When the Flash Flood Comes With Godlike Velocity, Why Do I Stay and Watch?

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.