The river was an ephemeral one (sometimes called a wash, a wadi or, my particular favorite, an arroyo); it flows with water only occasionally, then briefly, during rainstorms and after snowmelt. For most of the year — and in places for many years on end — arroyos, which cross the deserts of the world and drain arid mountain ranges, are merely riverbeds or incisions in canyon rock, tracts of barren ground more desert than river. In the West, where I grew up, the landscape is etched with them, and many still bear the disappointment of the explorers who named them. In 1839, when the mapmaker David Burr hoped to chart the course of the Buenaventura, a fabled waterway linking the Rockies to the Pacific, he instead wound up drawing dry riverbeds so thoroughly disappointing that he made the sentiment permanent, giving them names like Defeat River and Inconstant River.
From “Arroyos” by Noah Gallagher Shannon for New York Times Magazine, 2016; Photo by Damon Casarez (@damon_c)
