SOMETIMES ON THE GRAND CANYON TRIPS, A GUIDE OR PASsenger had to hike out—to go back to a job somewhere, to end the season and return to school, to resupply something very important, like toilet paper or wound sutures or beer. In that case, usually still in summer’s doggiest days, it was a grueling journey to the rim. A race with the sun. The hiker would start before daylight, carrying all the filtered river water he could manage. For his own sake, he’d have to get out before most tourists at the rim rose for breakfast. A hiker had to zoom up the Bright Angel Trail to the Devil’s Corkscrew (a wall of switchbacks near the top) with as little dehydration drama as possible. He’d bolt the 6.3 miles up to Indian Garden, where clean water was available to fortify him for the remaining 1.2 miles to the rim. “Indian Garden is an oasis in the canyon used by Native Americans up to modern times,” the National Park Service writes. The garden makes Bright Angel Trail the safest of all possible hiking routes from the canyon, due to “potable water, regular shade, and emergency phones.”
Going from an oasis like Indian Garden to an oasis like South Rim isn’t just a hiker’s invention; water sources on desert treks have been key to human evolution since our very first years. The earliest people lived and hunted in arid lands, traveling between rare springs and pools where plant sources of food grew and wildlife foraged and stalked. Anthropological digs of Homo sapiens in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, included paleontological evidence of isolated oases. Our forebears lived on the rare freshwater body, then traveled to the next one, especially during wet years, ultimately finding their way out of Africa.
Oases likewise determined the trajectory of trade routes and settlement sites. The 4,600-mile Silk Road through Africa, Asia, and Europe strung together water sources leading to and from communities like Turpan in China and Samarkand in Uzbekistan. There was the Darb el-Arba‘in camel route in middle Egypt and the Sudan. The Moroccan caravan path from the Niger to Tangier. The aboriginal foot trails in the Mojave Desert in the American Southwest. Separate bodies of water, sometimes miniscule, connected us.
Later, the built world borrowed key ingredients of the oasis to bolster community life. The water creed in Rome, In Aqua Sanitas, promoted immersion for recuperation, rejuvenation, and improved citizenship. Be a good Roman. Clean up and calm down in the baths. Elaborate systems of aqueducts led from rivers and springs to towns and villages to fill the balneae (small-scale public and private baths) and thermae (large-scale, Imperial baths). In these community centers of their time, citizens gathered for conversation, soaks, and massage.
Water, central to restoring the human spirit, was already imported from the wilderness.
So water flows from the Grand Canyon to Las Vegas today. From one adult playground to another, from its Rocky Mountain headwaters to its impoundment at Glen Canyon and Hoover Dams, the Colorado River helps supply the immense human need to recuperate. In so harnessing the water flowing between stone walls, we see it not as a river. We’ve invented language for its incomparable need to go somewhere, and ours: flow regimes, bypass tunnels, turbines, releases, and cubic feet per second.
MY FAMILY PUT LAS VEGAS BEHIND US, BUT THE MYSTERY OF the alley-sweeping clown stayed with me. A puzzle. Clowns around the globe have evolved on a long and wandering trajectory from trickster to fool to star entertainers under the big top. Trickster comes from the French triche, from trichier, “to deceive.” Fool derives from the Latin foilis, for “bellows” or “windbag” (and, some say, “scrotum”). Trickster is the one who slaps; the fool is the one slapped. The clown does both, giving as good as he gets, surprising us when he first trips and falls like a doofus but then jumps up to demonstrate he’s the best bareback rider in three states.
The television clowns I’d known before that evening in Las Vegas showed little inhibition—they’d sob at the death of a flea. They’d shoot water from a flower. Their single handkerchief would grow to a laundry line. The inscrutable man in face paint might do anything at any moment. Decades after walking with my family down that alleyway, whenever I’d stop at the Hopi mesas between river trips, the dancing clowns in the pueblos would be there, in costume, under the hot sun. Families sat in surrounding seats, or stood on the walls looking down onto the dirt dance floor, watching. Sometimes quiet laughter would ripple through the audience, but whatever amused them flew over my head.
Now I think it was all about distraction. Obviously the clowns knew what they were doing—vying for the attention of serious dancers, making offers no one could refuse, playing to the crowd. While they sashayed seemingly without agenda among the other players, they were part of the act, and an important one. Throughout history, the key purpose of clowns has been to take our eyes off the ball. They spin straw into gold. They pull tricks out of a bottomless bag and then lift an umbrella and float out of sight. They exchange violent slaps and insults, then do that ridiculous thing of making sausage. We let ourselves be taken in. We’re complicit.
While we’re dazzled, they part us from our gold. We’re feeling good, not so attached to our cash. We don’t resist the gambler’s sleight of hand even though our higher selves know it’s there. In the words of Ecclesiastes 1:15, “The number of fools is infinite.” Or, as P. T. Barnum famously did not say, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”
WATER THERAPY SPREAD FROM ROME TO OTHER PARTS OF the built world. In going global, it acquired an international lexicon. Spa, Belgium, is synonymous with the soak. So is the bain in France, Toplice in Slovenia, Bad in Germany, fürdo in Hungary, città thermale in Italy. Early adopters of the Roman tradition didn’t have access to today’s research, which shows that heart-deep immersion for just ten minutes in a tank of eighty-six-degree Fahrenheit water improves the ability of blood, full of oxygen and nutrients, to perfuse the brain. Immersion may be billed as luxury, but its positive effects on neurological function make it more essential health benefit than extravagance. Soaking helps us think straight.
The enhancement of shade at any oasis is key, too, natural or not. We (and other mammals) need a two- or threefold increase in natural evaporation to survive the desert sun. We bake out there, unless we have canopy to cool our sweat so we can keep going. Our minds, especially, need to chill out, as our brains stay about thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the rest of us. That brain fog we feel under hot sun beating down through cloudless skies isn’t imagined; it’s real and measurable. If we were to listen to our hot heads—our overheated brains—we’d cease walking to the next oasis. We’d perish out there, become a parody, emulate the crawling, ragged victims in the magazine cartoons.
To bring us immersion and shade, today’s spa towns install fountains and pools, plant trees brought in from exotic locales, and build dimly lit rooms to reimagine the shade of the natural oasis. The purpose: to help stimulate endorphins, morphinelike molecules associated with feelings of deep pleasure. Endorphins attach to “opiate” receptors in the body and brain. The forty-billion-dollar resort and spa industry, a fast-growing sector of leisure travel worldwide, knows about these feel-good results, and it’s not shy in using water to get them. Hot tubs, steam rooms, mud baths, and other assorted water bodies are built for relaxation, rejuvenation, and recovery. The touch of water on bare skin at the end of a hard day? It feels like heaven, and heaven is the oasis.
THE VALLEY DUBBED LAS VEGAS (“THE MEADOWS”) WAS known for its wealth of water long before the casinos offered Jacuzzi rooms alongside nickel slots with 93.42 percent odds (tops). “Oh! such water,” settler Oliver Pratt wrote in 1848. “It comes … like an oasis in the desert just at the termination of a fifty-mile stretch without a drop of water or spear of grass.” The Meadows has quenched human thirst for thirteen thousand years; it has sated wildlife for much longer. The natural artesian flow of the valley, though—once enough to “propel a grist mill