Lessons From the Desert

My wife got me a new book for Christmas- The Secret Knowledge of Water, by southwestern explorer and writer Craig Childs.  (A friend, Lynn Blackburn, highly recommended the book, and after hearing him read a few passages from it, I decided I had to get it.)  I cannot recommend this book enough to lovers of the Southwestern US!  His style is poetic and earthy at the same time, and you can almost feel the loneliness and ancient mystery of the Sonoran desert (and other sites in Arizona).

Childs writes this chilling line in the introduction:  “There are two easy ways to die in the desert: thirst or drowning.”

Most people get the first option; few understand the second.  But the fact is, every year, Arizona has brief but furious rains and the washes (gulleys), which are normally dry, quickly fill with raging flood water and can become lethal to anyone unlucky enough to be in a wash when a flash flood comes galloping down upon them like a thundering herd of wild stallions.  (Another of his books, The Desert Cries, recounts a summer in Arizona where over 20 people died in such flash floods, including a hiking party caught by a killer flash flood in the awesome Antelope Canyon, in our state’s northeast corner).

But what many people don’t realize is that the desert holds a surprising amount of drinkable water (even though you may need to filter it and treat it with purification tablets) if you know where to look for it.

An even casual scan of some of the topographic maps of Arizona show numerous “tanks”– like White Tank (for which the White Tank Mountains west of Phoenix are named), Red Tank, Smith Tank, and so on.  When I first moved to Arizona and started poring over the topo maps to find benchmarks to recover and possible sites from which to do astronomy, I thought these referred to water tanks for cattle.  But there were so man of them!  And frankly, there aren’t that many cattle on some of these quadrangles!

Then I learned in Childs’ book that a tank is the ugly English word for a beautiful Spanish word, tinaja, which is probably better translated as “basin”, like a large ceramic shaving basin.  Tinajas are depressions in rock that are carved out by fast-moving water that cascades down from the mountains during our furious thunderburst storms.  They take thousands of years to form.  They are shaped sort of like a gravy boat, being steep at the input end, and tapering to shallower and shallower water as the water approaches the exit point, where it cascades down the mountainside to the next tinaja.  (This shape keeps them purged of sediment, so that a free-fowing tinaja will be full of fresh rain water after a rain and little, if any, sand and silt.  Ranchers, thinking it would be good to build up the walls of tinajas to trap more water find that they then lose their hydrodynamics and silt in quickly, becoming useless.  It seems like every time people try to improve on God’s designs, they mess up things!)

Here is the point: people are often found dead in the desert because they run out of water and instinctively head for the low ground, thinking that this is where water goes in a rain storm (it does), but not realizing that the desert sand in such lowland is like a sponge!  Often, a flash flood will disgorge a wall of water, silt and mud out of a canyon in a 20-foot tall freight train (carrying trees, cacti, and house-sized boulders), and within a mile or two of hitting the shallow, open washes, be totally absorbed by the thirsty desert.  Too often, people trying to enter the United States illegally from Mexico are found dead in these areas, their plastic milk cartons of water having gone dry two days earlier.

Our economy is something like the desert right now– unpredictable, and dangerous.  Yet almost every HVAC salesman is looking for water in the wrong places– the low ground, the easy places to walk to.  Yet, they will find no water there, only death.

If an HVAC sales person wants to survive this desert, he must climb into the mountains, seeking the trapped and life-giving rain water that can only be obtained by herculean effort, climbing higher and higher.  There are no easy solutions.

In this economic desert, where will you seek your water?  In the easy places (where many will die this year), or will you climb the hard mountains and work hard and find the life-giving water in the heights?

Think about it…