Where the Water Goes, page 1
ALSO BY DAVID OWEN
The Conundrum
Green Metropolis
Sheetrock & Shellac
Copies in Seconds
The First National Bank of Dad
Hit & Hope
The Chosen One
The Making of the Masters
Around the House (also published as Life Under a Leaky Roof)
Lure of the Links (coeditor)
My Usual Game
The Walls Around Us
The Man Who Invented Saturday Morning
None of the Above
High School
RIVERHEAD BOOKS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
Copyright © 2017 by David Owen
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
Parts of several chapters of this book first appeared, in different form, in The New Yorker.
Some material about Las Vegas first appeared, in different form, in Golf Digest.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Owen, David, date.
Title: Where the water goes : life and death along the Colorado River / David Owen.
Description: New York : Riverhead Books, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016039410 | ISBN 9781594633775 | ISBN 9780698189904 (e-ISBN)
Subjects: LCSH: Colorado River (Colo.–Mexico)—Description and travel. | Colorado River (Colo.–Mexico)—Environmental conditions. | Owen, David— Travel—Colorado River (Colo.–Mexico) | Water-supply—West (U.S.) | Stream ecology—Colorado River (Colo.–Mexico)
Classification: LCC F788 .O84 2017 | DDC 917.91/304—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016039410
p. cm.
Map by Sarah Evans Lloyd. Reference: Pacific Institute, Oakland, California
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Version_1
For Alice and Hugh O’Keefe
CONTENTS
Also by David Owen
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Map
1.
THE HEADWATERS
2.
THE LAW OF THE RIVER
3.
TRIBUTARIES
4.
GO WEST
5.
GRAND VALLEY
6.
SALT, DRY LOTS, AND HOUSEBOATS
7.
LEES FERRY
8.
BOULDER CANYON PROJECT
9.
LAS VEGAS
10.
COLORADO RIVER AQUEDUCT
11.
CENTRAL ARIZONA PROJECT
12.
THE RULE OF CAPTURE
13.
BOONDOCKING
14.
IMPERIAL VALLEY
15.
THE SALTON SEA
16.
RECLAMATION
17.
THE DELTA
18.
WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
Acknowledgments and Selected References
Index
About the Author
1.
THE HEADWATERS
Our pilot, David Kunkel, asked me to retrieve his oxygen bottle from under my seat, and when I handed it to him he gripped the plastic breathing tube with his teeth and opened the valve. We had taken off from Boulder not long before and were flying over Rocky Mountain National Park, thirty miles to the northwest. Kunkel was navigating with the help of an iPad Mini, which was resting on his legs. “People don’t usually think altitude is affecting them,” he said. “But if you ask them to count backward from a hundred by sevens they have trouble.” What struck me at that moment was not how high we were but how low: a little earlier, we had flown within what seemed like hailing distance of the sheer east face of Longs Peak, and now, as Kunkel banked steeply to the right to give us a better view of a stream at the bottom of a narrow valley, his wingtip appeared to pass just feet from the jagged declivity beneath us. Snow had fallen in the mountains during the night, and I half expected it to swirl up in our wake.
The other passenger, sitting in the copilot’s seat and leaning out the window with a big camera, was Jennifer Pitt, who at the time was a senior researcher for the Environmental Defense Fund. Pitt is in her forties. She has long brown hair, which she had pulled back into a ponytail, and she was wearing a purple fleece. She worked at the EDF, mostly on issues related to the Colorado River, from 1999 till 2015, when she moved to a similar job at the National Audubon Society. In recent years, her focus has been on the river’s other end, in Mexico, but she had agreed to show me its source. Our principal destination that day was the Colorado’s headwaters, just over the Continental Divide, roughly fifty miles south of the Wyoming state line. “The best way to see a river system is from the air,” she’d told me earlier. She arranged our flight through LightHawk, an international nonprofit organization that supplies volunteer pilots and their airplanes, at no charge, for a variety of environmental purposes. The previous day, a LightHawk pilot had flown twenty black-footed ferrets from Fort Collins to a spot near the Grand Canyon, for relocation.
Before our flight, I looked up Kunkel on Google and was disconcerted to find a news story about him landing his Cessna 340 on a highway in the Rockies after losing both engines in succession. But then I realized that nothing like that could happen to us, because the plane he’d be using for our trip, a Maule M-7, had just one engine. I looked up Pitt, too. She was born in Boston and grew up in Westchester County, New York, in a suburb of New York City. “I think you can trace my interest in rivers back to my childhood in Westchester,” she told me later, “because I grew up in a river town, on the Hudson, and when I was a kid Pete Seeger came to my school and sang to me about rivers.” As an undergraduate, at Harvard, she majored in American history and literature, but developed an interest in urban planning and landscape architecture. “After graduation,” she continued, “I worked in Manhattan for a year, for the Department of Parks and Recreation, and realized that that was not what I wanted to do.” She got a job as an interpretive ranger in Mesa Verde National Park, in southwestern Colorado, and that experience, she said, “gave another twist to my view of the world, and how an ancient culture used the resources around them.” She earned a master’s degree in environmental sciences, with a focus on water, at the Yale School of Forestry, then worked in Washington, D.C., for five years, mostly at the National Park Service. In 1999, the Environmental Defense Fund hired her to create programs related to the Colorado River and the ecosystems that depend on it. In 2003, she married Michael Cohen, a senior associate at the Pacific Institute, another environmental organization. (They met at a water conference in Tucson.) They live in Boulder and have a daughter.
Kunkel dipped a wing, and Pitt pointed toward the Never Summer Mountains, on our right. “There’s the Grand Ditch,” she said. I saw what looked like a road or a hiking trail cut across the face of a steeply sloping forest of snow-dusted conifers; she explained that it was an aqueduct, dating to 1890. Its original full name was the North Grand River Ditch. (Until 1921, the section of the Colorado that’s upstream from its confluence with the Green, in eastern Utah, was called the Grand. Hence: Grand Lake, Grand Junction, Grand Valley—but not Grand Canyon, which was named for its grandness.) It was built with pickaxes and black powder, mostly by Japanese laborers, and it operates by gravity—an impressive feat of pre-laser engineering. The Grand Ditch is fourteen miles long, and much of it is above ten thousand feet. It carries water across the Continental Divide at La Poudre Pass and empties it into a stream that flows toward the state’s eastern plains, where even by the late 1800s farmers were feeling parched. It doesn’t tap the Colorado directly, but captures as much as forty percent of the flow from slopes that would otherwise feed it, like a sap-gathering gash in the trunk of a rubber tree. We had already flown over several larger, more recent additions to the same network: Long Draw Reservoir, completed in 1930; Estes Lake, which serves as a trans-basin junction box; and five connected natural and man-made lakes that lie on the western side of the divide and gather and store water from the Colorado or its watershed. The northernmost of the lakes spills as much as a third of a billion gallons a day into the Alva B. Adams Tunnel, which was built in the 1940s. Adams was a lawyer and a U.S. senator, and in the early 1930s he served as the chairman of the Committee on Irrigation and Reclamation. The tunnel moves the water under the center of the park, drops it through five hydroelectric generating plants, and delivers it to a distribution system that serves a populous area east of the mountains, includi
Kunkel made a slow turn to the left. “We just flew over the headwaters,” he said. Our position was easier to see on his iPad than on the ground. The sky had been blue when we took off, but since we’d entered the mountains he’d had to pick his way under and around what sometimes looked like an upside-down ocean of clouds. The ceiling made flying difficult but helped to explain the existence of the water-storing-and-shifting network we’d been looking at. As moisture-laden weather systems move eastward across the western United States, they pile up over the Rockies, dumping snow and rain. Eighty percent of Colorado’s precipitation falls on the western half of the state, yet eighty-five percent of the population lives to the east, in the mountains’ “rain shadow.” If transporting water from one side to the other were impossible, most of the people who live and farm on the eastern side of the mountains would have to move. Pitt said, “Even people who describe themselves as worried environmentalists usually have no idea where their water comes from. We did a focus group once where somebody asserted vehemently that Denver did not get any water from the other side of the mountains, and we actually had to intervene and make sure that the guy leading the focus group knew that that was wrong, so that the whole two-hour discussion didn’t go off in some other direction.”
• • •
WHEN THE FIRST EUROPEANS to see the Grand Canyon looked down from its southern rim, in 1540, they guessed that the stream they could see at the bottom must be about eight feet wide. They’d been fooled by the scale of the canyon, but even so the Colorado River isn’t huge. Marc Reisner, in Cadillac Desert, his classic book about water in the western United States, published in 1986, calls it “comparatively miniature.” If you were to spread a full year’s worth of its entire flow evenly over a surface the size of its drainage basin, roughly 250,000 square miles, the water would cover it to a depth of only about an inch. Forty years ago, I crossed the Mississippi River on a tiny ferry, now long gone, which operated between northwestern Tennessee and southeastern Missouri. My car and I were the only cargo, and as we churned toward the setting sun I took swigs from a bottle of whiskey, which I’d bought in Kentucky a couple of hours earlier at the House of Bourbon, a liquor store, and by the time we got to the opposite bank the sun was almost gone and I was a little bit drunk. No part of the Colorado is so wide that crossing it would give you time to become even slightly buzzed, except in places where dams have turned the river into lakes. The Mississippi is also a thousand miles longer. It carries the equivalent of the Colorado’s entire annual flow every couple of weeks.
Yet the Colorado is a crucial resource for a surprisingly large part of the United States. In a report published in 1861, James Christmas Ives, an Army lieutenant who had led a mapping expedition up the river from its mouth in northern Mexico a few years before, described the Grand Canyon as “altogether valueless,” and concluded: “It seems intended by nature that the Colorado River, along the greater portion of its lonely and majestic way, shall be forever unvisited and undisturbed.” It didn’t remain that way for long. Less than seventy years later, a congressman described the Colorado, more accurately, as “intrinsically the most valuable stream in the world.” It and its tributaries flow through or alongside seven western states—Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, and California—before crossing into Mexico near Yuma, Arizona. It supplies water to more than 36 million people, including residents not just of Boulder, Denver, and Colorado Springs but also of Salt Lake City, Albuquerque, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson, San Diego, and Los Angeles, several of which are hundreds of miles from its banks. It irrigates close to six million acres of farmland, much of which it also created, through eons of silt deposition. It powers two of the country’s largest hydroelectric plants, at Hoover Dam and Glen Canyon Dam, as well as many smaller ones. It’s the principal water source for two enormous man-made reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, as well as many smaller ones. It supports recreational activities that are said to be worth $26 billion a year. Some of its southern reaches attract so many transient residents during the winter that you could almost believe it had overflowed its banks and left dense alluvial deposits of motorboats, Jet Skis, dirt bikes, golf carts, all-terrain vehicles, RVs, mobile homes, fifth wheels, and people with gray hair.
All that human utility has costs. The Colorado has helped to shape some of the most otherworldly landforms on earth—the Grand Canyon, of course, and also the Vermilion Cliffs, in northern Arizona, and the eerily striated buttes and mazelike sandstone meanders of Canyonlands National Park, in southeastern Utah—yet even within those seemingly wild landscapes its flow is so altered and controlled that in many ways the river functions more like a fourteen-hundred-mile-long canal. The legal right to use every gallon is owned or claimed by someone—in fact, more than every gallon, since theoretical rights to the Colorado’s flow, known to water lawyers as “paper water,” greatly exceed its actual flow, known as “wet water.” That imbalance has been exacerbated by the drought in the western United States, which began just before the turn of the millennium, but even if the drought ended tomorrow, problems would remain. The river has been “over-allocated” since the states in its drainage basin first began to divide the water among themselves, nearly a century ago.
The Colorado suffers from the same kinds of overuse and environmental degradation that increasingly threaten freshwater sources all over the world, as the global population rises toward its projected mid-century level of nine or ten billion, and as changes in the weather play havoc with accustomed precipitation patterns. (“Climate change is water change,” a scientist told me.) Water challenges in the United States are less dire than those in places like India, Syria, and Brazil, but they’re similar in kind. They also involve much more than water, since they’re inextricable from equally thorny challenges concerning energy, economics, governance, democracy, and climate.
Water problems are straightforward in one way: without water we die, and not centuries from now. When supplies are short, people have no choice but to find solutions, one way or another, in real time. They change behavior, cut back consumption, develop new sources, negotiate treaties, pass legislation—all right now—and we know that happens because in dry places all over the world there’s evidence of it every day. Water problems in the western United States, when viewed from afar, can seem tantalizingly easy to solve: all we need to do is turn off the fountains at the Bellagio, stop selling hay to China, ban golf, cut down the almond trees, and kill all the lawyers. As you draw closer, though, you realize that every new solution creates additional problems and that tinkering with even small elements in the river’s vast network of beneficiaries can upset dozens of others. Addressing everything effectively, equitably, and permanently will force us to weigh the kinds of choices we prefer to avoid. We haven’t had much success with that sort of thing in the past. But who knows?
• • •
I GREW UP IN KANSAS CITY, and, like many people who grow up in Kansas City, I spent a lot of time thinking about places far away. Most of all, I thought about the Rocky Mountains, six hundred miles to the west. I first visited Colorado on vacation with my family when I was six, and I returned many times: for summer camp, for adventures with friends, for backpacking, rock climbing, and skiing, and for my freshman and sophomore years of college. The first big purchase I made with money that I myself had earned was a fancy mountaineering sleeping bag. I hung it on a wall in my bedroom at home, both to keep the goose down from compacting and to remind my parents that I was just passing through.
In 1976, when I was twenty-one, I spent the summer living in a rented house in Colorado Springs and working on the grounds crew of an apartment complex on what was then the outskirts of the city. During most of the week, my coworkers and I moved hoses and sprinklers around the property, to keep the grass green, and then we mowed what we had grown. We had to be at work at six-thirty but weren’t allowed to begin mowing until seven, to allow the residents to sleep in, so for the first half hour we devised alternative methods of waking them up, such as slowly dragging shovels across parking lots. Watering was like a race. The grass began to turn brown almost the moment we moved our sprinklers, partly because we were a mile above sea level in what is essentially a desert, and partly because the apartment complex had been built on porous ground, on the site of an old quarry. One night, I dreamed that one of the Rain Bird rotary sprinklers we used at work was keeping me awake by rhythmically spraying me in bed, and I made a mental note to ask my housemate not to water my room while I was trying to sleep.
