In 2013, I took a (much-needed) semester off of college and ended up in Utah with the National Outdoor Leadership School. Those four months I spent exploring the Colorado Plateau were formative in making me the citizen and scientist I am today. In particular, that wilderness interlude planted in me a curiosity to understand how we relate to rivers and, perhaps, how rivers relate to us.
I wrote the essay below last month, in a moment of frustrating impasse when I couldn’t figure out what research I wanted to conduct for my PhD. Because I never know what I think until I write about it, I decided to write my way into a question, and here is where I arrived.
The water and the sky slide by, mirrors of grey-green slate. As the air chills and the light thins, it is time to scout the shoreline for a tent site. But I do not want to disembark and go ashore. The viscous silence of this place unsettles me; an incorporeal discontent flows downstream with my boat.
The left bank rises too sharply from the river, but the right shore promises terra firma flat enough for rest, however uneasy. A few paddle strokes and my boat stalls in clay mud. The river doesn’t want to release my kayak, so I wade into the ooze and wrestle my boat above the waterline. Winded, I survey my accommodations. A fire must have razed this land recently; the shelf above the river is charred, all vegetation shorn to charcoal stumps. A veneer of corrugated ice crinkles beneath my neoprene boots. This will have to do.
What happened here?
An uneasy place to camp.
The next morning, my wetsuit is frozen, even though it lay flat beneath my sleeping pad overnight. As I chip rime from the zipper, I steel myself for the chill that awaits. The neoprene will be cold, the air will be cold, and the water will be coldest of all. Onward.
With a few thrusts, my kayak glides into the current. I hop into the cockpit and silence settles around me again. As the morning wears on, the river and I find a tentative truce, so I paddle steadily for hours. The miles pass hypnotically and take my thoughts with them. Any world beyond these growing canyon walls has ceased to exist. The mystery of this place ferments in my stomach. My fellow travelers paddle around me, but I feel apart. I have nothing to say. I end the day feeling that I know less than when I started.
I continue in this way for another two days as the river drags me deeper.
A moment of calm and re-collection.
And then: one moment the rumble is not there, and the next moment it fills the ochre canyon. So this is where the river releases its ire. Anxiety grabs my throat as I remember I’m a novice paddler, but it’s too late for escape. What is it they say? The only way out is through? Or underneath, I muse. The river doesn’t care whether I emerge with air or water in my lungs.
The current around me thickens and gathers, drawn inexorably by an accelerating magnetism. I stop paddling; nothing I can offer will be of use now. A breath, and then the horizon arrives suddenly at the bow of my boat.
The river drops away.
A maze of whitewater roils before me, around me, beneath me, in me. The canyon walls press in, collapsing my chest and aggravating this river monster seething in its cage. Everything is motion. I cease to see, smell, hear – I am but a body tossed by a focused fury. The river has become solid. What is water, what is rock? I thrust my paddle into the churn, gasp in a breath, pull, hope, hold on hold on hold on.
Hold on.
It ends as abruptly as it begins. The river and I exhale together. The current is once again slate, flowing polished and dark past my kayak. Sandstone minarets cast shadows across the water spreading before my boat and the rumble fades behind me. It is only providence and the river’s beneficence that have delivered me to this interlude. This river, this place, is so much deeper, wider, grander, older than me.
Frozen and quiet.
I have been lucky to get to know a few fabled rivers in my life. As a child in New Zealand, my family vacationed on the Whanganui River, a patient and stately current that wanders through emerald passages rimmed with ferns. In 2017, the Whanganui River was granted – or rather, remembered as having – personhood. A few years later, as an adolescent in the Twin Cities, the seasons of my life cycled with the Mississippi River’s freeze-and-thaw patterns. The Mississippi River flows through its only gorge where it cleaves Minneapolis from St. Paul. Many times, I’ve stood on a bridge over the gorge and pondered the enormity of the river building below.
But I did not know that rivers are alive until I pushed a humble kayak into the Green River above Desolation Canyon. I spent the next three weeks awed by the river’s beauty and terrified by the river’s might. But in the quiet moments when the river lapped at the sides of my kayak, it felt as though the water and I shared a view, however piecemeal and unresolved, into the Anthropocene. The Green River – the largest feeder to the weary Colorado River – and its lifeblood tributaries are impounded by 10 dams. Meanwhile, I live in a state where rivers flow uphill and hydrologic engineering has become both gospel and law. I wonder how much of this is necessary. I wonder how much of this has opened new possibilities. I wonder at the intricacy of it all, and whether it can persist. And I wonder whether our definition of life is too narrow to recognize things that are alive.
The marquee impoundment on the Green River is the Flaming Gorge Dam. The dam’s descriptors are astonishing: standing 502 feet high, Flaming Gorge is a delicate concrete arch that can hold back a volume of water equivalent to twice the Green River’s annual discharge. Pause there: the river could flow for 730 straight days, and the dam could ensure that not a drop passes through its gates. Flaming Gorge epitomizes the challenges of taming and harnessing a river in the American West, as it serves three cross-purposes: water delivery, hydropower production, and flood management. Flaming Gorge is a critical component of the Colorado River Storage Project, a five-state plumbing effort whose consequences and complexities continue to unfurl more than 45 years after its completion.
I drove across Flaming Gorge Dam during my return from that fated Green River adventure. The spiritual heart of my whitewater trip had been an 83-mile negotiation of Desolation Canyon. Desolation Canyon, an incision that cuts through 5,000 feet of rock and 156 million years of Earth’s history, is reputed to be one of the most remote geographies in the contiguous United States. And yet, the river that carved a desolate cathedral out of sandstone and shale is fully at the mercy of Flaming Gorge Dam.
I was 20 years old when I peered over the edge of the Flaming Gorge Dam to see the Green River reduced to a thread of water snaking away from dam’s apron. Flaming Gorge Dam was the largest concrete sculpture that I had seen in two decades of life. Was it a machine, a prayer, an arrogance, an invocation, or some other mystery? Flaming Gorge occupies a special place in my imagination, but it is not unique. It is only one of approximately 9,200 “large” dams taller than 50 feet in the United States, and there are perhaps another two million small, man-made barriers sprinkled across the country’s waterways. Most of these dams were constructed between 1950 and 1990 as government and industry alike sought security in the metering of America’s rivers. It is commonly cited that 17% of rivers in the United States are now dammed, but west of the 100th meridian that figure rises sharply. In California, my home state, only one major river flows undammed from source to sea.
The heyday of American dam construction was 50 years ago. The world has changed in the past 50 years, and concrete subjected to the daily weight of water cannot go unmaintained. Accordingly, many dams, particularly large dams, are being reconsidered under the tangled pressures of cyclic permitting, environmental degradation, climate change, and structural deterioration. In this reconsideration, each dam’s future may go one of two general ways: re-licensing with required modifications or decommissioning and removal. How this decision is made is particular to each river, dam, and budget, but managing organizations are increasingly opting for removal. American Rivers, a nonprofit organization, estimated in June 2019 that nearly 1600 dams had been removed in the United States to date, and other studies have documented that the pace of dam removal has accelerated in the past 20 years. In a notable reversal – or perhaps an evolution – more dams are now annually removed than built.
However, the dimensions driving dam removal writ large are still murky. Only a handful of researchers have turned their eyes to this growing trend at a national scale, perhaps because the pace of change has been rapid, the disciplinary perspectives are myriad, and any given dam removal is a universe of questions unto itself. After all, dams are so much more than economic intent and engineering pragmatism: dams are barriers and openings. They are lifeblood and tourniquet, dominion and fragility. Metaphor and cement.
These contradictions draw me in. We are now attempting to turn back riparian time, remove dams that were so assertively emplaced, but restoration isn’t promised. Ecosystems reorganize, species expire, waterways change course, and memories of rivers past transmute.
Why do we take up this challenge of dam removal and river restoration in the first place? The answers may not always be what first meets the eye.