A reprieve from drought’s dusty grip

EVERY EVENING FOR two weeks, I have been walking down to the Colorado River where it passes through the bare stone desert of southeast Utah. I’ve been watching its whirling mud-brown water swell as it does this time every year, muscling up its banks in a dance choreographed by the melting snowpack of the southern Rockies, a couple of hundred miles upstream.

This year the dance is a frenzy. The snowpack is one of the deepest I have seen -- and I don’t need to hear it from newscasts or from measurements at gauging stations. I can see it plainly even here in the desert, this rising river attesting to avalanche basins overflowing in their high mountain crags and dark summits melting their way out of blistering white beds of snow.

This is a year of years for us in the Southwest. From the bank, I watch trains of ants furiously evacuating their riverside homes, each hoisting a pearl of larvae toward higher ground. Islands of sand exposed for eight months are washed away as junk heaps of debris come sailing down, uprooted fences and trees busted by upstream floods. Barges of bloated, dead cows pass by, floating banquets for the ravens who cackle and squawk with pleasure.

The Colorado River has always struck me as an interloper in the desert -- a solitary, shimmering cord running millions of gallons of water each second through here like a smuggling operation, the cliffs and canyons all around as dry as road dust.

But even this year there is water back in the usually parched side canyons, banks of ferns dripping with leftover rains, and pools clear as window glass below. Flowers are pushing up through the sand, buttery cups of lilies and cactus erupting into scarlet bouquets. But I shouldn’t be surprised. This land was designed by water. A tapestry of canyons and usually barren gullies, it is a hydrology map showing paths of flash floods and rainfall streams, enormous mouths of alcoves weathered hundreds of feet deep by the monastic dripping of some tiny spring. Go down to the most slender of canyons out here and run your hands along the scalloped walls. There you will feel stone eroded into sweet, fluted forms like wine glasses carved into the earth.

Even when these canyons are bone-dry, you can feel the shape of moving water. When the rains come, when the river rises, the water spins and rushes into place as if it had been there all along. It fits into whorls behind boulders and unfurls into trains of easy eddies.

For those brief times, when the water runs high, you can see clearly that the desert, the whole of the Western landscape for that matter, has been formed solely for the purpose of getting water from one place to the next. It is the pulsing blood of this country.

The drought will come back. It always does. When I hear people speak with pained voices about drought in the West I think: It’s not drought. It’s just the way things are here. This place has been dry for the last 11,000 years. Our success out here has simply been a fluke of rather epochal proportions.

When researchers at a tree-ring laboratory in Arizona pieced together the last several thousand years of climate in this part of the world, they found that in the cyclic ups and downs of drought and heat, the most anomalous and notably wet period in the Southwest had been over the last few hundred years -- the time of European expansion across the Americas.

During this brief window of time, even the desert regions were a relative paradise for pioneers. And this is what we got used to, building desert cities where rainfall seemed predictable and where thousands of miles of glinting concrete canals could deliver Colorado River water for growing industry and even such water-heavy crops as lettuce and cotton.

We made our treaties and set our baselines according to the wettest years on record, even though one glance at this land -- one lengthy walk in the desert -- would have told us that the climate here cannot be trusted. This is a country of delicate balances, always at the mercy of minor shifts of rainfall, where 2 inches less precipitation in a year can send entire regions into drought. There is no baseline here. The rivers rise and fall with wild unpredictability, summer thunderstorms fickle in where they will and where they won’t drop their rains.

According to the tree rings, this historic wetter period came to an end in 1996. In less than 10 years, we can see that the Southwest has returned to a more customary era of aridity and heat. So we begin wailing about drought, about implementing alternative plans for urban lawn watering, about restaurants serving water only upon request.

Some transplants from wet and humid climes curse winter blizzards as if they were catastrophes. They complain about rain squalls interrupting their perfectly sunny days, and I think: Bite your tongue! Do you realize where we are? There are international disputes over water here. Small towns have gone dry, and water trucked in. Here you pray for rain, and you do so modestly, head bowed. If you complain at every cloud that passes by, they may stop coming altogether.

Sitting over this evening river following its ravenous, coiling swells of mud I think that someone must have said the right prayers to overcome all the negative press about rain, all the weddings and parades where people implore the gods for clear skies.

This year we’ve been thrown a bone. People are saying that maybe the drought has finally broken, that we can start watering our lawns again with impunity. We should know better. We should know that this year will merely be one of the stories we can someday tell our children.

Why, I remember when the mountains were heavy with snow well into summer, and the desert rivers engorged themselves with unmentionable delight.

Feeling the cool wash of the river’s breeze I think: Savor this season, it might be the last.

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Craig Childs is the author of “Secret Knowledge of Water: Discovering the Essence of the American Desert.”