Review by Jeanne Englert
Outdoors – May 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
The Secret Knowledge of Water
By Craig Childs
Published in 2001 by Little, Brown and Company
ISBN 1-57061-159-9
I DON’T EVEN LIKE books by nature writers, especially by women, who always seem to be agonizing over some ineffable female complaint more suitable for a telephone chat or coffee klatch, but I was so engrossed in The Secret Knowledge of Water I could not bear to put it down.
When he’s not holed up in his Gunnison Country cabin with its solar-powered electricity but no inside plumbing, the book’s author, Craig Childs, tramps around the desert, descending into slot canyons or scaling cliffs with nothing but his fingers to anchor him to the wall.
When his tale begins, he’s working for the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge in southwest Arizona, near the Mexican border, searching for tinajas — Spanish for “earthen jars” — secret natural water holes of water found tucked amongst the crags and chasms of the desert mountain ranges he traverses. These, when full (which is always a temporary condition) teem with the triops shrimp as well as clam and dainty, ethereal fairy shrimps.
AS HE MAPS THE TINAJAS, following routes first established by Jesuit missionary Father Eusubio Kino in 1702 and the faint traces of trails made by prehistoric denizens of the salado culture, Childs ponders the mystery of how these creatures originally got across the burning sands to inhabit these isolated water holes.
Their astonishing survival mechanism defies comprehension. Their eggs or cysts have absolutely no metabolism. Zilch. As the author says, “They are as dead as rocks. If a Mars lander were to be given a scoop of dust from a dry water hole and allowed to run all of the spores and shrimp eggs and desiccated adults of various species through its battery of life-finding tests, it would conclude that no life was ever present.”
In a cosmic flash, I knew this was how life had gotten to our planet, in cysts such as these travelling through the emptiness of space by hitching a ride in comet tails.
But Childs does not dwell long upon such musings. Instead he carries the reader with him on his water treks as if we were stuffed into a sidepocket of his pack. We are there when he and his equally foolhardy climbing partner don wet suits and penetrate the innards of one of the waterfalls that burst from holes in the Grand Canyon walls, bringing a whole new meaning to exploring the “interior” of the Grand Canyon.
We explore with him a hidden desert oasis in the Pajarito Wilderness in southeastern Arizona, much like Cave Canyon, another bird watchers’ unexpected paradise I once visited. I remembered how I had cursed my friend who had told us about this place just before we found its hidden entrance, because the stark, barren Sonoran desert on the eastern flank of the Chiricahua mountains gives not even a clue to the existence of this ecological oddity. It’s a microclimate, where alders and other water-loving trees line the creek, creating a haven for such rare birdwatcher delights as the red flash of the elegant trogon, a relative of the Guatemalan quetzal.
CRAIG ALSO TAKES us with him when he gets trapped on a rock in a narrow slot canyon during what he calls a “Fear of the Lord flood.” The details of his attempt to extricate himself from this life- threatening predicament, which he has deliberately gotten himself into in order to witness the flood, gives us a glimpse into the peculiar mindset of the writer.
Trapped on the rock, unable to find a toehold, Childs tries to kick himself free, but finds his waist pack has wedged him in. Then something pops in his shoulder, a muscle pulled too far. In pain, he struggles to free his pack, but his hand loses its grip on the strap. The pack falls, he sees it sail, straps swinging out, landing, he writes, “in the pool below like a sack of laundry.”
“My notes.
“That is all I thought. My notes.”
Yep. There’s a writer for you: a damned fool, crazed, obsessed spinner of tales, interwoven with scientific fact, adventures, and explorations best experienced, by one of my age and creaky knees, while ensconced in an armchair, popping open another Cold One.
— Jeanne W. Englert