Along the Way

long the Way From Mastodons to Javelinas, the Cycle Goes On Bringing Change ... and Hope

The four-inch-long bass floated in the crystalline water above the burbling caldron of sand. Effortlessly, the scaled invader held its position as the water, which probably last saw daylight before the mammoths died, broiled up through the coarse, clean sand in the bottom of Shea Springs. Thousands of years ago, the water now gushing from the spring in an abandoned meander of the Verde River fell on a lush landscape, populated by giant sloths and scattered bands of humans wielding stone-tipped spears. The rainwater ran through stream courses filled with strange fish with great humps, protruding lips, and iridescent scales.

Soaking in, it trickled downward to underground layers of ancient lava. The water followed the seam of lava until it struck the surface once again near Tuzigoot National Monument. Now it bubbled into the sunlight of an altered world, filling a small pond shaded by an alligator juniper and rimmed with emerald green watercress and reeds.

Sitting in the shade of the juniper and listening to the soothing sound of the stream, I watched that ancient rainwater complete its cycle. It swirled into the pond, caressed the tiny bass, brimmed over a barrier of rocks, flowed into Tavasci Marsh, and gurgled on down to the Verde River.

How utterly things had changed in this past cycle. The mastodons and saber-toothed tigers were replaced by javelinas and coyotes. The great trees that once lined the swollen rivers had been supplanted by thorned mesquite and cottonwoods. The Indians who planted their corn and beans in the bottoms and watched the birds soar over the marsh from their brooding fortress on the hill had given way to suburban escapees like me.

But the water didn't care. It simply welled from the Earth, sounding precisely as it had the last time it escaped from this spring, which has persisted from one outlet or another for perhaps four million years.

I found the thought reassuring in the midst of cycles of my own. A year ago, I staggered away from a newspaper job with a retirement plan to takeup free-lancing. Now I felt like an oarless dory in the rapids of the Grand Canyon. Nonetheless, the water soothed me.

I watched the bass, waiting for minnows or other unwary prey to swim within its gulp. Human beings imported bass to Arizona decades ago. The hungry bass, trout, catfish, and carp helped finish off native fish already devastated by the effects of dams and plunging water tables. Lordly predators like the six-foot-long squawfish and humble bottom feeders like the humpback sucker all dwindled toward extinction, hanging on only in isolated tributaries.

For instance, the last time this water made the circuit it nourished several species of freshwater snails. Once these snails crept along the shore of a vast lake that filled most of what is now the Verde Valley. As the climate dried and drainage systems changed, the snails developed into distinct subspecies. Some specialized in springs, evolving a foot whose strength was matched perfectly to the flow of that spring. They clung to sticks and stones and watercress while grazing on microscopic diatoms. The snails, in their turn, served as food for assorted native fish.

One of those Ice Age relics survived in Shea Springs until recently, according to Jerry Landye, a snail expert at the state fish hatchery at nearby Page Springs. He found a few snails in the spring in 1973. But they'd vanished by the time he returned two years later.

I lay on my belly and studied the stems of the watercress, hoping to find some sign of a snail.

Nothing.

Initially, the loss of the snail saddened me. But sitting there beside the spring, watching the plucky bass weave in and out among the stems of the watercress, I couldn't sustain my melancholy.After a time, I began feeling hopeful.

The camels of the Pleistocene surrendered to extinction, but the remarkable javelinas adapted so well they eat rose bushes in Prescott backyards. The stately trees that once filled the valley have retreated to higher elevations, but the cottonwoods still lure brilliantly colored birds from the tropics. The Sinagua went elsewhere, but here sit I.

As the cicadas stirred to life in the limbs of a nearby cottonwood, I decided that everything will work out, so long as somewhere along this seam of the Earth the rainwater of ages past still bubbles to the surface, brimming with possibility.