Does
a River care if it doesn’t get to the
Ocean?
These
are thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head ever since the
first
time I looked down the
There
I found myself looking five hundred feet down a steep slope to a
watercourse
that I could only see at first as “lost.” A lost river
wandering around in
loops and bends on a flat, brushy, marshy valley floor, often almost
doubling
back to where it had just been, a lost river trying to find its way
downhill.
It
was so beautiful that I thought maybe it wasn’t really lost at
all. It was just dawdling – yes, the river was
dawdling,
loafing, goofing around – acting like maybe it just didn’t
want to leave. And
who could blame it, on such a day?
But
that moment was where the question slipped into my mind: what is this
water doing?
We
all know that water flows downhill, obeying gravity like all of us,
because
it’s the law. But what kind of a flow is a river? Ditches, storm
sewers and the
plumbing in your house are all flows of water too; how are they
different from
rivers? From an engineering perspective, a river could just be
considered a
natural storm sewer: more water falls on the land than the land can
absorb, and
the river carries off the excess.
But
do rivers demonstrate the kind of efficiency that engineers design into
effective storm sewers or other forms of plumbing? Look closely at a
river at
work, and you see a very different behavior.
When
too much water falls too fast for all of it to sink in, or when the
land is
really steep, the water has no choice but to run off downhill, and here
in the
mountains there often seems to be a kind of tearing rage to the water.
But
looked at another way, water running off of steep land does exactly
what a
human falling out of control on a steep slope would do: it grabs at
everything
it can to slow and stop its descent. It pulls at dirt, sand, pebbles,
twigs and
leaves, rocks, trees – and everything that can’t help the
water by holding it
back is torn loose and carried along with the water.
But
the water only carries its load of debris until the gradient changes
enough for
it to start dropping the debris in its own path, forcing itself to slow
down
and find its way through or around its own debris. If the shape and
slope of
the land don’t allow water to stay with the land, then the water
– working as a
river, not a storm sewer – gradually rearranges the land until it
can, through
strategies like the beautiful floodplain I found myself looking down on
that
day on the road, through which the East River meanders with such
consummate
grace and beauty.
It
occurred to me that a river allowed to seek its own course will do what
it can
to alter geography in ways that deter
water from leaving the land. All rivers might flow into the sea, as the
Biblical philosopher claimed, but there’s evidence in the way
they work, that
they are in no hurry to do so, and maybe would even rather not.
But
building a floodplain to meander through is a relatively simple
strategy for water
thwarting gravity and staying with the land. Water’s most complex
strategy for
staying with the land is life itself. From an elemental perspective,
all
land-based biological life could be defined as a highly diversified
joint
strategy between water and earth, to keep water on or in the land.
Life, from
this elemental perspective, is just a stacking up and connecting of
minute
water vessels, each filled with a soup of water and dissolved
earth-elements;
without the water, those vessels are without life; add water and stir,
and life
stirs.
So
all biological life, in this sense, is a way for water to push back
against the
pull of gravity – through plants, water actually thrusts itself
up directly against
gravity, to heights of as much as three hundred feet in the greatest
trees. And
through us animals, water moves all around the landscape, uphill as
well as
down, or just stubbornly staying in place. Beavers build dams to back
up
shallow ponds that gradually fill in with sediment and plant decay,
creating
rich soggy meadows marrying water and land.
We
humans are products of this marriage of water and mineral earth that
have
figured out how to stand up and look around, think and dream. A That’s
unrealistic of course, and
even unfair to everyone downstream – but we’ve certainly
gone far beyond the
beavers in figuring out how to slow the water’s passage from the
land,
spreading it out over the land to hide out in more plants, pooling it
up behind
dams far larger than the beavers’ work.
But
there’s also evidence that water doesn’t like to end up in
a reservoir behind a
dam any more than it wants to get to the ocean – witness the way
a river
patiently goes to work filling in a reservoir till eventually it can
turn the
dam into a waterfall. A riverine action that’s similar to what a
river does
just before it disappears into the ocean, pushing a delta cone out into
the
ocean as if it were taking on the impossible task of filling the ocean
too.
Reservoirs and oceans – they’re just big salty waiting
rooms, places where
water waits till the sun again sucks it up into the great wheeling
currents of
the sky’s rivers, and carries it out over the land where, again,
it creates a
river doing whatever it can to dawdle through the land, always moving
but as
slowly as possible, watering as much as possible, putting off its
disappearance
into the ocean as long as possible.
Water
does become something else when a river disappears into the
“holding action” of
a lake or a reservoir or the oceans. It continues to move around
restlessly –
the great oceanic currents dwarf even the largest of land rivers
– but
everything from the way it moves, what drives its movement, and the
life it
nurtures is different, a different world, and I’ll leave that
exploration to
Jacques Cousteau or whoever wants it.
Suffice
it to say, for present purposes, rivers disappear in the oceans, and in
reservoirs too – die there, in a way; even though water comes out
through the
dam below the reservoir, it is no longer the same river. For water that
has
been part of a river, reservoirs and oceans must be like consignment to
a
waiting room, with the only escape via the sun – being sucked out
of the still
water and carried out over land to fall again to begin the long process
of
trying not to go downhill too fast.
I
think of that when, for example, people repeat this truism about the
On
the other hand, it’s too bad the
That’s
a long run in the imagination, from looking down on the East River,
high in the
Colorado River’s headwaters that sunny soggy spring afternoon
forty years ago
this summer, to the distant delta of the Colorado – a river that
now dies a
number of deaths by dam en route, but will someday have resurrected
itself,
overtopped and removed the dams and recommenced the construction of a
delta
built from the removal of the Colorado Plateau, and eventually the
Rockies.
Meanwhile, as water organized to think and dream, I recommend more
riparian
loafing by moving waters trying not to move through too fast.
***
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