Something is coming. I smell it before I hear it, and I hear it before I see it.
When the rushing red water rounds the corner, it spreads like a liquid hand across the desert. My body is flooded with adrenaline, frozen, watching the thick water explode into the arroyo in front of our house, and tear out both sides of the ditch. A coyote is trying to outrun the water, and I know I should run, too. But I’m not thinking. I am watching God in the relentless power, force and fury of this water remaking the world into a frothing blood bath of detritus carrying everything from rocks and roots to tree trunks down the valley.
The roaring water is the wrath of what we have sown. One species, our species, has set the world asunder. If this sounds like biblical terms, it is because these are biblical times.
In the red rock desert of Utah, where status is tied to how long one has lived here, not even the old-timers remember anything like this summer. We have experienced five flash floods after extremely heavy rainfall since June 21. When the last and most terrifying one arrived on Aug. 25, it washed out the road, and neighbors who are without a four-wheel vehicle haven’t been able to get out. No one can get in.
We in the Four Corners region of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona know flash floods intimately. They come like a banshee on the cusp of night sometimes without warning, and can be particularly deadly and destructive because of how canyons can funnel water to reach great speeds and depths.
In the past they were typically short-lived. Big flash floods would mark a particular year, such as 2009. But recently, just as scientists predicted, human-caused climate change has produced bigger flashes that are more frequent, more violent and more desperate.
Last week, Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah declared a state of emergency responding to flash floods in three counties, including Grand County where my husband and I live. The Arizona National Guard rescued more than 100 people stranded from a deadly flash flood in the Grand Canyon; a woman was swept away, her body found days later. Havasupai Falls within the Grand Canyon, where tribal leaders reported up to three inches of rain raising the water level in Cataract Creek from one foot to eight feet in 15 minutes, is closed to visitors until Oct. 1.
(Terry Tempest Williams) Writer Terry Tempest Williams stands near her home in Castle Valley after a series of flash floods.
These floods are not unique to the American Southwest. In 2022, flash floods in Pakistan killed more than 1,700 people and 33 million people were affected or displaced. Last year, more than 4,300 people were killed in Libya from flash floods. More recently, communities in Brazil, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have found themselves deluged. Forced displacement and climate vulnerability go hand in hand.
My neighbors and I stay in this valley in spite of its raw nature because we love it, knowing the same forces that created the beauty are the same forces that could displace us. This series of floods didn’t force us to leave. But the next ones might. When the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror” for desert dwellers it is just the opposite: terror is nothing but the beginning of beauty.
On the night of the fifth storm, my husband was away on a trip, and I was alone.
As the army of water arrived, everything in my body screamed to go back inside, but the compulsion to stay was stronger.
It ripped through every assumption I had: that we were safe or settled. And when the mouth of the flood opened, I watched all it consumed, and I ran, I ran into the kitchen and turned on the stove to boil beets as flood water rushed down the arroyo 30 feet from our house. It took a long time for the beets to soften. They were good enough and I turned off the stove. Red water flowed into the sink as I drained them and peeled off their skin. I cut up the beets, put them in a bowl, sat in a chair and ate them. When I looked down at my hands, they were blood red and shaking.
Before dawn on the morning after the last flood, a coyote was howling under the overhang of our house. In over 25 years of living here, I had never heard this mournful cry — a wailing, a lament that would not stop.
Living here, I have seen the losses: coyote pups drowning in their dens, magpies hurled through the air by angry dust storms and centuries old junipers uprooted without mercy, dead in jammed culverts.
A new canyon had been created from the cascading waters. It is now dry, and one could believe it has been here forever; that’s how fast cataclysmic change occurs in Utah’s red rock desert.
Sitting cross-legged on the damp clay, the chasm felt like a holy room. Multitudes of darkling beetles were out in full force, their black bodies scuttling on top of the rain-pocked mud, efficient scavengers eating the detritus of dead plants and animals. Ant colonies underwater the day before were now thriving, and tracks crisscrossing the sand bear signatures of whiptail lizards, jack rabbits, badger and deer. Nests of ground sparrows did not fare as well. Several washed away held in the fingers of sage. The reformed landscape of newly carved arroyos and redistributed sediments exposed my two minds: One mind saw ruins. The other mind saw renewal.
Earth is speaking loud and clear through the forces of water, wind, and erosion. Are we listening and do we love the world enough to change?
If our answer is no, then we are standing in the ruins of our own making where what is coming is already here: suffering and more suffering.
Our lives and the lives of all we cherish depend on us saying yes.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
