by Craig Childs
Twenty-one days later another raft group found her husband's body in an eddy a short distance down the river from Bright Angel Creek. Both bodies were completely naked. Bones were broken. All that remained was flesh.
The water of a flood has numbers, of course. It has clean definitions: thunderstorms, flood bores, paths of least resistance, streamflow currents. But a certain divination lies beneath, secrets that cannot be sought until the flood recedes. One canyon floods while all others remain still. A two-year-old child survived the border flood while strong, healthy adults helplessly washed away. A woman died in a flood where boulders were demolished, yet she was found naked except for her sports bra, which had not even slipped. In one case, seven bodies clogged together, almost arm in arm, while one was deposited 100 yards up a side canyon nowhere near the people she had died with. The Antelope Canyon flood originated from a place the Navajo call Many Ghosts Hill. This most recent flood formed in Haunted Canyon, killing the husband and wife when it hit Phantom Canyon, allowing the brother to live at Bright Angel Creek. Patterns show in the most unlikely places.
Wisher was the man sent down the Colorado River to recover the woman's well-traveled body. His voice is extremely fluid, pleasant. Even when explaining the disturbing shape of her limbs, her breasts, and her face, his words came almost as whispers, no different from when talking about being chased by the flood down the canyon. His voice conjures emotions. The sight of the woman, his first recovery of a female corpse, haunted him.
When asked what these people could have done to save themselves, he almost answered, but did not. It is a question he had been asked before, a search for a simply worded answer tying everything about death and flash floods into an unsoiled package. From his station at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, he did not give me any colorful quotes. He simply looked west. West, where Phantom Creek ran deceivingly clean, and newly ordered boulders stood like statues.
10. FLOOD AT KANAB
Kanab, Utah
September
AT ABOUT TWO O'CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON I SNUGGED into the sticky booth seat of a Mexican restaurant in Kanab, Utah, and ordered the number three combination plate with a root beer. It had already started raining when I abandoned the pay phone outside and ducked in here. A good early September thunderstorm. Now hail rattled the roof.
It pinged off the cars in the parking lot. In about thirty seconds the Chevron station across the street vanished into the cloudburst. People left their meals and stared out the windows, forks still in hand. Waitresses gathered at the small diamond-shaped window on the front door, a door that bore a plate that read PUSH, but was missing the SH from being pushed too often. They said things like “Oh my God” and “Never, I have never seen it like this.”
Water rose hubcap-deep after only a few minutes, rushing in clean and fast, as if somebody had opened the wrong valve and couldn't get it closed. The restaurant manager, wearing a NASCAR Phoenix International Raceway T-shirt, stood under the outside awning, up to his ankles in hail and rainwater, looking serious with a mop. It was no longer a work environment in here, or a place to eat. Strangers suddenly knew each other. Waitresses no longer had to say ma'am or sir. They could lean right over the tables and look out the windows. Stories were swapped. It felt like the first snow of the year in elementary school, a sudden excitement.
A girl, nine or ten, waltzed between booths, singing to no one, “I'm from Utah and this is my first flood.” Then a man stumbled through the door, shaking out his hair, and when a waitress finally addressed him he looked up as if surprised to find himself in a restaurant. “Oh, I don't know,” he said. “How about coffee.”
The line cook emerged from the back with an armload of dish towels. He used them to dam the bottom of the front door, to stop the stream that had appeared around the cash-register-and-pepper-mint-candy-bowl counter. Clear water bucked down the street, through the intersection, so that passenger cars foundered. Drivers' expressions could not be made out through their rippled windows.
The storm abruptly ended. A curtain opened. The rain tapered, rose, tapered, and was gone. Sunlight arrived like a father busting in on his daughter and her date making out on the couch. Fun's over. People looked back at their plates, heads shaking, and the food suddenly looked banal. One comment could be heard several times as people resettled themselves. “I thought this was a desert,” they said. They were not from here.
Still, the passenger cars were stuck in the intersection, four-wheel-drive trucks plowing around them, lofting wings of water. The water in the street suddenly turned from clear to deep red, the red of the Vermilion Cliffs that surround Kanab, flowing instantly with the viscosity of milk and not water. Objects began to show. Rocks. Uprooted plants. When I saw this change, I finished my meal quickly, paid, and got out of the restaurant.
One of the pickups now swimming through the center street was mine, working toward Highway 89 on the other side of the intersection. The water that had been flowing before was just street wash, inconsequential. This red water was earth. Floodwater. It painted the town red and kept growing. I drove slow enough not to drown the engine. A river, silken with tongues and eddies, occupied the street between the Jehovah's Witnesses Kingdom Hall and the Hitch-n-Post RV Park, exceeding its sidewalk banks and consuming the RV park. People scrambled with buckets or stood stock still, dismayed. A Bureau of Land Management truck parked by the gas station was getting battered from behind as water churned over the tailgate into the bed.
Kanab Creek is the major drainage through here, gathering its water from over two thousand square miles of desert, starting in the Pink Cliffs, coming through terraced canyons of limestone and sandstone. It breaks out briefly, where the Vermilion Cliffs open onto the town of Kanab, then swirls across the border into an Arizona box that becomes part of the Grand Canyon. But this flood entered Kanab Creek from just outside of town, not from those two thousand miles of waiting canyons. It originated from a nameless canyon to the northwest that had taken the brunt of the storm. This canyon fed the flood straight through town into Kanab Creek. The narrow downstream box of Kanab Canyon was going to be a violent place in about two hours. Anyone hiking down there, or lounging on a boulder in blatant sunlight, was probably expecting the next noteworthy event to be nightfall.
An early-century flood in Kanab
If the storm had held its breath for another fifteen minutes, it would have opened over White Sage Wash to the west. The flood would have been directed elsewhere, and the BLM man could have gotten back into a dry truck and not even considered himself lucky.
A few homes showed the damage already, with mud ebbing and flowing halfway to the doorknobs. Water spilled from an open bedroom window. A man hoisted belongings away in milk crates, like a scene doctored for television news dramas. Employees at the Lumber Post fortified their front door with a black welcome mat and a couple bags of cement.
Down Highway 89, traffic backed itself into a line in both directions with the occasional car pulled askew to get a view ahead and see what was holding things up. Emergency vehicles flashed their red and blue lights at the front of each line like fingers pointing out the culprit. Between the two lines, identified by the flashing lights, ran a mile-wide swath of floodwater through a channel that had been dry for the last eight months. The flood cut the highway at a right angle. Uprooted trees sailed over the asphalt, snagging on the barbed wire fence across the way for a moment, bucking back against the force, then tearing through. I got rid of the truck on a hill and marched down to the front of the line. The sun was out, bringing the temperature to about a hundred degrees. The heat made this event seem utterly outlandish, like a trick.
A state trooper and a marshal stood with arms folded. They had brought their cameras from home. I approached them with notebook in hand, wearing shorts and sandals, asking if they minded my walking out there. I told them that I study floods. This amused them.
“Have at it,” one said. He waved his arm toward the sashaying red mass occupying
what was most of the time a very uneventful spot in the road, a place that usually gathers trash and hitchhikers aiming for somewhere far away. So I walked out there with permission, not getting close at all to the center of the channel where the flood crested and fell like a very long and animated Chinese dragon bounding through a crowd. Thigh-deep in mud that had the consistency and physical properties of oatmeal, I picked through the material beaching on the southern shore of Highway 89.
Live cottonwood leaves
juniper branches
willow leaves
a battered, emptied can of Coca-Cola
rags
islands of foam made from oxygen churned into the
mud
one ground squirrel (recently drowned and still limp)
one spade-foot toad (alive and very agile)
pieces of a barbed wire fence
broken deadwood
live wood
part of a Styrofoam ice chest lid
juniper berries
an acre's worth of drifting, displaced sunflowers
Through the sheeting water an orange Department of Transportation road grader lumbered in to begin the process of getting cars through. It had difficulty navigating a busted cottonwood tree, high-siding on it for a couple of seconds, then grinding it off the road. An orange front-end loader followed. They really could not get anywhere near the flood. It was just for show, work to do. The water here, half a mile from the center of the flood, was a sheet flow exactly three feet deep. While I stood with a tape measure, scooping water samples into film canisters, mud slopping above my knees, a man stopped his beat-up van on the road. He had actually stopped at a tributary that looked too intimidating to cross, but since I was there, he rolled down his window to give me his opinion.
He was once Kanab's postmaster. He must have been the first person I met all day who was not a newcomer to Kanab. He was fascinated by the flood, but not surprised. “Not that unusual in this country,” he said, his forearm fulcrumed over the steering wheel. “I'll get my backhoe. Give them a hand with this road.”
Indeed, it was easy to discern who has lived in this part of the desert and who has not. Those who were born here know that deserts and floods are the same thing. When people first established the town of Kanab, they had not yet garnered generations who would grow accustomed to desert floods. The thought of flooding was the last thing on their parched minds. On August 30, 1882, about ten years after the municipality was built, an afternoon cloudburst removed most of the town. In the following five years, floods deepened Kanab Creek's channel by more than fifty feet and widened it by at least two hundred feet (partly a physical response to grazing), leaving a broad, flat-bottomed, mostly dry riverbed with steep walls where there had once been a slim finger for the creek.
At the end of July 1883, a cloudburst unleashed a flood that lasted seven to eight hours, cutting open the earth to reveal new freshwater springs. A telegram sent to Salt Lake City from Kanab read:
Yesterday afternoon at 3:30 o'clock the heaviest flood known in this part of the country came down Kanab Canyon; the force of the water was so great that masses of earth as large as a common house floated down the stream with willows still standing upright. All the wheat in the upper field washed away. The water covered the entire field from fence to fence, the stream at that point being one mile wide. In the canyon it has washed the channel 30 to 40 feet below the former bed of the creek. A number of cattle were washed away and drowned.
W. D. Johnson, a bishop who had moved here to try the desert, had a habit of writing letters up to Salt Lake City expressing his awe at such spectacles. Of this 1883 flood he allowed that “the torrent of water in volume, rapidity, and noise resembled the whirlpool rapids of Niagara.” Along with mentioning the same blocks of earth with the same “willows standing erect,” he wrote that “it beat everything I ever saw. The canyon is so changed you would not know it.”
Residents of Kanab would find floods coming regular as holidays. In 1886 five major floods arrived between August 18 and September 1, two of them occurring eight hours apart. The cellar of the Tithing Office filled with water, causing the building to cave in. Hailstones were said to be an inch and a half across. Sand and gravel buried several acres of adjacent land. A Kanab correspondent for Salt Lake City's Deseret News wrote eight days after the final September storm of 1886 that “the dams in the creek went out some time ago, but we are so used to that I had almost forgotten to mention it.”
I walked back to the truck with mud and pieces of juniper covering my legs like chain mail. A pickup with its cab spilling over with teenage boys raced through far too fast. Their hollers and crazy, irreverent laughter identified them as locals, saying something about living here.
Driving through town, I saw that a mudfight had started between two young girls in the parking lot of the auto parts store, while water poured out of the building's front door. This was the grooming of the next generation. Children of Kanab would grow to understand that this is a color of the desert, not some hundred-year fluke. They would someday talk of Kanab Creek's floods with a familiarity as precise and mindfully harvested as family histories. At first it looked as if the mudfighting girls were on their knees in mud and water, but they were actually standing. They squealed and shouted, lobbing fistfuls at each other.
This was not like floodwater you might get from the Mississippi or the Platte. It was so pure that someone from around here could tell me which rock formation it was from, how the south end of town got more Moenkopi mud than the north. You can tell by color. Or maybe even the smell, or the way it feels when rubbed between fingers. The floodwater I collected would prove to be over a tenth solid by volume, the leftover silt being fine as sifted flour. Snow shovels were brought out to get rid of the stuff in a number of parking lots.
Seven miles away, across the border in the Arizona town of Fredonia, they did not get a drop. It never even clouded over.
11. FEAR OF GOD
Grand Canyon
September
IN THE MORNING CAME THE BANGING POTS AND PANS of distant thunder. I rolled from my bag into the thin blue dawn, shuffled across the sand, and stood there naked, peeing on a broom snakeweed. All parts of the planet lay below. This was the top, four thousand feet off the floor of the Grand Canyon, between Fern Glen Canyon and Kanab Canyon. To the west an unsettled broth of storms emerged from Nevada. I ran my fingers over my head, stretched my arms into the air. It was early for this kind of weather. I would usually not see storms of this size until at least noon, when the atmosphere had a chance to embroil itself in rising late-summer thermals. The ocean must have been shedding a healthy layer of moisture in this direction. Now that I was looking, rubbing my eyes and walking to the rimrock, I saw that the storm was about the size of one of the New England states. It dragged lightning over the ground the way someone distractedly pets a cat. From here it looked like toothpicks touching ground, holding up the storm.
I had been waiting, patient, walking these canyons for weeks while sorting through flood debris, counting flood stones of different sizes, using delicate tools to measure the angles of carved bedrock. Mostly, though, I lurked in shadows, waiting for the unexpected arrival of a flood, looking up now and then to see a small cloud heading north. The late-summer storms I had been counting on had spun in every direction, ravaging Olo Canyon while I was at Shanub Point, tearing the insides out of Deer Creek while I hunted for drinking water at the rim of Tuckup Canyon. At night I sat with my knees to my chest, watching the faint blue flashes, hearing a dim rumble, ostracized by another storm heading to another place, missing me entirely.
There would not be much time before this storm arrived. I realized this and sorted through my gear. The storm wheeled east toward the Grand Canyon while I was at least a couple thousand feet too high to get into position to see a flood. No time for the big pack; it would take too long to lumber that thing down the canyon. I wrapped what I needed into a small waist pack: a bottle to hold some
floodwater, a quart of drinking water, some food, tape measure, notes, binoculars, raincoat, knife, and a map. I thought of bringing the webbing to help with climbing, but figured I would avoid that kind of unpleasantness entirely. I left the rim, heading toward low ground for a flood. I felt like one of those people studying tornadoes, driving into the storm while everybody else is hell-bent to get out. But there was no one to come running the other way, calling me crazy.
The storm arrived in half an hour, combing the rims, belting out thunder that sounded like a loose aluminum roof pounding in the wind. Still another fifteen minutes before I reached the upper channel of the canyon below. This was a long, narrow catch basin of a canyon, about fifteen miles from end to end. Down inside, it dug itself into a vast chasm, sawing through the planet to the Colorado River.
Rain began as I jogged across one of the interior rims, passing the lone standing boulders that had tumbled thousands of feet to get this far. I started to run. Cloudbursts pounded into the canyon as lightning began striking open ground. I sprinted down to the channel, just above where it entered the canyon. Rain had filled my boots already.