A Song for the River. Copyright © 2018 by Philip Connors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written consent from the publisher, except for brief quotations for reviews. For further information, write Cinco Puntos Press, 701 Texas Avenue, El Paso, TX 79901; or call 1-915-838-1625.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint copyrighted material:
Patrice Mutchnick and the estate of Ella Jaz Kirk for excerpts from the writings of Ella Jaz Kirk, including “Cord Fluidity” and “A Prayer to the Raven,” copyright © 2018 by Ella Jaz Kirk.
Counterpoint Press for an excerpt from the poem “The Lookouts,” from Left Out in the Rain by Gary Snyder. Copyright © 1986 by Gary Snyder. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint Press.
FIRST EDITION
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Connors, Philip, author.
Title: A song for the river / by Philip Connors.
Description: First edition. | El Paso, Texas: Cinco Puntos Press, [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017057947 | ISBN 9781941026922 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Connors, Philip. | Fire lookouts—New Mexico—Gila National Forest—Biography. | Gila National Forest (N.M.)
Classification: LCC SD421.25.C658 A3 2018 | DDC 634.9/61809789692—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017057947
Book and cover design by Anne M. Giangiulio
Cover photographs by Jay Hemphill
This is it! (Isn’t that what you heard, Mary?)
Also by Philip Connors:
Fire Season: Field Notes From a Wilderness Lookout
All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found
FOR MÓNICA
A Prayer to the Raven
A Hummingbird’s Kiss
Birthday for the Next Forest
The Navel of the World
A Song for the River
Catechism for a Fire Lookout
IN MEMORIAM
JOHN KAVCHAR
Signal Peak Lookout · May 2012
ELLA SALA MYERS, MICHAEL SEBASTIAN MAHL, ELLA JAZ KIRK
Gila River · April 2014
Like any Romantic, I had always been vaguely certain that sometime during my life I should come into a magic place which in disclosing its secrets would give me wisdom and ecstasy-perhaps even death.
—Paul Bowles
The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.
—Annie Dillard
A river loves the water / that it can never keep.
—Benjamin Alire Sáenz
A PRAYER TO THE RAVEN
SUMMER 2016
AFTER ILLNESS and divorce did a number on my body and soul, after wildfires burned the mountains and an airplane fell from the sky, after a horse collapsed on my friend and two hip surgeries laid me up for the better part of a year—loss piled on loss, pain layered over pain—I found I wanted nothing so much as to be near moving water.
So I went once more to the river.
The river emerges from springs and ice caves high in the mountains and gathers rain and snowmelt from a watershed of nearly 2,000 square miles. For more than a decade I had kept watch over those mountains and found the experience a two-hearted deal, living amid calamity and resilience. In the beginning I simply wished to remove myself from human company. I had my reasons, not at all unusual. But I kept returning for the communion of creatures that made my mountain hum, a beautiful Babylon of owls hooting and nutcrackers jeering and hermit thrushes singing their small and lovely whisper song—a palace of organisms, a heaven for many beings, a temple where life deeply investigates the puzzle of itself, as a wise man once said. The vultures, the ravens, the hawks, the Steller’s Jays, the foxes and bears, the elk and deer, the salamanders in their holes, the ladybugs in their tens of thousands: all of them were part of the mountain, and so were death and rebirth.
To watch a mountain you love murmur and chirp and howl and green up from rain and bloom with flowers, then see it succumb to flame and be blackened by heat only to live once more from the ashes, was to absorb an object lesson in transience and renewal. From my perch above the shaggy pines and stately firs, I looked down on a world burning itself up, most of us burning ourselves up in work and striving and the peculiar game of consumption and accumulation without end—the whole world on fire from our appetites and their cost—and I sometimes thought it would not be a terrible fate to lie down for the last time in ashes, preferably on a mountain.
On a mountain, ashes do not remain still for long. They are worked on by wind and water and follow ancient courses decreed by the laws of hydrology, which are determined by the laws of gravity. When enough of these watercourses converge in a form that pulses and recedes but does not cease, we call the convergence a river. In the mud along the banks of the river, mud dappled by the pawprints of bears, were remnants not just of the forests in the mountains but of people I had loved and admired, and their remnants also arrived there having been transfigured by flame to ash.
The river drew its shape from volcanic upheavals thirty-five million years ago, and for untold millennia creatures have gone about their mysterious business along its floodplain and in the substrate of its waters. Some of the mysteries have been revealed to us, thanks to people who make it their business to interpret them. I spent time with a team of biologists in the river that summer, wading hip deep in the big pools, watching their stream-dance as they high-stepped with dip nets and seine nets and hauled up fish to measure and count before returning them to the water unharmed.
They spoke of things they had learned—for instance how native loach minnows excavate a pocket beneath a flat rock in cobble. There the female lays her eggs for the male to fertilize. Being buoyant, the eggs adhere to the bottom of the rock. The male acts as the lookout over his progeny, cleaning away any fungus that attaches to the eggs and warding off insect predators and bottom-feeding desert suckers, until the eggs hatch and another generation takes its place in the weave of life that constitutes the river.
A threat hung over all this, another reason I went to the river. The threat appeared in the form of a concrete diversion dam that, if built, would put an end to the upper Gila River as a living entity. I wanted to find solace and strength in nearness to my friend John, a forest guardian while he lived, and my inspiration Ella Jaz, a river guardian while she lived, each of whom had gone before me in ash down the river—John after falling to his death beneath his horse, Ella Jaz after dying with her friends in the fiery wreckage of a plane. I wanted to hear, if I could, not just the voice of the river but the voices of my friend and inspiration, each of whom had known a thing or two about countering hubris and greed with logic and poetry. I wanted to pay homage to their memory as I rejoined the work of defending that sinuous green gallery of beauty from any attempt to defile it. I wanted to assure them we continued to speak up for the array of life that made the river sing—the yellow-billed cuckoo and the willow flycatcher and the spikedace minnow and the narrow-headed garter snake—in contrast to the bureaucrats, engineers, and county commissioners who uttered not an honest word in favor of the creatures that depended on the river, but instead sang hymns of praise to concrete berms, coanda screens, grouted boulder weirs, and prefabricated booster stations.
I wanted to see the river as it was and always had been, aware that men with power dreamed its death was nigh.
KNOWING I COULD stand a measure of frivolity amid my fear for the river and the obligations I felt to it and
the dead, I called my friend the Swede and confirmed I was welcome for a visit to his lonely redoubt up a canyon in the headwaters. There I would be far enough upstream to have early warning were the river to rise and make feasible a float trip by boat. I took down a grocery list for the both of us and, provisioned for three weeks, set off on a drive ending beyond two locked gates and nine stream crossings.
“It’s good to see you moving about,” he said, as I hauled my coolers full of food onto the porch of the bunkhouse. “I thought you might have been lost forever down in the desert with your dubious hips and your shattered illusions.”
Like others who are part of this story, the Swede was the sort who broke the mold. For as long as I had known him, he had spent his summers loafing about the Eagle Rock Ranch like some reprobate Buddha, babbling the days away, alternating between profundity and nonsense, although where one ended and the other began was not always clear. Occasionally he tired of his own voice and resumed a vow of silence: “I’m back in rehab,” he would mutter, before retreating to a corner of the crumbling adobe bunkhouse with a cigar and a book, his last bladder bag of white wine abandoned to the recyling bin.
In a previous incarnation he had been a sort of anti-industrialist with a knack for dirty demolition work, and before that a lighthouse keeper in northern Sweden—the experience over which we first forged our connection, lighthouse keeper and fire lookout amounting to the same line of work if you swapped water for trees. Along with three partners he had built a small fortune using robots to dismantle nuclear reactors, steel plants, and other places where humans had found a way to heat, beat, and treat some industrial product. He had known both the sublime hush of the Baltic coast in deepest winter and the roar of heavy machinery in the act of high-dollar destruction; his company had repaired the ceiling of the Holland Tunnel between New Jersey and Manhattan and saved the Glen Canyon Dam spillway from the ruin of cavitation during the 1984 flood, an intervention for which I found it hard to forgive him. Without his robots working to hold it, the dam would have burst, re-exposing the drowned splendors of Glen Canyon.
“You should have let the thing crumble,” I told him. “You would have been a hero. Ed Abbey would have kissed you.”
“Emergency government money,” he said. “It was a really tasty deal. But I do look back and wonder. My true calling was mycologist, but I ended up a garbologist. Someone had to clean up the disasters of industrial ingenuity.”
After cashing out his share of the business in the mid-’90s, he sailed a boat around the world for nearly a decade, mostly in the south Pacific but also up and down the coast of Mexico. Rumor had it he had engaged in a little part-time smuggling to keep some skin in the game and not go flabby. As with most of the best characters I had met with some deep connection to the Gila River headwaters of southwest New Mexico, out on the ragged edge of the republic, he appeared to have lived his life in technicolor.
It was a verifiable fact, for instance, that he had served as the personal gofer, in San Francisco in the 1960s, to the manager of the Kingston Trio, a guy the Swede called by his first name only: Frank. Busted in possession of 258 pounds of marijuana during a police raid in 1968, Frank spent the rest of that strange decade in legal limbo. In the end he got off with a slap on the wrist.
A few years later Frank liquidated his various businesses—a record-production company, a restaurant, and several real-estate holdings, including San Francisco’s Columbus Tower, which he sold to Francis Ford Coppola—and bought a plot of dreamland surrounded by the Gila Wilderness. There he spent the second half of his life chasing enlightenment and transcendence amid trickling hot spring seeps and pools alive with the movements of trout.
The Swede paid his first visit in 1976 and promptly fell in love with the place. He returned a couple of times a decade for the next forty years. He had abandoned the life of the oceans and returned to his native Sweden when the call came that Frank had died after a period of illness. The Swede got on a plane to the States, thinking he’d be gone a week or two in order to pay his respects to Frank’s children.
Instead he stayed a decade.
The enchanting atmosphere of the canyon was the major thing that held him—that and the duty he felt to keep the place functioning now that Frank was buried on the mesa just above the stream. Since the ranch no longer had a permanent resident, the Swede feared it would fall into ruin if he didn’t step in and tend to Frank’s legacy. This fact may have accounted for our deepening bond, since I felt a similar devotion in regard to John and Ella Jaz, both also now joined in perpetuity with the river.
The Swede had perfected the life of the cot master, a vagabond creature capable of sleeping anywhere as long as he had a foldout cot, a sleeping pad, and a good mummy bag. The ranch offered him a stab at the ways of the bath master. Hot springs flowed from the ground all around, and some of them were tapped and redirected via hoses to a spot near the bank of the stream. The Swede took a profound and sustaining pleasure in maintaining a world-class private spa under semi-primitive conditions, running an array of siphons from horse trough to horse trough and ultimately to a clawfoot tub nestled in sedges and willows, keeping waters of various temperatures and pristine clarity available for soaking at all hours, in all weathers. He credited his continuing health in part to the therapeutic quality of those waters, and he tended to them like a lover.
Having judged me a kindred spirit on the basis of our shared experience of solitude, he let me know I was welcome at the ranch any time. I wasn’t shy about making good on the offer. It was a place where you could always count on the welcome mental scouring of a good tequila drunk and ribald talk around an outdoor fire in the evenings, which together made for a nice anaesthetic for the sorrows of this world. Throw in some quality fishing, and those horse troughs arranged with a view down the canyon of burnt-sienna cliffs, and it was a trial run at Shangri-La. We had a standing agreement whereby he reimbursed me for the groceries, I cooked all the meals, and he cleaned up afterward—the rest was play and minor maintenance. Now and then a water pipe would spring a leak and take four hands to fix by a method the Swede called “backcountry welding”: inner-tube material, also known as “Mormon rawhide,” cut in strips and wrapped around the leaky pipe with baling wire twisted over the top to hold the seal.
There were those who failed to understand my affection for the man, mutual acquaintances who viewed him as an unreconstructed ne’er-do-well, needlessly profane, a souse and a malingerer. It was true that he had neglected to sand off the rough edges of his persona, unlike most of us who bow to social pressure and an innate desire to please. But I have found it useful, for the sake of one’s private morale, to have at least one friend who is not a better human than you are. Richer, sure. Older and wiser, fine. Just not better. We were both, he reminded me more than once, “lowlife white trash” of the northern European variety, and captive to our private dreams of freedom. But he was also something of a demented genius with the English language, a high priest in the secular practice of mirth.
Perhaps most crucially, he understood and honored the beauty of flowing water in an arid land.
Back in the canyon for the first time in more than a year, floating in the hot springs beneath the vastness of a sky unmarred by city lights, I made the Swede tell me all the old stories again—about Frank and San Francisco in the ’60s, the lighthouse on the Baltic coast, his years in robot demolition—and I secretly dreamed of a wild run down the river.
I bided my time, waiting for the flood that would carry me and the ashes of the forest and the ashes of the dead on a journey that seemed like a prerequisite were I to feel fully alive again, after the loss of a marriage and a forest and a friend, all of them gone forever, and the loss of my mobility, thankfully only temporary. In the green light of dawn and the velvet dusk of evening, I took the healing waters in the tubs. By day I fished the glide runs and deep pools upstream and worked on improvements to a swimming hole, repositioning rocks, excavating sand and mud.
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br /> My own little diversion dam, I realized. My own little engineering project, playing with the flow, shaping it to my selfish purposes. A dream different from that of the schemers and boosters only in its scale and permanance.
My dam would burst with the next big rain in the headwaters.
Theirs would mar the river forever.
IT WAS IN KEEPING with the history of the place that I should dream of a dam across the stream. A century earlier the property had been owned by a cattle baron of some renown, a British-born mining engineer and rancher who used it as his private retreat, forty miles upstream from his headquarters. Known to some by the sobriquet Thomas the Lion, the man controlled more than a million acres of rangeland at the height of his powers, attracting investors from London and New York, where he took a room at the Waldorf-Astoria when in town on business.
Back in his stronghold along the Gila River, he warred with rivals, evicted small landholders, and imposed his will, sometimes at gunpoint, on any who dared challenge him. When he discovered his first wife sharing intimacies with another man, he promptly shot the man dead, without consequence from local law, which deferred to him in most matters of life and property.
As sometimes happens to such men, Thomas the Lion died from a hammer blow to the skull, his body dumped in a ravine off a side street in El Paso, Texas, in 1917, after which his empire crumbled.
While he still had the ability to dream his dreams of dominance, he had imagined a dam on the river’s main stem. With partners he went so far as to incorporate the Gila River Power Company in February 1910, with the goal to generate, sell, distribute and transmit power for mining, milling, manufacturing, lighting, heating and other purposes, either by steam, electricity, water power, or any other means whatsoever. That was in keeping with his methods: by any means whatsoever. The dam would have stood 200 feet tall, with a span across the canyon of 1,000 feet. It would have funneled the river through a nine-foot-diameter pipe across a length of nearly seven miles from the point of diversion to an off-site reservoir with a capacity of more than 217,000 acre feet—or enough water to fill, to a depth of twelve inches, the surface area of 217,000 football fields. Like other such ideas that came after, it foundered on the shoals of cost and logistics.
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