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

by Craig Childs

  The canyon walls lifted, ushering me into darker passageways until I reached a confluence of canyons and came to a churning stream. Branches, leaves, and small rocks turned over each other. In the currency exchanged by desert floods, water is the cash. The pocket change is the debris, coming in denominations of boulders, trees, rocks, sticks, sand, mud, and silt. In that order. Small change tumbled down the canyon.

  I sprinted to the front of this water, leaping from side to side, trying to outrun it. It was not a terrifying bulwark of floodwater. It was what I call an ornamental flood. Still, I kept note of places to climb out, stopping to look behind, then scanning the terrain ahead. I'll give you my categories for measuring floods: Ornamental; Powerful; and Fear of God. I have spoken with a few people who have witnessed Fear of God floods. In describing them, they often lift both hands, trying to frame something that is not there. They search all the words that they know and still cannot find the right ones. I have seen evidence of floods above the forty-five-foot mark in certain canyons and have even found pieces of driftwood a hundred feet up.

  This flow on the Arizona Strip did not have the crushing force of a large flood. It was small enough so it couldn't bury its own refinement. I watched individual currents move around rocks, becoming as adorned and ornate as a Corinthian order, sending out curls and loops. The water tested the canyon floor with slender, winding fingers, pausing to fill deep holes where piñon cones and yucca pods gathered and bobbed until a route was suddenly found, funneling between boulders. I kept with this leading bore of the flood, pausing as it paused, running ahead as it rolled over itself. It swirled into depressions, building shores of foam, setting objects into motion. Seeing this first water was a blessing of details. None of the anatomical acts could be overlooked: each leaf of cliffrose or rabbitbrush pushed to life, each dune of sand disassembled.

  This was unlike the running streams I had seen in the Sonoran Desert or in the Tierra Caliente of Mexico. Those free-flowing streams were long familiar with their canyons, having married themselves to every bend. Their floor cobbles had all been arranged and packed into place—armored, as it is called by those in the trade of fluvial geomorphology. Armored because the water knew each divot and angle it would cross every night, in some cases every day, setting rocks into place out of repetition. The water of those clean, sweet creeks had every turn memorized, sending messages up- and downstream, building entire forests like the walls and roof of a comfortable house. This flood at my feet had no such contentment. It knew nothing of the canyon ahead. Time and wind and past floods as unrelated as strangers had left barricades of unarmored debris everywhere. Every move this small flood made was original. Every stone came as news. But what impressed me was that it took up residence without deliberation. It immediately knew how to turn behind a boulder, how to run straight down a chute and then wind like a stirred pot below, as if it had been here for a thousand years. It read the world as quickly as it could move.

  For whatever fluke of the storm system, this water remained relatively nonviolent and clear. Not clear enough to see through, but not like the viscous meal of a hard flash flood. I had seen the insane ravage of floods before. I had watched pieces of earth cave in, stood near waterfalls of crushed boulders. Within two weeks of now I would be inside a Fear of God flood. But this was different. This was like seeing the pieces of creation, the first pieces that fall together, that will define everything from here on. This was the careful work. The work at the beginning, when the water first runs.

  Ornamental flood over a pour-off

  More water entered from narrow tributaries. I heard small waterfalls stammering in the dark of their chambers. They met with the stream just as I passed, one after the next adding to the flow. By then rain had gotten into every wrinkle of clothing, every crease of my skin. It came in sideways, then straight down, then whipped into circles in the enclosed canyon. Lightning girdled the sky.

  The canyon tunneled into an arch, where a flat bridge of sandstone joined one wall to the next. I jumped onto the arch's roof as the stream cascaded behind me, plunging into the hole below. The stream burst against the hardpan floor and continued as I down-climbed the wall. The front of the water now traveled a couple of feet every second. The rain slowed markedly as the chubasco continued its passage to the north. But the water kept coming, already set into motion. Up higher on this land, the smallest pools continued finding and feeding each other. The stream only grew. I ran along the path of the flood, but still it would not grow to a size to topple me or drag me under.

  The canyon threw itself open at an unexpected lip, falling at least six hundred feet into a much deeper series of chasms. With the stream fifteen seconds behind me, I had to look up, suddenly confronted with this enormous view. Thousands of feet of smooth towers leaned from cliffs. Between them, everywhere, were waterfalls. Waterfalls stacked on waterfalls as if a biblical flood were about to sink the earth, water rushing off the desert, over every point. One waterfall plunged eight or nine hundred feet before erupting into mist. Some were membranous and white, narrow like strings, taller than the falls of Yosemite. Others ran thick with debris. I saw one actually begin, peeling over an edge miles to the south. It sailed outward, and at an outcrop of rock shattered into ten new streamers. Each waterfall led into another gorge and into another until I could not see the bottom. Canyons within canyons, sewed together by waterfalls.

  The stream came behind me. It did not pause at the edge. Did not think twice. It dashed over the rim and into open space, joining the procession. Hammering against the next ledge below, it pushed off again into five hundred feet of airspace. Wind captured the falling comet of water, spinning it into tendrils, moving the entire waterfall thirty feet to the right, twenty feet to the left. It passed from my view.

  I stood over this echoing hole of canyons not sure of where I should look, what I should be hearing. The mobilized leaves and uprooted sand dunes had become canyons, had become rivers. The desert, an inert fossil of stone, had been triggered awake. All of the desert's bloodlines ran furiously, feeding off networks of precisely designed flumes, revealing the desert's sole purpose, to move water. And the water revealed its purpose, to build a land that will carry it.

  Seeing this, the crust of the planet catapulting alive, revealed a depth to this landscape that could not be measured with a compass or mechanical instruments. It is measured in time, in the differences before and after storms, and in the kinetic energy that waits unaffected, then bursts like a choir. Every rock I could see out there was under the influence of water. I stood almost blinded by the animation, knowing that even when the place went dry I would be able to see it, the rocks and canyons as scrolled and driven as floodwater itself. I could only bow my head to this. This is the way things are. Always. Water flowing.

  9. HAUNTED CANYON

  Grand Canyon

  September

  A THUNDERSTORM CELL ARCHED ITS BACK NEATLY AROUND the curve of the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. A radio call came down in the afternoon. Heavy rain. From the interior of the Grand Canyon, 5,700 feet below, skies were partly cloudy with occasional light rain. Sprinkles really. Bryan Wisher sat in the bunkhouse, set just east of Bright Angel Creek in a cluster of small Park Service buildings. The only buildings at the floor of the Grand Canyon, they seem huddled for dear life below these huge, black, scowling faces of Vishnu schist. Screens instead of windows wrap the outside walls, the way they would on a bungalow in the tropics. For elevenyears Wisher had been a ranger in this park; now he was stationed in Phantom Ranch, at the bottom of a pit where canyons run to the center, then into the Colorado River. People come here by trail. Wisher has to rescue them. Sprung muscles, dehydration, ridiculous falls from loose-rocked edges, old men who make it only halfway by sunset. It is a longer, steeper walk than most people think.

  He knows weather, is familiar with quick alterations the canyon will take. He looked outside. Rain is as common to the North Rim as sweltering heat is to the floor. There were n
o more messages on the radio. He returned to his business.

  Four o'clock. A sound of industrial motion entered the canyon, like continents grinding together. The bunkhouse shook. Wisher hit the screen door and sprinted toward Bright Angel Creek. A waist-high dam of moving tree parts and loaf-size boulders was on the move. It rolled over the crystalline water below with the hasty resolution of a book burning. It traveled about six miles an hour, just slow enough so that Wisher could jump into the lead and run, looking over his shoulder. It rumbled and broke and grabbed every rock it could, lifting it from its setting, putting it in motion. He stopped, turned, peered into the mass, then ran farther.

  First, his assignment was to look for bodies and equipment. Upstream canyons are markedly more restrictive, the water much more violent. And he had no idea where this flood actually originated, which canyon was spitting it out. He squinted into the froth and debris, hoping not to see a water bottle or a backpack or the flash of someone's face gone slack in death.

  Second, he was seduced by the flood. To be at the very front is like standing at the tip of creation. Only certain events have this kind of focused rage: the first breaking of ice on northern rivers, an avalanche, a flash flood; all from water. To be there at the moment is indisputable, exquisite. Wisher has pulled people from this kind of water, timing the sounds of passing boulders so he could bolt across and check an engulfed tent. During a midnight flood he once locked arms in a human chain to breach the water, rescuing five people out of Bright Angel Creek.

  There was no sign that people had been captured by the water. He stepped aside and the flood passed him, kicking and shouting to the Colorado River. Even if he had seen the people, a husband and wife who had been hiking up Phantom Canyon minutes ago, there was nothing he could have done. He would have stood helpless, suddenly weak as they washed away.

  The canyon of Bright Angel Creek is a hive of tributary canyons. It drops twenty-four miles to the river, agglomerating two dozen major side canyons on the way: Roaring Springs Canyon, Manzanita Creek, The Transept, Wall Creek, Phantom Creek, and the mostly unnamed canyons such as the one containing Ribbon Falls, Upper Ribbon Falls, and Upper Upper Ribbon Falls. These lesser canyons are then dissected into farther tributaries, which are again bifurcated so that the whole place looks like a kindergartner got at it with scissors.

  The flood did not arrive from the usual suspect of Bright Angel Creek. It stemmed from Phantom, but not even from Phantom proper. Of all the teeming, extensive watercourses, the architect of this flood was Haunted Canyon—five and a quarter miles long. This was the discerning nature of desert cloudbursts. One and not the other. Here and not there. It began behind Widforss Point at 7,822 feet and cascaded to the desert four thousand feet below. As it entered Haunted Canyon, it ripped the world apart. New channels were excavated at the headwaters, old ones slopped over with mud. A fresh cut in the alluvium measures fifteen feet wide by six feet deep, plowed through a stately grove of cottonwood trees. Some trees bridge from side to side, felled by the flood. Others are missing entirely. Meaty, arm-wrestling roots of older cottonwoods are exposed along with the fishnet roots of everything else. Imprinted into a treeless quarry of roots is the shape of a boulder five feet tall and four feet across. The boulder is gone, carried down the canyon.

  Against the still-standing trees are aprons of debris, some hurled nine feet up the trunks. They are constructed of riparian grasses, horsetails, reeds, slabs of dismembered cottonwoods measuring three feet around, roots, branches, stones, agave leaves, pieces of cactus, ponderosa pinecones, cottonwood leaves, and sodlike carpets of earth woven together by grass roots. Branches are not cleanly broken, but frayed into papery strings. The trees hosting these debris aprons are peeled of bark, as if they had been relentlessly chewed by animals trying to get out. Everything is draped with the finest material: blackened horsetail rhizomes and bits of tree bark curled like chocolate confections.

  Flood-piled debris

  The flood merged from Haunted Canyon into Phantom Canyon and angled southeast, mowing through thickets of coyote willow. Most are laid flat. Their topmost, lance-shaped leaves are sewn into debris on the ground. In the main channel several twenty-foot-tall willows are pressed plumb to the creek, fitting rock contours as if they had been as pliable as licked stamps.

  There is a place where the canyon dumps into a hole. No debris shows here. The canyon is narrow and clean. Walls are shaped like shells and the boulders are freshly placed. Anything small enough to be carried by water was combed out. Three people had been down there, near the mouth of the canyon, when everything was scoured clean, when the wall of water came down.

  They had been camping below Phantom Ranch, and had come in the afternoon to explore the waterfalls of Phantom Creek. Scattered rain did not offend them. They had no idea how long this canyon was, how many tributaries and daughters of tributaries hung above them. Still, it was the kind of deep, narrow canyon that smelled like apprehension. Most of the sky was blindfolded. Black walls crowded at the already dull light.

  A terrace of waterfalls had been loud enough to mask the sound of an approaching flood. So there was no time, no warning. If there had been four seconds, they could have scuttled up the ledges. They could have found some break, but it came quick, like a car accident.

  The flood buried the waterfalls above them. They had one second, maybe two. They dove behind a grayish, leaning boulder. The crease where the eight-foot boulder meets the wall, no more than nine inches wide, is now a hydraulically packed sandwich of debris. None of it can be dislodged by hand. Tamped into place are shredded agaves and the branches of every local tree species. The wood is so distressed that its pulped cellulose is downy to the touch. Resting at the top of the boulder just over their ducked heads is a twenty-pound rock tossed up here like a paperweight.

  Water struck the boulder with a backhanded, chin-deep slap. The wife and husband, both forty, were pulled down. They cartwheeled into the mobilized boulders. The woman's brother, in his mid-thirties, stayed on top of the flood. Likely it was luck. He pointed his feet downstream, flailed his arms. But brochure instructions cannot explain how someone lives and someone else dies in a flood. In the haystack pulses of floodwater there is no sense.

  The brother hit the east shore at Bright Angel Creek. He grabbed something stable, pulled himself out. If he'd gone any farther, he would have been naked, his clothes ripped from his body. Any farther than that and he would have been dead. Badly abraded, drenched, he stumbled to the ranger station. There he found Bryan Wisher.

  His words came out in a monotone, as if emerging from a cardboard box. Then he sobbed. He tried to tell the story. The flood had let him go. Now, in the safety of human company, the event was inexplicable. He had always been the better swimmer. He tried to put it in order. Sobbed again.

  Wisher had no time for wasted words. He is not a callous man, but he had to know where the people were seen last. The conversation went three minutes, Wisher breaking in to reroute the story. “Where did you last see your sister and brother-in-law?”

  “At the boulder.”

  Wisher could not find them. Helicopters and dogs could not find them. They were gone, spilled into the river miles beyond.

  This was the end of the summer flood season, the final event. A month earlier fourteen illegal immigrants had been caught in a flash flood as they crawled through culverts beneath the Arizona border town of Douglas. Nine blocks into a four-foot-wide storm drain they were hit by a fist of water. Only six made it out alive, crammed beneath a manhole cover they found jammed, trapped until the flood subsided. Three days later an Amtrak train derailed into a flash flood in western Arizona. Just before sunrise, before the dining car opened with its fresh flowers and linen, the train struck a flooding arroyo at ninety miles an hour. The three engines separated while cars toppled and snapped from each other. Its manifest listed 307 passengers and 18 crew members. Over half were injured, many critically, but no one died.

  The following
afternoon a flash flood destroyed the village of Supai in Havasu Canyon of the Grand Canyon. A helicopter flew ahead of the flood, swerving into the narrow canyon to warn hikers, who immediately scrambled into the cliffs. When the flood reached the Colorado River, it pounded into several raft outfits docked inside the canyon. Two fully loaded twenty-two-foot snout boats, three eighteen-foot Canyon rafts, and several other large boats were hurled end over end. Deck canoes, kayaks, and trees blew out like confetti. Every rope, metal D-ring, and chock holding the boats to the rock snapped. When a Park Service crew was sent down to survey the damage, one man found a polypropylene rope and a life vest still clipped to a rock. Reaching down to cut them loose, he found that the force of the flood had actually melted them into each other. Still, no one was killed.

  Two days after the Havasu flood, twelve people were struck by a flash flood in a popular northern Arizona slot called Antelope Canyon. Only one person, the hiking guide, survived, while the other eleven drowned. He was thrown onto a ledge, mud packed beneath his eyelids, completely naked. When he was found, he was delirious, asking over and over why he had lived and the others had not. A rescuer, experienced at the task of finding bodies, later told me that she was left uneasy by the implications of this flood. Each body she uncovered was stripped. Even jewelry and tightly laced boots were torn free, breaking bones to get off if they had to. Then she found the body of a man wearing only a belt and an empty camera bag. And a twenty-four-year-old woman with a handmade silver ring on the middle finger of her right hand. The final two bodies from Antelope Canyon were never found.

  Following the flood out of Haunted Canyon, Bryan Wisher finally gave up his search for the husband and wife. They were declared dead. Seven days later, well out of the search range, a raft outfit sighted the woman's body near Tapeats Creek along the Colorado River. Guides tied the body to a bush to keep it from drifting. She had floated forty-eight miles from the tilted gray boulder where she had taken shelter with her husband and brother, down Phantom Canyon into Bright Angel Creek, and finally down some distance of the Colorado River. This was farther than any drowning victim had traveled in the entire Grand Canyon. The way it was discussed among Park Service people and those who understood the circumstances, it was a sort of postmortem victory that she out-traveled even those who had drowned in the river itself. Searching for meaning in death is reflexive. Even though she had likely died before reaching the river, there was an admiration for how she was propelled through Crystal Rapids and past Elves Chasm, all the way to the clear, converging waters of Tapeats Creek. As if she had done it herself. By those well versed in this territory, she was offered a fleeting sainthood.