Secret Knowledge of Water: There Are Two Easy Ways to Die in the Desert: Thirst and Drowning
Craig Childs
Language: English
Pages: 285
ISBN: B00FOR2E9O
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Deserts are environments that can be inhospitable even to seasoned explorers. Craig Childs has spent years in the deserts of the American West, and his treks through arid lands in search of water reveal the natural world at its most extreme.
percent of the original size. If an anhydrobiotic organism regularly lasts for three weeks from egg to death, it does not matter if one hundred years of drought are placed in the middle of the life cycle. It will still live for three weeks, the extra hundred years being nothing but a pause on the biological clock. Abandoned in dry water holes, these barren animals can be exposed to heavy doses of X-rays, gamma rays, neutrons, proton beams, high-energy electrons, and ultraviolet radiation with
listened to the sounds, the liquid timbre in thin canyons, water running where there is no sound elsewhere, no water even if I walked for days. Vowels lifted from the purl. Whole words. Unintelligible garble, then words again. Water taught me that it was an organism itself, alive, not merely a landmark. At times I woke suddenly in the dark, sat straight up from my bag and reached to grab something—my knife, a headlamp, something. Even coming fully awake, I could not talk myself down. The voices
bulging to my hips as I pushed forward. The water could not have been much warmer than a glass of ice water. Keith was just getting his hands around the corner, looking toward the dark. Half in and half out, I turned to look at the daylight, to make sure we knew what we were doing, that we were making the right decision, and our eyes met once. “Pierce the veil,” Keith commanded. I nodded and turned inside. It was firehose water, charging from a crack. Nothing was soft in here. The rock, a hard
into a fat, green pool. The pool was then inset into a large room constructed between fallen boulders and a concavity of bedrock. To get inside this room, I had to place feet on one side, hands on the other, flipping back and forth as the walls changed shape over my head. I could swim, but even in the desert, winter had sunk itself too deeply into this pool. Using small fingerholds, I crept into the back of the room, pinning my boots to the curved rock just above the pool's surface. The chamber
leaves and several Toumey oaks, compact and formed like bonsai trees. Two canyons met and the waterfalls thinned into a smooth stream flowing beneath sycamores and ashes. Exposed by floods, roots of a sycamore tree wrapped around a boulder like a starfish working open a clam. The stones along the creek bottom sat smooth and round, nicely rolled into shape by the water. Along the shaded walls grew coral bells, blood-red flowers with heads as bowed as a bishop's crosier. Among the coral bells grew