not in clumsy, formless bites. In the scream of a flood, consummate carvings are left behind. Careful scallops are taken from the faces of canyons. This is not random work. It is artistry distilled from madness.
A small Sonoran creek, one of the more rare and lush, with nests of springs and nearly forty quiet pools, took a March flash flood twenty thousand times higher than normal flow, excavating over thirty thousand cubic feet of earth in l
ess than an hour. The springs were destroyed. The entire geometry of the creek, with gentle descents and almost no exposed bedrock, became a ladder of boulders, waterfalls, and smoothed granite floors. Half the pools vanished. Few plants remained. Leopard frogs, Sonoran mud turtles, and black-necked garter snakes washed away with the earth beneath them. As if claiming superiority over the animal's adaptations, the flood completely wiped out a population of endangered fish, a subspecies of the Sonoran topminnow. Then, as if balancing the loss with sorcery, the flood left behind canyon tree frogs, which had never before been seen on the creek.
This give and take is never subtle. Water in flood means exactly what it says. It has no hypocrisy. Even as it murders, it leaves life behind and carves elegant, intricate passages into raw stone, all the while having no debate about its intention. It is the same water that will sit complacently in a hole for months or years, the same arrangement of atoms that flows gently, singing lullabies, the same that fiercely consumes children and tears the walls from titanic canyons.
It washes over fields beyond the canyons, soaking the earth for the planting of tepary beans or corn, depositing nutrients necessary for agriculture. But don't pray for too much water in the desert, even if the crops demand it. It will come eventually, and it will bring its desideration with it. Catholic saints are often employed to call the rain for crops or drying wells. I've heard many stories of people running to hide the small ceramic or plastic figurines they have placed, as lightning punctures the ground around them, as outbuildings are lifted away in wind, as the arroyos fill, then overflow with a raging, dun-colored water that smells of all the villages and lives upstream that have been consumed. The displayed santos are quickly clutched up, hidden away as if pulling the plug on the rain, concealing the request. At that point it is too late. The water reveals itself to the ground without reservation. And the dry ground waits, completely open with its bare rock and expectant passages like a lover who has no hesitation. The water tumbles wildly inside. The message is scrawled into the desert, a savage, but impeccable, signature.
I know a woman who has, as a forensic scientist, dealt with the bodies of flood victims. She told me of the face of a six-year-old girl. Surgically removed from the girl's head by a flood, there were no bones or teeth attached. It was only a face, limp as a rubber mask. The rest of the body had been unharmed, protected, she said. This seemed like something she had been waiting to tell somebody. In the wrong context, it may have seemed trivial or too grotesque for conversation, but when we talked about it, she was enchanted by what it proposed. Something was hidden in the water. The water meant whatever it had done. There was nothing personal to the victim, no vendetta. It was just that water was too powerful for life to withstand, and within that power was precision, as if choices were being made, she said. The final word of water had been revealed by its own fierceness.
6. THE SACRIFICE OF CHILDREN
Tohono O'odham Reservation, Southern Arizona
February
THE STORY TOLD FROM SOUTHERN ARIZONA IS OF a Tohono O'odham man chasing a badger into a hole, intending to kill it. As the man prodded into the hole, a burst of wind shot out, as if a seal had broken, followed by rushing water. The water erupted across the ground. He backed away in fear, and when the water would not stop, he ran.
I came looking for the place where this happened, walking on the Tohono O'odham reservation west of Tucson to find a shrine. The shrine had been erected exactly where the water emerged, and where dras tic deeds had been performed to stop it, leaving the hole now completely dry. From talking to people who shared stories of such a shrine, I had heard that it was not in a wash, and not on an outcrop of rock where a spring might emerge. It was on open plains of desert, where the sudden, inexplicable appear ance of water would incite fear instead of celebration.
In one telling of the story, four villages were rapidly swallowed by the water. The people panicked and a hasty council was held among shamans. The first solution came. A small waterbird was taken to the gushing maw and shoved inside. The bird vanished below and the water dropped back slightly but did not stop, letting the people know that they had been heard but not pardoned. Then a larger bird, perhaps a crane, was forced in, which had the same result. The third attempt involved a sea turtle, probably obtained through trade and travels to the south. It, too, disappeared while the water barely flinched, consuming the offerings like smidgens of unsatisfying meals, its mouth still open, querulous.
Shamans made the next difficult demand. Two boys and two girls were to be sacrificed, even though the act was unheard of in this culture. It was decided. People protested, but the water threatened to take the entire desert, so the children were to be selected, taken from the family clans of the Coyote People and the Buzzard People, a boy and a girl from each. During the selection a grandmother hid her grandson by rolling him in a reed mat. The hidden boy was passed over.
Four children were chosen and bolstered by the grieving communities, told that they were going to a better place, that they were saving their people. It was a strong act they were doing. They walked bravely, but with tender eyes. Dressed in ceremonial clothes, faces painted, they were taken to the roaring throat of water and, like the offerings before them, forced inside. When they sank from view, the flow ceased.
Water drained back to the earth and a slab of rock was placed over the hole, sealing the children and the water forever. Another rock followed that, then another. Rocks were stacked one on top of the next until the hole was secured, and the place became an unmistakable landmark. Ocotillo stalks were cut, peeled, and erected around the rocks in certain locations so that the story would be told by their placement: four sets of ocotillo limbs marking four children, surrounded by a larger wall of hundreds of limbs with openings to the east, north, west, and south.
As I walked through the desert, I recounted the story, imagining water flushing across the ground, consuming villages, inundating forests of saguaro cacti. It was the grandmother hiding the boy that I remembered clearest. When the water subsided, she hurriedly returned to her grandchild and unrolled the mat that had protected him. The boy was not there. She found only dry scabs of algae, the kind left on rocks when water drops back.
Out looking for the shrine, I first came across an embankment of compacted, water-driven sand left far from any drainage, just out in the desert. Someone had gone at it with a bulldozer, clawing a hole and carrying away a few trips' worth of sand and gravel. I took a close look at this pile, finding behind the bulldozer scratches the fine sweeps of cross beds, common in sand deposited in quick water. I blew on a few of the cross beds, cleaning them out so that they stood more clearly, describing arcs leading east, the direction of flow. The pile would have been a notable landmark to find anywhere out here, even without this story. I was scientific about it. Some big flood from long ago. I moved on.
As I walked farther, motion showed through creosote bushes, something flashing and silver like a fish. I turned south and walked toward it, noticing that over the bushes stood a crown of crooked white dowels leaning around each other, over six feet tall. Beyond and all around was a congress of low winter clouds darkening the desert, causing the whiteness of the erect wood to stand out like chalk on slate. I watched the motion below and could hear something rustling. Too small for a person, I thought. Too redundant for an animal. The air smelled moist, the way it smells before a rain. In all of southern Arizona only two-tenths of an inch of rain had fallen in the past five months. Third-driest winter of the century. The smell was only a tease. A breeze came from the south. The scent of dampness and creosote. Creosote limbs swayed, tending to the breeze. Again came the spinning, bright flash of something in the background. I could hear quick tapping as it moved. Something plastic.
I walked into a clearing and stopped. The shrine stood before me, built from the branches of ocotillos stripped of bark and spines so that they gleamed as white as bleached bones. Several hundred of these branches, shoveled upright into the gro
und so that they bent and curved around one another like interlaced fingers, formed a circle over a mound of flat stones. Stuck between the stones was a glittery toy spinner, designed to catch the wind and spin like a windmill. It rattled as it spun.
When the breeze slowed, the spinner wound down and stopped. I looked around.
Bare mountains.
A road nearby.
Desert.
The stones in the center lay covered with offerings. Teddy bears and costume jewelry and beads and a plastic dinosaur. Flowers made of crepe paper had scattered like colorful little heads of lettuce, petals unfolding, faded by the sun. Feathers, worn thin by winds, hung from four entrances where the ocotillo walls parted for each cardinal direction, for each child sacrificed. Standing at the eastern entrance I waited until I could feel my breathing along with the rise and fall of the breeze. Until my eyes adjusted to the setting of this peculiar shrine. Until everything turned quiet.
The shrine
The shrine was obviously old. Some accounts place it back over three hundred years. By the passage and work of people, the ground of the shrine had been beaten down a couple feet lower than the general terrain. Every four years the ocotillo limbs are replaced, the old ones heaped up so that they rest in massive, graying piles like haystacks, only more orderly. Rather than being thoughtlessly tossed aside, they had been stored in a routine fashion, stacked lengthwise for however many hundreds of years this shrine has been preserved. There had been no variation in the treatment. The grounds were cleared of any rock larger than an almond, leaving the sand just coarse enough to sigh beneath my boots.
Ceremonies are held here during the four-year replacements of ocotillo limbs. Little has been openly spoken of these ceremonies other than references to night processions, perhaps nine days of preparations with a tenth-day dance around children. Whatever is done, there are obviously people assigned to this place, rituals passed along.