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 less 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.