Water in the Desert

Chapter One — May 18

Water

Not a lot of water in the desert, and what there is, is deep underground.

Desert plants know how to find it.

Chapter Two — May 20

Shallow and Deep

Most desert plants don’t, actually. They work with what’s shallow and unreliable — the brief pulse after rain, the capillary moisture near the surface. Survival on luck and timing, not depth. And it might not come, and if it does, something else might get there first.

There’s a whole category of exception: phreatophytes. Desert plants with taproots 20–30 feet long, reaching the actual water table. The champion is the mesquite, whose taproot can go 25 meters down, always reaching permanent water.

The saguaro goes the opposite direction — roots that spread horizontally as wide as the plant is tall, catching surface rain across as large an area as possible.

Two strategies. Wide and shallow, or narrow and impossibly deep.

The plant that reaches the deep water doesn’t look like a survivor. It looks like a tree. It escaped the desert’s terms entirely.

Chapter Three — May 22

Racetrack

For years no one knew what moved the sailing stones across the Death Valley Racetrack. Long time-lapse cameras finally caught it.

Ice. A thin layer forms around the rocks — possibly melting underneath — and when the wind comes, it blows the ice, which drags the rock across the playa. Then the ice vanishes.

The ice is the part. Not wind, not rock — a temporary ghost of water that moves things and then disappears. What’s left is a furrow across the playa and the question of what caused it. The agent of change that can’t be reconstructed after the fact.