OUR STATE OF WATER

OUR STATE

Morning light illuminates the Navajo Nation's Grand Falls as it flows strongly with runoff from monsoon storms. The site's nickname, "Chocolate Falls," is inspired by the muddy water of the Little Colorado River.

IT BEGINS NOT LONG INTO the clear sky of morning: a puff of bone-white, then another, and another. By noon, the sky over the desert towers like Greek columns. Electrical violence wells toward the stratosphere. Millions of tons of water vapor rush upward at a hundred miles an hour or more, blossoming into cauliflower heads and anvils. If you stop to watch a cumulonimbus cloud on the back of a summer monsoon storm, you'll notice it is boiling, its shape changing, swirling, skirts spinning. As you stand on the ground, looking up 60,000 feet, more than 11 miles high, you can see bulges the size of mountains splitting, taking form. The sky grows, fills. Shade falls across you, hot white light turned soft and bruised. Your eyes barely uncrease. Wait for it, then. The scent will come. It may take an hour, or it may take days. Take note the moment it arrives: the impossible perfume of water.

Counting the ways water exists in Arizona would require volumes. In a much older form than the transience of clouds, it has been waiting in the Galiuro Mountains, a couple of ranges northeast of Tucson, for 15,000 years, its isotopes dated to the Pleistocene, when Arizona was inundated by rains and statewide snows. This was when our aquifers filled. Glaciers bloomed in the San Francisco Peaks above Flagstaff, one esti-mated to have been 4 miles long. The "snow bowl" between the summits of Agassiz and Humphreys peaks is not the result of a volcanic explosion, as it might appear, but of the scour of ice thousands of feet thick. Back then, we were sitting on a sea of fresh water that has gradually dribbled, flowed and been pumped down. While the Galiuros were never glaciated, they were much wetter during the ice age. Their water remains because the geologic core of the range dips gently, rather than steeply, forming pans and planes inside the rock, places for water to hide.

Sycamores and cottonwoods with moisture-fat leaves hang over a wash bottom cobbled from floods. Around 8 in the evening at the blazing height of July on the flanks of the Galiuros, if you've picked the right date and place, you will find yourself in a gallery of fireflies and the trill of canyon treefrogs. It's one of the few places in the Southwest where you might happen upon fireflies, drawn by heat and humidity in the air, the finest of mist pumped out of riparian leaves. Turtles small enough to fit in your palm come out from under logs as a thin, clear stream that was not here the day before babbles and sings, the Earth opening its mouth, letting out ancient water.

Although it is the same trio of atoms, this element comes in varieties, discrete forms you can spot from a mile away. In dry, landlocked country, water is not awash in itself, no unthinkable volume of an ocean or languid rivers drifting through cities with bridges half a mile long. What you find in arid country tells its own precise story, summer rains cold as ice pounding against hot, sparsely vegetated ground and building into flash floods; winter fog sitting on the Four Peaks like a blanket; saguaros ringing the slopes below and fattening like accordions. Every form counts. Maybe you remember Big Surf when it was new in Phoenix in the early 1970s: imported sand as hot as smoking oil on your bare feet, water as blue as the sky. Against the backdrop of Phoenix, people swam and floated on awk-ward blow-up pads on a man-made, 400 million-gallon lagoon with a wave-making device at one end, invented and built by an engineer whose wife missed living by the sea. Water changes whatever it touches. It ignites the world between clouds and groundwater. Five years after Big Surf was built, construction began on the Central Arizona Project, running a portion of the Colorado River like a bloodline more than 300 miles into the Arizona interior. It took 20 years to reach the endpoint: blasting and chopping through mountain ranges; laying down canals, aqueducts and pumps; feeding through Phoenix and into Tucson; pouring water into our open mouths.

I've heard along crashing shorelines, "Never turn your back on the sea." Same here. Never turn your back on water.

In the first canals of Central Arizona, built more than a thousand years ago, imagine Hohokam children jumping in and swimming from head gate to head gate. Gleaming curves flowed between mounds and ball courts as apportions of the Salt and Gila rivers ran tepid and clear to lines of cotton and corn. People left footprints in mud a thousand years ago, splashing through fields, a silvery mess of light and ripples that must have felt like all the wealth in the world.

In high school, sitting through state history, you might have learned that "Arizona" comes from "Arid Zone," believed to have been called that on Spanish maps: Zona Arida. That's not likely, however. More probable, the Spanish name was Arizonac, which may have come from an O'odham term, ali şonak, meaning "small spring." Either way, the state is defined both by water's absence and by its presence.

You could say the same anywhere, of course. This is the most precious substance we deal with. Nothing lives without it, and reduction makes it stand out like a spark, like a flame. You feel the pinch, the friction, the parched throat of drought. Drinking a glass of it, you feel the coolness pouring into your body as if you were a leather bag - a pleasure not the same in greener places.When you spill it on the ground, you stop for a moment to watch it spread, teardrops absorbing each other.

When it rains, your face tilts up.

It's important to taste the water. If it's questionable, if you think it might make you sick, such as scooped from a cattle trough, at least touch it to your lips. Let your body recognize the molecular makeup, the unique isotopes of geology that it flows through. Rain gathered on rock is fair game. Get on your hands and knees and drink. The best are water pockets and tinajas. A water pocket is a slightly deeper version of a kissing pool. These are depressions, often rounded, where rainwater or snowmelt gathers atop lenses of sandstone. Tinajas are much larger, and they tend to be found in lower desert ranges, tanks and tubs eroded by floodwaters in steep, rocky canyons, their vaulted depths measuring in the thousands of gallons. Come to the edge and look in closely, and you will see the popcorn hopping of tinyseed shrimp, obsidian beads of water beetles, and filter-feeding fairy shrimp cruising like sharks.

A small pool of water mirrors surrounding rocks in the Tinajas Altas Mountains of Southwestern Arizona. The range is named for its natural pools, or tinajas; however, the extremely arid nature of these mountains makes water a rare sight.

When you drink it, you are tasting wherever it's been. This is a way to know a place. Water's fingers do not stop search-ing, each O and each of the two H's linked to every molecule around them, like a form-shifting ghost that moves everywhere. In Phoenix, from the tap, it can taste a little green, shipped through wastewater treatment plants, pulled from shrinking reservoirs, pumped from underground, added to long-traveled Colorado River water that has been set in lines across the des-ert. It feels like you're drinking the whole of the Southwest. At the Grand Canyon, where the North Rim and South Rim visi-tors centers are fed from a single gushing spring, it's important to fill at least a bottle or two from a park spigot. It tastes like polished limestone.

Springs coming out of Navajo Sandstone in the northeastern third of the state are more brightly flavored, and you might call them the cleanest of all: stored in quartz-grained bedrock, fil-tered through tiny rounded crystals cemented together, spaces between them one-tenth the width of a hair. Billions of gallons move slowly underground, inside the sandstone, reaching cracks or alcoves to come out in drips and dribbles. In other cases it's mined, tapped or given over to slurry pipes for coal, or it's pumped to golf courses, towns, resorts and metal water towers painted white or silver to keep off the sun, most bear-ing black lettering such as "Tuba City," "Kaibito" or "Home of the Eagles." It's best from the source, though. Hold an empty bottle beneath a dripping seep in the back of a shaded clam-shell of Navajo Sandstone, and listen to the cadence, rain from inside the Earth tapping higher and higher notes.

If you don't turn your back to water, if you keep your eye on it, you'll notice springs have been drying on the Navajo Nation and below the Hopi mesas. Remembered for centuries, some are turning to powdery creases and dead wires of maidenhair ferns. People talk about the taste of salt and evaporated min-erals, wells going down to dregs, arsenic levels three to four times the legal limits. Infrastructure for moving water to com-munities and homes is antiquated and, in many cases, not in place. About one in three households on Navajo and Hopi lands does not have running water, meaning it comes in buckets and jugs. Families drive to wells and fill up tanks on flatbeds, Water's fingers do not stop searching, each O and each of the two H's linked to every molecule around them, like a form-shifting ghost that moves everywhere. And hands don't get washed as often, dishes and clothes not as clean. This has played out in COVID-19 numbers, access to hygiene being a major factor. The Navajo Nation became one of the most deadly hot spots in the country, a generation of elders wiped thin.

You might think thirst and drowning are the only ways water, or the lack of it, can kill. Lack of funding to move it, and to make sure it's clean, kills just as efficiently.

You'VE BEEN TO ANTELOPE CANYON, outside of Page, or at least glanced down its winding gullet. Slivers of light fall through shadows the shape of moving, roaring water even when nothing is moving or roaring. Water has left its name in the earth, carved into rock. As you walk through, let your fingers graze the walls. The rock is as fashioned as ceramic. The science is called fluvial geomorphology, the study of how water changes the surface of the Earth. Shapes and stones left behind are called bedforms and aquafacts, every solid object rounded, smooth and organized, as if water were a librarian arranging everything onto shelves.

Across Arizona, there are hundreds more slots like Antelope, thousands if you count each narrow declivity, some as thin as a hand on edge, some wide enough you can sashay back and forth from wall to wall. Splashing in the waters of the Paria River, you feel like you're at play in a temple. Walk the wild banks of the Hassayampa River after a thunderhead blowout, and you'll see train wrecks of flood debris, 40-foot-tall trees crumpled into each other, the landscape rewritten. The ground both resists and gives way.

All of Arizona is a drainage system aiming for the Gulf of California. Canyons are named without end: Aravaipa, Tsegi, Sycamore. Washes are the same: Tom Mix, Chinle, Big and Little Lithodendron. They get bigger and bigger: the grainy outcrops of the Gila Box in Southeastern Arizona, or the Verde River swirling under sun-bright cliffs as if the rock of Central Arizona were made of ivory. The Colorado River eats the Grand Canyon, and the Salt River is dressed in gorges through San Carlos Apache and White Mountain Apache land.

How would you begin naming all the ways water shows itself? Streaked black seeps on bare rock and lightning-shaped chasms. Summer flash floods drowning city intersections. Dewdrops beaded at the tips of cholla needles. This is the old god of the desert, the plumed serpent, the well of Tlaloc deep underground. Nothing here is named without water. Sprin-klers pop on at midnight. A cold glass with ice cubes sweats a circle onto the table. First raindrops pluck the ground, freck-ling rocks and sidewalks. Thunderheads rise like titans. Kachi-nas soar over the Peaks. Wherever it appears, you can't help but stare. Reach out, touch your fingers to it, bring it to your lips. This is what allows everything to live.