Hope Beneath Our Feet_ Restoring Our Place in the Natural World - Martin Keogh [103]
River Gods
KEN LAMBERTON
For me, living in the Southwest, it’s a question of finding a way. The poet and writer Alison Deming says, “In the desert, one finds the way by tracing the aftermath of water,” so I look to the dry rivers. And there I find people working to restore them.
On the afternoon of the winter solstice, Daniel Preston and Renee Red Dog of the Tohono O’odham Nation stand in the rain next to the Santa Cruz River thirty miles north of Tucson. The smell of burning sage mingles with the tonic scent of wet creosote. Fifteen observers, jacketed and sweatshirted against the chill, huddle around a potted blue paloverde sapling. As Daniel blesses the tree in the O’odham language, a volunteer slips it into the ground.
Daniel, wearing his trademark bolo, speaks about how his ancestors once drew life from the Santa Cruz and how life has begun to return here now, coming full circle. He asks everyone to face east and then he and Renee begin to sing, praying for strength and guidance for the people who are working diligently to heal the land.
The Santa Cruz, river of the Holy Cross, is a dead river, a dry channel of shining quartz grit except during heavy storms. It’s been this way for more than a hundred years, since groundwater pumping for agriculture and mining lowered the area’s aquifer. Occasional floodwaters subsequently downcut and entrenched the river’s once-meandering course.
But here, downstream from Arizona’s second-largest city at a place called the Simpson Site, the river flows, unfurling a dark liquid ribbon along a cottonwood- and willow-hemmed seam. Even during the hottest of summers, the air smells of dust and effluent. Tucson’s unwanted waste-water has granted the Santa Cruz a second chance.
Standing with Daniel Preston and Renee Red Dog is Kendall Kroesen, Tucson Audubon Society’s Restoration Program Manager and the tall, lanky, bearded force behind the salvation of the river. Kendall is a permaculture specialist whose handiwork appears at many sites along the river in mesquite-clotted basins and swales. His interests in people and nature, and his research into what makes communities successful, have led him to seek ways to create a more sustainable human society, particularly in the Sonoran Desert. Kendall sees ominous trends in today’s commerce-driven society, which consumes nonrenewable resources along with cultural diversity. His passion is the belief that natural ecosystems and wildlife can thrive alongside humanity.
Rodd Lancaster is Kendall’s disciple and right arm, a quiet, taciturn man who cultivates vibrant creosote bushes and paloverde trees out of dry hardpan. Like his plants, he lives “off-main.” His home and amazing garden are supplied by harvested rainwater rather than city pipes. This, in a desert that receives less than twelve inches of precipitation each year.
I like to think that I might live my life like Rodd and Kendall, treading lightly on the earth while engaging with people and nature to help create healthy communities. It’s not easy. The least I can do is to participate in their stories. Theirs are stories of hope. Stories of despair and defeat have already been told, and we have enough of them. Despair is why people allow our rivers to be drained and their beds used as landfills. But hope, unlike despair, leads to productive action. Hope means another world might be possible.
At the Rio Cocóspera in northern Mexico, enormous cottonwoods rise out of the riverbanks and erupt into the sky like glaucous-plumed thunderheads. Male vermilion flycatchers pump their dark and undersized wings to corkscrew slowly above the highest branches. Everywhere is the smell of water and rock, a quiet gathering of pungency, of shining runnels and algal slackwater trapped in the wallows and trackways of cattle. I look north toward the Sierra de Pintos, whose upwelling