A Song for the River

by Philip Connors

  Teresa and I were both wildfire geeks. She knew I had an amateur’s interest in fire research. But I sensed, beneath the facade of her jocular note, another message on a different frequency, something more than an invitation to share in the fruits of scientific inquiry conducted with the aid of liquid chromotography and bioassay-guided fractionation. Aware of how long and discouraging a battle with chronic pain I had waged—how my faulty hips had robbed me of nearly every pleasure that previously sustained me—she seemed to offer access to a useful metaphor. Something will grow from this, even though the landscape looks bleak. Something, even now, is being triggered to flower from the ruins. Those, at any rate, were the unspoken words I chose to hear.

  It cannot have been a coincidence that around that time, bed-bound with nothing better to do, I began writing this story in earnest—the idea of karrikins acting as a sort of mental karrikin on my dormant urge to spin meaning out of the chaos of life.

  But I see I’ve gotten ahead of myself once again, leaping forward in time from that morning when Teresa’s departure from the mountain with a bag of John’s ashes left me alone to the gathering spectacle in the sky. And what a spectacle: the ancient drama of the season’s first monsoon moisture streaming north from the Gulf of Mexico, meeting the cauldron of the desert and rising over the mountains, the resulting cumulus clusters expanding and climbing, blowing up like popcorn kernels, their bottoms slowly darkening and the first tendrils of virga beginning to fall like the delicate strings of a beaded curtain, and finally the first hot flash of a ground strike in the middle distance, then another, and another. By midafternoon dry lightning jabbed the mesas to the north every few seconds. New smokes were popping up, demanding my attention. I called in three in the span of an hour. Still unfamiliar with the terrain from John’s vantage point, I misplaced one of them by two miles. The crew sent to suppress it found it anyway by talking me through the landmarks and flashing a signal mirror in my direction.

  That evening, off the clock and out of service, I took a couple of pulls off the tequila bottle John had left behind. Then I rinsed my mouth, uncapped his tube of lipstick, and made myself up in the reflection of his signal mirror. As I stood on the catwalk in the day’s last light, lips puckered, a sad clown waiting on a hummingbird’s kiss, I couldn’t help thinking that the man I would have liked to ask about the contours of the landscape, the man who better than anyone could have alleviated my ignorance, was forever out of service. No longer up above the country keeping watch, he was now a part of it—and a part of me.

  A MONTH OF WORKING John’s shifts on Signal Peak, once it was over, felt like plenty long enough in his space. His relief lookout, Mark Johnson, would take over for what remained of the season, and Mark’s boss Keith Matthes would spell Mark for a day off now and then. I was more than happy to step aside. They had both been close with John, each in his own way closer than me, and it felt right to leave the place in their hands. Besides, I had fallen into a trap that sometimes snares the grieving. Alone, I found the dead were more alive to me than the living. The living moved like shadows on the periphery of a dream where the dead lived again. But of course the dream could not last.

  It wasn’t just John I kept alive in my imagination, but those three Aldo Leopold Charter School students. My inner ear kept playing a remembered moment from that open-mic event at Diane’s Parlor, two months before the plane crash, when Michael Mahl sang Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” with a haunting beauty that made my skin tingle. I often remembered the poignant last words he posted to social media on the occasion of his sixteenth birthday, less than two weeks before he died: I’m so thankful for everyone in my life and there is not a single thing or person that I take for granted. Thanks everyone for the birthday wishes. It’s been the greatest 16 years I could ask for. I have treasured the good moments, embraced the love, and cherished a life well lived.

  My thoughts also turned to Ella Myers and all the writing that ought to have been still ahead of her, a prize-winning author by the age of sixteen, a young woman who emanated intelligence and curiosity even through the scrim of her shyness, and whose closest companion had been her horse. I wish that time could halt, she had once written. That moments in our lives where we find happiness could last forever… I wish I could drive out all the darkness in our world and leave only light… But most of all I wish that somehow, some way, I shall leave something behind long after I am gone. After her death I learned from her mother that she had carried around like a talisman a book I had inscribed to her, one writer to another, by way of encouragement. The world felt crueler for the fact that she had not lived long enough to return the favor, but her words nonetheless lived on in the memories of those who had read them.

  I thought as well of Ella Jaz’s efforts in defense of the Gila River, and that petition with 6,470 signatures she delivered to the governor, asking for a reprieve from the diversion dam that made the river as much a source of worry as delight for those of us inclined to care about things wild and free. Having felt an urge to bend my sorrow to some redeeming purpose, I had turned my creative energies toward preventing a foreseeable death: the death of the river below the dam. My efforts were exceedingly modest, I admit. They mostly involved writing a regular column for the local newspaper at $25 a pop, a column in which I attempted to channel the voices of John and Ella Jaz in order to throw light on the shenanigans of those who dreamed of destroying the river. I was guided too—as usual—by a nugget of wisdom from Aldo Leopold: Somehow the watercourse is to dry country what the face is to human beauty. Mutilate it and the whole is gone… The economist, the engineer, or the forester may feel there has been no great loss and adduce statistics of production to prove it. But there are those who know, nevertheless, that a great wrong has been committed—perhaps the greatest of all wrongs.

  Despite more than a century’s worth of ideas to dam it near its headwaters, the stream still ran unmolested through about as rough and broken a piece of country as you could find in the continental US, the southern portion of the Gila Wilderness. The difficult topography was a big part of what had saved it from the engineers and boosters down the decades. But their tools had only gotten bigger, and if the bureaucrats at the Interstate Stream Commission (ISC) in Santa Fe had their way, the moment the river escaped from its mountain fortress and crossed the Wilderness boundary into the Gila-Cliff valley, it would at last be tamed and made servile to man, at a projected cost of more than a billion dollars.

  The back story was complicated, as water law tends to be in the West, but the short version could be summarized by reference to the novelist and poet Jim Harrison, who once wrote: Man has an inexhaustible ability to beshit his environment, with politicians well in the lead. In 2004, Congress passed the Arizona Water Settlements Act (AWSA), which dealt with numerous water-rights issues in the state. In a bit of horse-trading necessary to win support for the bill from New Mexico senators Pete Domenici and Jeff Bingaman—both of them crucial votes on the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources—the Arizona delegation agreed to throw in some additional money for water projects in the four counties of southwest New Mexico. Congress authorized $66 million for that purpose. It also stipulated—and this is the crucial detail—an additional amount up to $62 million be made available if the state opted to construct a diversion dam on the Gila River.

  That dangling carrot skewed the incentives in predictable ways. The $66 million could have been spent on conservation and watershed restoration, effluent reuse and upgrades to existing infrastructure—proven, cost-effective ways of addressing water demand. The state could have left the $62 million on the table and said no thanks to another disaster of industrial ingenuity. But that’s not how Western water politics works. First comes the solution—almost always a dam—and then follows the search for a problem to justify it.

  But there was no problem. Farmers in the Gila-Cliff valley already took all the water they needed with a temporary earthen diversion rebuilt in the river each spring. �
��We don’t have a shortage of water,” one local expert told me. “We have an excess of money encouraging us to do something stupid.”

  The river Ella Jaz knew—the river Ella Myers and Michael Mahl and John knew too—was unrecognizable in engineering studies I read that summer at the tower after hours. In one fever dream the majority of the river’s flow would be diverted through a nine-foot-diameter pipe blasted through a mountain and aimed into a stagnant side-canyon reservoir. Certain parties of an exceptionally grandiose temper argued for the water to be pumped from there up and over the Continental Divide and sluiced through a pipeline seventy miles to the dusty little burg of Deming.

  The studies were bought and paid for by the ISC, then obligingly churned out by its favored hirelings in the engineering-consulting racket. The engineers mostly portrayed the river as an underutilized ditch that—if repurposed for “wiser use” than simply letting a river go about the business of being a river—could slake the thirst of citizens in another river basin entirely, lure new industries to an artificial oasis in the desert, and provide additional irrigation options to a few dozen hobby farmers, all with welfare water paid for by someone else. A diversion dam was theoretically possible. Therefore the engineers had an obligation to play with the idea in the sandbox of their imaginations. But their dream was so brazenly irresponsible that to criticize it on technical or scientific grounds felt like trying to wound a hippopotamus with a pellet gun.

  If you looked hard enough through the blizzard of acronyms and jargon, the smoke and mirrors of grandiose proposals, you found a simple motivation and a sly strategy. The strategy appeared to be to conjure the most byzantine plan imaginable, as profligate as possible, so that when it had to be scaled back to jibe with fiscal reality, the plan’s authors could pat themselves on the back for their prudence and responsibility. The motivating impulse arose out of an old grudge. The goal, stated baldly by more than one dam proponent, was to do whatever it took to prevent Gila River water from crossing the state line to Arizona. New Mexico officials had long cultivated the fiction that the state had been stiffed in the water wars of the 20th century. Now it was payback time, and the Gila would have to be placed upon a sacrificial altar to settle old scores.

  The intellectual contortions required to buttress the dream were a thing to behold. One report ginned up by the consultants claimed a diversion dam had the potential to increase habitat for an endangered minnow species downstream. That’s right: reengineer and de-water the river they’ve called home for millennia, and they’ll thrive like never before! Meanwhile the real story was revealed by a close inspection of public records, which turned up back-channel text messages between a local water commissioner angling to oversee the project and an investment banker in Denver eager to make a “bankable deal.”

  It will come as no great news flash if I take a moment to note that a lust for domination over nature comes part and parcel with other forms of dominance. Paying witness to the personalities most invested in the whole charade revealed that the ISC bureaucrat who pushed hardest for a dam—indeed without whose chicanery the idea would have died in the cradle—was the sort of man who made a habit of bullying employees and belittling opponents. Court documents I dug up in Santa Fe revealed that the state had quietly settled a lawsuit that detailed his pattern of racial harassment of an ISC subordinate. This same man had also, with no trace of shame, once called the upper Gila River “the G-spot of New Mexico” in an open public meeting. If, in his wet dreams, the river was akin to female genitalia, then it didn’t take a Freudian to figure out what was represented by the big hard piece of concrete that would violate it.

  The US Department of Interior would have the final say on the dam’s feasibility and compliance with environmental laws. Congress mandated that a “record of decision” be handed down by the feds by the end of 2019. If history was any guide, politics could massage the outcome either way, science and fiscal responsibility be damned. In the meantime I resented having to sit through Orwellian public meetings in order to come to grips with the sort of hubris and dishonesty that could call the whole thing—and with a straight face—ecologically beneficial. The upper Gila watershed was home to seven threatened and endangered species of fish, birds, frogs, and snakes. With a diversion dam stealing water from the river, it would be robbed of the natural pulses of energy and nutrients that made it a living system—the ebb and flow that continually reshaped the floodplain and rejuvenated niche habitats crucial to those creatures’ survival. None of this troubled the schemers and dreamers. By their reckoning the fish would somehow survive in a river without water. The cottonwoods that offered nesting habitat to the birds would somehow learn to drink sand.

  For those who followed every serpentine twist and turn in the process, there was one inescapable conclusion. The water buffaloes were in the grip of a religious delusion. Who would pony up the $900 million shortfall once the $128 million promised by the feds ran out? If any of them knew they weren’t saying. Exactly how much water would the project yield? They couldn’t be bothered to share the numbers. Who were the precise end users of the water? Their identities changed month to month. Would the proposed reservoir site hold water or leak like a sieve? The question was of zero interest, since the engineers had a foolproof plan to line the thing with an enormous plastic diaper. What would happen as global warming inevitably diminished the river’s flow? Merely to mention it marked you as the dupe of a left-wing hoax.

  It was an axiom oft proven in the West that when water law put the fate of a river in the hands of bureaucrats, engineers, and investment bankers, they could find a way to make it flow uphill toward money. Contemptuous of dissent, impatient with nettlesome questions, these men—and they were almost without exception men—turned in their rhetoric with surprising frequency to mention of forebears and forefathers. They appeared intent on summoning in the imagination the sort of hard-handed go-getters who dug the first irrigation ditches with steam shovels more than a century ago, not to mention extirpated the wolves and grizzlies from some of the roughest country in the Lower 48, to make it safe for civilization and beef cattle, though not in that order. Even as they tipped their caps to a mythologized past, they insisted it was the prosperity of future generations that mattered above all—and the future would assess their character by one criterion only. They would be judged by whether or not they had shown the cojones to stick a straw in the state’s last wild river and suck.

  Their recall of history tended to be highly selective, as is always the case with demagogues and fantasists. They failed to mention, for instance, the most renowned forefather of all, the godfather of the Gila Wilderness, Aldo Leopold. When he first came to the country in 1909, a newly minted forester fresh out of Yale, he found six mountainous areas in New Mexico and Arizona with more than half a million roadless acres at their core. A decade later all but one—the headwaters of the Gila River—had been splintered by roads. It was a moment of reckoning in our treatment of wild places, and Leopold seized the chance to protect one last big remnant of our natural heritage in the Southwest.

  The parallels to the present reckoning could hardly be missed. Once again, the Gila encompassed the last of something—in this case, the state’s last free-flowing river. Every other main-stem stream in New Mexico was subdued by human infrastructure, dammed for agricultural and municipal water, backed up in bathtub reservoirs beloved by jet skiers and bass fishermen. The state’s most storied river, the Rio Grande, was a dessicated swath of sand in long stretches across its middle for much of each year. That stood in stark contrast with the Gila, which even the engineers who prepared the preliminary report on a diversion dam acknowledged as still “wild and scenic”—for now.

  There was another vision for the future of the river, one articulated in the advocacy and writings of Ella Jaz: a precious ribbon of riparian lushness, a haven for fish and wildlife, and a variable but unending song of celebration for the miracle of flowing water in the desert. Hers was the truer vision,
by far the more beautiful one, and the one destined to prevail if science, common sense, and humility were brought to bear in the final analysis. Water has always been the difference between life and death, boom or bust, and it will be the difference once again between a sustainable future and no future at all, she had written. Though it may be hard to transition to a sustainable lifestyle of limited growth and renewable resources, it’s mandatory if we want to continue on this planet for a little while longer and leave this good Earth alive, after we are gone.

  It was her farsighted perspective that I chose to celebrate when the first monsoon storms sent a pulse of floodwater down the canyons that summer, coincidentally on my days off from the tower. For years I had devoted myself to a study of the ways of fire, but I sensed a new obsession beginning to percolate—the ways of water, which were intricately linked with the ways of fire, since the forest of the high country determined the character of the watershed. The vegetation and soils of the mountains having undergone a radical realignment due to the big burns, so too would the river in the years to come. It would see muddier and flashier floods, for example, with less forest litter to hold the soil in place in the headwaters, and the spring runoff would begin much earlier, with far less shade on the snow of the high peaks to hold it in place.

  One way to begin to understand a watershed is to be on the water as it sheds. Besides, it was past time to visit the scene of the premeditated crime, in honor of Ella Jaz’s efforts to forestall that crime. So I packed up my inflatable kayak and a few necessary supplies and threw them in the back of my truck. The Wilderness run—a run I had long imagined but not yet attempted—beckoned.

  MÓNICA JOINED ME for the journey, which was only appropriate, since the purpose involved not merely homage to a wild river, but celebration of my recovered ability to sit for long stretches in a boat or anywhere else for that matter, an ability I owed entirely to her. Many a therapy session was required to bring about this miracle, but she never blanched at her role in my revival as a fully functioning human being. In fact she embraced it. The bestowal of nicknames began not with me calling her Lady Magic Finger, but with her calling the gland in question her Little Friend. It was a bold move, adopting the most damaged part of me as something to be cherished and tended to. She typically performed her remedial treatments on said amigo to the accompaniment of lit candles and meditative music designed to create a mood of mental relaxation and sphincter acquiescence—the whole business yet another reminder of the messiness of the human animal, and real mountain man stuff, no doubt about it. Over time a procedure I viewed as a necessary indignity evolved into an occasion for teasing, laughter, and a surprisingly sweet sort of intimacy, the old story of one human helping another turn the unacceptable into a source of amusement and pleasure—another possible working definition of unconditional love.