by Craig Childs
I set a camp within a limestone bottleneck, on a ledge as humped and gray as an elephant's back. It was high enough to be above yesterday's flood, but again, some floods had scarred the walls still higher. As I arranged my belongings on the rock, setting the cooking pot down slowly so as not to make any loud noises, I thought of the people trapped in the 1910 Havasu flood, how they clung to the roof of their house, and how they must have deliriously feared for their lives through the night as everything around them washed away. I looked to the sky. No storms that I could see, but I could see only a hundredth of the sky.
All night I listened to voices in the chortling and murmuring water. At one point I sat up. I swore I heard words being spoken up-canyon. A young man talking. A father responding. A father and son had somehow become lost and wandered in. It was dangerous to come in here at night. What were they thinking?
I closed my eyes and concentrated, but still could not rid myself of the voices. No one should be in here. There was no trail, no easy way to reach the rim. The dirt roads, all of them accessible only to four-wheel-drive vehicles on the most distant side of the Grand Canyon, were a two-day walk away. It was not a place where people would travel. When the voices did not come closer and they did not get farther away, I relaxed. I lay back against the rock.
The walls were flawless mirrors of severity, even in the dark, the way they cut against the stars. The stars, forming a slender ribbon, showed the only difference between dark canyon and dark sky. The voices went on the rest of the night.
Ellen Wohl, a researcher at Colorado State University, took the study of these eroding, bedrock canyons and turned it into sandbox play in order to understand the articulated carving of a channel. She designed a twelve-foot-long trough that could be tilted at different angles. Then she placed cemented material along the bottom and began running water across it at various gradients. First she found that with clear water, even at six gallons a second, erosion would not begin, so she added sand to the running water, making it more like a desert flood. The carving began. As water carried sand into specific configurations, detailed channels were engraved, offering delicate curves instead of random gouges, beginning to meander, forming a variety of shapes that she recognized from her extensive fieldwork in narrow desert canyons. Everything in her miniature canyon looked familiar.
Wohl found that as she lifted the gradient of the trough, her pretend canyons began pulsing from side to side. Instead of incising at a constant ratio between depth and width, which would leave a simple flume, they became narrow and undulating. It is what you might do if skiing down a steep slope: slaloming back and forth to slow down by way of throwing energy. At a 1 percent grade all she got was an almost straight channel. At 10 percent her canyon became broad and slightly curved. At 20 percent it narrowed and built tight, rhythmic meanders. Basically, a straight channel is unstable with water trying to get out, needing to stabilize itself with greater urgency as it moves faster. As she tilted the trough more the water quickened, complicating the dance of water as it tried to shrug its energy.
Forty-percent grades from Wohl's sandbox trough brought tortuous chutes and pools, identical to sheer desert canyons cut through solid rock. It hardly matters what type of rock is being cut. Water proves stronger than rock. Erosion from running water is not merely insipid weathering. It is a process as intricate and arithmetical as the curve of a nautilus shell.
I have difficulty with the numbers and abrasive calculations that come with the likes of smooth and turbulent interfaces and grade percentages. I am not stricken by the sense of violence that should take me in narrows like this. I am reminded, rather, of paintings by Mary Cassatt of women bathing children. The shapes are too sensual, too meaningful to be disgraced by numbers alone.
Walking and swimming into this flood-formed canyon, I was overwhelmed with the feeling that everything here was animated—my muscles, the rock, the water. I felt as if I were moving through a live body, taking note of the intricate organs, of the flow and pooling of blood, and of bones arched as if they had grown here. I came through valves and sockets. I swam and hoisted and inched around ledges, trying not to fall into the pools below. There came one plunge too far to scramble down. Boulders tilted far over the water. With the webbing tied to a logjam, I lowered my pack twenty feet off the cusp of a boulder. A couple of inches before it touched water, I tied it off so that the pack dangled there; then I climbed up to the edge and dove off. Once in the pool, I had to kick for a while, reaching up to untie the pack. Its weight settled on my head so that it pushed my face under. I awkwardly struggled with it across the pool like an animal unaccustomed to swimming—a giraffe or an armadillo. I climbed back up to retrieve the webbing and dove in once more with the webbing looped around my left shoulder.
Viscera of boulders and inlets blocked the path from there down. It was mostly struggle. Too much water. The canyon entered the ribbed walls of Muav limestone and again I had to suspend my pack over a pool. There was no place to dive this time. I had to climb through a waterfall, the stream thudding on my skull as I groped for handholds. Sunlight came to the bottom so that streamers of water leaping from my shoulders looked like threads of platinum. Tilting my head down, I could keep an airspace below for breathing, hearing only the garbled roar of the waterfall socked around my ears.
One last climb was necessary. I recognized the canyon below, having been here years ago, walking up one evening on the twelfth day of a summer river trip. At the time I had stopped at this rock face and cupped my hands where a small, clear stream squirreled into my palms. I had sipped this water from my hands and wondered about what was above, where this canyon might lead. I had no idea of its size then. It was evening and the climb would have been challenging, so I stayed down. I remembered standing there for a long time, looking up into the night.
Now I perched at the edge of the final boulder, looking down. I strung the full length of webbing across an angled wall, using it as a handline as I gingerly took backward steps. Reaching the bottom, I left the webbing in place for the climb back out.
Not far beyond, the floor turned to mud. The flood had met the Colorado River, backing debris into the canyon. Tree limbs stuck through. I slogged up to my thighs in a material no thicker than pudding. Around a turn, the river became audible, its rapids rumbling over the boulders that this canyon had offered up over the decades. It was a far deeper sound than anything in the canyon behind me. Beneath a sheer eight hundred feet of cliffs that spread open like French doors, I rounded to the river, climbing out of the mud onto clean beach sand.
With a custard of mud slopping off my legs, I walked out to some of the flood-thrown boulders that reached into the river. Maybe a hundred feet across, the river's silt-heavy water passed at about eighteen thousand cubic feet every second. Eight million gallons a minute. Enough water to fill…what? Does it matter? Twenty thousand refrigerators every four seconds? Fifty boxcars in a blink? It was more water than I could calculate. To come upon a river like this, to walk out of the desert, even a flooded desert, and find this is like discovering an unknown ocean. The river passed with perfunctory swiftness. It is astonishing that this river flows and does not pause. Whenever I am camped at this river I wake in the night and walk to the shore, just to be certain that it is still flowing steadily, that it will never stop, never pause.
The canyon here, the Grand Canyon itself, is a cathedral of a gorge. With walls too high and steep to be accurately discussed, this is the most burrowed portion of the Grand Canyon. River guides call this stretch the refrigerator for its lack of sunlight and warmth. I washed the mud from my legs with river water, exchanging mud for a scrabbled grit of sand and ground leaves and twigs. It's not a refrigerator in the dead of summer. I sat on one of these boulders and watched the river pass.
Two hours later, after I had set a camp beneath a tamarisk bush, a twenty-two-foot snout raft pulled up and thudded against the beach. It belonged to a commercial outfit—the supply raft sent down early to captur
e a camp and set up the kitchen. A skull-and-crossbones flag flew from the stern. A tanned woman with strong arms jumped off the snout with a rope in her hand. At first she didn't see me. I was not sure if I should stay hidden, slink away, or wave. As she dropped a clove hitch around a half-buried piece of driftwood, she spotted me. This startled her. She scanned me for a few seconds, then looked around for my boat. Not finding one, she smiled.
She flicked her head toward the canyon I had just climbed. “Came down the canyon there?”
I walked to her, feeling suddenly awkward, aware of my limbs. “Yeah, down the canyon.” My voice sounded strange, like opening an old wooden box. The first words I had spoken in nearly a month. At least the first words to somebody else.
I helped unload, figured I would get a meal out of this. “Twenty more people are coming,” she told me as I helped with the big tables. “You okay with that?” She knew what she was asking. She had seen people in the bottom of the Grand Canyon before, people traveling alone on foot, appearing out of some side canyon along the river. I told her it would be all right. A change of pace. I tried to laugh, making it sound natural, but the laugh came off like I'd just tripped over my shoelaces. I still didn't know what to do with my arms when I wasn't carrying anything. I had forgotten how to act.
As she promised, within another hour twenty people arrived at the beach, piling out of eighteen-foot Canyon rafts. Once they had tents set up and clothes changed, a few came over to ask how I had arrived without a boat. After I had described to them the canyon and the route down, they looked over their shoulders, not seeing the place, which was too narrow to be visible from the beach. I could not quite explain.
That night I ate steak, beans, salad, and sautéed mushrooms. I sat in the sand and ate until I felt foolish, so one of the guides brought me a cup of rum, said I should drink it and have more steak. I did.
After dishes I sat on the soft tube of a raft. A loose oar by my leg clacked in the current. I talked with the guides late into the night, discussing floods and things wild. They told me to keep my eyes out. There should be one last body coming down the river, a man who had not been found after a flash flood in Phantom Canyon. Other raft guides, friends of theirs, found the man's wife downstream of here, tied her body to shore so she wouldn't float away. These were the two killed where the brother survived, victims of the same storm that had launched the flood down this canyon two days earlier. They had been only a short distance to the east. I told them about this flood I had seen and they all nodded, turning quietly into their own memories.
“Yeah, floods,” a man said. “I've seen some floods I will never forget.”
The rest of the night we told flash-flood stories: boats getting bowled over, camps split in half, people trapped on ledges. Most of the talk, though, was not about disaster. It was about the color of the water and the sensation of being near a flood. I heard some good stories that night.
When I walked back to my camp, I felt awake. Their stories had tightened my thoughts and emotions. Each person had remembered exquisite details: the weight of floodwater against the legs, a smell that could not be placed, the way water lifts as a wave comes, uncanny premonitions that led to the evacuation of each person from a canyon just before it exploded. One man explained that many of the trees in Deer Creek had been uprooted this past week. He spoke with a clear recollection of where all the trees had been. This kind of familiarity pleased me, made me feel comfortable in just hearing his voice. He never kept a notebook on Deer Creek; he simply knew because the arrangement of trees in a canyon is a thing a person should know.
I had talked to them about the language I saw written in the canyon I'd just come down, how a flood brings water to a point, forcing it to inscribe into the rock its every secret. This is the place, I said, that you would come if you wanted to know the truth about water. These canyons are like the hieroglyphic tombs of the Egyptians that we read by torchlight. The information is written here. A couple of people nodded. They had thought this too.
In the morning the river was still flowing. I sat in the sand below my camp watching, surprised as always that the river never even stopped to breathe. So much water in the desert. You see this and you imagine that you could build a city out here. But it was only water moving through, on its way out. The desert just happens to lie between here and there. This was not the desert's water. The desert's water had been in those springs, and in the floods, and in the evaporating pools in the land beyond.
I had been watching the river since before first light, with stars raining through the canyon, when the river was black, before coffee came on in the camp kitchen. Along with the sun, color came to the water. The river ran a reddish brown, its namesake color, Colorado, colored by the desert. And it spoke, of course, talking around its eddies, hissing up and down the beach in gracious waves, laughing behind a boulder.
Pieces of cottonwood trees and leaves of seepwillow and the crushed boulders of a thousand canyons rumbled by. Drowned beetles with decorative carapaces orbited the whirlpools. Inside this river were feathers and bones and mud and a dead man washed out of Phantom Canyon. Everything comes to the river. Water spills from seven states, traveling from hundreds and thousands of miles away. It is a pilgrimage with pathways set deeply into the land where every rock leans toward the river. It is not wind or fire or humans or gods, but water that defines this land. Could there be any doubt about the influence of water when the Colorado River is the final say for every shape and angle of land from here to the Wind River Range in Wyoming?
The desert had made its offerings to the river, sending down its boulders and trees during the last flood. I, as well, had been sent.
When people stirred in the camp and coffee started, I was asked where I would go next. A ride was offered. They could drop me downstream, at Fern Glen Canyon or Stairway Canyon, where I might find a way out. These routes had been my hope originally, but I knew little of such downstream canyons. In the light of recent floods, I was uncertain of how other canyons might have been struck. Fresh dams of boulders and mud, new waterfalls. I turned down the offer, opting for the known risk of climbing the canyon I'd just descended.
When the rafts put on the river, I left them, entering the mud again, grabbing my piece of webbing, and lurching my way up into the flooded canyon. I was immediately alone as the others continued downriver with their gear and food and laughter. Every motion I made—grabbing a handhold, pulling up—reminded me I was alone, an acute sensation now that I had seen people and eaten in their camp. The canyon was mine, the river theirs. All the way up the canyon I had the unwelcome feeling of water trying to turn me around. I kept saying upstream, while thrusting against my body, pushing waterfalls down on my head; water kept saying no, downstream. It took three extra days to again reach the canyon rim.
Epilogue
THE ARRIVAL
Kanab Canyon, Arizona
February
THE SOUTHERN MEETING OF CALIFORNIA AND ARIZONA has a moonscape moun tain range locally called Los Chiches de Cabrillo, The Goat Tits. They stand a couple thousand feet high, one sharpened pillar after the next. A saguaro cactus may appear once every twelve miles on the Arizona side. A leafless burst of ocotillo. Brittlebush. The rest is a tangle of mountain after mountain, and volcanic spikes so complex as to look like a chessboard midgame, strewn with pawns, rooks, and bishops. My grandfather tested airplanes here for the Army Air Corps in 1943, returning every day to the base in Yuma, Arizona. What I remember from his stories is the heat. All he wanted to do was get his plane to a high altitude and open the cockpit window so he could finally 1 breathe. He said nothing else of his time in Yuma. He never told me about seeing water from up there. Just rocks.
I know of a two-thousand-gallon water hole in a canyon between Carrizo Wash and Bear Canyon Bluff. I know of another place, an arroyo nearby where I once dug into the sand, where a coyote and a feral burro had dug before me, and out flowed a few gallons of stored rainwater. Otherwise nothing.
/> Walking out here for a day, I followed crests and ducked into thin, barbed canyons. It was deranged navigation. I climbed one of the volcanic steeples so I could see around, high enough to get my grandfather's cockpit view. The desert below was bewildering, almost painful to look at. All rock, it showed no letting up, no soft places. I remembered the water on my body, the floods that had crossed me, pools in the backs of canyons. None of that here. I got about two thousand feet up there, finding a seat on a ledge below the top.
Goddamned horrible land, I thought. The land where I was born. If I had been from anywhere else it would have been easy to despise this place. It looks like a plot of half-exhumed bones—femurs and spines eight hundred feet long. The familiarity I sensed was like studying the faces of close relatives, their stories offered through expressions and scars and peculiarities in dialect. A slender, high-pitched canyon is an aunt that took care of me as a child. My father is the difficult terrain to the east, full of dark turns and revelations. I know these places. My family extends.
The blood, the connection, is water. The land begs for it, turning barren of life in many places. It also begs to be free of it, to shrug it into floods, dispelling it, dredging out canyons in the process. Caught in between, the place is broken into wild pieces, each identifiable in the desert lineage—a wash, a spire, a canyon, a bajada. I had spent two years tracing the bloodlines, meticulously studying the documents, then walking to see if it was true, if the desert was, indeed, bound by water as I had believed. From this high point I viewed the Trigo Mountains, where in the entire mountain range I had once found a green handful of water and thought that I'd made a discovery.
To say that the desert has no water is a tantalizing misstatement. It is believable. But to look over this raven land and know the truth—that there is immeasurable water tucked and hidden and cared for by bowls of rock, by sudden storms, by artwork chiseled hundreds and thousands of years ago—is by far a greater pleasure and mystery than to think of it as dry and senseless as wadded newspaper. It is not only drought that makes this a desert; it is all the water that cannot be seen. I thought of the two-thousand-gallon water hole a few miles from here. Then the big, cloistered tinajas in Cabeza Prieta, not far to the southeast. And the springs, such as Agua Dulce, and the creeks and floods beyond.