Bad Water
With the ease of an expert in the ways of the desert, he found a path down out of the rugged mountains the white men called the Panamints. He saw the huge, sparkling white basin of salt and poisonous chemicals. It was a bad place, even though it sparkled white, like the snow that dusted the tops of the mountains once or twice a year. This was not snow, but alkaline crystals puddled with water that bubbled up from underground, terrible to drink … inciting madness.
Any wise person knew not to come here, but not all men were wise, and he came to look upon the strangers and fools.
He had taken the name of Kit Fox, though it was not the original name the Panamint Shoshoni had given him. Some of his people called him arrogant, but he didn’t need them. He had learned well what the Earth had taught him. He knew how to make his way through canyons, how to find private springs, even when the valley seemed filled with nothing but death. Like his namesake, he could hunt, catch lizards or round-tail squirrels; he could gather and grind mesquite seedpods. He could be self-sufficient, and if that made him “arrogant,” then his people simply used a poor choice of words.
No matter what Kit Fox thought of the stodgy and unimaginative Shoshoni, however, at least they were not ridiculous. As he came down into the powdery white basin, he looked upon the fools out there. The white men. They never failed to amaze him with their outlandish ideas and stupid practices.
They had built a camp not far from the edge of the long-dead sea, dozens of men in their hot tents pitched far from the nearest drinkable water at the oasis their people had named Furnace Creek. And worse than their absurd settlement were their giant machines that belched smoke and steam, bubbling up foul-smelling chemical vapors from vats and boilers that cooked down the caked, powdery borax residue scraped from the lake bed. What were these fools thinking?
The white men had come from faraway lands, with their strange culture and impractical dress. They did not belong here—as the desert often harshly reminded them by killing entire groups of wayward and unprepared pioneers, or idealistic treasure seekers looking for a shortcut to the gold fields in California, or merely settlers duped by a promise of paradise just on the other side of the mountains. Kit Fox knew this land: Mother Desert was a stern parent, but fair to anyone who followed the rules of survival. The white men did not take time to learn; they tried to change the land to fit their needs, rather than vice versa.
The men wore heavy, dark clothes, broad-brimmed hats, and thick beards that made them look like animals. And they treated some of their workers as animals, too—smaller people with dark hair and a different yet equally strange style of clothing. Kit Fox had heard that these others were called Chinamen, that they came from even farther away than the white men did. They had come out to the alkaline desert to work all day long in the impossible sun, shoveling the white powder from the ground, building up “haystacks” of borax for the chemical works.
When converted and condensed, the borax was packed into iron-rimmed barrels and stacked high; the loads were so enormous that they required numerous beasts of burden, as many as twenty-mule teams, to haul them over the Panamint Mountains. Why did the white men want the poisonous powder? For what purpose? Maybe they should scrape away all the alkaline salts and make the bad-water lake into fresh water again!
Kit Fox decided to go back and visit his people after all, if only to tell them of the laughable things he had seen. Many of the Shoshoni might not believe him, but he hoped they would come and see for themselves before the desert killed these dirt-scrapers, ruined their camp, and frightened these people away forever. Someday, the Shoshoni would tell stories about the white men who had ventured where they didn’t belong and perished.
He kept to cover, camouflaging himself in the land. As he watched their activities, he laughed silently to himself, wishing they would know that he was having a joke at their expense.
Kit Fox found a shaded spot and waited until nightfall. Under full dark, with just a fingernail of moon, he would leave some sort of sign to show them that he was there. It would be just one more thing about the desert they did not understand.…
The bearded men had their own tents, with bright yellow lanterns and boisterous conversations as they played card games. The larger group of Chinamen was separate, quieter, and the men sat alone with their thoughts instead of raucous games and liquor.
Moving as quiet as a shadow—even though these invaders seemed deaf to the natural world—he completed his task just outside the range of their lantern light. He heard their conversations, their guttural words like rocks clashing together, but he scampered about, gathering stones of his own, laying out a pattern on the parched pale ground, a mocking symbol in his own language. They would never understand it, but the curse was there nevertheless. They would find the sign, wonder what it meant, but Kit Fox knew. And the Earth knew. Before he headed away, he took time to piss on the edge of their camp, then, grinning, he bounded away.
As he moved back to the dry lake bed, Kit Fox saw a silhouette of a lone Chinaman at the edge of one of the shallow seep pools that dotted the surface of the basin; he was smoking a long pipe. Intrigued, Kit Fox crept closer, moving with all the silence of his desert skill. Maybe he could sneak up on this stranger from behind, show him that there were people who belonged in this landscape, and yet the Chinaman lifted a hand in greeting, without turning, even though he couldn’t possibly have seen or heard his approach. Kit Fox hesitated but did not want to give the impression he was afraid.
He barely knew any words of the white men’s language, and he understood that the Chinamen spoke an even more alien tongue. But the stranger offered the pipe—communicating in a language that everyone could understand.
Kit Fox sat next to the stranger, and they both looked at the smooth mercurial pool of alkaline water that had puddled among the hard, white salt. The man looked dry and haggard, overworked, barely a ghost of a human being. With a start, Kit Fox realized he was still a young man—they were almost the same age!
The Chinaman showed him how to smoke the unusual device, and Kit Fox took the pipe and inhaled. He had never tasted such strange fumes before; the smoke made his eyes and his nose sting, and his thoughts went dizzy. Had the Chinaman scraped up some other alien chemical from the desert? He saw what looked like a hard, white ball in the bowl of the pipe.
Kit Fox gathered his courage and demanded, “Why do the white men take all this useless powder?” He picked up a handful of the crumbling borax. He knew this stranger did not speak the Shoshoni language, but he could not ask the question in any other way. “You don’t understand how to live in the desert! This place will kill you.”
As if he had understood perfectly, the Chinaman shook his head.
“And why would you come here? Are you being enslaved? Why would you come here willingly?”
The Chinaman took another draw on his strange pipe and handed it back to Kit Fox, then he picked up a pebble from the ground, considered it in his palm, and gently tossed it so that it struck the mirror-smooth pool. Ripples radiated outward, leaving in the wake … images.
Kit Fox saw steep hills, green valleys, a land unlike anything he had ever imagined. Was this the Chinaman’s home? Then the pool showed crowded villages, skeletal people, starving families, excruciating poverty—a concept that he didn’t understand, even after a lifetime of accepting the austere bounty of what the desert gave him. Kit Fox felt a tug of the man’s responsibility for a large family, the aching hope that by going away to this far-off land in this harsh desert to work with these white men in the borax fields would stop the suffering back home. Kit Fox had never imagined that the Chinamen might have come here because what remained for them there was even worse!
“The white men should go away. They should not be here. They are fools to dig the poison from the dirt. You should leave them—soon they will all die. You are wasting your time. Go back to your family.”
The Chinaman shook his head again, either refusing to go home to his family, or refusing to believe Kit Fox’s conjecture. He seemed to accept the inevitability of what the white men were doing, taking part because it helped him to survive, not because he supported it. How strange! Kit Fox remembered his old grandfather once shaking his head at the boy’s intractability. “If rocks fell and an avalanche came toward you, you would be too stubborn to get out of its path!”
The Chinaman seemed to understand something he didn’t. He waited for Kit Fox to inhale again from the pipe, then he tossed a second pebble into the pool.
The ripples created a new set of images, the first showing the loud and smelly borax works here, then a larger encampment by Furnace Creek, the mule teams hauling loads of borax on rutted paths that became wide roads and then paved roads. The white men didn’t just come to the desert—they were everywhere. Camps became villages, villages became towns, towns grew into great and crowded cities with tall buildings made of glass and stone and metal, stretching higher than the mountains. Their behavior remained foolish and incomprehensible.
Kit Fox had seen the white men as unprepared, with foolish and silly ways that did not respect the earth. And yet instead of being squashed by nature, as would have been right, these visions showed them thriving, ascendant.
It was impossible! Kit Fox understood the smallest secrets of the desert, and yet when he heard guffaws and conversation from the lantern-lit camp tents as the bearded men continued their card games, he felt that these people were now laughing at him.
In the night shadows by the edge of the pool, the Chinaman sat there with his pipe and a faint smile of resignation, not horror at the nightmares he had revealed … simply acceptance of the way the world changed, rising and falling.
Kit Fox lurched to his feet and felt as if he were floating, dizzy. He broke off a large, sharp-edged hunk of dry salt, squeezing so tightly that it bit blood from his fingers. He wanted to destroy the images, and therefore destroy that future. It was a bad omen, a bad dream. Maybe he was smoking some poisoned chemical, and he was succumbing to madness.
He hurled the chunk into the pool, eager to shatter what he saw. But the images remained undisturbed. Instead of a splash in the shallow puddle, he felt the ground crumbling beneath him. Kit Fox swayed but could not get his balance. His head and his body weren’t right—and he fell into the pool.
But it wasn’t just a sheen of standing water. He found himself drowning in it. He flailed and splashed, but the liquid pulled him down, feeling oily and cold. This was impossible! These pools weren’t deep.
Kit Fox did not know how to swim—why would anyone who eked out a living in the desert know how to swim? But no matter how much he struggled, he knew it wasn’t the bad water killing him; it was the implacable future. He tasted the chemical water filling his mouth and lungs, and his eyes burned from it. But what he could not survive was the progress of industry, civilization, population growth, technology. Though Kit Fox struggled with all his might, he would be suffocated in the undeniable reality.
He coughed and choked, and as he went under again for what he knew to be the last time, Kit Fox saw the Chinaman sitting on the shore, much too far away, smoking his pipe.