A young man points south toward the only cloud floating in a deep blue October sky. We are part of a group of six with reservations to hike through Upper Antelope Canyon, east of Page, Arizona. We know that cloud. We call it El Nubé. El Nubé comes to the desert valley we call home, softly, innocently. We are not fooled. It can change quickly, and havoc results. 

“If it moves over there,” our guide from Navajo Country says, making a quarter-turn to his right, “a flood will come.” The innocent cloud we call El Nubé expands as it fills with water. It grows a white tail and turns gray, and into a killer. 

We ask the young man, whose name is Robert, how he knows that the fate of French tourists killed when they were flushed by a massive flood into this same canyon a decade before will not be our fate. 

He says he has always watched that cloud and that the People know. He means his “People” the Diné, or Navajo, at home in the Four Corners. 

In the fall, where we live, El Nubé has been known to drop through the gray, quilt-like ceiling after soft, female...