When I first met the Tuolumne River, I didn’t know it. I was touring apartments in San Francisco nearly a decade ago, trying to convince landlords that despite my youth and uneven employment history, I was a reliable tenant who would pay rent on time and never disturb the peace. In every apartment, I scrutinized all the faucets, put my fingers under each tap, let water course over my skin, and confirmed that warm water and cold water alike were available on demand. Beyond that, I thought nothing of the water itself—just another line item on my checklist to build a West Coast life.
That I didn’t notice the water—how it caught the light, how it circled each drain differently, how it had traveled more than 160 miles from the Tuolumne watershed in the Sierra Nevada to arrive in San Francisco—is surprising. I was moving to the Bay Area for a job in drinking water management because I was fascinated by the built, natural, and geopolitical waterscapes of the American West. I wanted to be useful however I could in saving the West from itself and repairing legacies of racial, colonial, and environmental harm. But privately, I was also moving to the Bay Area to be able to breathe as a queer woman—I had been holding my breath in the Midwest for years, and my soul was starting to asphyxiate.
As I settled into San Francisco, I was drawn first toward the hills of the Marin Headlands and then higher, into the peaks of the Sierra Nevada. Coming from a flat place, the topography of California captivated me. I was unaccustomed to landscapes so obviously shaped by water—valleys incised through lithified ocean floors, batholiths chiseled by glaciers and meltwater, dry washes littered with rounded cobbles attesting to floods. As I traced the waterways eroded into the hills and peaks, the waterways eroded parts of me as well. The more time I spent along creeks beneath silent redwoods, the quieter my self-doubt got. The more streams I followed across alpine meadows and granite amphitheaters, the more solid I felt in my sense of self. Each mountain lake I jumped into seemed to wash away a little more queer shame—shame that I had been taught and that was never mine to begin with.
Tenaya Lake, Yosemite National Park
After meeting the Tuolumne River for the first time in an apartment in San Francisco, I met the Tuolumne River for the second time after an adventure gone wrong. My climbing partner and I had planned a mellow day of scrambling up Tenaya Peak in Yosemite. But we got a late start, messed up the approach, and climbed slower than we expected. When we summited, daylight was fading fast. We knew the walk-off negotiated a series of benches and scree fields to climber’s right, so as we admired Tenaya Lake below us, we considered the terrain we could see and picked a line. By the time we had opened a snack and changed our shoes, it was dark. I took out my headlamp, pressed the power button, and—nothing. Dead batteries. Rookie mistake.
For the next two hours, I followed my climbing partner and her headlamp, a ring of light too small for both of us that would have to do nonetheless. If she walked off a cliff, we were going to walk off that cliff together. There was no moonlight by which to keep our bearings. A couple of times an hour, a car would drive by on Tioga Road, its headlights glancing off granite escarpments and the mirror surface of Tenaya Lake, and we would note as best we could the direction in which we needed to progress and the drop-offs we needed to avoid.
When we arrived back at the car near midnight, our relief was palpable. We laughed at our poor planning and unexpectedly late bedtime, inhaled a bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, and promised each other we would never get ourselves in that kind of situation—the edge of a climbing epic—again. Though we didn’t wish to repeat the outing, it had solidified a lifelong friendship.
The next day, we swam in the Tuolumne River near Tuolumne Meadows. The sweat, dirt, and anxiety of the previous day’s adventure washed off. Sitting on slick rock, eyes fixed on water slipping over polished stone, too afraid to make eye contact, I told her that I am queer. I had never told anyone that before, but the travails of the prior day and other shared mountain adventures had built a deep trust between us that invited authenticity. After I told her, she gave me a hug. It had taken me a decade to arrive at that moment of honesty, and yet it ended up being so simple.
A few years later, she and I would revisit that spot along the Tuolumne River, this time on a trip without vertical ambitions. She was seven months pregnant and I was seven weeks into recovery from hip surgery—we were a funny, inert pair. So much had changed in each of our lives in the intervening years, and I suspect that my friend didn’t remember what had transpired at that bend in the river. But for me, returning to the Tuolumne River was a homecoming—into my body, into integrity, into wholeness, into relationship.
The Lyell Fork of the Tuolumne River in Yosemite National Park after a storm
I met the Tuolumne River for the third time in June of 2020. That summer I was caught in a liminal suspension, alongside so many—carrying on and yet unmoored as COVID-19 raged. Mired in the early pandemic, my world was limited to a studio apartment. Video calls and the view out my window had started to seem unreal, and I felt that I was beginning to lack dimension as well. I did the only thing I knew to do: take refuge in the mountains.
At the whim of the backcountry permit system, I ended up meandering around Parker Pass Creek in Yosemite—the highest tributary of the Tuolumne River, an alpine brook cascading across shattered metavolcanic bedrock. This was San Francisco water as far away from San Francisco as it can get, water not yet captured, water free to do its work in the world. The wildness of the water, the stillness of the peaks, and the abiding clarity of the Eastern Sierra sky made me feel small and inconsequential—liberated.
It is in the anonymity of such mountain environments that I feel the most uncategorized, the most queer. As José Esteban Muñoz wrote in the canonical Cruising Utopia, “queerness is a longing that propels us onward… queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing.” In the mountains and next to rivers, I sometimes feel acutely that something is missing—that there is a wound in the soul of the world inflicted by systems of domination and extraction—and yet it is also in the mountains that I feel the most peace. I often wonder what this peace is. Is it undercurrents of deep time reminding me that on the grand scale of things, I am small? Is it removal from the panopticon of modern life, making it possible to reject social molds? Is it simply enough space and silence to really hear my own heartbeat?
When California burned later that fall, I came undone. It was the first time that I have had to reckon with the reality of a contingent home, the possibility that the place that makes me whole and alive might transform so completely under climate change as to be unlivable. The threat felt existential—who am I without this place? There are other locations like this, no doubt, but the work of starting over in building a chosen family and a relationship to the land is not work that I wish to take up. And there are so many places that could never be home because queer hate, even when espoused only by a vociferous minority, has been allowed to fester.
California’s waterways and watersheds have taught me to love myself and provided the space for me to learn to be who I am. As Judith Butler has written, “when we lose some of these ties by which we are constituted, we do not know who we are or what to do.” I am constituted by ties to this place I call home—its streets and bridges and sidewalks, its hills and rocks and trees and rivers. What would it mean for me, and by extension all people for whom questions of home are complicated, if California’s waterways and watersheds are transformed so radically by human hubris as to become unrecognizable? Because my professional work entails a careful, constant awareness of climate change and its impacts and its origins, some days I wake up with a heaviness and am beset by anticipatory grief. What are the ethical implications of grief?
Clichéd as it is to say, in a mortal and ever-changing world, grief is inherent to love. As I understand it, the ethical imperative of grief is to love fully and humbly, to pay tender attention, and to never lose our sense of wonder, even with tides of sadness and loss lapping at our hearts. In the words of bell hooks, “we need not contain grief when we use it as a means to intensify our love for the dead and dying, for those who remain alive.”
The love I have to offer to the waterways that have brought me to life is a queer love, a love that refuses to be disciplined into normative partnered relationships or a futurity predicated on reproduction. It is my life’s work to come to know our rivers as relatives, to love them wholeheartedly, and to release them from dams and dewatering and the burden of forced work. There is contradiction inherent in this assignment: some of the dams and some of the work that rivers perform is necessary for the world we have built and as a result will not be altered any time soon. But queer love is political; returning to Muñoz, “queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.” I insist on a world where domination, extraction, control, and profit no longer structure our relationships to place, to each other, and to the many beings with whom we share this planet.
The Tuolumne River immediately below the O’Shaughnessy Dam that impounds Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in Yosemite National Park. The cascade of water on the left is the dam’s spillway.
I am no longer getting acquainted with the Tuolumne River. Now, when I visit the river, I am visiting an old friend. I visited the Tuolumne River a couple of months ago with a group of scientists. We rafted down the Wild and Scenic-designated stretch that the Rim Fire incinerated a decade ago. The affective contours of our work bubbled up in conversation—delight at finding a mountain yellow-legged frog, bafflement at the behemoth O’Shaughnessy Dam, fear of the river’s power despite its containment, rapture at perfect swimming holes hidden in tributaries. I want us to talk about these emotions, all of our emotions, more. If we fail to grieve, do we fail to love? If we don’t collectively kindle joy, can we continue our work of care and attention? I hope that as scientists and people connected to rivers, we can have the courage to bring not only our intellects but also our hearts and spirits and very selves to the crucible of climate change. We owe our waterways, our watersheds, and each other nothing less.
A Wild and Scenic-designated stretch of the Tuolumne River in the Stanislaus National Forest
This writing was prompted by a rafting trip down the Wild and Scenic-designated stretch of the Tuolumne River, hosted by the Secure Water Future collaborative and funded by the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative Competitive Grant no. 2021-69012-35916 from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Thanks to the organizers, Dr. Josh Viers and Sarah Naumes at UC Merced, for such meaningful experiential learning.