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The Desert Cries: A Season of Flash Floods in a Dry Land
Flash floods spread violence and fear over the land. And yet, they sometimes bring peace and grace. You will meet survivors whose stories explain such a paradox. Gripping stories of five flash floods that raged in the Grand Canyon and elsewhere in Arizona within a two-month span and killed 22 people.
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First published April 1, 2002
About the author
Craig Childs
33 books423 followersCRAIG CHILDS is a commentator for NPR's Morning Edition, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Men's Journal, Outside, The Sun, and Orion. He has won numerous awards including the 2011 Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award, 2008 Rowell Award for the Art of Adventure, the 2007 Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, and the 2003 Spirit of the West Award for his body of work.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
May 10, 2019
Craig Childs has a poetic and realistic way of describing the movement and behavior of flash floods in desert environments, whether it be through slot canyons, the tributaries of the Colorado River into Grand Canyon, or just across the open desert. This is a series of stories about the flash floods in the desert southwest which happened in the late summer of 1997. I was on the Green River, rafting on a single boat trip with my husband during the week of those floods. The picture on my refrigerator of me joyfully rowing down the Green shows the huge expanse of water behind me which had turned to muddy brown overnight. We heard the day after we took out that 22 people had died in the flash floods in various canyons in the Southwest. This book describes their ordeal, but it is a little more than a tribute to them, it is an analytical regard for the mechanisms of raging water. Childs, having grown up in the arid southwest, is an avid flood chaser and knows what water can perpetrate on the unsuspecting. His excellent book is a testament to the power and malevolent beauty of water that comes from miles away out of clear blue sky.
May 16, 2018
I was rescued by a helicopter in Havasu Canyon, Grand Canyon (mentioned in the book) during a flash flood in September 2015. Four of us were hiking downstream to Beaver Falls. It started raining a little bit but I didn't think much of it. At Beaver Falls we noticed muddy waterfalls start to pour off the top of the canyon. We were a little worried but... decided to eat lunch before heading back. As we finished, a helicopter flew past signalling to us. We started to hike up the side of the canyon to higher ground. It circled back and landed on a tiny section of a ledge and we got in. They took us back to the campground in Havasupai and then went back out to look for more hikers. Back at the campground there were campers stranded on an island in the middle of the rising stream. Havasupai tribe members used a zip-line to get them off of the island. I didn't see a big gush of water in the canyon bottom like the folks in the stories in this book, but I'm guessing this was because we were taken out of the direct path of the flood.
I felt pretty bad that people had to risk their lives to rescue us, as well as ignorant, and after that experience I wanted to learn more about floods, which is how I discovered Craig Childs. I first read his book The Secret Knowledge of Water, which blew me away. So fascinating. The stories in The Desert Cries are very powerful. I liked the drawings, too.
I felt pretty bad that people had to risk their lives to rescue us, as well as ignorant, and after that experience I wanted to learn more about floods, which is how I discovered Craig Childs. I first read his book The Secret Knowledge of Water, which blew me away. So fascinating. The stories in The Desert Cries are very powerful. I liked the drawings, too.
December 7, 2020
Really beautifully written, helps you to understand how incredibly dynamic the desert can actually be.
May 16, 2021
Excellent read. Very interesting topic.
August 25, 2016
This slim, elegant book is both harrowing and exquisite. Craig Childs, conducting research into the dynamics of flash floods in American deserts for his master's degree, visits five places that over the course of one season in 1997 saw tragic devastation, including on three of those occasions loss of life—and in the two instances where no one died, it was as if by a miracle.
The five chapters are written in pairings: a description by Craig of his visit to the place, after the flood; and an account of what happened, based on interviews with survivors and rescuers. In both cases, his language brings to life the unimaginable.
"Seeing a flash flood catches God red-handed," he writes in the prologue. "A flood constitutes an act of such creation and destruction, of such raw energy, that you cannot avert your eyes. Some people travel the globe to witness solar eclipses or volcanic eruptions or the migration of millions of birds to a single waterway. They hope for the same thing I want when I chase floods—to accompany an event that is flawless, humbling, and eternal. Born in the dry country of central Arizona, my love is for water. The stroke of a desert flood across a once-dry floor enslaves my eyes."
The five places he visits are a storm drain running under Douglas, Arizona, where a flash flood took the lives of eight illegal immigrants on August 6, 1997; the Mojave Desert in western Arizona, where on August 9 a raging torrent undermined a railway bridge, causing a transcontinental passenger train to derail (no one was killed); Havasu Canyon, Grand Canyon, where on August 10 a "cowboy" helicopter pilot flew down the canyon ahead of the flood warning hikers (no one was killed); Antelope Canyon, northern Arizona (eleven people, mostly European tourists, killed on August 12); and Phantom Canyon, Grand Canyon (two hikers killed, September 11).
His physical descriptions are lyrical and evocative, of the places both in stillness and ravaged by angry waters. Here he is flying over the landscape where the train had derailed: "The mountains below are studded with fins and sharp spines. There is no sign of humanity, no place for dirt roads or buildings. In fact, I have the impression that a human would be swallowed up just by trying to walk around down there. The jumbled topography goes on for nearly a hundred miles with crooks and stabs reaching up for the plane. Yet there is a constant glimmer of sensuality secluded deep within each range. Floods have left hundreds of wandering canyons that slice like sinuous ribbons into the ground. From up here, the canyons look elaborate, richly decorating the senseless chaos of stone. The mountains are male, the canyons female. And the floods are rare and genderless."
And then there's this, from the Antelope Canyon chapter, part two: "They all stop when they hear it. They do not breathe at the crescendo, as the ground shudders like hoof beats. The moment is as still from thought as possible. A blunt mass of dark water surges into view. It splits around the ladders above them. Streams of water and foam cut through the metal steps into the air. Tangled inside this water is the Frenchman, struggling to breathe, to get out. His face spears through the water, screaming. Bowled over, he tries to keep his ground. He can't. The vision is terrifying. They watch him as he is thrown unwittingly toward them."
This alternation of quiet observation and urgent narration is effective and forceful. And despite the occasional horror of a flash flood, Childs would not want it any other way. "I sometimes think that, in the perfect Eden, there are no floods. In Utopia, a person never dies fighting beneath muddy waves. Then I am glad to not live in such barren places as these. Floods belong to a fertile and dynamic land. We cannot control elements of danger, magnificence, and prowess in the world. To wish them away or to tear them into survivable pieces is to wish for a less genuine Earth."
The five chapters are written in pairings: a description by Craig of his visit to the place, after the flood; and an account of what happened, based on interviews with survivors and rescuers. In both cases, his language brings to life the unimaginable.
"Seeing a flash flood catches God red-handed," he writes in the prologue. "A flood constitutes an act of such creation and destruction, of such raw energy, that you cannot avert your eyes. Some people travel the globe to witness solar eclipses or volcanic eruptions or the migration of millions of birds to a single waterway. They hope for the same thing I want when I chase floods—to accompany an event that is flawless, humbling, and eternal. Born in the dry country of central Arizona, my love is for water. The stroke of a desert flood across a once-dry floor enslaves my eyes."
The five places he visits are a storm drain running under Douglas, Arizona, where a flash flood took the lives of eight illegal immigrants on August 6, 1997; the Mojave Desert in western Arizona, where on August 9 a raging torrent undermined a railway bridge, causing a transcontinental passenger train to derail (no one was killed); Havasu Canyon, Grand Canyon, where on August 10 a "cowboy" helicopter pilot flew down the canyon ahead of the flood warning hikers (no one was killed); Antelope Canyon, northern Arizona (eleven people, mostly European tourists, killed on August 12); and Phantom Canyon, Grand Canyon (two hikers killed, September 11).
His physical descriptions are lyrical and evocative, of the places both in stillness and ravaged by angry waters. Here he is flying over the landscape where the train had derailed: "The mountains below are studded with fins and sharp spines. There is no sign of humanity, no place for dirt roads or buildings. In fact, I have the impression that a human would be swallowed up just by trying to walk around down there. The jumbled topography goes on for nearly a hundred miles with crooks and stabs reaching up for the plane. Yet there is a constant glimmer of sensuality secluded deep within each range. Floods have left hundreds of wandering canyons that slice like sinuous ribbons into the ground. From up here, the canyons look elaborate, richly decorating the senseless chaos of stone. The mountains are male, the canyons female. And the floods are rare and genderless."
And then there's this, from the Antelope Canyon chapter, part two: "They all stop when they hear it. They do not breathe at the crescendo, as the ground shudders like hoof beats. The moment is as still from thought as possible. A blunt mass of dark water surges into view. It splits around the ladders above them. Streams of water and foam cut through the metal steps into the air. Tangled inside this water is the Frenchman, struggling to breathe, to get out. His face spears through the water, screaming. Bowled over, he tries to keep his ground. He can't. The vision is terrifying. They watch him as he is thrown unwittingly toward them."
This alternation of quiet observation and urgent narration is effective and forceful. And despite the occasional horror of a flash flood, Childs would not want it any other way. "I sometimes think that, in the perfect Eden, there are no floods. In Utopia, a person never dies fighting beneath muddy waves. Then I am glad to not live in such barren places as these. Floods belong to a fertile and dynamic land. We cannot control elements of danger, magnificence, and prowess in the world. To wish them away or to tear them into survivable pieces is to wish for a less genuine Earth."
January 31, 2016
Nobody understands the desert southwest like Craig Childs and no one can express that understanding as poetically. This book was so emotional, I had to keep putting it down. But I knew I would read it all. I've been in slot canyons and I've experienced flash floods (not at the same time, thank goodness) and my limited experience helped me to picture the situations he describes all too vividly. When that wave arrives, one's mind is unable to comprehend what it is, since, unlike Childs, most of us are not expecting such a thing to arrive full-blown, roaring and violent. I thought a wave of lava was coming at me across my orchard because in my experience, water is not thick, black, goupy and loud. The freight-train-like roar which preceded the wave by several minutes should have been a clue.
May 9, 2014
A fascinating reflection on flash floods and those who experience them. The descriptions are riveting and do an excellent job of portraying the duality of nature at her best: deadly yet uniquely beautiful and enchanting.
December 30, 2008
Not for the faint at heart. This book is about death...death by flash floods. But if you find flash floods fascinating and the desert irresistible then this is the book for you.
March 23, 2011
more good writing by Craig Childs, he makes you feel what it's like to be caught in a flash flood
February 21, 2011
One of my favorites by Craig - and filled with art by his wife, which is also fantastic.
February 22, 2012
Loved this. Beautiful writing. Aching questions. Really good read.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews