River Don?t Break My Heart

By Laura Paskus

“Sundown swimmer. Water’s daughter. Shady sand pool hid from men’s eyes. I’m the only son to suffer here, to stand and kiss your tree bark and to dream this warm tree is you, but my tree can’t spread its legs and can’t laugh the way you’re laughing.”

–Woody Guthrie, from Seeds of Man

 

As per my training, I started to write an informative, un-biased essay about water rights in New Mexico, climate change and the Rio Grande’s shrinking waters, as well as the various battles I’ve witnessed as cities, farmers, politicians, developers and environmentalists duke it out for the river’s waters.

But then I decided, screw objectivity. Just write this fucking essay.

There’s a big river that runs through Albuquerque. You may have read about it in history books or seen it from a circling airplane. It’s called the Rio Grande, and judging from the archaeological sites across the floodplain and the city’s west mesa, it has sustained communities for thousands of years. I remember reading about the Rio Grande as a junior high school student; I imagined a giant swirling river tossing about the ships of conquistadores. In my early 20s, when I approached the river for the first time, I walked to its waters as a Catholic greets that blood-of-Christ wine. My heart was pounding and I was near-breathless with anticipation, awaiting the moment when I could dip my hands into its waters.

And then I realized that wasn’t the river I was talking toward, but the low-flow conveyance channel.

Anti-climatic, to be sure. But I wandered through the Bosque, found the actual river, then knelt the way only a lapsed Catholic knows how: with fervor and lust, awe and guilt, and the whole-hearted desire for a better world.

Before I go any further — yes, yes, I know that I’m a part of the problem — I live in Albuquerque. I was smitten with this valley the first time I drove through Tijeras Canyon in a crappy hatchback Honda held together with bungee cords. (And that was even before I’d read any Ed Abbey; so I didn’t realize his fictional cowboy had died in that canyon.) And even though I was headed for someplace else, I stayed. And even though I’ve left a few times, I’ve always come back.

Almost three years ago, my husband-to-be bought a house in Albuquerque’s North Valley that came with water rights. That amount of water isn’t enough to make our garden grow. But when it comes down the feeder ditch and out from under our backyard fence every two weeks, I’m giddy to see the waters of the Rio Grande trickle in my backyard.

This breaks my heart to admit, but I also freak out when my daughter splashes around in those waters, because I know they are full of who knows what, ranging from the shite that washes off the mesa from Los Alamos National Laboratory upstream, to the actual shit that drains into the river from all over the watershed to the fertilizers and pesticides that sweep off upstream fields.

I can’t help but think that if more of us enjoyed the river and made it a part of our daily lives, we’d never tolerate its dirty waters. If we took our children to its banks to play or counted on finding wildlife along its banks, we’d balk at its unnaturally low flows. If we remembered the opportunities the river affords us for solitude and quiet, picnics and canoe trips, bird watching and baby making, we’d not be so quick to take it for granted; to allow its waters to be siphoned off or piped beneath our houses. If the river were truly a part of our community, there is no way it would be dying the death it’s suffering today.

The reality of this valley is that “no river” equals “no life”: No means or reason to live here, and no tales for the history books save one: A generation of New Mexicans who were so ignorant, fearful or lazy they let the state’s largest river disappear.

I can suggest that people write letters to legislators, make phone calls to water managers and avoid electing jackasses to public office. Or, I can drop the names of advocacy groups to join or restoration efforts to support. I can even give some ideas of offices to picket with loudspeakers and big signs.

But what I really want to say is this: There is a river flowing through this city and slinging its muddy waters through this arid state. We can drain it dry or we can show it some love. And I don’t mean write-a-form-letter-to-your-senator love. I mean stripping-down-naked-with-your-lover kind of love.

Because even though my heart has been tempted at times to shrivel like a dried-out cow paddy on a patch of overgrazed BLM land, the truth I stand by is that love matters — most spectacularly when it comes to wild places, muddy rives and the clear blue skies above them.