Читать книгу Virga & Bone - Craig Childs - Страница 12

SPRINGS

Istood on a breezy flank of the Panamint Dunes in Death Valley National Park, looking around the barren horseshoe mountain range that allowed these dunes to exist. I had no idea where one could find water. With the highest temperatures in North America and some of the lowest rainfall, the Mojave Desert is bare and sharp, almost nothing but rock. If not rock, sand. Where would you start?

I thought of myself as a water hunter. Trained in desolate places, I looked for rain holes, springs, seeps. I learned to follow bees and trace geologic layers, keeping note of the taste of water from one canyon to another, hunting through halls of sandstone for a clutch of moss and fern emerging from a crack. I picked up simple techniques, digging in sandy washes to find stores of moisture, seeing underground with imaginary X-ray eyes where buried bowls in the bedrock held water under the sand. I waited for nightfall and the water table to rise, dampness around cottonwood roots lifting with it. I’ve hung plastic over plants and collected very little to drink by morning, and boiled seawater in a pressure cooker to make it barely potable.

First time in Death Valley felt like I was starting over. I could make out the green cluster of a small spring town, a relative oasis, about fifteen miles down from the dunes in a pale, windstruck, flat-bottomed valley. But that’s not what I was after. Trees in the settlement were imported, the ice cream at the gas station expensive. I was thinking of water if I needed it, how it might make itself known in these reared-back mountains lifting a few thousand feet, earth monsters barren of nearly all vegetation. Snow had fallen up high, leaving taller mountains downrange white-stroked. It would melt and fill the insides of mountains, most going into aquifers and subterranean rivers flowing unseen from one basin to the next. A desert spring researcher out of Northern Arizona University told me that little springs were all over the place in this valley. The researcher was heading out to document springs on the nearby military grounds of China Lake, California, and he waved his hand in the air as if gesturing across all of the Mojave Desert. Springs were all over the place, he said.

In this ring of peaks, a city of dunes rising from the back end, I saw nothing that might resemble water, not the kind you could take in your mouth and drink.

I guided years ago in Anza-Borrego, in the Mojave east of San Diego, lost a client through a palm oasis where she got away from me, climbing and scrabbling upward, maybe on drugs. Or maybe the smell and sound of water pouring over rock, the skirted shade of palm trees and the brittle aridity everywhere, got to her. I spotted her way ahead running like a monkey up the canyon, heading for the source, which I’d already told her not to, not with me guiding. I sent the rest back to camp and followed her for about an hour up through uneasy boulder fields and rock-jumps over water. She was a city dweller, strong and smart enough, but she was making leaps I thought twice about, smeared with fresh mud from her hand, her shoes soaked and leaving a pattern on rock. I found her coming back down through a brushy declivity with mud on her face, and a grin that made me forget how damn worried I was, the paperwork and the search and rescue contingencies. She was breathless. She didn’t need any help at all. I told her she’d worried the shit out of me and please don’t do that again, but did you find the source? She smiled, as if she’d found something impossible, and nodded yes.

Water does something to you. It’s like finding gold, but more shimmer, less money. It is the purer element.

Standing on the dunes, I didn’t need palm trees and sparkling, dancing water. Just a drip would do, a spot of moss, a dribbling grotto. It should be marked, I thought, not with a sign screwed into rock, but by cattails, watercress, maidenhairs … I didn’t know what grew out here. I was a stranger. Even with binoculars every rocky face and canyon looked the same.

Coming up the swell of a dune, my gal was carrying a day pack, walking barefoot. We were out on a date in the desert. We’d been courting for a few years and we walked easily together, our feet warm in the sand.

The Panamint Dunes are egg whites whipped up into peaks at the head of Panamint Valley, a pearl seated in a thuggish pendant. Everything around the dunes is either pan or broken, staggering rock and mountain, the ground pebbled and bouldered, not a place you’d want to walk barefoot. Rocks that look like shark teeth and hatchets stick up from the ground, or they splinter into books. Anything that grows means soil poisoned by fallen leaves, or spiny urchins prying between rocks, or sandpaper leaves on bushes that look like they’re from Mars. Again, not barefoot.

On the dunes, nothing grew. Nothing was sharp. We left tracks around the last few boulders, pieces of gray dolomite sanded smooth like small whales breaking the surface.

The sky behind us ripped like thunder. We both turned to see a fighter jet blazing along the edge of the dunes at eye level. My partner pumped her arm in the air, like getting a trucker to pull the horn. The pilot saw the gesture, a helmet turning for a half a second. In response, the throttle opened up, wings snapped in a fuel-burning greeting, a wave hello back to her. The jet punched forward in a dazzling roar, tipping into a U-turn at the amphitheater toe of the Panamint Mountains.

Aerial flight training and combat are regular features of Death Valley. You shield your eyes from the sun, searching for the source of a tight-throated roar overhead, the planes moving well in front of their sound. I don’t get mad at this sort of crap. Blowing a hundred thousand dollars to race a sleek, sound-barrier-breaking projectile with a joystick between your legs, navigating an ancient and fallen realm bare to the bone—not some virtual nonsense but the actual sky—even I’d consider a little of that. It’s the wars I don’t like.

I stood on the dune slope awed by the sheer power of what I saw. I suspected the pilot was showing off, giving a show for us mortals on the ground. As the jet banked hard, two blue circles of flame made eye contact with us. The pilot pushed back down the valley, laying it out in the opposite direction, still at eye level, and we were the cheerleaders, pompoms pumping in the air.

Combat air space is a desert element, no trees to block out what you’re seeing, few or no towns to disturb the dark. Sitting up at night at a small, darkened camp, you watch dogfights from two thousand feet off the deck up to the stratosphere, red lights looping and diving, engines straining like thunder escaping through pinholes. Do you admire all those wires and plates and hours of g-force training, drill rigs plumbing the earth? What went into making a person be able to dive and swerve like a hawk? It’s hard not to accidentally admire power and grace, at the cost of so many wars. That’s what you see from the desert.

The mountains where I saw the most aerial action were at the bottom end of the Basin and Range from Arizona into Mexico, bare and darkened, metamorphic rocks and volcanics scratching the sky, broad valleys between. Saguaros stand across the sloped bajadas, days-long floors threaded with ironwood tree washes, flash flood debris bungled in bushes of ragweed and acacia. This is how you find water. Follow the lifelines up. Sometimes there’d be a spring, sometimes a tank, a tinaja, a rainwater hole drilled in the rock.

In Death Valley, I saw no slightly verdant washes, no green bands of thornscrub surrounded by spiny Joshua trees. I could see life out there, but not much of it: sparse coverage of creosote, like ghost shadows fanned across the rocky apron of the dunes. There were waves of nothing but rock, ramp lands, far-off highway invisible but for the odd, bullet-like car sweeping across the wasteland. The oasis town was specks of buildings glinting in the sun around a cluster of palms and voluptuous, salty tamarisk trees. No trees in the rest of the desert, nothing green from several thousand feet in elevation down to the stark pan of sea level in this ocean-less Mojave.