I’ve always liked the way a story gets spun — the way people with a belly and a heart for words veer toward one topic or another or a whole handful of them in a single piece of writing.

For reasons beyond my understanding, I lean toward themes of water and fire. Elemental things that, like words, can bend and twist in any direction. Things that move and jump and curl and sleep.

Writers I admire go down roads of sadness and pain, or redemption and healing. The abstractions of human experience and emotion.

This story, though, is about finding water. It is for now, anyway.

I don’t like Sedona on principle — the crowds of tourists, the traffic, the idea of forced spirituality. In some ways, it feels like a curio shop set in scenic wonder. But the water near and there makes me fonder of the place than I care to admit.

It is the place I find when the desert dries my spirit.

One summer, I helped lead a group of hikers along the Bell Trail. It was my first time there — as it was for so many of us that day — and by the time...