Stormy Chasm

Sycamore Creek Roils as Rainwater Propels Flash Floods Through a Remote Canyon

On this day, the monsoon stood over the desert as if it were about to eat the place. Up there: cumulonimbus boiling to 30,000 feet, spreading anvil heads against the troposphere, stirring lightning and hail inside, and wind a couple hundred miles per hour. Down here: hot sunlight on the desert, a point from which to observe clouds fighting it out along the higher rims of central Arizona. Every day they come. All of August and September, rising from the mountains and pushing against the wall of heat over the Sonoran Desert. A low-level jet stream crosses the continent with the precision of dates on a calendar, importing warm, moist airfrom the Gulf of Mexico. It is called the wet tongue. And every day the clouds adjourn, hissing and gasping. On the summer days when the sky finally opens, that is when the rains will come to the desert in earnest.

Rain came as if someone had knifed the clouds. It came in the sunshine and spattered in obscenely fat drops onto the rocks.

[ABOVE, LEFT TO RIGHT] Afternoon thunderheads begin to build over Mount Ord, about 50 miles northeast of Phoenix in the Mazatzal Mountains, signaling that monsoon rains - the annual summer rite of passage are imminent. Saguaros bask in the early-morning light in Sycamore Canyon below Mount Ord. By midday, the clouds have gathered, sending a downpour into the canyon and creating a flash flood along Sycamore Creek.

[RIGHT] Muddy tracks caused by rainfall are always a rare sight on the desert.

Temperatures made records. The far-off storms pressed with greater weight each day until it was unbearable - until people actually felt the pressure from the east and nearly had to lean into it. Life down here was begging for the storms to come, but the rocks were still hot, still shaking down the sky with mirages and vibrating chords of air.

Nicole Drake guided me to the canyon. Doing master's degree work at Arizona State University, she was a stream ecologist who doubled as a backcountry horse packer, Dutch-oven chef and barrel racer, skilled at sawing the horns off bulls. One day she had found the place by walking up Sycamore Creek, with a pack of specimen bottles and notes. She walked farther than she had to, up the creek to where the bedrock began to show, rising more and exposed until it made the whole creek bed. She came to a canyon filled with water and did not turn back to tell anyone. She removed her clothes that day and swam in her field of study.

We parked on the highway's edge, where the state patrol later slapped a bright orange right-of-way/will-be-towed sticker on my windshield. We came down through the gritty beer cans and twisted bits of grill plates that had found their way off the highway. From there we picked our way down through heaps of granite boulders and catclaw acacias, prickly pears and fat, green agaves. Saguaro cacti skulked around the canyon rims.

She told me that it isn't a known canyon. How could people know of this spot a halfmile below the highway but out of sight, where no ranch hands venture because a cow would have snapped its legs trying to walk into it? This sweet, short piece of canyon, for just a mile or so, fills with Sycamore Creek-one of several Sycamore Creeks in the state-which travels hard rock then drains to the open desert floor. The canyon is built of elegant, hyperbolic waterways left empty. Chambers and smoothed passages lower themselves to where one band of water slips and ricochets into the bottom of "Big White Canyon."

Big White Canyon is Nicole's name for the place. Fitting. I had just come from guiding weeklong trips on the Green River in Utah. I'd come from finding fresh mountain lion prints at Bowknot Bend and cooking, washing dishes, lighting lanterns, sleeping in the sand. From a place of redbed formations and an occasional plant, I arrived at salt-and-pepper granite in the lush Sonoran Desert. Called an arboreal desert, the Sonoran is forested with paloverde, ironwood, cottonwood and mesquite trees and saguaro and tree cholla cacti. Its ground cover, occasionally more thick than a rain forest's, proved more painful to wade throughstudded, spiked and barbed. Desert plants either razor-blade-edged or poisonous. It is a good place to know where to step and where to draw back. We came through this to the water, hands out to help each other down the rocks.

We stowed gear above the creek and dove into the water. Nicole took me upcanyon, following composed pools and long, curved streamers where the water shimmers blue only where it's deepest, then black in holes where crayfish prowled. We skirted rocks smooth as eggshells.

"I love the sound of bare feet on granite," she told me, slapping her feet as she padded along rock above the creek. We'd come to a place rounded out, sloped downward, full of chambers and scooped passageways where bits of year-old flood debris sat undisturbed. Crayfish swam in the water. With a quick count, I came up with 57 in one pool. Floods removed most wandering leaves, branches and sand so that trout - eaters of crayfish-could not survive here. Besides, the water was far too warm for trout. The raccoons would come to grab the small-brained, hard-shelled crayfish with their fingers, but otherwise Big White Canyon was ruled by those crustaceans. They jetted backward as we came through, bouncing off our ankles like stray shooting stars.

I went down into the water with a stick and prodded at them, watching how they scooped water with their tails and propelled themselves far from me and my stick. Nicole pointed out a smoothly rounded channel in the rock she called "the bed." Indeed, as I later followed crayfish, I glanced up to find her asleep in there, lying face-down along the axis of the tube like a butterfly crosssectioned out of its cocoon.

I went on with the crayfish, haunting them back to their cracks and cavities. Their dull eyes and sweeping antennae watched from the dark. The clouds had come while I wasn't looking, while I was getting my thumbs pinched for placing crayfish on dry rocks to see if they knew the way back to water-which they did. The clouds turned under themselves, roving toward the desert. A third of Arizona, carved off the southwest side, consists of low desert. Elevations, basically in the hundreds of feet, are surrounded by Jericho walls of mountains rising first to 7,000 feet and then to 11,000 and 12,000. The storms gather and crowd these final mountain edges at the Pinal Mountains, the Aquarius Mountains, the Mazatzals and the Nantac Rim. Big White Canyon lies just beyond the border of this higher country, only miles from the impres-sive pressure ridge between desert and mountain. The first place hit when the storms finally break in will be Sycamore Creek.

Rain came as if someone had knifed the clouds. It came in the sunshine and spat-tered in obscenely fat drops onto the rocks. I looked up from the crayfish. Nicole yawned out of "the bed." The clouds fell off the mountainside and into the desert, coming down the sink of Sycamore Creek. The shadow hit us. Tonight there would be floods in Phoenix, streets 3 feet under as arroyos run onto asphalt, sending water nowhere in particular. The water must always go somewhere, following the most rudimentary instinct, taking out any road and any house on the way. The truest of anything, water will run.

It began here. We scrambled downcanyon. The creek rose quickly. We pushed and swam through slots, tumbling over falls into the holes below. The water turned dark and swift. Mud swept out of the desert, adding to the liquid. Lightning came down. The side-by-side flashes and thunder confused my eardrums. Lightning forked inside the canyon, touching ground each time. With each bolt, the torrential deluge increased, thick as wood.

Places dry since April were smacked with water in broad daylight. The water turns the desert over. Standing there, you would be shocked to watch paloverde trees uproot and join the procession. By morning, sand would have slid into place, the flood gone as If it had meant nothing by it. Barricades would be up on roads in Phoenix, pointing cars away from lakes formed overnight. There was a time Nicole had me over for dinner. She was rooming in an expensive home in the desert north of Phoenix. She is the type who prepares many courses for a meal, everything from original ingredients. We ate on the back porch. It was summer. Neither of us wore shoes.

From here on the road we could see the process. The desert was being taken by a congress of low, dark clouds.

A monsoon storm had been riding down from the mountains, and, with a light breeze, we could suddenly smell it: the aroma of wetted creosote, a sharp medicinal scent lifted into the desert air by a night's rain. It was a brothy smell of acids and waxes from the sticky creosote leaves. The storm, still at the horizon, was visible only for half-seconds of lightning. In the brief backlighting, shown from the inside-out, the curve of clouds appeared as gentle and round as the skin on your shoulder. It swallowed its own thunder. We stopped eating when we smelled the creosote. We looked north, toward the swift flashes of lightning. Even in the dark, we knew what was there, what would be coming.

Now, at Sycamore Creek, so close to the source of water and right under the foot of the storm, it tumbled us end-over-end. There were no gaps between thunderclaps, and the air continuously roared. We had to shout. Some lightning bolts came closer than others as we swam out the long channels. The sky sounded like a block of marble split with a sledge. Cracked clean in half. The air smelled of burnt powder. We were pushed out to the far end of the canyon, where we groped into the rocks and huddled there.

As Nicole watched through curtains of water, she complained of not having proper equipment. I mentioned that next time she could tie specimen bottles to her wrist so that when they found her body in the floodplain, samples would remain intact. She did not answer; or if she did, thunder stole her voice. We climbed out through our gap to the highway.

Rivulets sluiced off our bodies to the cracks of the car seat. Our matted hair ran wild in our faces. We drove out, playing a country music station too loud, windows down because we were already soaked. From here on the road we could see the process. The desert was being taken by a congress of low, dark clouds. Every time we crossed a bridge above a creek bed, she asked, "Is it running?" "Yes," I said. "Turbid?" "Yes."

We returned to the canyon the next day for the afternoon storm. We brought packs, setting camp in the canyon itself. Nicole had her proper equipment. This time the flood came at night. We could hear it beyond the tent, the slick hiss of rising water and the grind of rocks knocking against one another, bounding downcanyon.

In the morning, she was waist-deep in the dark creek, taking measurements. She wrote the information in the back of a paperback she had brought. It was a copy of one of Edward Abbey's desert books. On shore I looked through her bottles and her notes. I read her findings on Sycamore Creek, water speeds and whatnot, and I flipped to an inside page.

Abbey had written: "Stay out of there. Don't go. Stay home and read a good book, this one for example. The Great American Desert is an awful place. People get hurt, get sick, get lost out there. Even if you survive, which is not certain, you will have a miserable time. The desert is for movies and God-intoxicated mystics, not for family recreation."

I closed the book and waited for the floodwaters to drop. AH

The LIFE AND DEATH of Sally Brand FICTION PART 1 A Wild Woman of the West is WANTED for the Murder of Riley Bing

The killing of Riley Bing was entirely personal. I ought to know, on account of it was me that pulled the trigger. I'm not one bit ashamed of it, either. He was lower than a burro tick and deserved what he got. The thing that surprised me was that my itty-bitty derringer laid him out as flat as it did. But I paid a big price for that day. It put me on the run for four years and separated me from my most prized possessions on this Earth-my twin girls, Nell and Jane. Well, my days of outlawing are ending. Right below this hill where I'm setting is my farm, Six Springs. It's called that for the beautiful water flowing through the ground down there. I tell you, looking at Babocomari River, the house sitting so peaceful in the grass valley, why, it puts a bump in my throat the size of a strongbox. But I can't afford to get worked up, 'cause what I'm fixin' to arrange is my own death. Yes, siree. I'm going to convince the whole blame world I'm toes-up dead. If I pull this off, it'll be my greatest performance. My name is Lila Randall, although now most folks call me Sally Brand-but that comes later. Actually, my birth name is Lila Wiggins. But when I stepped onto the stage for the first time in