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| Storm Descending |
It’s true what they say: there is
no shortage of water in the desert, but exactly the right amount. Living off
rainwater in the desert takes vision: you have to be able to see past dryness
to the deluge so when rain does come, often in the form of a sudden, biblical downpour,
you are ready to collect as much rainwater as possible.
Floods are as much a part of this
place as drought. As dry as the desert appears
much of the year, its shape is dominated by the running of water. Since it’s
dry most of the time, the soil doesn't seem to know what to do with water when
it does come and storm scars cut deep and last for years.
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| Horses crossing an arroyo |
Arroyos are the great gutters of
this desert: rivulets lead to small gullies and then larger ones, which empty
into the deep arroyos that, a few times a year, I’m told, flow in white caps
down to the Galisteo River. Knowing the arroyos as deep, dry scars, I found it
hard to fathom them full of water, until I witnessed an August flash flood.
One minute it was sunny, then it
was a bit overcast, then rain was coming down in buckets. Rain is rare enough
here to warrant stopping what you're doing to go watch it from the porch. But
this time my porch was already soaked. This storm was something different. The
rain was falling sideways and upside down, the wind-driven drops pelting so
hard that when they hit they bounced back up towards the sky.
I sloshed upstream, towards the spot I'd always planned on heading in the event of a storm like this: a spillway of red sandstone evidently sculpted by past floods less than a quarter mile from my house. The violent current was knee deep and frothy brown, like a melted chocolate shake – the good kind, thick with cream – and nearly as cold.
Following the roaring, sloshing river between the high arroyo banks, water borne debris – sticks and rocks and I hoped not rattlesnakes– pelted my submerged feet and wrapped around my legs and I was glad for the long pants, though they were soaked and filthy. I rounded a few bends in the river and arrived to an incredible scene: raging water had transformed the usually dusty dry place and save for the familiar rocks crowning the falls, I hardly recognized it.
Rain was
pouring, thunder was rumbling, lightning was clapping and the waterfall was
glorious, falling like rushing chocolate and churning madly at my feet. A flood in the desert! I had to see it to believe it.
In a one-inch rainstorm, a
thousand square foot roof will catch 650 gallons of water. In that one
spectacular summer storm – which loosed more rain than in the previous nine
months combined – my roof collected enough water to last me through most of the
winter. And that’s not even as wet as it gets out here. Heading west from my house across
BLM land, I can hike to the Galisteo Dam, a massive flood control dam built in
1965 to hold back 100-year floods. As far as I know, they've never come, but
there’s still time.
Standing at the top, on the
edge of the dam, among bright red and pure white sandstone slabs – the red
dotted with chartreuse lichen, the white decorated with delicate fossils of
frozen grass – I finally saw the need for the dam: the land below is
rippled by giant flood waves.
Only from this vantage, high above
the desert, could I begin to grasp the vast expanse of time preserved here.
Millions of years ago, this landscape was underwater, drowned beneath an inland
shallow sea. Much later the Cerrillos Hills and Ortiz Mountains littered the
ground with glittering shards of volcanic rock.
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| Cerrillos Hills Summit |
The rains will always come again,
but there’s no telling when. In our lifetimes the deserts are desertifying:
trending drier and drier, with longer and longer waits between deluges. How dry
is too dry? How long is too long? Better to learn the weight of water, before
those miraculously free flowing taps run dry.
