When You Need a Waterfall in Your Desert Places

“Listen! Do you hear that?” my husband Kevin asked as we walked along a trail in the Superstition Mountains. I stopped, stilled the crunching of my hiking boots as I tugged Mollie, our rust-colored mutt, next to me. I waited. Listened.

Char char. A cactus wren tilted back his head and rasped from the top of a tall saguaro. Hew hew. A northern mockingbird answered as it flitted to a nearby creosote bush. Other birds joined the anthem as a slight breeze stirred against my cheek, but I knew these desert sounds—although familiar—were not the sounds my husband meant.

I slowed my breath as I tuned my ears to the morning. There.I heard it. Up ahead, along a cliff face, came the out-of-the-ordinary sound of cascading water. Moving forward, we pushed past some underbrush and skirted several barrel cacti until we came to a wall of solid rock. Turning right we felt the spray before we saw it—water streaming about 100 feet above us, tumbling down the gray rock to the earth below.

A desert waterfall.

Most waterfalls in the Sonoran Desert are ephemeral, lasting about twenty-four hours after a substantial rainfall. With one inch of rain falling the previous day, we had come with the express purpose of hiking to Carney Springs Falls accessible from the Goldmine Trailhead. That had been the original plan, but we got sidetracked. The sound of water drew us. Enticed us. Beckoned us like a siren call, luring us from the original quest to investigate an unnamed falls instead.

While Kevin took photos and Mollie lapped water from puddles, I stood in wonder under the mist of this temporary falls that whispered the sound of renewal in the desert. I couldn’t help but think it was a promise for the new year, a promise found in Isaiah 43:18-19 NIV, “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.”

Streams in the wasteland. A way in the wilderness. A new thing. I felt something larger than myself arise as I joined the faith of other desert dwellers who have repeated this promise throughout the centuries.

Yes, God, do it.In this generation. In the months ahead. In the tired and worn-out places inside us all.In the deep darkness where we have forgotten how to believe in the good and the beautiful.

I prayed the words, no matter how improbable, as hope sprang up inside me, cascading through my soul.

Like a waterfall in the desert.

This post appeared recently in the SanTan Sun News.