The springs at Furnace Creek still run

What I wanted

I needed a dead place.

The hero is driving west, and an oasis at one of the lowest, hottest points on Earth falls on his route. The scene had to be empty: ruins, dust, nothing. That was the starting point, and for two days it did not occur to me to ask whether reality was willing to help.

My reasoning was simple. No rain, therefore no springs. If not a drop has fallen inland in fourteen years, a desert spring dried up long ago.

What refuted it

The springs above Furnace Creek are not fed by local rain.

This is a discharge point of the Death Valley regional flow system: the water arrives from far away, through Paleozoic carbonate rock, from under the Funeral Mountains. The water of Travertine and Nevares springs resembles that of the Ash Meadows spring group both in composition and in its isotope ratios — which is to say it is not made of this year’s rainfall, or last year’s, or this century’s.

Residence time in that system is counted in tens of thousands of years.

And if that sounds abstract, there is a number that fixes it. Researchers reckon that the rainwater which seeped in during the Nevada nuclear tests will not surface at Ash Meadows for another fifteen thousand years or so. What comes out of the ground today fell before anybody knew what uranium was.

You cannot kill a spring like that with a drought. A drought happens at the surface. This water is not travelling there.

The discharge leaves no room for doubt either: Travertine Spring puts out 1,500 gallons a minute, year-round — around eight million liters a day. Travertine and Texas together supply the Furnace Creek area with up to two million gallons a day: the resort, the Park Service offices, the residences.

So it has not run dry. And it is not going to.

My second mistake

Then came the rescue idea, and that failed too: fine, the water is there — but the pipe that brought it down has died.

That picture is true of the Furnace Creek of before 2008.

In 2008 the Park Service stopped collecting drinking water from Travertine Spring and Texas Spring. What people drink there now comes out of wells: through pumps, through a treatment plant, and through somebody having the job of maintaining both.

This did not weaken the location; it sharpened it. My old picture was passive — a pipe that carries. The reality is active: the settlement is not sitting on water, it is sitting on machines.

What I did not expect

In the early 2000s the springs were tapped so heavily, for drinking water and for landscaping, that Furnace Creek itself shrank to about 20 percent of its historic length.

Then the Park Service pulled out the spring boxes, and the creek grew back.

That sentence sat at the top of my notes for two days. A place I had set out to prove was dead turned out to have got more alive because people stopped taking.

What I did with it

My original plan — the spring dried up, therefore the place is empty — could not be saved. Just as well.

What I got instead is precisely what the whole book is about. The water is there. The water will still be there in 2052, because underground it is travelling on a thousand-year road and does not care what happens above our heads. What can die is the work: the pump, the treatment plant, and the person who checks both in the morning.

That is why there is no explanatory narration in the scene. In the old world the hero was a waterworks mechanic, so he reads what happened here off his own trade: off a frame standing with its housing removed, off three cylinders, off what is left of the plant. He doesn’t say it out loud. He doesn’t need to.

One question does remain, and the answer to it is not about water: if the water is free, why does nobody live there? Because this water cannot be carried away, cannot be sold, and is not a living. It surfaces at the lowest and hottest point in the landscape, out of spreading openings you cannot put a gate on — and most of what you take from it you drink just staying alive. It becomes a watering hole, not a settlement.

And power does not sit on the spring. It sits on the road.