"Faith in the Dry Season," chapter from Reading Water by Rebecca Lawton
"Faith in the Dry Season,"
chapter from Reading Water by Rebecca Lawton
Late summer going into fall is when I set out to the creeks looking for clues. By autumn in this valley, the streams have dried up like wrung sponges, their bare beds testimony to something lost. I must believe I can find traces in disappeared pools and past currents, because I get up and walk the bare creek bottoms. They draw me from home like a migrating bird that rises and moves with assuredness to the foothills north of town. There, stream canyons funnel like unsigned roadways into the flanks of old, worn-down mountains.
Sometimes I go at dawn, when parched leaves falling from the neighbor’s birch remind me it’s been months since the rains. Then as I walk, I see stars fade in a strip of light building over the hills to the east. Other times I go in the evening, after a breeze has curled through my kitchen screen with a cool edge that says summer’s heat is breaking. By the time I return home, the stars are visible again, as if they’d never disappeared, and didn’t I just know they’d be back?
This morning I walked to the hills before dawn, and now I’m standing in a tributary to my hometown creek. This nameless drainage winds out of the mountains, dodges under bridges, and twists past vineyards and houses, joining the mainstem creek on its north side, at the edge of some country properties. About four feet deep and three wide, this tributary channel today lies thick with everything but water—an orange carpet of fallen buckeye leaves, handfuls of wild plums. A flicker’s barred feathers crown a bank of cobbles topped with deflated algal mats.
Spring floods are just a memory. In March this creek danced with standing waves, smelled of earth, and rose to within inches of its bridges. Heady days, when weather reports promised more, though the channel couldn’t hold it. Glory days, but they’ve passed. Now here it is, the end of summer going into fall, and this dry bed won’t see water again until the winter rains return. It runs only during big storms. By definition it’s ephemeral--from the Greek ephemeros, meaning, “lasting one day only.” With no way to rewet its surface year round, the ephemeral stream is dry more days of the year than not.
Today, evidence of wet storm pulses shows up only in clues that say something’s passed. Tangled tree roots adorn undercut banks, the soil that once held them gone with the high water. Isolated pockets of dead pollywogs lie with their black bodies drawn into question marks. Crawdads scutter over the streambed, digging for moisture at the fringes of sandbars. In the drying mud, cracks join end to end to form polygons whose edges curl in the sun.
There is water farther down and deep here. I know it’s there because of the skin of dry mud that arches up from the underlying wet layers, as if pulling away from an unloved twin. If not for the telltale curling of the mud, would we know about the moisture below? Would we recall high water and have faith in the dry season? If not, the aridity of the place might overwhelm us, days without rivers stretching endlessly ahead.
Late summer going into fall speaks to others as well, especially my friends in the river-guiding community. These are boatmen who ran or still run rivers commercially throughout the west. Year after year, through their twenties and thirties, and sometimes into their forties or fifties, they have matched their lives to the change of seasons. Although I left the business years ago, I still feel the shift in my cells: in spring, blood runs higher than water. The river calls us to get back to it, to jump in and hold on. Summers bring kinship, good food, and rapids to jar the senses with adrenaline. The weather is so easy we live on sandbars under balmy skies and stars so numerous we have no need of nightlights.
Then the summer ends in fall, a restless time. By autumn in desert river country such as the Grand Canyon, a chill lingers in the air long after dawn. Trips taper off, and boatmen find themselves more and more in town. These former bronzed gods shuttle between cars to laundromats carrying mountains of clothes that must be washed several times to come clean. Those who have no winter jobs or schools to attend hang out in coffee shops and bars, no longer surrounded by the passengers who praised their skills and worshipped their heroism. Sometimes the guides hustle to get scheduled on off-season trips, if not in the Canyon, then in Costa Rica, Chile, or New Zealand. Most often, though, the boatmen simply pass through an amorphous period of transition, during which they run idle errands while making decisions about the coming winter.
An indifferent, isolated time, fall is also when we’ve lost many of the boatmen who have taken their own lives. Our community mourns them still, although in some cases decades have passed. A surprising number of skillful, daring men have met their end that way—enough so you could call it occupational hazard. The death toll for guides by suicide may outstrip even the numbers dead by drowning. Sometimes they’ve used the bottle, sometimes more immediate, violent means, often carried out in the collapsing days and fading light of autumn.
Whale was a mountain of a man, soft spoken, utterly competent. I never knew him by any other name, never considered calling him anything else. He worked the Grand Canyon every season since 1970, as a commercial guide on motor-powered pontoon rigs. After nearly ten years of seeing him cruise past our oar-powered trips, I finally met him one lunchtime in 1983. He walked into our river camp from his rig parked far down the beach. Swampers, green boatmen twenty years his junior, flanked him on either side. With their sun burnt hair and mirror shades, they might have made a formidable entourage had Whale not pulled off his sunglasses and grinned.
I pumped his arm and introduced myself. “I’m the one you pulled out of Crystal last trip.”
Whale smiled and nodded.
“Thanks for saving my life,” I said.
He shrugged, and our conversation went no further. Wondering why he didn’t speak, I peered at him, with his boyish, tumbled-blond boatman’s hair and freckled, pink suntan. He just squinted and made soft little assenting sounds, as if “Ah, shucks” were lodged somewhere deep inside him. We stood staring at each other a few more moments, and I became aware of his complicated eyes—they had distance in them that seemed to reflect much more than the 224-mile stretch of Colorado River between Lee’s Ferry and Diamond Creek. Then he and his swampers, their curiosity about me apparently satisfied, retreated back to his rig.
To say that he’d saved my life may have been no overstatement. He’d fished me out of the river a few weeks before, after I’d flipped an eighteen-foot-raft in high-water Crystal Rapids. Crystal is an unforgiving place--waves the size of ocean swells, house-sized reversals that eat boats, and a raft-ripping rock island lurking only dozens of yards downstream. In ten years of working full time as a commercial guide in the Canyon, Crystal was the only place I’d even come close to witnessing a drowning. There, I saw more than a few nasty flips and more than one boater who couldn’t get out of the water. A handful had drowned in the whitewater-choked gorge downstream. Crystal was one of a few rapids I never wanted to run, much less swim, no matter how many Canyon trips I had under my belt.
After my own flip in Crystal’s main hole, I found myself in the same speeding current that had claimed others’ lives. My boat foundered somewhere upstream of me, too far away to be of help. Used to scary swims in the Canyon, I told myself to stay calm and breathe between waves, but I felt panic creeping in. The river at Crystal is about fifty degrees cold, and it was numbing me. Washing through the worst of the waves and aiming desperately toward shore, I saw a few narrow eddies race by like a string of lost opportunities. The good news was that I’d been running empty—there was no one to save but myself. The bad news was I was starting to feel like I couldn’t do it.
Just then I looked up and saw hope. It was Whale, standing at the stern of his thirty-three-foot pontoon rig, motoring out from shore at a perfect ferry angle to catch me. He’d been waiting in an eddy below the hole, right where I needed him to be. Although floating fast and low, I still had the sense to admire him in all his glory, coming to the rescue in full control of his boat and the situation—a supreme look of concentration on his face, his blue eyes in a focused squint, his blond hair properly tousled and wild. He looked as brave as George Washington on the storm-whipped Delaware, as alert as a predator about to pounce, as unwavering as if he were my best friend.
His crew tossed a safety line that landed squarely in my arms. “Hold on!” someone yelled. With Whale minding the helm, his crew and passengers pulled me from the river. They motored me to shore, catching and righting my raft along the way and setting me in it. None of my gear had even moved in the rigging. The rescue was over that fast—as if nothing had happened.
But Whale and I knew it had happened. He passed a bottle of whiskey to me in my washed-clean boat. To the applause of his crew and his own silent appreciation, I stood in the rowing well and threw back a few slugs. Although I felt waterlogged and cold to the bone, I’d survived it, and Whale was my hero. I raised the bottle and toasted him and high water.
Back in my hometown tributary, I’m separated by time and distance from Crystal Rapids. I’ve been retired from commercial boating for fifteen years. Whale has been gone more than half a decade. Near the close of the 1995 river season, with fall in the air and the cold nights upon him, he walked into the ponderosa pine forest outside Flagstaff. He stood alone among the sweet smells of tall trees with desert wind in their needles. As I imagine it, he gazed up at a sight he knew he’d never see again--blue sky above a spiral of conifer branches, wisps of white cloud passing even higher overhead. Then he ended his life with a pistol, and he left no note.
My friends called to ask how well I’d known him. Did I know he’d fought in Vietnam? In the war, he’d been a helicopter door gunner and later a crew chief, lasting a year in the job at a time when life expectancy was about three days. Did I know he’d recently broken up with his long-time girlfriend? How well had he handled that end-of-season thing? One friend said she’d seen him a few weeks earlier in line at the Flagstaff post office. He’d looked a mess, as if he’d been “sleeping in a dumpster.” He probably hadn’t showered in weeks, a habit perhaps carried over from the river. “But I saw him the next day and he looked fine.” He’d looked fine to me, too, the last time I saw him, the first time we truly met. He’d been smiling because he had helped me.
The dry creek bed unfurls a path of secrets before me. I pause when I hear an acorn woodpecker frenetically storing nuts for the winter, and I notice that I’ve stopped near a low bank of gravelly spheres. Each one is tough and a few inches in diameter, a stone-thrower’s dream. I break one in two, the halves parting as easily as a cloud. Inside is a center that’s damp and muddy, still soft and pliable. Armored mudballs. In spring, before the wet season is truly over, high flows scoop up mud and roll it around in sand and pebbles like cookie dough in sugar. The result--small, soft spheres with tough exteriors.
Finding armored mudballs is a strange comfort. Although this creek runs dry more than half the year, high flows still define its character. The signs may appear inscrutable at first, but if you take the time you can discover their origins. Water-worn boulders studding the shores, the sandy streambed as rippled as an ocean floor, armored mudballs—all are the patient, loving work of moving water. The channel itself, carved below the surface of the floodplain, is proof positive of cycles and seasons.
Had I known how to read Whale’s face as well as I’ve come to understand the features of this dry creek bed, perhaps I could’ve returned the favor he did me back in Crystal in 1983. Maybe I could’ve saved him somehow. But I didn’t come through for Whale—none of us did. It’s much easier to look inside the armor of a mudball than the skin of a man. We didn’t know how to convince him that his despair would pass—if indeed it would have—as high water always comes again. Getting him to believe in the return of a better season would have taken more than a pontoon boat, a rescue line, and a boatman’s cool skill.
I turn to head down the creek for home. For the first time, I notice that the sunlight looks different today—muted, thick, and angled low. Straightening up to pay attention, I hear a call from farther off and higher up, a mournful cry from the north. In a moment a single bird flies into view, wings beating furiously, neck outstretched and reaching south. It’s a lone goose, calling in autumn.