I

The New York Times obituary for Luna B. Leopold (March 20, 2006) reminds me how little we know about rivers. Luna was the son of Aldo Leopold, whose Sand County Almanac and land management essays are basic eco-consciousness documents, and the first to articulate a land ethic that has come to appear a necessity and not merely a compelling idea. A fine scientist in his own right, Luna edited his father’s journals for publication, and devoted his professional studies to America’s river systems. “We in the United States have acquiesced to the destruction and degradation of our rivers, in part because we have insufficient knowledge of the characteristics of rivers and the effects of our actions that alter their form and process.” That’s on the first page of A View of the River, issued in paperback shortly before Luna’s death.

What Leopold did best was figure ways to measure characteristics no one had ever established: river depth, water velocity, shapes of channels, sediments; the seemingly whimsical layout of rocks, how they got where they are, and what their effects on currents are; how currents carry particles down riverbeds. Working with the U.S. Geological Survey for ten years he pioneered the study of rivers in their terrain. He angled his eye to learn about slopes, hills, rock gradient, floodplains, stream banks, and the geology that underlies river systems. Rivers take shape and shape their landscapes by meandering, and Leopold notes that the meander is “the pattern most prevalent in nature.” That’s why, I suppose, the map of a watershed looks like the veins in a leaf. As the Ogalala Sioux medicine man Black Elk told the poet John Niehardt in a similar context, “They have the same religion we do.”

Earth is the only planet we know of with a hydrologic or water cycle. So far it is the only planet we know of with biological life. Water evaporates from oceans into the air, moves with the wind, drops on the land as rain or snow, sinks into the soil, evaporates, and transpires from plants. About a third of what hits land drains through the continents as rivers, which distribute nutrients and sediments as they pass. This life-giving cycle is reason enough for some to regard Her (the water cycle) as a divinity. She has moods—calm, soothing, inscrutable, benign; stormy, turbulent, withholding; overflowing, destructive. She changes shape in ways that elude us. Leopold: “Rivers are far from simple. In fact the mathematics of hydraulics and sediment movement, for instance, have become so complex that even many experts find them difficult to understand.”

Each rill, spring, stream, creek, or river might be a local divinity. India is famous for river deities—always female. These water ladies draw so close to human form (in sculpture and poetry) it is sometimes hard to know whether the lady is flesh and bone or supernatural. In China, folklore and poetry are rich with rain maidens, water spirits, rainbow goddesses, waterfall shamanesses. Edward Shafer’s book, The Divine Woman: Dragon Ladies and Rain Maidens, a study of T’ang Dynasty poetry’s encounter with these semi-divines, opens with, “This book is about permutations… It tells how drowned girls became goddesses, and how goddesses became drowned girls.”What about North America? What do we know of the waterways that give or withhold indispensable water for us? What do we know of permutations? One discovery Luna Leopold made catches my imagination: it seems so simple. Water velocity increases as rivers move downhill, towards their mouths. Simply put, they move faster. Prior to his studies conventional opinion thought rivers slowed—“as when the Mississippi River widens and appears to come to a muddy standstill near New Orleans” (New York Times). Appearances were wrong. Water divinities are notorious shape-shifters. They are adept at hiding their forms.

Luna knew the rivers of the American West. He traveled 300 miles down the Colorado in 1965, through the Grand Canyon (where John Wesley Powell, prophet of American water policy, had gone a hundred years earlier). He charted the geology of the river and its canyon, taking careful notes and detailed measurements. Leopold’s work is called science. I’d note how close it is to art. Art—science—lifting the unseen, the half-understood worlds into view. He did his work without compromising the complex, deeply mysterious riparian communities he traveled through. He and his predecessor Powell could be those tiny contemplative men you see in boats in Chinese landscape paintings. Furthermore, Luna wrote only about the physical properties of rivers—not their chemistry, biology, or the teeming life of their riparian zones—“no one volume can treat them adequately. I have neither the expertise nor the space for a proper discussion.” This from a scientist who learned ecology from his own father, and who lived to be ninety years old.

North Americans have straightened, dammed, dredged, paved, channeled, and rerouted our rivers. Dumped sludge, pesticides, beer cans, agricultural runoff, nuclear contaminants, industrial waste, and pissed into them. Fought over them, named and renamed them, poached from them, drowned in them. Some Americans have also cleaned them up, removed dams, restocked them with fish, fenced them from livestock, legislated their protection, planted native willows, and restored riverbanks. (The American beaver, Castor canadensis, its geologic family-range dating from the Oligocene era, has always managed the waterways better than humans.) We North Americans have also made songs and poems about rivers, produced energetic paintings, spine-tingling photographs, and inherited or evolved a strangely gorgeous vocabulary. Meander, bedload, swale. Floodplain, cross-bed, siltstone. My favorite from Leopold’s book: thalweg, the deepest part of a river channel, or the lowest thread running the length of a streambed. River maidens must dwell there.

II

Here in Colorado, within the context of urban high art, the engineers Christo and Jeanne-Claude have devised a plan, decades in the making, to produce an installation along, or over, the Arkansas River. In a high altitude, fragile stretch of canyon, along Highway 50 between the two towns of Salida and Ca~non City, as the road winds between burgundy, burnt orange, caramel, sage, and chocolate colored cliffs, they hope by the year 2010 to add “Over the River” to their portfolio. This is to be a suspension of 6.7 miles of blue fabric, held over the riverbed by 1200 steel cables, anchored to the ecologically sensitive shorelines by 2400 gigantic concrete blocks. The fabric will cover the river surface, between eight and twenty-five feet above the water, high enough that rafters can run the river beneath.

I recently drove that stretch of canyon expecting it to be wild, or at least little populated. It’s surprisingly settled. The Ute Indians were a presence in the dramatically tight canyon, as a historic site sign relates, for eight thousand years—“or maybe forever.” Ranchers of European descent were in by 1870. And a refugee colony of sixty-three Russian Jews, abandoning their country under the Tzar’s pogroms, arrived and founded the town of Cotopaxi. The 1880s saw construction of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad up the east bank. By 1915 the “Rainbow Route,” a road built by prisoners from the state penitentiary at Ca~non City, and named for the kaleidoscopic colors of the soaring geologic formations, ran all the way through. There are houses, gift shops, ranches, a few lodges, and one or two diners. A motel under construction advertises “bunks, cafe.” The river has seasonal raft tours, scenic turnouts for automobiles, and quiet fly fishermen. There’s lots of vernacular or folk art to see along the route, including a roadside shrine built in the arched interior of an upended canoe—a shrine to fish that “got away.”

Eagles are present, and on the ledges farther up, bighorn sheep. “Over the River” will need approval by a patchwork of agencies, federal, state, and local. Much of the river and its banks are held by Bureau of Land Management, which has established recreation sites with parking lots and signs—

The Migratory Bird Treaty Act and the Bald Eagle Protection Act will need to be circumvented by Christo’s project. Eagles may very well fly into the Christos’ cables, breaking their wings. They have been fishing the Arkansas along this stretch since a geological upheaval diverted the river’s course away from what is now Poncho Pass to the south, forcing the waters through the colorful rock. Christo and Jeanne-Claude are concerned about F.A.A. restrictions on airplanes and helicopters. Helicopters will be necessary to install their art piece, and other aircraft for documentary purposes, and to provide art lovers a bird’s eye perspective. Waterfowl feed in the Arkansas’s calms.

The likely impact on a local population of bighorn sheep makes eco-activists increasingly irritable towards Christo. Bighorn rarely stray far from their native habitat, maintaining “a high degree of site fidelity” as one wildlife biologist put it. Bighorn are already stressed by road building in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, by shrinking habitat, by ranches, tourist raft excursions, antibiotic-laced apple mash provided by Division of Wildlife biologists, and bridge construction on a far smaller scale than Christo’s installation. Bighorn are highly susceptible, when stressed, to lung-worm pneumonia, their principal killer. As you drop out of Salida along the highway to Ca~non City, a sign welcomes you into Bighorn Canyon.

At the BLM recreation sites:

The BLM and the Collegiate Peaks Anglers have posted a notice about New Zealand mud snails, one of many invasive species in Colorado that threaten native ecosystems (someone walked in with contaminated boots, and the small snails took opportunistic hold). The signs ask that before you visit another stream, you wash or soak boots or waders in a solution:

You can alternatively soak your boots in very hot water, or freeze your boots overnight.

The river will bear scars after Christo’s bulldozers and cranes have moved on. “Over the River” is scheduled to stand for two weeks, after two years of construction. Christo hopes to draw a half million “art lovers.” That’s about thirty-five thousand people a day in the canyon. The Christo and Jeanne-Claude website speaks of the installation coming out of the two artists’ hearts. It describes how they “prospected” 14,000 miles of Rocky Mountain roads as they searched out a river over which to hang their industrial mega-art. Funding for the project will come not from grants but from sales of artist drawings and souvenir pieces of fabric. We’ve witnessed something like this before. When the two artists slung a “Curtain” across a Colorado valley near Rifle several decades ago—haunting, even gorgeous as the artist drawings look when they hang in a Denver gallery—heavy winds tore the actual fabric apart within twenty-four hours. Shredded orange fabric blew for miles through the valley.

What might seven miles of shimmering “diaphanous” fabric do to geomorphic forces like wind, temperature, or sunlight? What will be the effect on waterfowl, fish, wildlife, plant growth? How will the caddis fly respond? Local officials are concerned by the prospect of heavy traffic in a narrow canyon, and emergency personnel have spoken their reservations about visitors who climb steep, crumbling, deceptive terrain, across rock formations populated by rattlesnakes. In 2006, on February 15th a truck of uranium ore overturned on a sharp bend near Swissvale, the hamlet where the roadside shrine to lost fish stands. “The Department of Transportation is pretty concerned about a thing like that happening with all those tourists packed into the canyon,” a BLM official confided to The Denver Post.

If the river or the wind does something unpredictable—as at Rifle—and miles of the Arkansas get clogged by blue fabric, what will it look like? Geomorphology of a river system is delicate. The mathematics elude even specialists, as Luna Leopold observed. Ecology up in Bighorn country is a delicate, highly vulnerable weave of life forms and climates—a “fabric” ecologists sometimes call it. We don’t know the basics of this fabric’s response to sunlight, wind, temperature change, or sedimentation. We do know the rivers of North America are in trouble. That is one of the reasons Luna Leopold stated for devoting a ninety-year life of scientific study to North America’s waterways. How will miles of industrial fabric, and a string of automobiles, buses, and helicopters, alter the many microclimates along the Arkansas? How do you reconstruct a soil that has developed over geological periods, once you remove two and a half thousand concrete blocks?

I’d like to propose a poetry reading, “Over the River,” in place of Christo and Jean-Claude’s installation. (Poetry readings are notorious for drawing small but respectful crowds.) The Southern Rocky Mountains and their river systems—which irrigate millions of square miles—have had poets and singers of note for longer than any of us can imagine. In Frances Densmore’s study, Northern Ute Music, published in 1922, appears a song that might open the festival. It was recorded by a Ute Indian named Nikavari, singing into a horn on one of those old recording devices that used wax cylinders. Eighty-five years later Nikavari’s song seems prophetic of Christo’s “Over the River” project—

Bibliography

Densmore, Frances. Northern Ute Music. Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 75: Washington D.C., 1922.

Leopold, Luna B. A View of the River. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, 2006.

Shafer, Edward. The Divine Woman: Dragon Ladies and Rain Maidens. North Point Press: San Francisco, 1980.

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