As we talk, I look west to La Sal Mountains rising up, snow still showing at the summits. Disappointment Valley unfolds between here and there in waves of distance and heat, the creek that passes below the cabin winding through much of the valley. To the north lies a road less traveled, more dirt than gravel, county maintained, sometimes. Unseen from here, it trends east-west like the fence I share with Bureau of Land Management and the mustangs they manage. Beyond the fence runs a tall rim of gray cliff, on the top of which I have seen wild horses—lone stallions appearing for moments as they wandered the sparse bunchgrasses growing on the rim. I have seen bands in a swale just to the east, meandering out of a fold in those random hills to graze a greasewood flat or shade up in junipers.

I have even seen mustangs from my bedroom window. That is one of the main reasons I live here, 47 miles from the nearest gas station in an off-grid cabin above a creek with a personality that changes radically through the seasons. All things here are seasonal—propane, my backup heat source, gets delivered in May and October, about when the red ants come out and disappear. Mustangs change coats and colors, and sometimes bands, with the season. Elk move up to the high country come spring. In winter coyotes get bushier, mountain lions stealthier. In summer, heat dominates.

The cattle are seasonal, too, like rain. Environmental assessment studies of cool- and warm-season grasses and forbs and overall range health determine when cattle come and when they go, as well as determining the number of mustangs allowed. The only sheep these days are the desert bighorns reintroduced to the redrock layers near the Dolores River at the west end of the valley. Of our species, hunters mob here in October, villages set up among the piñon and juniper, huge RVs and herds of ATVs altering the landscape visibly and audibly for weeks. We wear blaze orange during hunting season when we ride, check fence, or go out to see mustangs. It’s the only time of year more than two or three vehicles travel our dusty road in a day.

TJ stands up. The dogs stir at her sudden movement. “Mustangs,” she says, pointing. “The pintos.”

I search the northern distance—a hump of land that rears and drops to the road, beyond that the fence and the 21,932-acre Spring Creek Basin Herd Management Area. I find the pinto band dappled in juniper shade: the stout black-and-white stallion Corazón, his mares, this year’s sole foal, and a three-year-old lieutenant stallion hanging along the fenceline we share. I’ve not seen mustangs there before and wouldn’t have but for TJ’s younger, keener eyes. This band was the first of the Spring Creek Basin mustangs I saw in the valley. I didn’t even know then that the valley held mustangs, but when I saw the pinto stallion—his eyes and nostrils wide, his thick neck curving as his body shied away—I knew he was wild. He blew a warning and trotted off, my skin tingling as his band followed him over the hill.

TJ has documented the mustangs of Spring Creek Basin for nearly ten years, now also managing a sanctuary for mustangs removed from BLM land but unable to adapt to domestic life. She lives seven miles down the valley from me; between our homes no other houses exist, just a dilapidated, 70-year-old set of sheep pens and a modern set of shipping corrals built to aid the cattle ranchers in the area. Other than a few thousand acres of private land, including the sanctuary and my quarter-section inholding, this land is public—hundreds of thousands of high-desert acres managed by BLM, and the montane forest above managed by the Forest Service.

Water in the desert is dicey. Not much falls and often when it does it arrives in a rush. We two-leggeds live here among the many desert species, some branches of which evolved here while others migrated or were introduced, like cheatgrass, by our species. We make the choice to be here—one of the few species that can move water, we can turn on a tap or drive a pickup with a 320-gallon water tank in the bed or order up a 4,000-gallon load of water. That water insures our survival. It allows us to stay. We alone among all species on earth can make this choice, although as we alter the overall abundance of water this will change.

In the absence of rain in the desert comes prayer. I ask quietly, in an internal voice, for rain. Please. In winter, we pray for snow. We need both for the land, the native plant species, the pronghorn, elk, mule deer, mustangs, mountain lions, bobcats, black bear, coyotes, foxes, desert bighorn sheep, mice, kangaroo rats, pack rats, bunnies, birds, and bugs. In Disappointment Valley, I need it so the catchment system fills my cistern. Please.

As the summer days pass without rain, Disappointment Creek drops lower and TJ’s water worry increases. Nine miles of the creek meander through her ranch—the only natural water source for the sanctuary mustangs. She has a well that brings up alkaline water no human would touch, though her sanctuary horses will drink it—those who don’t mind coming close to the barn and house—but they prefer the creek, its water saline and silty but banked by coyote willows not buildings. For her personal use, TJ has water hauled in. Someday her boss may install a catchment system like mine for her house, but the priority when he bought the ranch was water for the horses. He put in the well.

In the Herd Management Area (HMA) that is geographically a basin and bureaucratically a designated, fenced range on which mustangs are allowed to live, one might guess, following the fencelines, that the HMA was designed more for human and cattle convenience than for wild horses: The mustangs are close to Disappointment Creek—surely from some parts of the basin they can hear it running past as I do this minute, and they can smell it—but they cannot get to it. They cannot drink from it. Fences turn them away. They are dependent on ponds or dirt tanks—hollows dug at the mouths of shallow arroyos to catch runoff when it comes. In addition to the ponds in the basin, there is a catchment system—two fenced acres of thick black plastic spread over sloping ground to collect rain and snowfall, with filters and underground pipes at the low end that connect to a 12,000-gallon metal tank, which can be filled with purchased water when drought threatens, as it does each summer.

Spring Creek, for which the basin and herd management area are named, is the one drainage inside the basin that carries water over distance, but it runs only when rain falls in a certain area of Mancos Shale badlands in the upper valley. From my truck on a bridge I saw it run once, the gray-black water charging down the dry creek bed, waves forming and falling away as debris pushed along by the sudden river made dams of logs and stones, and then the water broke through, again and again, violent and lovely. It could have swallowed my truck whole.

Along with the BLM, mustang advocates and volunteers installed the catchment system in the late 1990s. In 2016, we installed a second one, another collaborative effort between BLM and volunteers, which, this time, included TJ, both my sons, and me. After several hot June workdays, we had water on the south side of the basin. I think of it as the gray stallion Chrome’s catchment, as his band frequents those rough, scrubby hills.

While the pinto stallion Corazón was the first mustang stallion I saw out here, and I love him for his strong, sturdy body and the big heart that covers his left flank and side, it’s Chrome that makes me go weak in the knees. I can’t help it. A flea-bitten gray, he’s rugged and fierce and battle-scarred, yet so tender when grazing nostril to nostril with his mares, his long, wind-rolled mane sweeping the ground, while the little ones butt his sides and buck and play underhoof.

On the back porch, TJ and I shrink against the cabin as the world spins and shade recedes. Below us the creek runs along, a low but steady flow minus the muscle of spring. We got crazy and wonderful rains throughout May and the first June weekend, which totaled more than four inches, turned our desert green, raised the level nicely in the back ponds of the basin, and filled my two underground cisterns. But June was as dry as it always is. Now it’s late July, and still no rain. I trust that monsoons will come sooner or later, top off the ponds, and fill the basin’s catchment supply, but if the creek goes dry, TJ’s sanctuary horses will become dependent upon a single spring and humans hauling water. Which TJ will do.

The mustangs in the basin used to have access to creek water, too. Like the bear, elk, and deer, like the cattle that are still allowed that range, during the hot months they would go into the high country of ponderosa pines, aspens, and Colorado blue spruce to graze lush meadow grasses and drink from springs and natural pools. This was before people drew arbitrary lines across the country, traced those lines with barbed wire, and decided how many cattle could live in designated areas and where to entrap the wild horses. Now if no rain comes and the catchments don’t fill, we will pay to have water hauled in for the mustangs—$500 per 4,000 gallons of water—which advocates fork up when BLM cannot.

With the passing of shade, my border collies retreat to the covered front porch and TJ and I go inside to eat. Each day for the past couple of weeks the temperature has pushed—or passed—a hundred degrees. As we sit in the living room side of the cabin’s kitchen-dining-living room, plates on our knees, the cabin darkens, clouds moving in from the east exactly that fast. Thunder follows and lightning strikes the sky. The dogs come in and crowd my feet. Cojo wants my lap. TJ and I look at each other. I’m holding my breath; my heart pounds: Is this it? Our first monsoon of the season?

A few raindrops splatter the metal roof, but no downpour follows. The clouds drift off to the northwest. Thunder grumbles in the distance, echoing our disappointment.

It’s after 5:00, the sun still well up in the sky, the early evening holding the day’s lingering heat. “We still have time to go into the basin,” I say.

“It’d be a quick trip,” TJ says. “Two hours of good light left.”

She leaves first. I’m in a flurry of my own storm as I gather journal, binoculars, dogs, and water, always water. Hiking boots and a sweatshirt already in my truck—in case of hoped-for rain and a drop in temperature—I follow TJ’s dust west to her house, where she grabs her camera and binoculars and jumps into my old Tacoma.

Clouds crowd the northeast line of mountains; directly to the east, the horizon is hidden in cloud shadow; in the west, La Sal Mountains shimmer with sunlight, those last pockets of snow sparkling glitter.

We cross Disappointment Creek, which looks half the size of what was passing below the cabin. My part of the creek travels over bedrock and so far, even in the driest, hottest weeks of summers past, that rock has held puddles connected by the tiniest trickles. But the sanctuary’s miles of creek run through the soft Mancos Shale of the valley’s bottomlands and the water is known to disappear entirely. Hence TJ’s worry, and my quiet alarm—the creek here has dropped significantly in the last few days.

As we curve back east across the sanctuary toward the basin and the clouded mountains, lightning flashes on the far perimeters and thick, purple-dark clouds rim the basin, rim the whole eastern world. Long sheets of rain blow across that distant edge of the valley—the longest rain-hair I have ever seen bending in the wind like Chrome’s wild mane, the ends reaching down and brushing the land. From sky to earth this long hair floats and above it, backed by black clouds, a rainbow appears. One end touches the northern rim of the basin. Brilliant color arcs above, vibrates against the dark eastern clouds, and reaches to the south.

“It’s touching your cabin,” TJ says.

My heart brims. “It’s embracing the horses.”

Four years ago, I did not know that the mustangs and I would be neighbors, sharing a common fence. I did not know TJ, or that we would become neighbors and friends. Spring Creek Basin and the BLM herd management area were unknown to me, as well. I was just wandering up a dirt road in the fall to a future life I hadn’t yet imagined. That road and its mustangs led me back to my heart.

Which is right here, beneath a great canopy of color. We cross the cattleguard into the basin and there stands Chrome with his band, heads lifting from grazing to inspect my truck, which is not TJ’s Jeep, a vehicle the horses know well. I stop the Toyota to watch the sky and Chrome’s band and Chrome, his flea-bitten gray and the muted hues of his mares and offspring, all shades of gray but for one buckskin mare, grouped beneath a rainbow. Way off in the dip toward Spring Creek canyon and its dry creekbed two bachelor stallions graze, a stallion and mare even farther away. Above them on a curve of earth three bands drift until they have seemingly merged into one, all this beneath the colors of a rainbow. Who could ask for more?

And yet I’ve seen more. On a supermoon night in September 2015, the moon in its perigee phase, an eclipse happened that turned the moon red. A friend and I were out to see mustangs, TJ separate from us, walking with her camera and its long lens to get the best light behind a band of horses, but before us—right in front of my friend and me—stood Chrome. Ambassador of the basin, so often the first stallion and first band people see upon entering the herd management area, and there he was, standing tall and ropey with muscle and that long wild mane, watching us as the moon rose red behind him.

Red moonlight flooding the basin. Washing over Chrome. Flooding me.

My friend turned to me, wiping at a tear. “I’m crying,” she said, as if surprised.

TJ and I drive on into this rainbow eve and the colors shift in the changing light, thinning at the edges and then above and fading into sky as the shades of the horse spectrum of colors replace it, from the lightest gray (white) to black and everything in between: dun, buckskin, red bay, pinto, sorrel, dark dark bay. The horses beckon us in for a closer look. No rain has touched the dry ground so we keep going.

TJ breaks the silence. “Have you been on this road since the creek last ran?” I know she means Spring Creek. Amazing to us, that one early June rain caused it to run. I have not been deep into the basin in my own truck since then. “I moved boulders to make the crossing possible,” TJ says, “but it’s a still little rough.”

I’m not worried. We round a bend. Something glints silver in the lowering light.

“Water,” we both say, in a shared burst of recognition and awe.

“Water in Spring Creek,” TJ says. We envision puddles.

I make the last turn, dropping toward the creekbed, preparing for the four-wheel-drive bump and grind over boulders and the push up the steep far side. But, “It’s running,” one of us says, and TJ’s out the door before I stop the truck, running, herself, toward water.

Something in me slows as I complete the stop, let the dogs out, and walk to the edge of the swirling gray water of Spring Creek. It’s not the charging rush of a serious flash flood but a thick, steady flow—water that follows a course of eons as it slowly carves the canyon downstream, Dakota Sandstone eroding and carried in miniscule pieces, one grain or pebble at a time, toward Disappointment Creek and the Dolores River and then the Colorado.

TJ, seated on a rock, stares into the running water. I give her a minute but the dogs don’t, racing up and down the soup of this desert river just come to life with rain.

On a nearby hill, a line of mustangs assembles, one wild mare or stallion after another. I recognize the compact little buckskin, Hollywood, and his two older, range-wise mares, Alegre and Houdini, their gray fading to bright white with age, followed by Houdini’s daughter and a bay mare who looks almost gray, her sides caked with mud from a roll in a pond. More mustangs arrive, standing side by side on the crown of a hill against the clouds and sky of this great basin, looking down. At us? At the dogs playing? Or at the water itself.

Back to the truck for my binoculars, I sit sideways on the seat of my Toyota, feet propped on the running board, elbows on my knees to steady my vision, and watch as mustangs lift over the rise and join the line.

I’m watching wild horses while witnessing Spring Creek run. For me, this is a first.

TJ remains on her rock as the light fades. Even though this water will mostly go downstream, it will leave holes and pockets and then hoofprints of water and the horses will drink along with all the other wildlife of the basin. Right here, right now, in this piece of desert, there is water.

No rain falls on us and the road back to TJ’s is dry. She has forgotten something and follows me the seven miles to the cabin. I think about rainbow horses as I drive.

Stopping to open my gate, I feel the ground soft under my river sandals. In the headlights the gray soil looks smooth. The earth springs with smells, sage and greasewood and four-winged saltbush fresh, sharp. Driving again, I feel mud gripping the tires. Puddles stain the road.

We hear it as soon as we step from our vehicles—loud, pulsing water. I leap onto the back porch to grab a flashlight, leaving wet tracks on the kitchen floor, and lead the way through prickly pear and claret cup cacti to the cliff ledge, the dogs just ahead of us, Cojo’s toes at the edge. I tell him to get back as I step closer and there’s the river, wild with water. Even in the dim beam, moonlight hidden in cloud, we can see the rush and surge of fast water, rapids forming, the huge rock I use to mark water level completely submerged.

“Look,” I yell over the roar, pointing to a log rushing down; “Look at that,” fierce water pushing over stone; “Look there,” peering over the edge into the crashing darkness, not realizing I’m shouting my joy like TJ cried hers. “Oh the smells,” I say, as the pungency of thick, oil-shale and sediment-rich water collides with the sweet scent of wet sage.

Standing safely above the mayhem, we watch for a long time. The river does not fade in movement or strength or sound.

Suddenly TJ says, “You bolster my spirit.”

She says this to me. “No,” I say. “I don’t. It’s this,” my hands arcing rainbows over the river, the valley, night clouds covering horses, lives that live dreams.

Later in the night with a better flashlight I go out to look at the river. Marker rock still submerged, a log charges down the thick gray water. The flow has not yet begun to ebb.

The river changes through my sleep. In the morning two new large pieces of driftwood sit atop the wide flat stone in the middle of the river, the drainage once more a creek in size. Deep chocolate mud and bent coyote willows line the banks. Below the cabin a huge slab of sandstone that has been working free of the bank that held it for unknowable years tilts more vertically, the roots of sagebrush once growing at the rock’s crown now hanging in air.

“You bolster my spirit,” I say aloud to everything I see: roots and rocks and ravens; cliff and creek; the cleansed earth, water, sky. I say it to the air, the breeze. To new clouds forming. I say it to wild horses. To water in their desert.

It is a simple prayer. Not please but thank you.