The Secret Knowledge of Water

Craig Childs opens by tracing his connection to desert water back to his birth. His mother was born beside a spring in the high desert of west Texas, kept alive in a lightbulb-heated incubator and fed with an eyedropper. The spring water that sustained her passed from mother to child, and Childs grew up believing that water and the desert were the same. Three early childhood memories confirmed this: green cottonwood trees against cliffs, tadpoles in a nearly dry water hole, and water streaming over carved rock into a clear pool. He states the book's central paradox: "There are two easy ways to die in the desert: thirst or drowning" (xvi). Over two focused years, Childs searched not for dams or canals but for desert water in its natural forms: water holes, springs, rare creeks, and floods.

The first section explores still water, the hidden pools scattered across landscapes so dry that rain sometimes never falls. Working on a mapping project for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Childs spent 37 days traversing a single mountain range in Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge near the Arizona-Mexico border, one of the driest places in the Western Hemisphere. After seven waterless days, he discovered a bee-infested crack in an isolated granite block holding 22 and a half gallons of rainwater, hidden where sunlight could not reach. The range's largest tinaja, a natural rock cistern, held over 2,000 gallons in a disk of water 15 feet across, "like coming across blood on snow" (27). Near it, ancient petroglyphs and a faint handprint marked the terminus of subtle prehistoric trails converging from all directions. Childs calls these waterlines: the opposite of canals, moving people to water rather than water to people. By the end of his fieldwork, he had found 52 water holes totaling about 5,500 gallons, proof that survival was possible in this seemingly impossible range.

Childs weaves his fieldwork together with historical records: Father Eusebio Kino, a 17th-century Jesuit missionary who produced the first paper map of Sonoran Desert water holes; Kirk Bryan, who led a 1917 U.S. Geological Survey expedition that erected 305 water signs across 60,000 square miles; and an 1882 boundary commission map whose black dots labeled tinaja mark the same locations Childs mapped. The story of desert water, he argues, has never been interrupted.

The search shifts to the Arizona-Utah border, where Childs and his traveling companion Tom Vimont, a former mountaineering instructor, crossed barren Navajo sandstone carrying only a couple of quarts of water each. They discovered an immense collection of waterpockets, rainwater depressions carved into open sandstone plains over thousands of years. What began as 25 pools quickly revealed itself as hundreds, holding an estimated 70,000 gallons, along with Triops, an aquatic crustacean unchanged for 180 million years. These organisms survive long droughts through anhydrobiosis, a state in which they release all moisture, shut down metabolism entirely, and wait until rain returns. The pools also host fairy shrimp and clam shrimp, each species genetically isolated over millions of years. Childs identifies the place as Major John Wesley Powell's "Thousand Wells," described in 1870 as a billowy sea of sand dunes with potholes holding a hundred or a thousand barrels of water.

Part Two turns to moving water. Childs traces this fascination to a childhood moment when his father lifted a moss-cushioned rock in an Arizona canyon to reveal an underground stream no wider than a wrist, flowing through a tunnel of red roots. In the Grand Canyon, he sat beneath a rock shelf studying seeps with a stopwatch, finding that one dripped every four and a half seconds, never varying by more than a tenth of a second. An archaeologist told him that when she brought Native American tribal elders through the Grand Canyon to see ruins, they looked past the ruins toward the springs, explaining that the springs were alive, points where creation came to the surface.

Childs and Keith Knadler, a tile setter and river guide, undertook a weeklong trek into the Grand Canyon's interior to enter a cave behind a massive waterfall-spring. Wearing wet suits and carrying climbing gear, they worked through the thundering entrance and reached a room the size of an aircraft hangar filled with waterfalls and pools. At the back, Childs swam alone into a silent chamber where a single bead of water fell from the ceiling every 40 seconds. He turned off his headlamp. In total darkness, thinking of the Hopi emergence story and the ceremonial song that could be sung only four times before the hole closed, he heard the drop pluck the surface and thought, "The first act of creation" (116). Emerging into daylight, the cave's interior washed from his memory, and all he managed to write was "Remember this silence" (117).

In southern Arizona and northern Mexico, Childs explores perennial desert creeks as ecological corridors between the tropics and the temperate north. A single canyon near the Mexican border hosts 11 species found nowhere else in the United States, including a tropical passionflower growing near a Virginia creeper, all sustained by running water. In the Tierra Caliente, the hot lowlands of northern Sonora, he found the rarest forest type in North America: a cottonwood-willow-palm grove along a living creek. Fish biologist W. L. Minckley told Childs he could not see native desert fishes surviving another 50 years, with non-native sport fish destroying their habitats. Minckley once illegally transplanted Yaqui chub from a dying spring into a remote creek. The source spring soon dried completely, and those fish became the species' only surviving population.

The final section belongs to floods. Childs visits a shrine of the Tohono O'odham, a Native nation whose reservation lies west of Tucson, where, according to tradition, water once burst from a hole and consumed four villages. When offerings failed to stop it, four children were sacrificed into the roaring water. The centuries-old shrine holds offerings chosen for children: teddy bears, a miniature tea set, toy guns. Childs left a 300-million-year-old fossilized clamshell, whispering that it was also for a young friend who drowned at 16.

In the Grand Canyon, a flash flood from Haunted Canyon killed a husband and wife while the wife's brother survived by riding the current to shore. The woman's body was found 48 miles downstream, farther than any drowning victim had traveled in the canyon. In another storm, Childs got trapped on a chockstone, a rock wedged in a narrow channel, and dropped into a plunge pool to free himself. A catastrophic flood filled the canyon within two minutes. From a ledge, he watched the water pulverize an oak tree and jet rocks into the air. The flood took two hours and seven minutes to leave, after which silence was complete. Following the floodwater down the next day, Childs found a single redbud tree with leaves untouched despite 20 feet of violent water, growing in a calm vortex spun from the canyon wall, proof that turbulence has order. He emerged at the Colorado River, where raft guides fed him and told him to watch for the body of the husband killed in the Haunted Canyon flood, still missing.

In the epilogue, Childs walked 11 days into Kanab Canyon, where water poured through limestone corridors and filled pools 30 feet deep. On the 11th day, walking upstream, the creek vanished entirely. Then a sound filled the canyon from wall to wall. A flood bore down with no apparent source, no storm in the sky. Tree-ring records show that big floods in Kanab Canyon arrive in swarms across centuries. The flood encircled Childs on a boulder, currents taking over as if they knew exactly what to do. His two years of scientific study were washed blank. The book ends with the roar rising and consuming the air.