A Song for the River

by Philip Connors

  Their joy transported me in memory to the high mountains along the border of Michoacán and Mexico state, for by then Mónica and I had fulfilled our vow of seeing the wintering grounds of the monarch butterfly. We had visited with members of an ejido—a traditional structure of communal farmland ownership—who were hard at work on strategies for preserving the monarch’s habitat: sustainable agriculture, forest protection, responsible ecotourism. I was intrigued to learn that among the ways the ejido guarded the oyamel fir forest crucial to the monarchs’ survival was to station lookouts in the mountains to sound the alarm against illegal logging. In at least one case, a lookout had been killed by tree poachers. Others had had their lives threatened. I found these stories both sad and inspiring: lookouts who put their lives on the line to protect a landscape they loved, a forest they recognized as precious and irreplaceable, in defiance of men who thought only of short-term profit. Lookouts engaged in the profound work of nurturing inter-species respect.

  We rode horseback into the forest to watch the monarchs awaken with the heat of the day. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. We felt as if we had found ourselves inside a snowglobe filled with butterflies—tens of thousands of them swirling like autumn leaves not exactly falling but drifting and floating, and us privileged to sit for a moment inside their riot of color.

  To be a native of southern Minnesota, as I am, is to be from a land where men systematically destroyed almost every last wild thing that once enlivened the place. As a child I participated in the transition from the old practice of pulling weeds by hand from the soybean fields to using Roundup herbicide that killed everything it touched. With a spray bottle full of liquid poison, I had walked the rows of beans and laid waste to patches of milkweed that the monarchs depended on for sustenance. Part of my journey to the butterflies’ winter home involved an impulse to greet them where they gathered and tell them I was sorry. I expected the moment to be somber, but try being somber inside a snowglobe full of butterflies.

  Once the children studied and released their catches, Patrice gathered them around her and calmed them by lowering her voice to just above a whisper. “Let’s all turn and look at the pond,” Patrice said. The kids complied. “Isn’t it pretty? Part of the reason we picked this place to make Butterfly Way was that my daughter loved to come here. She and her friends liked to swim in the pond and teach children like you about the river and the butterflies. We made this place so you could enjoy the beauty just like they did.”

  She told them, very gently, that her daughter had died in a plane crash with her friends while studying the forest, and that the bench with a memorial plaque on it, next to the pond, helped people remember things that Ella Jaz and her friends had cared about. The children stood rapt, the only time all day they went completely silent.

  Patrice urged the group to follow her on a path, single file, to a sycamore tree on the north side of the pond. “This tree is 200 years old,” she told them, “older than any of us will ever be. Some things grow very old, and some people die very young, but no matter how long we have, we should try to bring beauty into the world. Give the bark a touch and see how smooth it is. When you feel it, think about things that are important to you. Things you love or think are beautiful.”

  One by one the children touched the tree. A pale, morose-looking boy, blue-lipped and shivering, waited to be last in line. A few minutes earlier he had broken down in tears, complaining of the cold. Now he placed his palm against the tree and whispered a few words. He fell silent and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, his face softened into a smile.

  ON MY WAY UPSTREAM toward the headwaters, I stopped in Silver City for a monthly meeting of the New Mexico Unit of the Central Arizona Project: the CAP Entity, as it was known for short. Created under a joint powers agreement with the Interstate Stream Commission, it was comprised of fourteen voting members, the majority of them representatives of farm irrigation commissions with an interest in the dam. The group would have ultimate responsibility for designing, building, and operating any diversion-dam project on the Gila. But thirteen years after the legislation that made the dam a possibility, and $12 million into work by lawyers, consultants, and engineers fattening at the public trough by committing acts of vandalism against good government, and still there was no defined project, only a vague conviction among all involved that the river had to be dammed, somehow, somewhere.

  The project remained a folly in search of a justification, but none of the men around that table had one, other than ancestral spite for Arizona. Their delusions were more entrenched than ever. Their self-interest was so naked as to be embarrassing. They had been convinced by powerful men in Santa Fe that the water was theirs for the taking, a bit of propaganda that gave the push for a dam the character of a moral crusade—never mind that every drop they robbed from the Gila would have an exchange cost attached to it, whereby they would have to pay, at a rate of $160 per acre foot, to deliver Colorado River water to senior rights-holders downstream, in order to replace what was diverted from the Gila. If the diversion dam took 14,000 acre feet per year—the stated goal of its champions—that would add more than $2 million to the project’s cost annually.

  Members of the CAP Entity almost never mentioned this inconvenient fact. Nor did they acknowledge that, indirectly, a diversion dam at the head of the Gila-Cliff valley would amount to a corporate giveaway: the largest private landowner just downstream was none other than the international mining giant Freeport-McMoRan, which leased most of that land to farmers. Instead they quibbled over where to put the dam, and who would get first crack at the water, and whether it should be stored directly on farms in ponds, or sluiced into a reservoir, or injected underground by some nebulous process of “aquifer recharge.” They had finally given up the billion-dollar pipe dream to pump water over the Continental Divide. They had never seriously considered fully funding projects that could have benefited the 60,000 residents of the four-county area targeted for help by the original legislation. Instead they now appeared inclined to build not just one diversion dam, but three—including one on the San Francisco River, a small tributary of the Gila—and all for the sake of bringing subsidized water to a number of farmers who could fit comfortably in a Silver City bar.

  For all their high-minded talk, one thing appeared clear. They would eventually do as most men do when handed power and a big pot of free money. They would privilege their own private interests. And to what ultimate purpose? There was no rational answer. An obscure provision in a pork-barrel spending bill had set in motion a process that now moved under its own momentum, making everyone involved a prisoner to another form of mission-completion bias. And the mission, by all appearances, was to spend a big wad of government cash to throw down some concrete in the shape of a middle finger pointed toward Arizona.

  EAGER TO BE IN BETTER COMPANY, I fled Silver City and dropped in that evening on the fish biologists, who were in the midst of their annual stream-sampling survey. I found them done with their work for the day, gathered in the kitchen of the bunkhouse at the Heart Bar Wildlife Area, making dinner. The mood of their talk indicated that happy hour was well underway. The minute I walked through the door, the dean of the upper Gila River native-fish biologists, David Propst, handed me a glass. “Fish drink water,” he said, “fish biologists drink whisky. I presume you’ll join us.”

  He poured me three fingers of good Scotch, and we sat on the screened porch with his colleagues and their graduate students, paper plates full of salad and barbecued chicken in our laps. Propst, a tall, bespectacled fellow with a salt-and-pepper beard, had been at this work since the 1980s, mostly as a scientist for the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish. He had played a major role in the recovery of the endangered Gila trout, which had nearly gone extinct but now claimed a solid foothold in the headwaters. More recently he had sat on the doctoral committee of James Whitney, a Ph.D student studying food webs in the river—who was eating what and where.

 
After the big fires hit, the focus of the study shifted. The burns and subsequents floods had offered a chance to examine how native fish respond to historic wildfires in a relatively intact river system. Since Whitney had data on fish populations from before the fires, it made sense to keep collecting and see if they could hazard some answers.

  “All of us anticipated really devastating impacts on native fish,” Propst said. That fear was initially borne out by the data. After the big burns in 2012 and 2013, their annual survey had found radically diminished numbers of natives—in particular loach minnow and spikedace, both listed under the Endangered Species Act—at all of their sampling sites, and not a single instance of the headwater chub. They began to fear the fish might never recover.

  Their survey this year dispelled that fear. It had been, Propst told me, a very good couple of days. On the main stem of the river, downstream of the proposed dam, spikedace and loach minnow appeared in their nets in numbers not seen in years. And in the headwater forks, traditional stronghold of the chub, the sampling effort turned up several of that species in places where it had been completely absent since before the big fires. Propst and one of his research partners, Keith Gido, from Kansas State University, had thirty years of good data on the upper Gila’s native and non-native fish, but they admitted they had less of a working theory of what was going on in the watershed than ever. “If you have devastating disturbances, and at all sampling locations you’re not finding species, and then all of a sudden they’re back, and in some cases superabundant—where are their refugia?” Propst asked. “How do you explain it? I could give you my theory, but I’d be talking like a man with a paper asshole in the middle of a forest fire.”

  I laughed, and Propst poured us each another glass of Scotch as the conversation continued. The thing the fish had going for them, he said—the major plausible reason for their recovery—could be summed up in one word: connectivity. Somewhere in the watershed, survivors had hung on in little scattered pockets, finding havens amid floodwaters dark with ash and sediment. As the burn scars recovered and the watershed stabilized, the survivors began to leave their refugia and recolonize stretches of the river where the floods had wiped them out.

  This connectivity made the upper Gila River unique in the Southwest. So many other streams were dammed up and sucked dry, which fragmented habitat and isolated surviving fish. This in turn eroded genetic diversity in those fish, and with it their resilience to threats such as drought, non-native predators, and floods thick with ash. By comparison, the upper Gila was relatively pristine. Another Ph.D student, Tyler Pilger, had performed a study that found a genetic link between minnow populations in the Gila-Cliff Valley, below the proposed dam, and populations in the headwater tributaries, more than forty miles upstream. To think of minnows making a journey that long boggled my mind. I had found it arduous enough in a boat, moving with the current, and no one along the route had tried to eat me. But DNA tests of fin clips, gathered from netted fish over multiple years during the sampling survey, told the tale. It had happened.

  “In a fish population,” Propst said, “it’s just like with humans. Some have wanderlust. That’s what maintains genetic diversity—the wanderers.” Building a dam would be like building a wall. If a discreet population in one place suffered punishing effects from drought or ash, they might never recover without connectivity to other populations. And if they died out in a localized extinction, the dam would limit the ability of others to move in and recolonize that reach of stream. The wandering of the wanderers would forever be curtailed.

  What is a species more or less among engineers? Aldo Leopold once asked, rhetorically. Among those hell-bent on damming the Gila, I had heard more than one, at a public meeting, proclaim with ignorant certainty that the ash flows in the big floods had totally wiped out minnows whose listed status under the Endangered Species Act might otherwise complicate their wishes. They viewed the fish not, in Leopold’s words, as fellow voyageurs in the odyssey of evolution and therefore deserving of a place alongside us humans for the long run, but rather as annoying pests whose death at the hands of fire and flood would be no great loss—indeed, would represent a green light to the backhoes.

  They were wrong, of course. They had spoken like men with paper assholes in the middle of a forest fire, although they lacked the dignity to admit it. The minnows had proven resilient and, by extension, reaffirmed the resilience of the living river system on which they depended. Maybe, just maybe, we could seek to understand them instead of throwing them on the ash heap of history. Maybe, just maybe, if we left them alone and allowed the river to sustain its wild energies, they would make it through the climate bottleneck of the 21st century, when life is destined to get harder for most living things on Earth. To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering, Leopold also wrote, but one needn’t look very hard or very far to see that our species’ tinkering generally lacked forethought and caution.

  Industrial-size threats to what’s left of our natural inheritance are a whack-a-mole phenomenon. David Brower, the founder of the Sierra Club, once said that “the extractive interests—the miners and loggers and dam builders—only have to win once. We have to win every time.” So far advocates for a wild upper Gila River had won every time. It still ran as high and fast as snowmelt and rainfall dictated, at least until it met its first immovable obstacle at Coolidge Dam, far down in the desert of Arizona, after which the lower Gila could hardly be called a river at all. Upstream from there the only predictable thing about it was its unpredictability. Maybe that’s what irked the schemers and dreamers—that here, in the 21st century, a wild and living thing remained beyond human control.

  We had arrived at a moment when any American ideal worth defending was under enormous new threat. That included the hard work of shared ownership in protected public land—indeed the very idea of the commons as a public good, and not merely a profit source awaiting plunder by private interests. Certainly the virtue of humility did not appear ascendant. But humility and the commons were at the heart of what the upper Gila River watershed represented: a place where humanity’s industrial tools were kept at bay, to allow the land to be—to simply be—and in the process remain ours to share, not just with future generations but with the marvelous diversity of nonhuman life that preceded us.

  If we abandoned that ideal here, in the birthplace of American Wilderness, surely we could abandon it anywhere.

  FOR A VISION of interspecies coexistence, I traveled over the Continental Divide into the valley of the Rio Mimbres, a drive of one hour from the Heart Bar. The Mimbres, while small, was a unique stream—a river to nowhere in a land between. Unlike the Gila and the Rio Grande, which carved their separate paths to different oceans, the Mimbres did not pick a side off the Continental Divide. It traveled a slender swath of country down the middle before dying underground in a desert basin east of Deming, fifty miles southeast of Silver City. In the foothills of the Black Range, though, it ran clear and cold, cold enough for trout.

  I had been invited there by Ella Myers’ sister Raven after seeing her in a Silver City coffee shop, our first encounter in five years. After some initial pleasantries, we had taken up a discussion of our shared membership in an unfortunate club, those of us who’ve had a sibling die young. We both remembered the way her sister had to be prodded to speak of her writing as we sat together over dinner with mutual friends. Dreams in which the dead reappeared with shocking clarity had been a feature of grief for both of us, and we each knew the feeling of detachment from the world that comes from losing a part of oneself in the loss of a brother or sister.

  “I know the one thing she would have wanted was for us to share her artistry with people,” Raven said. With that in mind, Raven had pushed her parents to mount a show of Ella’s writings, photographs, and short films in Silver City. Later some of Ella’s gorgeous, ethereal photos of clouds from that show would appear alongside work from other contemporary artists at Albuquerque�
��s 516 Arts gallery, in a group show called “Landscapes of Life and Death.”

  Raven showed me some of her own photos from Africa and Mexico, where she had gone on study-abroad trips through WNMU. There she pursued a degree in biology with an emphasis on entomology; her most charismatic images captured extreme close-ups of beetles, her personal passion. Before she ran off to an afternoon class, she invited me to visit her family’s farm for a picnic sometime. I immediately accepted.

  Along the banks of the Mimbres, on thirty-one acres of riparian bottomlands and juniper-studded hills, her father, Brian, had almost finished building the family’s dream home—the most personal expression of his longtime work in construction. He and Raven’s mother, Jennifer Douglass, both had careers as visual artists. Jennifer also bred and trained horses and tended a small herd of Navajo-Churro sheep, a heritage breed first brought to North America by the Spanish more than 400 years ago. In an effort to destroy the traditional way of life of the Navajo, the US government had attempted to wipe out the sheep: they were almost lost to extinction by the 1970s. Now Jennifer was helping revive this rare land race of beautiful, desert-adapted creatures. Raven practiced animal husbandry too, raising her own flock of champion show chickens under the name Sky High Sumatras. The family had lived for years on another small working farm just south of Silver City, but they planned to sell that property and move to the Mimbres with their livestock once Brian finished work on the house.

  The shape and character of their Mimbres farm site was the culmination of years of sweat and planning. They had owned the property since 2008, but first it had to be cleared of the detritus left by the previous owner—a hoarder of some renown. “Nothing ever left here,” Brian said. “Things came in and all of them stayed. We had to haul them away by the ton.” Most of it was irredeemable junk, but amid the cleanup they found a few treasures that remained useful. The previous house on the property had burned in a structure fire. Brian salvaged some of the lumber from the porch for use in a barn he also built with his own two hands. He pointed to certain planks marked by char along their edges. Making use of them had been a way to recycle available materials, but it was more than that. Those blackened boards gestured to the history of the place. They braided threads of heritage from past to present.