Ditches Are Deadly
On what Albuquerque forgot about water, and what the water remembers
Originally published on Medium, March 14, 2026.
Ditches are deadly.
That’s the first thing Albuquerque teaches its children about water. Not how it works. Not what it does. Not why it’s there. Signs at every arroyo crossing. Radio spots every monsoon season. Public service announcements with the cadence of commandment. Three words, delivered to a six- or seven-year-old with the weight of scripture.
Stay away. It will kill you.
I never stayed away.
The Winrock channel ran behind Pinewood Estates — the apartments were pink then, a sun-faded salmon that looked like the building was blushing. They’re not pink anymore. Tilt arcade was right there at the mall, close enough to hear the electronic chaos through the doors, the clatter of tokens into coin slots, someone’s older brother cursing at Mortal Kombat. And a mile from all of it, a concrete channel.
Not an arroyo. Not anymore.
A concrete trough, maybe fifty feet wide, sloping walls engineered to move water as fast as possible from one place to another. Dry most of the year. Full of junk and tree branches all year. Shopping carts half-buried in silt that collected in the corners where the concrete walls met. Debris — plastic bags, fast food wrappers, tumbleweeds dried to skeletons in the corners where concrete met chain-link, things that blew in and never blew out because the concrete had no ecology to break them down. No microbes, no roots, no soil. Just a trough that held whatever fell in.
And an old car. I don’t remember the make. I remember the rust, the way the paint had oxidized into something that wasn’t a color anymore, just a texture. It sat against the channel wall like it had been there since before I was born. Maybe it had. Nobody moved it. It was part of the channel now, the way the shopping carts were part of the channel, the way the broken bottles were part of the channel.
The city had turned its water way into a place you throw things.
There was a catwalk — a pedestrian bridge — that ran from Winrock over to Jerry Cline Park. Below us, I-40. The freeway sat lower than the overpass, and when the semi trucks came through, we’d stand in the fenced cage over the railing and pull our arms down — the trucker signal, the universal request. The semis would honk. That sound — the air horn of an eighteen-wheeler reverberating off concrete walls while you’re standing on a metal grate thirty feet above the interstate — that was the sound of the channel. Not water. Cars and trucks. The city had replaced the sound of its own watershed with the sound of freight.
Where ABQ Uptown is now, there used to be a dirt lot.
Not a small one. A field, really, stretching out toward the mountains with the kind of openness that doesn’t exist in that part of the city anymore. And running through it, a natural channel — not concrete, not engineered, just a crease in the earth where water had been finding its way for longer than anyone had been keeping track. The Embudo Arroyo. Embudo — funnel in Spanish. It originates in Embudo Canyon in the Sandia Mountains and flows west-southwest across the mesa, carrying monsoon water toward the Rio Grande. It had been doing this for thousands of years before anyone built a mall or the house I grew up in on top of it.
In the early 1990s, that channel was our half-pipe.
We’d ride our bikes down the dirt walls, the arroyo banks angled just right, the sand compact enough after a number of attempts, to hold a tire but loose enough that you could feel the give, the negotiation between tire tread and earth. We didn’t know it was a watershed. We didn’t know it was the last undeveloped stretch of a drainage system that once ran uninterrupted from the Sandias to the river. We knew it was a great place to ride.
We also knew that if you put dry ice in a plastic Dr. Pepper bottle and screwed the cap on tight, eventually the bottle would explode. We did this in that field more times than I should probably admit in print. The crack of the plastic echoing off nothing — no buildings, no walls, just open scrubland and the wind.
I go to Lush at ABQ Uptown now. I park in on the concrete, walk past the retail, buy bath bombs for my nieces. And I think about riding my bike across dirt that’s now under two floors of parking garage.
The arroyo is still there. It’s just underneath everything. Channelized, buried, routed into concrete infrastructure that moves the water efficiently from point A to point B. The half-pipe is a storm drain. The field where we blew up Dr. Pepper bottles is an Apple Store.
The water still comes down from the Sandias when it rains. It just doesn’t touch the dirt anymore.
When it rained — really rained, monsoon rained, the sky going slate-green over the Sandias and the smell of creosote rising off the mesa before the first drop hit — everything stopped. The heat broke like a held breath. The light went warm, the shadows disappeared, and for a few seconds the whole city hung between dry and not-dry, between the desert it was and the river it was about to become. Then it hit. And I’d go out of my way to watch.
I’d ride to the channels. Not away from them. Toward them. I wanted to see the water. The arroyos that were concrete-lined and dry all summer would transform in twenty minutes into something violent and fast, dark brown water churning with debris, foaming, moving at a speed that didn’t match the still, baking the city I’d been riding through five minutes earlier. The sound was wrong for Albuquerque — this was a city of wind and quiet, and suddenly there was rushing, a low roar that came up through the ground before you could see the water.
The fire department practiced rescues in the channels. I’d watch that too: the ABQ Fire Department running swift-water drills, crews in helmets and harnesses working the concrete banks, throw rope bags arcing across the current. They practiced because people died. Because children died. Because the channels that were engineered to move water fast moved it fast enough to kill anyone who fell in. The concrete that was supposed to make the arroyos fast had made them lethal. A natural arroyo spreads. The water fans out across sand, slows, dissipates, drops its sediment, soaks into the ground. A concrete channel accelerates. The water has nowhere to go but forward, nowhere to slow, no friction, no soil, no roots to grab. The ditches became deadly after we made them ditches.
The signs went up because of the concrete. Not because of the water.
Seventy years before I blew up Dr. Pepper bottles in that field, there was nothing there. Not nothing as in undeveloped — nothing as in open mesa. Chamisa. Apache plume. Cholla. Saltbush. No Russian thistle. No tumbleweeds. They hadn’t arrived yet.
The mesa grew what belonged to it. The same scrubland that still covers the foothills where the city hasn’t reached yet, the same vegetation that grows on every south-facing slope in the Sandias. The land was ejido — communal grazing under the Spanish land grant system. Goats and cattle driven up from the valley. Not farmland. Too far from the river, too high for irrigation.
The valley had its water. The mesa had its own.
All of Albuquerque was thirty-five thousand people in 1940. The Northeast Heights, everything east of San Pedro, everything above the valley floor, was essentially uninhabited. Open mesa, arroyos running through it the way arroyos had been running through it for millennia, carrying monsoon water from the mountains to the river in channels the land had carved for itself.
In 1920, the University of New Mexico bought four hundred and eighty acres of that mesa to grow vegetables for students. They never planted them. For thirty-three years, the land sat empty. Kids rode bike trails through it — not so different from what we’d be doing seventy years later, a few hundred yards away, on the last piece of unbuilt ground.
In 1958, a man named Winthrop Rockefeller financed a shopping mall on that unplanted garden. They called it Winrock. Win + Rock. It opened March 1, 1961. Thirty thousand people showed up on the first day to walk through New Mexico’s first regional shopping center, designed by Victor Gruen, the architect who invented the American mall and later disowned the entire concept.
The garden that was never planted became the mall that paved the desert.
Then came the bomb. Not the bomb itself — the bomb’s economy. Kirtland Air Force Base. Sandia National Laboratories. The federal investment that turned Albuquerque from a small city in the valley into a sprawl climbing east across the mesa. The population tripled between 1940 and 1950. Doubled again by 1960. Developers moved across the Heights like water across a flat surface, filling every low point, building subdivisions on land that had never held anything heavier than a goat. You could stand on the mesa east of Juan Tabo and watch the bulldozers cutting grade through arroyos that had been running since before anyone kept records.
They built across the arroyos. Through them. Over them. The natural drainage patterns that the mesa had carved over centuries — the channels that carried monsoon water safely from the mountains to the river — were treated as obstacles. Engineering problems. Inconveniences to be solved with concrete and culverts. Smaller feeder arroyos were simply filled in and forgotten. Built over as if they’d never existed. Where the bulldozers scraped the mesa bare, the ground grew back different — not chamisa, not saltbush, but something that hadn’t been there before.
The Embudo Arroyo — the one we’d ride our bikes through thirty years later — was channelized. AMAFCA, the Albuquerque Metropolitan Arroyo Flood Control Authority, was created in 1963 specifically to manage the drainage problems that development had created. Their first independent project was the channel connecting the Embudo Arroyo at I-40 to the North Diversion Channel. Public hearing: March 4, 1969. The freeway and the arroyo channelization were the same generation of infrastructure. Same concrete. Same decade. Same logic: move the water out, fast, before it causes damage.
The logic made sense. People were dying in flash floods. The city was growing faster than anyone had planned for. The engineers solved the problem they were asked to solve.
Nobody asked what the arroyos were doing before we called them a problem.
Here’s what they were doing.
When monsoon rain hits bare desert soil, the arroyo catches it. The natural channel spreads the water. The flood pulse fans out, slows, drops its sediment. And then — if you stood still long enough after a storm, at the edge of an arroyo that hadn’t been concreted yet, you could watch the water disappear. Not evaporate. Not run off. Disappear into the sand. The arroyo floor would darken, then dry, and the water would be gone. Down through the sand, through the gravel, through the substrate, into the aquifer. The underground reservoir that the entire city drinks from.
That’s what the arroyos were doing. They were filling the aquifer.
The concrete stopped that. Concrete doesn’t percolate. Water hits concrete and runs. It accelerates, it concentrates, it reaches the Rio Grande in a fraction of the time it used to take. The aquifer stopped receiving its recharge. It dropped.
Now, the city that paved its water system had to buy water from another state.
The San Juan-Chama Diversion Project — a four-hundred-million-dollar pipeline that brings water from the San Juan River in Colorado, through a tunnel under the Continental Divide, into the Rio Grande above Albuquerque. That’s the solution. That’s what it costs to replace arroyos with a concrete channel: a four-hundred-million-dollar pipeline to import water from another state because you paved over the system that was recharging your aquifer for free.
The arroyos were doing it for free. The city just had to not pour concrete into them.
The cottonwoods along the Rio Grande are dying. Not because anyone cut them. Because the floods stopped. The bosque (the cottonwood forest that has lined the Rio Grande through Albuquerque for as long as the river has been the river) depends on the periodic flood cycle. The inundation replenishes the soil, carries seeds, resets the understory. The Army Corps and the conservancy controlled the river. They stopped the floods.
The cottonwoods are still standing but they’re already dead.
The silvery minnow — Hybognathus amarus — was once the most common fish in the Rio Grande. It’s now federally endangered and conservation-reliant. It needs clean, flowing water with sandy substrate. It needs the kind of cool water that runs through natural channels, not concrete.
The minnow doesn’t decide to die. The physics of the water changes.
Someone upstream tends the channel, or doesn’t.
Down in the valley — below the mesa, below the Heights, below Winrock and the channels and the freeway — there was a different relationship to water.
The acequias.
Acequia — from the Arabic as-saqiya, the water carrier. The Moors brought the word and the technology to Spain. The Spanish brought it to the Rio Grande Valley in 1598. But the Pueblo people had been irrigating the valley floor since 800 AD, long before anyone arrived with a Spanish word for what they were already doing.
An acequia is a gravity-fed irrigation channel, dug by hand, maintained by the community that uses it. The mayordomo manages the ditch — decides when the water flows, who gets it, how much. The parciantes are the users, the families whose fields the acequia feeds. Every spring, the community cleans the ditch together. It’s physical work — shoveling silt, clearing debris, rebuilding banks that winter eroded. It’s also a social event, a seasonal ritual, the annual act of maintaining infrastructure by hand, together.
Children grew up inside this system. They didn’t learn that ditches are deadly. They learned how water moves. They learned where it goes. They learned that the ditch needs you and you need the ditch and the relationship is maintained through work, through seasons, through showing up on March 14th with a shovel.
Seventy-nine acequia systems operated in the Albuquerque area. In 1923, the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District absorbed them. Not dramatically. Bureaucratically. An administrative consolidation. The functioning infrastructure didn’t collapse. It was filed. It was managed. It was incorporated into a system that prioritized efficiency over participation, control over relationship, engineering over ecology.
Some acequias still run. The Acequia Madre de Albuquerque in the North Valley. The ditches in Corrales, in Los Ranchos, in the villages south of the city that the sprawl hasn’t swallowed yet. The mayordomos still walk the ditches. The parciantes still clean them every spring. The same physics, running since 1598. Since 800 AD. Since before there was a city here to forget how water works.
Every year, the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, AMAFCA puts up a snowman.
Not a real snowman. This is Albuquerque — it rarely snows enough for that. A tumbleweed snowman. Three tumbleweeds stacked, decorated with scrap metal eyes, a broken ax handle for a nose, old work gloves for hands, a fifty-five-gallon drum for a hat. The scarf is knitted by the mother-in-law of one of the maintenance crew. He goes up along Interstate 40 — the same freeway whose construction was simultaneous with the channelization of the Embudo. He’s been there since 1995. He averages twelve to fourteen feet tall. His appearance signals the start of the holiday season.
Albuquerque loves the tumbleweed snowman. It might be the most beloved public gesture in the city. The agency responsible for the concrete channels, the flood control infrastructure, the engineering that dropped the aquifer and necessitated a four-hundred-million-dollar pipeline from Colorado — their most cherished contribution to the city’s life is a snowman made from tumbleweeds.
Tumbleweeds are Russian thistle. Invasive. They arrived in the American West accidentally in the 1870s, in contaminated flax seed from Russia. They thrive in disturbed soil. They’re an indicator species — where tumbleweeds grow thick, the native ecology has been damaged. The ground has been scraped, compacted, altered. The tumbleweed is a signal that something was disrupted.
The agency that channelized the arroyos builds its beloved mascot from a plant that grows where the ground has been disturbed.
I don’t think they know they’re telling you.
I spent twenty-three years detecting security breaches and lately, fraud. The kind of deception that moves through systems at machine speed and exploits the gap between what a credential says and what a person actually is. There’s a word for the physics underneath all of this, but the arroyo already told you.
The arroyo did its work without a policy document, without an engineering plan, without an agency to manage it. It did it through the relationship between water and sand and slope and time. Through the way the channel shaped itself to receive what the sky gave it.
The concrete replaced that with a policy: move the water out, fast, before it causes damage.
The water was never the damage.
I think about the kid on the bike. The dirt lot where ABQ Uptown is now. The Embudo running through it — not channelized, not yet, not in that last stretch, the arroyo’s final breath before the city paved it over. The banks angled like a half-pipe. The sand compact enough for spoked tires. The Dr. Pepper bottles and the boom of exploiding plastic echoing off nothing.
I think about the backyard I grew up in. The hose on full blast, water running through channels I’d dug myself, flooding the infrastructure, watching what held. Moving on when erosion won. The shade under a tree where I had dug a big hole — cone-shaped, wide at the top, narrow at the bottom. I filled it with cold water and got in. The water was so cold it made my chest tight. But it was smooth to the touch. The dirt walls darkened where it soaked in, the same way the arroyo floor darkened after a storm. Roots hung above me like the ribs of something. I stayed until the water went warm, then filled it again.
The kid in the hole under the tree. The snowman on I-40. Both made from what the city didn’t plan for — the roots that shaped the me, the thistle that grew from where the ground was scraped. Neither one knew it was telling the story.
The city said ditches are deadly. The kid said let me see what they do.
He was running the acequia model without knowing the word. Ten years old, same physics the mayordomos had been running for four hundred years. Build the channel. Let the water through. Watch what holds. Maintain it. Show up in the morning and see what survived the night.
The channels that survived overnight were the ones that worked with the slope, not against it. The ones that let the water spread where it needed to spread and narrow where it needed to narrow. The ones shaped by the water as much as they shaped the water. The kid didn’t know the word for that either. He knew the feel of it. The way a channel that’s working looks right — the water moving without fighting, the banks holding without forcing.
The channels the Corps built don’t look right. They work — they move water from A to B with engineering precision. But they don’t look right. The water is moving too fast. The walls are too straight. There’s no negotiation. The concrete doesn’t care where the water wants to go. It tells the water where to go.
An arroyo asks.
I drive past Winrock now — Winrock Town Center, they call it, the mall reinvented as mixed-use development. Pinewood Estates is still there. Not pink anymore. The catwalk is still there. I-40 is still below it, the semis still honking, though I don’t pull my arm down anymore.
The Embudo still runs. You can follow its path from the Sandias to the river — partly trail, partly concrete channel, partly buried under parking lots and retail. It’s there. Under the city. Under ABQ Uptown. Under the store where I buy bath bombs for my nieces on top of a buried arroyo that used to be my half-pipe.
The water still comes down from the mountains when it rains. It still finds its way down-west. It’s been doing this since before the Pueblo. Since before the acequia. Since before UNM’s unplanted vegetable garden and Rockefeller’s mall and the Corps and AMAFCA and the signs that said the ditches were deadly.
The snowman will go up again this year, the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. New scarf. Fresh tumbleweeds. Fourteen feet of Russian thistle on the shoulder of I-40, telling the story of the ground it grew from to every car that passes. The most beloved thing the city builds, made from the evidence of what the city broke.
The channels that the mesa carved for itself over millennia — the ones that spread the flood, slowed the water, filled the aquifer, fed the bosque, held the minnow — those channels weren’t a problem to be solved. They were the solution, already running.
Ditches aren’t deadly.
Forgetting what they do is.