I became aware of a deflating tire and stopped the pickup in the middle of the wash, spanning the rivulet of clear water. It was the only level place immediately available.

Our girl friends walked ahead up the road while my buddy and I jacked up the truck and pulled the wheel. We checked the tire and found that we’d picked up a nail, probably by the Hite store.

We were standing there bemused and barefooted, in the stream, when we heard the women begin to holler from somewhere out of sight up the canyon. Against the noise of the wind, and something like a distant waterfall, it was hard to make out their words.

Mud? Blood? Flood?

As we stood there discussing the matter I felt a sudden surge in the flow of water between my ankles. Looking down, I saw that the clear water had turned into a thick, reddish liquid, like tomato soup.

Our spare tire was packed away beneath a load of duffle, pots and pans and grub boxes. So we jammed the flat tire back on and lugged it down quick with a couple of nuts. My friend picked up the hub cap before it floated away with the rest of the wheel nuts, and stared up the canyon. We couldn’t see anything yet but we could hear it—a freight train rolling full speed down North Wash. Where there never was a railway.

We jumped in the truck, I started the motor and tried to drive away. The engine roared but nothing moved. One wheel still jacked off the ground. No positive traction in that pickup. We had to get out again; we pushed the truck forward, off the jack, and discovered that it was in gear. The truck humped ahead and stalled. The main body of the flood appeared around the bend up canyon. We got back in the truck and lurched and yawed, flat tire flopping, out of the bottom of the wash and onto the safety of higher ground. The flood roared past below.

The girls joined us. There was no rain where we stood, and the ground was dry. But we could feel it tremble. From within the flood, under the rolling red waters, we heard the grating of rocks as they clashed on one another, a sound like the grinding of molars in leviathan jaws.

Our road was cut off ahead and behind. We camped on the bench that evening, made supper in the violet twilight of the canyon while thousands of cubic tons of semiliquid sand, silt, mud, rock, uprooted junipers, logs, a dead cow, rumbled by twenty feet away.

The juniper fire smelled good. The food was even better. A few clear stars switched on in that narrow slot of sky between the canyon walls overhead. We built up the fire and sang. My girl friend was beautiful. My friend’s girl friend was beautiful. My old pickup truck was beautiful, and life itself seemed like a pretty good deal.