A SPLASH OF NATURE

ESSAYS BY RUTH RUDNER, LAWRENCE W. CHEEK AND KELLY VAUGHN The bottom tier of a waterfall spills into a deep pool in a rugged section of West Clear Creek, east of Camp Verde. Much of the creek is protected by a 13,600-acre wilderness area.

LITTLE COLORADO RIVER

RIVERS ARE BORN SMALL. Their headwaters formed by springs and snowmelt and the topography of mountains, they carve their place on Earth. Merging with other streams, expanding, turning back on themselves, racing forward, plunging down falls, dancing through rapids and riffles and ripples, hiding beneath mud and rock, growing and waning according to the seasons, rivers are always on their way from one place to another. The time frame is different, but so are we. Does this make us kin? Does the shared trajectory come from our own evolution out of water? Or is that just how life works?

The Little Colorado River rises as two streams not far from each other on Mount Baldy in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests. From their beginnings at elevations of almost 10,000 feet, the West Fork and East Fork meander downhill, through forests and across meadows, taking their own time to merge into a single stream, the Little Colorado, near the town of Greer.

Both forks offer tantalizing beginnings for a river headed for the big time, the Colorado River, the Gulf of California. Almost headed for the Gulf of California. Dams and diversions along its way cause the Colorado to peter out before the Gulf, which strikes me as an inappropriate ending for a river capable of carving the Grand Canyon. In recent years, however, several American and Mexican nonprofits have been working to revive a good swath of the delta. With the planting of native trees and the return of some native species, it becomes possible to imagine at least a modicum of a once-magnificent ecosystem.

This, however, is not what I think about as I sit at a shady bend on the East Fork of the Little Colorado, dawdling, dreaming, cooling my feet on a long hike, watching the play of water and light over streambed rocks, watching edges of ripples pick up edges of sun, musing about the shapes and colors of rocks beneath the surface. While there may be moments when I ponder kinship with all things wild, in actual fact, I probably rarely think. Or are thinking and watching the same thing? The stream's flowing water, gone as I watch it, is perhaps simply a fluid thought. I will never again see the moment of water I have just seen. Here and gone, it offers me nothing I can hold. Except memory. And even memory goes as I sit at stream's edge, staring into water and light.

Being present to a mountain stream flowing full and insistent down the mountain is an experience of the Earth's abundance. Framed by lush meadows and healthy forests, watching a stream dancing in sun, it is easy to imagine water is everywhere. But, in fact, fresh water makes up only 3 percent of the water on Earth's surface - and about two-thirds of Earth's fresh water is ice, while much of the remainder is locked underground. The great ice sheets and glaciers are melting at a rapid pace, but those figures are still enough to show me that the stream bank where I sit on Mount Baldy or all those others where I've idled away a few hours, or At sunset, pastel-colored clouds reflect in the East Fork of the Little Colorado River near the White Mountains town of Greer. This fork, which is about 6 miles long, joins the West Fork near Greer to form the Little Colorado's main course.

JOEL HAZELTON

camped (at appropriate distance, of course), or the streams I've jumped into after a dusty horseback ride are rare. A luxury, they are not to be taken for granted.

I love all mountain streams, but beyond their beauty, the two forks on Mount Baldy intrigue me because they form the Little Colorado. The beginnings of rivers open the imagination to all of the possibilities flowing water represents: the sense that anything is possible as the river runs, incorporates other streams, grows, journeys across its necessary landscapes. As I sit at the bend, the world is contained. Nothing exists apart from the stream, the meadow, the forest, the curious jay or squirrel or bear or butterfly. In the time I remain by the stream, it is all the world that is necessary.

Or not. Because Mount Baldy's streams intrigue me with what they become, I have to guard against thinking about the whole while looking at the moment. At my bend in the stream, I am not far below the source, the birth of a stream, the beginning of a river. What I see or, perhaps more accurately, imagine is the life held in its flow, its various mergings, its journey, the possibilities it offers of a nature allowed its perfection.

Part of that life is the stirring of various senses that watching moving water evokes. There is the sense of adventure that a thought of following any stream its entire way offers. And the sense of luxury that jumping into a stream at the end of a long, dusty day on a trail provides. The most vibrant, though, both here in the Mount Baldy Wilderness and in every other wild place, is the sense of wildness that comes from watching a wolf drinking at stream's edge, or watching elk cross or beavers play. I know firsthand the quality of wildness that comes from sighting a curious bear watching the odd human in the creek.

The multiple streams entering the Little Colorado as it travels from the White Mountains, through the Painted Desert and the Navajo Nation, to its confluence with the Colorado in the Grand Canyon cannot prevent it becoming ephemeral for much of its run virtual mud flats, rather than flowing water, until spring runoff or flash floods or summer monsoon storms replenish it. Year-round flow is guaranteed only near its headwaters and then again in itslower reaches, as it approaches the confluence. Along the way, though, it presents a drama that more than makes up for its mud flats, its periodic lethargy. When there is water enough to flow over them March and April during snowmelt in the White Mountains, or after a heavy rainfall in Eastern Arizona the Navajo Nation's 185-foot Grand Falls, higher than Niagara, rages full and chocolate-colored in a spectacular display of the river's power. (Not to mention an equally spectacular spattering of mud on cameras, clothing, packs, faces and whatever else happens to be exposed. This is not the place to eat a sandwich.) That kind of power is mind-boggling. But so is the beauty downstream, at Cameron, where the Little Colorado craters into one final, brilliant insistence on its own splendor. Carving itself a 3,000-foot-deep narrow gorge, it then paints the water flowing through it an amazing turquoise. The water in the gorge, restored by groundwater springs, is perennial, its color coming from dissolved travertine and limestone.

It is this water that confluences with the Colorado. After a journey of some 340 miles, the Little Colorado offers the bigger river its edge of color. It is as if to say, “This is me. I have traveled a long way to join you on your journey through the Grand Canyon.”

ARROYOS

It IS THE MID-1980s, and Les and Susan Wallach are picnicking on the 3 acres they've bought in the foothills of Tucson's Santa Catalina Mountains, studying the land and imagining the home they might build. Les is an architect and is fierce in his dedication to nesting his buildings in the landscape with the least intrusion possible. The lot is lavishly provisioned with native mesquite, acacia, ironwood and paloverde trees, essentially a desert forest. It offers one intriguing prospect for a site: a rocky arroyo. But Les is a near-native Arizonan and has been steeped in warnings: Stay the hell away from them. Arroyos carry baggage. Flash floods sweep people, cars and houses away. Revolting trash, dangerous critters and unsavory people lurk in them. It's probably illegal to build a house near one. Still, the Wallachs begin to think: What would happen if their house were built across the arroyo?

Skip back to a century earlier in Southern Arizona. The railroad arrives in 1880, but the frontier recedes begrudgingly. Statehood is still three decades away. Arroyos figure frequently in newspaper accounts, graphic reminders of civilization's tenuous grip. Stagecoaches and riders underestimate the depth and power of the churning, chocolatecolored water. Robbers spring out of arroyos to ambush travelers. Assorted desperados employ them as hideouts and escape routes. Bodies turn up in sandy bottoms, bleached in the desiccating sun. Occasionally, something happens in an arroyo to give an underpaid newspaper wretch a spot of fun. This, in 1884: Two drunks in Tucson squabble and then stagger to a convenient arroyo for a duel. One discovers he's forgotten his pistol. The other ungallantly fires anyway, but misses. The two then decide to head off to the local justice of the peace and apply for a permit to kill each other in a legal and honorable manner. The judge pops both into jail to sober up. The arroyo was their one good idea of the day: Stray bullets caused no harm.

There are, in fact, several fine attributes of arroyos. They are literally the desert's arteries, carrying and distributing life-sustaining water from mountains to lowlands. Even though water may surge through an arroyo for only a few hours or days at a time, and on just a few occasions a year, this is enough to foster riparian forests. These in turn shelter and nourish a prodigious variety of desert life: birds, reptiles, mammals, insects. Arroyo water recharges aquifers and periodically augments the few perennial streams and rivers still flowing through the Southwest's deserts. If Territorial Tucsonans had wandered into the mountains west of town, they might have found the place now called King Canyon. Its arroyo features a gallery of prehistoric petroglyphs pecked into boulders. One tableau depicts two human figures, one with arms raised in what looks like a joyous dance. Southwestern petroglyphs tend to be associated with significant places, so let us read the landscape. Just below this rock, the arroyo deepens dramatically, and it looks like there was a waterfall. It wouldn't have been useful for prehistoric irrigation, but it would have been dramatic and beautiful - and a portent of plentiful water in the neighborhood, at least for a time. Dancing would have been in order.

As the frontier elides into the 20th century, the human relationship with arroyos becomes more entangled. And divisive. On one hand, arroyos turn out to be useful in forms the pioneers had not imagined. Silver is discovered in one arroyo in the Phoenix Mountains, and gold in one in Nogales. In Tucson, a golf course completed in 1914 incorporates the gnarly desert riverbeds as intriguing hazards - the approach to the 16th hole, says the Arizona Daily Star, is guarded by a "bad arroyo" and the 11th by a "very bad arroyo." They also become casual trash dumps. In 1905, the Nogales paper reports that "the arroyo which passes through the city and is used as a dumping place for 'everything' ran full and was given such a cleaning as it never received before ... the rain saved the town money and everybody feels better." The reporter unfortunately fails to follow the arroyo downstream to appraise the landscape where "everything" ended up. In Tucson, the arroyo situation becomes complicated. The city has an emerging sense of itself as an authentic desert place, one that will increasingly celebrate its natural environs rather than try to repeal the desert with a stage set of lush lawns and palm trees. Colonia Solana, a ritzy subdivision designed in 1928, incorporates Arroyo Chico as a landscape centerpiece and pedestrian parkway. But the Tucson Basin is jam-packed with arroyos, and when it rains, their behavior ranges from inconvenient to catastrophic. Near midnight on August 9, 1945, a bridge over Julian Wash on Tucson's south side collapses in a monsoon-fueled flood. Five cars plunge into the water, later estimated at 25 feet deep and running at 30 miles per hour. Ten people die. Engineers figure out, belatedly, that the piers of an arroyo bridge have to be tied by a solid concrete link underground, because the water flows so violently that it will chew out single footings. As it did at Julian Wash.

Floods like this are infrequent but stupendous. Some of Tucson's arroyos themselves are stupendous on their own. The normally dry bed of the Rillito - "Little River" in Spanish is 12 miles long and up to 400 feet wide. In October 1983, a freak storm fills the bed with churning water the color of café au lait. It gobbles acre-sized bites of its banks like a dog devours meatloaf. There are, or were, houses on those banks. Medical student Michael CollierBY KELLY VAUGHN

WEST CLEAR CREEK

The OWL ARRIVED IN A HURRY, wings drumming the air. It was that hollow sound, the separation of space with one beat every four seconds, that let us know she was there. Three beats to the tree behind our tent, where she rested. The sky was stuck for a moment between the pink of sunset and the violet of nightfall, so the owl's body was a silhouette against the coming dark. I don't know how long she sat there until she took off again in a rush of wind, heading toward the back wall of the side canyon we camped in, up and into the somewhere out there. But I do know night had come at last as did sleep under a clear summer sky. I remember now that before I closed my eyes, I traced what I thought might be the constellation Draco with the tips of my fingers. I'm still not sure if it was.

We had backpacked into West Clear Creek Canyon earlier that day, a Sunday. It was August, and we hoped the heat and the waning hours of weekend might mean a deserted trailhead. That was foolish. Cars lined both sides of the dirt lot. Our route was teeming with people, despite the hike in a 600-foot vertical descent made more treacherous by its rocky terrain. Handholds are tree branches. Boulders are springboards onto the trail below, and everything is beautiful and violent and a blur when you are slipping, falling, sliding the way I was, with 40-plus pounds on my back for three nights in wilderness. One misstep. Down. Bouncing from one ancient rock to another on the back of my left leg, my tailbone, my wrist. Seconds felt like minutes; then, I was up again. And angry. I vowed never to hike into the canyon again. But then we were to the creek itself, which meant we were to the dozens of people who gathered there at the first big crossing - like it was the pool at Bushwood Country Club.

The pandemic pushed people outside. To space. To the notion that public land can sometimes be a private paradise. But to public land, too many people can be a curse. There is no wrong kind of person for wilderness. But there is a wrong kind of behavior for wilderness. It's the kind that leaves noise and garbage in its wake, the kind that fills the space of a canyon for hours, the kind that won't break down for hundreds of years.

So, we hiked upstream, following a narrow, green trail hundreds of yards to the crossing we'd hoped to find, the quiet one that led to the campsite we'd scouted on a prior trip, more than a year earlier. The farther we walked, the more the crowd noise diminished, and the trail erupted in a crescendo of color. The maidenhair ferns were jade, like the pendant my grandmother wore when I was young. Butter-hued columbines peeked from dense hanging gardens. Golden coneflowers turned toward the sun.

I was slow, my hamstring screaming from the fall. The muscle wanted that crossing, that clear water. It wanted the familiar, frigid therapy of it.

A fallen log punctuates a view of a vibrant riparian area in the West Clear Creek Wilderness. This wilderness area's varied terrain makes it a haven for numerous plant and animal species.

With headwaters at the intersection of Willow and Clover creeks, and its end some 40 miles west at Bull Pen Ranch, West Clear Creek is considered a perennial stream, present even in dry years. The water cuts a serpentine valley into the rock of the Mogollon Rim, nourishing a variety of trees, including cottonwoods, maples, sycamores and at higher elevations within the canyon ponderosa pines and Douglas firs. It is raw wilderness, both in principal and in practice. Congress designated the West Clear Creek Wilderness, protecting the 15,465 acres it encompasses, in 1984.

We spotted our site after hiking for less than a mile. It was tucked away on the other side of the creek and anchored by a massive tree - a maple, maybe. Getting there meant we'd have to wade. Happily, we unstrapped our packs, lifted them over our heads and inched into the pool. One step, two, a dip. The water was up to my chest, and my sternum seemed to want to sew itself even tighter to protect the things beneath it from the cold. Three beats, four beats, five to the other side.

OUR FIRST MORNING at camp broke pink and cool, with no sign of the owl who'd visited us hours earlier. There was no hurry to eat, to get going, to rush. The world had slowed down over the season before thispack.

It moved slower still down there, at the bottom of the canyon.

I remember walking the 200 or so yards back to where our gully ended, tracing the patina on the walls all the way up to blue sky above. Everything echoed, but mostly the chatter of the dozens of birds that flitted in and out of the brush and folded themselves into cracks in the walls. Bees hummed from a hidden hive, and we knew that we likely were the only people left in the canyon, save for maybe just a handful of others who'd spent the night, too, perched somewhere in their own secret camps.

As we ventured back across the creek and upstream again, we found our isolation to be fact as we followed the water until it took a hard turn and the walls seemed to close up. So, we stopped and sat for a while, doing nothing and talking about nothing, really. That is perhaps the greatest benefit of wilderness - the stillness of it, the quiet.

The bats came to camp that evening. As the sun was setting, they emerged from their roost as a massive swarm that dive-bombed insects above the water and buzzed the air above our tent.

Tuesday arrived in much the same way Monday did, and we were up and hiking sooner. Downstream this time, past the place we camped the trip before. Down and down to a pool surrounded by monstrous boulders. A narrow kingsnake slipped through the grass at the edge of the creek, then curled itself up to be recharged by the sun. We were alike in that way, I suppose, and neither of us bothered the other.

On our way back to what I'd started to call “the island” that afternoon, the dog disappeared briefly. I scanned the creek for only seconds before I saw her paddling toward me from 50 yards away, more otter than dog at that point. She put herself to bed before we did that night, just after the bats came to play again.

I'd hoped our winged visitor from Sunday night might return before we left the creek to our memories, before we had to hike back up that 600-foot descent, that rocky obstacle course. So, I waited, fighting the pull to sleep, longing to catch her silhouette on the branch. Instead, only stars. Draco again. Maybe. Half-sleep. Seconds to silence. Then, somewhere down canyon, one beat, the separation of space. Two beats. Three. AH