Things defy the laws of physics when swept up in summer floods like the one that roared through Aravaipa Canyon after a monster monsoon. A "gauge" -- an 18" steel culvert containing delicate instruments bolted to solid bedrock -- that measures the amount of water flowing through the Aravaipa meander washed away, ripped from its anchors before the water crested. It is estimated, therefore, that the flow reached 80,000 to 100,000 cubic feet per minute, which is roughly the flow of the Colorado River.
Granite boulders – in an avalanche of partial suspension, freed from the effects of gravity – tumbled like marbles down the stream bed, clacking against each other in a thunderous free fall. Stately cottonwoods and thick-skinned walnuts bent down like hair combed into rows as neat as corduroy.
The trees left standing in the streambed have no leaves, no branches, not even bark. Their trunks are all pointing to something that came from that way, upstream. Steel fence posts wrapped around trunks like spaghetti, and roots were woven into mats tighter than Navajo rugs. Trucks looked like aluminum cans pounded by pile drivers into rock banks. Corrugated roofing suggested tin foil, rolled and tucked neatly around the trunks of trees still standing.
All of this mess was in a hurry somewhere and forgot what it used to be before the floodwaters awakened sleeping traits.
Back before the floods, David Rychener bought a ranch along the creek and set it up to be a retreat center, a place for people to rejuvenate themselves, to rediscover old passions and excitements. He had fixed the place up on a shoestring. David’s one extravagance was the metal patio furniture that he and Joyce bought so that visitors could sit and see the wash next to the big house. It was nice stuff. Iron. Stylish. Expensive.
Then the first floodwater rose, entered the house, and carried the patio furniture into the orchard. David saw the table in a pile of debris and stood it upright, planning to come back later and move it up to the porch. The second flood came and tore out the tool shed, made tinker toys out of dumptruck, jeep, and tractors, undercut and then slapped down the suspension bridge, buried years of work, erased green, standing trees from the meander plain, and took the patio table away.
It seemed that the table was lost forever, along with other prized possessions of those who live along the stream. Even if it were to be found, it would likely be good only as some tortured mangle of rusted sculpture.
One night, Jumbo, a friend and ranch hand, was out looking for his flood-stolen pick-up truck and his nickel-plated pistol under a full moon. (Some things can only be found at night, under the moon.) His flashlight played across a metal leg of something buried beneath tons of trees, silt, matted branches, prickly pear pads, roots, more sand, rocks – all it overlaid with a monstrous, hundred-year-old cottonwood tree trunk. Yes it was our iron-legged, reluctant wanderer, upside down.
Two weeks later we were standing at the perimeter of the mess with every hope to exhume the itinerant mesa. With chainsaws, shovels, pry-bars, a front-end loader with a logging chain on the bucket, and pure doggedness, we began to dig. We worked our way from the outside, cutting away mesquite branches that had been dropped by the final wave of flood. Layer by layer, we undid what the flood had deposited. We tunneled into the congealed chaos, prying back the vines, the roots, the green branches – all fingers holding the table captive. Daedalus and his labyrinth held nothing over the maze we navigated.
Then came the dusty work of yanking silt-impregnated willow whips, roots, and cacti off of the inner layer of the knot the floods had tied. Then more chain-sawing as the giant toothpick pile and stripped trees were extracted, one by one. Then came the dirt: several feet of it littered with more dismembered cottonwood boughs, rocks, and tree trunks.
The legs began to emerge, one, then another, a fourth, a general shape. The table was down in there somewhere. We dug and swept and revealed. More trees. We cut out a box in the earth, reversing the purpose of a grave, leaving cross-sections of sycamore exposed in the sides of the excavation. Down. Down. Then Will hit the mesh with his shovel. The bottom. Or the top, depending on your perspective. Gradually we found the edges of the table’s mesh top. There it lay, revealed, undressed, born back into the light and air, in its entirety, still intact, flat as a Kansas horizon, unbent.
When we lifted it out from beneath the last of the trunks, we could not believe it. It was as if the table had been placed in bed of the stream, then packed with protective padding, and tenderly wrapped with tons of debris and tree trunks before being left for us to find and open, a scavenger hunt surprise.
What a thing.
We lifted it from its temporary resting place. It was a table reborn, a treasure recovered, a prodigal patio accessory come home. I thought David would burst from delight and gratitude. We carefully carried it to the tractor, where we bungee corded it to the bucket for its trip back upstream. David took it slow. He was in no hurry now. The table would be restored to its place with ceremony. Will and I rode alongside in the Mule, an informal procession. The hunters returned with the spoils and bounty of the river. We waved at the passing pecan trees, the croaking ravens, the chuckling stream, the clouds bowing overhead.
That night we sat beneath the half moon and ate together at the wrought iron table none of us believed we would ever see again. We toasted the second life of a friend thought lost forever, swept away by the floods of time and change, a refugee from irrepressible impermanence of all things, from oblivion mercurial as the whispering waters.
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